By Jack Chang
John Blake started his career on weekends during junior high school in Saratoga, when he would use makeup to turn his friends into zombies and werewolves. Now, at age 35, he has just transformed actor Anthony Hopkins into former president Richard Nixon for Oliver Stone's latest film, Nixon.
"None of this is any more complicated than 'Here! You look different! Isn't that fun?' " Blake said from his Los Angeles-area home. "It's the fun of the magic trick."
For Nixon, Blake and his colleagues experimented with elaborate fake noses and cheeks to try to make Hopkins look more like the former president. When those plans proved too time-consuming, they settled on minor changes, such as lowering Hopkins' eyebrows and using wigs.
"I went more for an attitude, more for the darkness in Nixon's face," Blake said. "When I saw it was so far to go with Anthony, who has very fair features, I just worked off my first impressions.
"I had a great amount of fun on this movie," he said.
Blake received his first makeup kit at age 9 when his Planet of the Apes Halloween outfit, which used foam sponges as sideburns, wouldn't stay together.
Mary Lynn Dutro, Blake's mother, said, "He was very upset, so I decided to buy him a good kit. He was always interested in faces and makeup."
As Blake entered junior high, he began doing makeup work for productions in Saratoga community theaters such as the Civic Light Opera and, eventually, San Jose's Gilbert and Sullivan Society. His first makeup job was for a Saratoga production of Man of La Mancha.
"There were maybe 30 theater groups in the area at that time," Blake said. "People were really enthusiastic about community theater then. And it was less formal. People would just let me work things out, although I was only a 13-year-old kid."
By age 14, Blake had already opened his own makeup studio.
"I had a bigger career there [in Saratoga] than here," he said with a smile.
Blake's mother said she was happy to see Blake pursue something he really enjoyed. She even took him to Los Angeles at age 13 to meet Don Post, a famed mask-maker at Disney.
"I try to let people develop as they are," she said. "I never had strong doubts that John could go on doing what he loved doing."
Many of Blake's Saratoga friends also learned stagecraft during those years and, like Blake, went on to careers in Hollywood. Among them were Ed Solomon, now a successful screenwriter, and Vance Piper, who worked as a cinematographer on Forrest Gump.
"I spent seven years doing makeup work in Saratoga with the same amount of intensity as I do now," Blake said.
Blake moved to Los Angeles at age 19 to try to break into the film industry. He said he would search out film crews shooting on location and hang out in their makeup trailers, watching and learning from their makeup artists.
After a few years studying portrait sculpture at Long Beach State University and doing makeup work for student films, Blake slowly made inroads into Hollywood.
He studied and worked with Rick Baker, a highly respected makeup pioneer, on one of the Nightmare on Elm Street films and on Gorillas in the Mist.
Slowly, Hollywood offered him chances to use the many talents he had cultivated in Saratoga and Long Beach. For Oliver Stone's The Doors, he sculpted a bust of rock singer Jim Morrison that was used in that film's cemetery scenes. He also practiced his zombie-makeup skills for the horror films Pet Sematary and Sleepwalkers.
Blake said he likes doing more realistic makeup work, similar to that in Nixon. Previously, he had worked on Tommy Lee Jones in Cobb and Danny DeVito and Jack Nicholson in Hoffa, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
"For a small-town boy, working with these big movie stars was extremely intimidating at first," Blake said. "With Jack Nicholson, I was terrified, absolutely frozen."
But working so closely with Tommy Lee Jones on Cobb finally helped him overcome his fears, he said. "He's got such a big personality," Blake said of Jones. "After Tommy Lee, I've never been scared of anybody."
Blake has just finished work on Fargo, a film by Joel and Ethan Coen, and is starting up his own production company called No Suits Productions.
Even with this success, however, he still has to interview six times a year for work.
"I still have to compete with everybody else. I'm still desperate for work," he said.
"But being from a place I really liked, with redwood forests and beaches in the same area, I've brought a certain appreciation and standard to my work."
He and his 3-year-old daughter, Kelly, still come back to Saratoga at least once a year.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, Wednesday, January 10, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing Inc. All rights reserved.