Monster Making Legend Rick Baker Quits 'Cheap And Fast' Movie Business

Rick Baker, Hollywood’s most decorated makeup effects wizard, is hanging up the prosthetics after an astonishing career that has spanned four decades, spawned myriad monsters, and scored him seven Oscars.

Baker announced the “time is right” for him to retire from the movies during an interview Wednesday on The Frame, a pop-culture program on Los Angeles’s KPCC public radio station.

“I am 64 years old, and the business is crazy right now. I like to do things right, and they wanted cheap and fast. That is not what I want to do, so I just decided it is basically time to get out. I would consider designing and consulting on something, but I don’t think I will have a huge working studio anymore.”

Related: Rick Baker’s Most Eye-Catching Creations Up for Auction

Baker has cleared out his warehouse, and its vast stores of zombies, gorillas, werewolves, gremlins, aliens, and sasquatches, in preparation for an online auction set for Friday.

In advance of the auction, he has been sharing some of his featured creatures on Twitter and YouTube.

Nicknamed “The Monster Maker,” Baker won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Makeup for his seminal work on 1981’s An American Werewolf in London.

He racked up an additional 11 nominations for a filmography that includes the Gremlins, Men in Black, and Eddie Murphy- Nutty Professor franchises, along with Harry and the Hendersons, Gorillas in the Mist, Greystoke, Ed Wood, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and The Wolfman.

Baker’s other tour-de-force work includes cantina aliens in the original 1977 Star Wars (he even suited up as one of the band members), the beastly look for TV’s Beauty and the Beast, Angelina Jolie’s witch look in Maleficent, and perhaps his greatest makeup hit, Michael Jackson’s groundbreaking “Thriller” video.

As Baker recalled on The Frame: “[Director John] Landis said, 'You’re going to be known more for this than anything you do,’ and I just said, 'No you’re crazy.’ But that is one thing when people say, 'Oh, what do you do for a living?’ [I say,] 'I’m a makeup artist.’ [They ask,] 'Have you done anything that I’ve seen?’ I know that if I say 'Thriller’ they’ve seen it.”

Baker isn’t giving up on making new monsters, just the movie biz. “I do all kind of crazy things. I paint, I sculpt, and I do digital models,” he told The Frame (Baker showcases such designs, including a rendition of the Joker and an American Werewolf painting, on his Twitter feed). “I am basically retiring from the film industry and looking forward to just doing what I want to do.”