6 Artists You Didn't Know Made Your Favorite Movie Moments

Now this is a name you probably have run across; he worked with James Cameron a lot, so you might have heard him mentioned here or there. But to try to encompass the scope of his work, let's just say that if somebody wanted to make that Aliens vs. Predator vs. The Terminator vs. velociraptors crossover we've been asking for, he could have had Stan Winston do the effects for all of them. He probably had the stuff still lying around.

Winston's first big job was doing work on The Thing, and by "work" we mean he made that disgusting tentacled dog creature:

GAAAHHH!!!

But it was the original Terminator film that made Winston famous -- he took Cameron's sketches of the Terminator exoskeleton and actually built the thing. (It took six months -- it was made of steel ribbing coated in plaster, then coated in chrome plating.)

Cameron brought him back for Aliens, tasking him with creating the alien queen -- a creature 14 feet tall that, oh by the way, would need to be able to move on its own with no CGI and no miniatures. He wanted a real, physical creature that would take two men to operate.

No problem.

A few years later, Winston created the Predator.

And designed Edward Scissorhands' scissor hands.

Then he was brought back for Terminator 2 ... wait, wasn't that all just CGI? What's the big deal -- it's all done on computer, right?

Nope. This:

... was not CGI. That's a robotic, moving physical model made by Stan Winston.

So is the "blown apart" T-1000:

All of that stuff is Winston, working with animatronic puppets and costumes and old-fashioned FX work. The CGI was basically just there to animate the transition from one Stan Winston creation to the next.

Oh, and then he did the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

And Dennis Nedry.

Again, that film is famous for its CGI, but the dinosaurs were mostly old-fashioned mechanical creations, built by Winston's team. Sadly, Winston passed away in 2008. Too bad, because in a world dominated by cheesy and unrealistic CGI (now in 3D!) we need his puppets more than ever.

Honorable Mention: Rob Bottin

We mentioned that Stan Winston made that disgusting dog creature in The Thing. So who made the rest of that film's horrors? Rob Bottin.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! FUCK YOU, ROB.

Not only did Bottin design the terror that is the alien in The Thing, but he actually worked so hard on the movie that he had to be hospitalized after shooting. It's hard to even describe how goddamned horrifying his designs were, so let's just look at that spider thing again.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Also? RoboCop. And by that we mean Bottin created RoboCop himself.

That seemed to be a temporary break from making really disturbing shit. After all, he also gave us the elaborate murdered remains in Se7en and the mutants in Total Recall (including Kuato, the thing growing out of that guy's torso). Yes, if you've ever masturbated to the scene in Total Recall where the nice young lady has three breasts, you really masturbated to Rob Bottin.

One more thing about Bottin ... he is a member of a very exclusive band. The Mos Eisley Cantina Band. That's right, he was in costume and rocking out in A New Hope. He was the bald one holding a stupid looking instrument whose face looked like an ass.

One of these butt-faced dudes is secretly a genius.

"Matte painter" is one of those jobs that you probably didn't even know existed, if you haven't watched a lot of "behind the scenes" DVD features. But whenever a film features a fantastic, alien landscape in the background, you can probably guess that they didn't build a whole alien landscape for the movie. So where do those stunning vistas come from? They're just big goddamned paintings.

Before they were all done with computers, they were painted by hand, by people like Michael Pangrazio. For instance, he did the impossibly huge warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

And, you know, pretty much all of the other backgrounds. He got his humble start painting mattes for the goddamn second and third Star Wars films.

That's him on the far right. Behind him is a matte painting. In front of him, the supposed snow-swept landscape is another matte painting.

His work has been featured primarily in movies that need a surreal, stylistic and heavily elaborate look, such as the mindbending landscape of Labyrinth -- a film featuring surroundings that appear to be the result of Jim Henson getting high and browsing an M.C. Escher art book.

We're blaming "Pigs in Space" on the same thing.

Labyrinth isn't the only fantasy film featuring Pamgrazio's paintings; he also has Willow, The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal under his belt. The next time you watch one of those movies, stare into the jaw-dropping background and imagine the actors walking toward it, only to bump head-first into a Michael Pangrazio painting.

This is the one name on the list you have almost certainly heard before -- this guy did the Star Wars theme, after all. But it's only when you appreciate the pure, epic scope of what he did that you realize Hollywood wouldn't be the same without him.

Just one more connection from Obama to Darth Vader.

Take Jaws, for instance. You probably can't hear the Jaws opening theme in your head the way you can Star Wars. But what you can hear is the duh-dum, duh-dum sound the great white shark made when it was bearing down on a victim. That was John Williams. He was able to not only compose the most perfect musical representation of a giant killer shark but also to do it with two freaking notes.

Trust us, this thing isn't as interesting when it's backed up by a jazz flute.

What are the odds that he could pull something like that again? Well, pretty good, actually, considering that he used only five notes to create the iconic alien communication method in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Superman theme that is now a musical shorthand for signaling movie heroics? John Williams.

The Indiana Jones theme? Same guy.

Jurassic Park?

Harry Potter?

Yeah, John Williams has pretty much scored your childhood happiness.

Honorable Mention: Bernard Herrmann

We could rattle off the classics Bernard Herrmann did the music for (Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Taxi Driver, etc.) but what's amazing is that this guy composed two pieces of music that virtually any human in the Western world can imitate on command.

He also had an adorable puppy dog, yes he did!

Remember the shower scene in Psycho? And the shrieking sound when Norman Bates stabbed the girl to death? That was Bernard Hermann.

Then, for several decades, anytime something weird happened, some joker nearby would start humming the Twilight Zone theme. They were humming Hermann.

Equally Honorable Mention: Hans Zimmer

When it comes to big, heroic themes, it's hard to beat Hans Zimmer. If you can't hum the themes from The Lion King, you certainly remember how they made you feel:

Of course, more recently you know Hans Zimmer as the sound of Chris Nolan's Batman films:

Goddamn, does that make us want to punch a criminal. Subtle, he is not. And as epic as the Batman scores are, even they're not as epic as his utterly sinister score for the mindfuck of the year, Inception. That film's score could shake the theater floor more than the explosions:

Oh, and he did one theme that several thousand of you reading this have heard at some point today. The theme to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:

A lot of you just now imagined a gruff sergeant calling you Ramirez and demanding that you go secure something.

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For more secrets from Hollywood, check out 5 Things Hollywood Reuses More Than Plots and 5 Annoying Trends That Make Every Movie Look the Same.

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