GREG HILDEBRANDT

AUDIO INTERVIEWS pt 1   pt2

A professional artist since 1959.

Best known work:  Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and numerous Sci-Fi/Fantasy series.

Mediums:  Primarily a graphic artist but does dabble in film and other mediums.

Contact:  brothershildebrandt@spiderwedart.com

THE INTERVIEW ARCHIVES  You are originally a Detroit native, a town that in an artistic sense is best known for its music scene. . .

GREG HILDEBRANDT  I grew up in the sixties and really loved classical music.  Here I am a kid growing up in Detroit but I am listening to Tchaikovsky. (laughs)  That was in the forties but in the fifties Rock music started and I got into that a little late, the late fifties and you know, I have my personal favorites but I don’t track any of this shit.  Not artists even, I am not into the minutia of shit like that, I don’t know how that sounds but I just don’t.

IA  There is nothing wrong with that, you like what you like.

GH  Yeah, I do what I do.  You know though, Michael Jackson got onto my artwork, before all that shit hit the fan.

IA  Really?  I am sure that is an association that you love to have?(laughs)

GH  Yeah! (laughs)  You know, he called because he saw all of these kids books that I had done for Unicorn Publishing and so when he was on that world tour, years ago, he wanted me to give him drawing lessons, which I did.  We went to New York City and he had me up at the Helmsley there for about two weeks.

IA  Nice!

GH  Yeah, I had to bring all of my work with me and I was working on Robin Hood for Unicorn Publishing at this time and he had this suite of rooms which was like, “God what the hell is this?”(laughs)  My God, the Helmsley Palace, it was ridiculous.  Anyway, it was kind of neat, he was a great guy and he was a big fan for years and I didn’t know it.  A big fan of animation in general.  A huge fan of Norman Rockwell and all of the classic illustrators that my brother and I were into, NC Jues and Howard Pyle and anyway so there I am with Michael and I obviously knew of Michael Jackson and THE JACKSON 5 but I wasn’t into that in the sixties so it was kind of like I was stupid about his music. (laughs)

IA  Right, I mean the man sold like forty-five million copies of one record but somehow it slipped under your radar? (laughs)

GH  Right!  See, I am kind of like stupid about it and I am feeling stupid that I am with this guy who is Ooh-ing and Ahh-ing over my work but I know nothing about his work, it was just kind of weird.

IA  I just finished an un-authorized biography on him which wasn’t too kind to him but it described this vault that he has, a room really, where he keeps all of his art treasures, did you ever get to see his collection?

GH  Well, I was to his house, the Neverland Valley house, for a couple of weeks and I didn’t see a vault.  No, it was all very open and there was no “weirdness” to me.  You see, to me, the guy was a fantastically enthusiastic and brilliant guy.  There was no weirdness or strangeness going on, that I saw.  He was fantastic and very knowledgeable about graphic art, the history of it and all kinds of stuff and that really blew me away.  I met Brando up there too.

IA  Marlon Brando?

GH  Yeah.  I am leaving and he has this plane set to take me back here because I had some jobs set and he (Michael) says, “No, you can’t go yet, Marlon Brando is coming to meet you tomorrow.”(laughs)  So, I get to meet Brando.  I had a whole bunch of my artwork set there that Michael had shipped form the East Coast to Neverland Valley and Brando is there looking at all of my stuff and what do you say to Marlon Brando?  I know that Tim and I have a reputation and everything but most artists spend their life in a room, that is what you do.  90% of an artist’s life is spent alone or in our case with your brother in a room so I am there with Brando and Jackson and what the hell do I talk about?  Geez, I mean, “Hey Marlon, Zappoto was one of my favorite. . .”  And you start praising one of his movies, what else can you say? (laughs)

IA  I would have yelled, “STELLA!”  Only because I know I would never get the chance to do something like that again. (laughs)

GH  (Laughing)  “STELLA!”  Exactly, I mean, what do you say?  What do you do?  I don’t know, I was swearing but fortunately in the room with us there were some guys that were working that were technicians, he (Michael) was building a theater and they were just like some regular guys that I could talk with.  It wasn’t like these guys were making life difficult on me but what do you say?  Anyway, Brando liked my work.  We were walking around, you have to get this, I have all of these paintings set up in this gigantic playroom that he had set up for kids that had disabilities and they were propped all over the walls, maybe like a hundred paintings, and Brando is walking along the wall and then there is me and then there is Jackson and we are walking slowly around which Brando stopping at each painting to look at it and scratch his head and kind of mumbling something, “You certainly have the ability to see things through the eyes of a child. . .”   And Jackson grabs me and and says, “He never praises anybody!”  He was just like a kid and it was fantastic.  That was a trip.

IA  Wow, you travel in some very interesting circles.

GH  Actually, no I don’t. (laughs)  Well, I do but not famous ones really. (laughs)

IA  Any given artist who worked on an album cover is generally sought out by other artists to do their covers, has that been the case with you?

GH  Yeah, I did quite a few of them actually.  I can’t remember how many.

IA  Any ones that were particularly significant to you?

GH  Yeah, there is one of a Unicorn and a girl, the girl is laying down in a bunch of Lillies with a Unicorn looking over her and that one became a poster and that was hugely successful.

IA  I know that you have worked for HEAVY METAL MAGAZINE a bit, did you work on either of the movies?

GH  No.  I have never done anything on those films but we have tried to get a bunch of stuff off of the ground ourselves and we have done some pre-production work but nothing on those movies.

IA  What about the Marvel Comics stuff, have you worked on any titles that the average person would recognize?

GH  Well, we have not done any comic books per se but we did do one graphic novel for DC, “SUPERMAN.”   And we did a graphic novel for Marvel.  “FRANK FRAZETTA ILLUSTRATED” was a magazine that came out briefly, for a year or so, I don’t know, and it came out under his name but he didn’t do any art in it but a bunch of other artists did a bunch of sequential stories in it and my brother, myself and my son did a story that went in that magazine and people can find that at conventions and what not.  Then we did some collector cards for Marvel, a ton of cards which were for Fleer and are still around.  We did a comic strip for about a year, a daily comic strip, with Michael Uslan who was an executive producer for the BATMAN movies and he optioned “CARRIE AND THE PIRATES” that was originally a strip from the forties and I think that there is going to be a collected edition of that.  There is the Tolkien art book that is out right now.

IA  Yeah!  That is right on time now too with the hugeness of the “LORD OF THE RINGS” movie.

GH  Yeah!  That is really wild.   Tim and I wanted to do that ourselves and when we were doing the calendars for Balantine books back in the seventies by the third one, which was forty-something paintings, we said, “Gee there should be a movie.”  So we started organizing all of our materials and started photographing all of the paintings along with some story boards and we brought them to Balantine books and said, “Hey, this should be a movie” and so they checked into it and found out that Ralph Bacci had the rights to it and that he was doing it.  We dropped the idea and did our own fantasy novel titled, “URSHARAK” and we tried to get that off the ground as a film and it didn’t make it.  Then about seven years ago Jane started organizing all of the “LORD OF THE RINGS” art for a book.  She had wanted to do that for years since she first started working with us when she first walked into our studio and all of the “LORD OF THE RINGS” sketches and stuff was there.  Back in those days we just threw it all away as did most artists because all that is was, was a means to an end, you wouldn’t even keep your layouts or anything.  Once the painting was done you just threw all of that stuff away but she saved all of the layouts that we had done for the paintings and put them away for twenty years and then pulled them out of some storage facility or something which Tim and I had both totally forgotten about.  We forgot that we had these things at all but she had them and they found their way into a book that she was working on and sold it to Watts and Guptal, the art book publishers.  That book was underway long before we knew that the film was underway, it just kind of like converged like this.

IA  Well, for the next few years it does look to be a hot property with all the sequels that are coming so you should see a bit of exposure from that I would think.

GH  Yeah, well our fans for this are still out there and we have done a lot of signings on this book and it is kind of neat to see the people who loved the book and then loved our artwork are now loving the movie.

IA  Do you have a preference in mediums that you want to work in most, film, painting, etc?

GH  Do you mean, what do I do best?

IA  Well, maybe not what you do best necessarily but what you enjoy doing the most, what you feel most artistically complete doing?

GH  Right, painting is it for me.  Like, what I am doing right now is I am doing these pinups, they are more retro-pinups from the thirties and forties and fifties.  I have done thirty of those and that is kind of an ongoing thing for me now and we are going to do a book on that.  Tim and I have done all kinds of stuff and I can’t say that I prefer one thing over the other, animated or movies or whatever, it is whatever is in front of my face at the time that I am most into I guess and God knows what the hell that could be in the next year, I don’t know! (laughs)

IA  You grew up here in Detroit, what was that like?

GH  Tim and I were born and raised in Detroit, on the East side around Warren and Maryland.  I went back there about fifteen years ago, which is something that I never should have done! (laughs)  I told my friend, “Jerry, I want to go back to the old neighborhood” and he said to me, “Greg, it ain’t like it used to be” and I said, “I know that. . .” but I didn’t know that! (laughs)  When I got there, holy shit, I freaked out for like a year.  I couldn’t deal with it.  Aside form the fact that every other house was burnt out and there was all this drug dealing going on in the streets and right at this same time there was this Dutch-Elm disease that hit Michigan right at the same time and all the trees were dead and it just looked like Berlin after WWII, it was horrible.  I mean, I was balling, I was in tears because this is where I grew up until I started High School.  We had just started High School when our parents moved us up to 20 Mile road and Rochester, right on the border of Troy.  My Mother still lives there, she is almost 90 now.  We went to Avondale High School and as a matter of fact AHS just sent us a letter last year.  We were like artists back then already and this was in the 1950’s so. . .

IA  So, you were not considered to be particularly high achievers back then? (laughs)

GH  Well, it wasn’t so much that as it was that Avondale was a more sports related school, as were most schools then I would guess.  They didn’t give a shit about art.  If you were into art you were like a turd to them.  Art was like, “What are you a faggot?”  “What would you do if I cut your hands off Hildebrandt?”  You had to deal with that kind of crap back then.  That was the 50’s kind of thing and so Tim and I were both pretty much misanthropic.  We would come home, we had three acres with a garage/barn thing and we were so into Sci-Fi because we had just seen “WAR OF THE WORLDS” and “WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE” and so we would go home and build these miniature sets in our parents barn, that is how we spent our High School years.  The school itself did very little for the arts, they could give a shit less but then they send us this thing last year, “Will you be our distinguished alumni and come to our ceremony in your honor?” and it really pissed me off.  The local paper calls me and I told them, “That school didn’t do shit for me and now they want my name so they can apply it to their school?”  It has nothing to do with the present people, they didn’t know what was going on back then but it just pissed me off.

IA  So what you do is you show up and when you accept the award you start out with, “You dirty pricks!”(laughs)

GH  Yeah!  Anyway.

IA  The area that you grew up in Detroit was obviously before the 60’s riots?

GH  Yeah, yeah.  Our parents moved us out of the city in about 1954 so Detroit, at that time, was a beautiful city.  We used to go back and visit all the time and take a bus and go downtown walking around and it was incredible, a very beautiful place.  When Tim and I moved to New York in ’63, that was when the whole deteriorization started, all the white flight.  We would go back to visit family and relatives and each time it would get weirder and weirder, more expressways heading out of town, more and more malls and shopping centers and it was so bizarre to me.  It looked like something out of Metropolis or some other Sci-fi movie.  You would get to downtown and it is just this crater, it was totally bizarre to me, very depressing and sad.

IA  Most parents try to encourage their kids with arts and other things these days, maybe too many other things, but back when you were a kid I could see the average parent being more like, “So when are you going to get a real job?”  Were your parents very supportive of you and your brother?

GH  Yeah, yeah.  Now see, we never had that problem, our parents were amazing.  They totally supported what we did from year one.  I never, ever got from either Mother or Father, “Stop this!”  And you know, in a working class mentality on the East side of Detroit in the 1940’s and 50’s that was really unusual.  Our Mother completely supported drawing from our imagination.  She was big on imagination and making sure that you develop that quality.  I probably believed in Santa Clause until I was like twelve or something!  We would go for walks in the woods, which was a big thing for them, we didn’t have a car and we would get on a bus and drive to the edge of town and spend the whole day walking through the woods.  She would be talking about the “Gnomes, Fairies and Elves” who lived there and it was like it was real and we believed it.  That was always there.  We would make Superman costumes and get up on the roof and jump off or make our Frankenstein costumes and walk down the street at night and they totally supported us.  Our Dad always made sure that we had paper, pencils, masking tape, he always kept us supplied with all the raw materials and if we didn’t have all of that stuff that he would bring home to us from work God knows that we wouldn’t have been able to buy it.  What the hell, you got a quarter for cutting grass and the money that you did get you would go and spend on a comic book or baseball cards anyway. (laughs)  We just drew and painted and we would make all kinds of things.  He would bring home rolls and rolls of masking tape, stuff that suppliers would give him, he worked in the Chevy office supply so he had access to all of this stuff.  We even made a whole Tyrannosaurus costume one time.  We built it up out of masking tape and cloth and paper and it was big enough so that we could get inside of it and walk around! (laughs)  After we saw Disney’s “20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA,” there was this big spot out in back of the house that was sunken and we were planning on flooding it with water and building the deck of the Nautilus on it!  We got as far as building the giant squid in our basement.  My Dad had his workshop down there and this squid occupied the basement for about a year and we never really totally completed it and it just laid around down there forever.  We came home from School one day and dad had been home all that day and we found the squid on fire!  He had had it; he couldn’t deal with it anymore and that is the most traumatic thing that I can remember about our Father not dealing with our shit! (laughs)  You wouldn’t believe some of the crazy shit that we did.  Once, we built a city scene in the basement, so that we could blow it up with a flying saucer.  Now this was a scale model thing and we spent months and months on it and in those days you could actually go to theatrical supply store and buy powdered magnesium, you know, flash powder, and you didn’t need anything, they would sell it to kids!  We would then go to pharmacies and get zinc and sulfur and saltpeter and basically we were going to make our own gunpowder for our own explosives for this miniature set.  We went into this one store and said, “OK, we need a pound of Salt Peter and a pound of Sulfur” and the guy is like, “What are you going to use this for?”  He basically knew and wouldn’t sell it to us and so we went to another place and bought the Salt Peer and Sulfur separately and then we got the charcoal and there we had our own gunpowder.  Anyway, we have this whole miniature set built in the basement and our parents took off for a whole Saturday and we just blew this thing up down in the basement! (laughs)  We were thinking that, you know, we had fire extinguishers around but we never thought that the house would be filled with black smoke!  Everything was just pitch-black; you couldn’t see your hand an inch in front of your face, literally.  It was the middle of the day and you can’t see anything so we are like, “What do we do?”  So we opened up all of the windows in the house and ran outside and all of this black smoke is billowing out of the windows and we are running around trying to clear it all out when we could go back in and when it was all cleared out they (parents) came home and fortunately they didn’t seem to smell anything.  A week or two later and our Mother would run her finger around the tops of counters and was like, “What is this!”  It was black soot everywhere!  The whole house was filled with soot everywhere and even with something like that you would think that they would take us out back and shoot us but they didn’t!  They would freak out a bit, “Don’t you ever. . .” and you would go through that but we would say, “OK, but can we build one out in the garage?”  They would say, “No, No No!” but then finally say, “Yes.”  So we built this model city scene out in the garage and we wired it all up again and blew it up again when they took off for another day.  We shot it all on 8mm which we still have the footage of in slow motion and it still looks good.  It looks professional and we used it as part of a real when we went to Jam Handy’s.  They put up with all this stuff.  Like I say, they didn’t have a lot of money in those days but my Mother had a coat with some Fur trim on it and we needed some hair for a puppet that we were making. . .

IA  Oh no, I know where this is going. (laughs)

GH  Yep, we cut the fur off of the bottom and said, “Oh, she won’t see this. . .”(laughs)  We would do this kind of stuff all of the time, swiping sheets out of the closet to make a costume or something and they were always with it, they supported us all the way.  This is still all amazing to me.

IA  You mentioned that your son was in the business, does he work with you?

GH  No, he has been writing a lot and has written a couple of screenplays.  He has worked with us on a couple of projects as well but he has not yet sold a screen play, he has got close, you know how that goes but that is his main effort, to get a screenplay bought.

IA  So I would imagine that he had your complete enthusiasm as far as any interest in arts went?

GH  Oh totally.  All three of my kids, I have two girls too.  My daughter, Mary is married to an artist and is an artist herself.  When I was raising them, anything went as long as they didn’t hurt anybody! (laughs)  One vivid memory was that we would always copy comic book covers and the first thing that we would do is lay a piece of paper on the top of it and trace it and my Mother would see me do that and she would say, “Don’t ever trace, never, never trace.”  She was very emphatic about it.  “Never trace someone else’s work, draw it on your own.”  Which was really outstanding, that was a huge statement to make, that is how you learn.