Rating: NR | Runtime: 105 minutes
Director(s): Nick Taylor
Writer(s): Joseph Krings & Nick Taylor / Steve Johnson (book Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs, and Special FX)

Do I sound bitter?

How did Steve Johnson go broke? He’d say it was the advent of computer graphics cutting into the bottom-line of practical effects makers in Hollywood. His protégés (including Jason Hamer and Bill Corso) and ex-wife (Linnea Quigley) would say it was his drug-addled and self-destructive nature. The truth lies somewhere in-between since one didn’t help the other. Not going sober or embracing CGI twenty years ago ended his career … but what a career it was.

Spring-boarding off Johnson’s own book, director Nick Taylor’s Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson takes us through those highest highs and lowest lows via a large collection of interviews cobbled together in linear and thematic order. So, while Johnson’s wardrobe and locale are constantly shifting from one scene to the next, his narrative through line isn’t. We move from his idolatry of Dick Smith growing up in Texas to his self-imposed exile in Costa Rica.

It’s quite the journey connecting those two places. One that saw him learning under the tutelage of Rick Baker on American Werewolf in London, being shipped off to Ghostbusters to lead his own team with Boss Films, getting fired off Predator to spread his wings as the captain of XFX, winning Emmys for Stephen King adaptations, and working with the likes of James Cameron, H.R. Giger, and Guillermo del Toro before it all crumbled down.

Johnson is a fantastic storyteller in large part because he’s full of himself enough to know he’s a genius in his field while not being delusional enough to deny that many of his problems were self-inflicted. The way he talks simply exposes that he wouldn’t change a thing. He loved the drugs. He loved the parties. He loved pouring whatever profit he did earn right back into the company to keep his stable of artists inventing regardless of having a film needing invention.

His tales of burning through myriad iterations of Slimer and the trial and error of doing the unthinkable on The Abyss and never quite getting the chance to do the same on Where the Wild Things Are prove as entertaining as they do insightful. The footage of him putting his puppet creations onto his genitals or saying he’d sleep with the alien form of Sil from Species proves just how much the industry was a hedonistic playground of nerds living like jocks.

While you could definitely question Johnson’s business acumen and ability to evolve in an ever-changing landscape at a moment when everything changed overnight with Jurassic Park, don’t conflate his unprofessionalism for the camera with the same at his job. Quigley is the first to admit that it didn’t matter how much cocaine or meth he was on, Johnson was always one hundred percent devoted to the work when engaged with a new problem to solve.

The finished products speak for themselves. Successful branches sprouting from his XFX studios to continue the tree that Dick Smith began speaks to the level of creativity and freedom Johnson fostered. And his desire to work a no budget creature feature with genre stalwart Tom Holland proves his excitement to keep making art remains. The “rubberheads” are a dying breed, but their rockstar legacy lives on. Johnson, despite his faults, earned his place as one of its pillars.

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Slimer and Steve Johnson in RUBBERHEAD: THE LIFE & MONSTERS OF STEVE JOHNSON; courtesy of American Nightmare Studios and Fantasia International Film Festival.