When Gorgo Met Hellboy

You may have read about a new, fourth Hellboy film that has been made without anyone noticing and which is set for release later this year. But did you know (you didn’t, I guarantee) that there is, alongside the existing three features, another film set in the Hellboy universe. An unofficial tie-in short which connects with the two Ron Perlman pictures in a way that even the most eagle-eyed viewer could not possibly notice. Basically, the connection was only apparent actually on the set.

Fortunately, I went on the set. Because I wrote it. The film is called Waiting for Gorgo, and you can now watch it on blu-ray.

Here’s the background. Years ago I write a short script called Waiting for Gorgo which was a semi-sequel to the 1961 giant monster film Gorgo. If you’re not familiar with Gorgo, check out the trailer on YouTube. It’s basically a British kaiju. A big reptilian monster is captured off the coast of Ireland and brought to London where it is displayed for entertainment. But it turns out this is just the baby. Momma Gorgo comes up the Thames, trashes Tower Bridge, fights off the British Army, and rescues her offspring. With a solid script, a good cast, a sophisticated monster suit, excellent miniature effects and a sincerity rarely seen in 1960s kaiju films, Gorgo is considered a classic of the genre.

Starting from the title, my script envisaged a forgotten section of the MoD, set up in the 1960s in the wake of Gorgo’s attack. Now reduced to just two old men in an office at the end of a corridor, the Department of Monsters and Oversized Animals is an anachronism, a relic that no-one knows about. A young auditor, querying these two salaries, tracks down the DMOA. The 18-minute film is basically a three-hander, in one location, as our two elderly civil servants explain their purpose, and the young civil servant assures them there has been a mix-up somewhere because Gorgo wasn’t real. It’s a satire on bureaucracy, basically.

I pitched Waiting for Gorgo on the old ShootingPeople mailing list, and a lot of people were interested. In the end I gave it to a young director named Benjamin Craig. He spent a couple of years rounding up cast and crew, and raising a four-figure budget, The film was shot in July 2008. On 35mm. At Elstree. On the George Lucas Soundstage. Holy cow.

Naturally I went down to Elstree to visit the set. Waiting for Gorgo is included as an extra on the excellent Gorgo blu-ray that was released last year by Vinegar Syndrome, along with a behind-the-scenes featurette which includes footage of me wandering around the set, being impressed. Production designer Timothy Orman and art director Alex Ward created an incredible office set (with fly-away walls), packed with details like charts, maps, leaflets and signage, all bespoke creations branded with the DMOA logo. Set decorators Gavin and Jason Fox did a brilliant job in making this look like somewhere that had changed by only the barest minimum over half a century of use.

One of the things you need, when decorating a set that represents a historical – or anachronistic – office is lots of letters and envelopes. (There was a computer, but it was still in the box.) And the thing about old letters and envelopes is: they have to look real. A letter has a shape: an address and a salutation and paragraphs and a signature. You can’t use blank sheets of paper, you can’t just print out half a dozen paragraphs of lorem ipsum; it’s got to look real, just in case it appears in shot.

You can, if you’ve got the time, type out fake letters and fake envelopes that have the right shaped text. But the easiest way to decorate your office set is simply to rent a bundle of old letters from a prop house, the same place you get your fountain pens and Bakelite telephones. Prop houses have boxes of this stuff, acquired from who knows where. There are love letters, there are final demands, but most of it is just dull, functional business letters, the sort of stuff that’s done by email today. No-one will ever read these, but if glimpsed on screen, they look like real letters because they are real letters.

So that’s what the Fox brothers did; they rented a bundle of old correspondence and scattered it around the set. But in among all these old letters from the 1950s and 1960s, they found a curious item. It was a modern fake letter composed of lorem ipsum text but laid out properly. It was on blue paper and there was a logo in the letterhead. Evidently this was something which had been made for a recent-ish film, which had somehow ended up in the prop rental company’s box of old final demands. Jason and Gavin gave it pride of place on a noticeboard at the back of the set. You can just glimpse a blue rectangle in a couple of shots.

So I’m on set, and the Fox guys show me this. And I recognise the logo. I probably wouldn’t have done, except that I had the latest issue of Fangoria in my bag, which I had been reading on the train. On the front cover of Fango was a picture of Ron Perlman in Hellboy II: The Golden Army. And on Hellboy’s belt was the logo of the organisation he works for, the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. And that was the logo on the blue letter.

Wait, what?

Hellboy II had been shot in Hungary the previous summer, three years after the first movie was filmed in the Czech Republic. This letter had presumably been created for one of those productions, but had then got mixed up with the real letters and envelopes when they were shipped back to a prop house in London. Now it had ended up on the set of my little film, Waiting for Gorgo.

What makes this so perfect is that the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense was set up by the US Government in the 1940s to combat weird threats. And the Department of Monsters and Oversized Animals was established by the British Government in the 1960s for basically the same reason. The former is the big, brash, American response to monsters, with fancy offices and lots of staff, and the latter is the more staid, formal British equivalent. The USA has guns and a tame demon, the UK has bowler hats and a kettle on a gas ring, but they basically do the same job. It makes absolutely perfect sense that the BPRD and the DMOA would correspond on matters relating to monsters and global security!

One rather out-of-focus snap that I took on set (the notice board had a glass cover) is the only evidence of this cinematic crossover. You can just about make out the BPRD logo if you look closely.

I’m very proud of Waiting for Gorgo although, for reasons I won’t go into here, it never found an audience. It played a few tiny, mainstream festivals, watched by punters who had never seen or heard of Gorgo, but frustratingly was never submitted to the places that would have really appreciated it, the big genre events like Fantasporto, Cinenygma, Brussels or Sitges. Eventually it turned up on Vimeo.

Vinegar Syndrome’s blu-ray release has finally brought The Film What I Wrote to the attention of the monster fans I wrote it for, and there are now some lovely reviews online. But none of them mention, because none of them know, that Waiting for Gorgo (and, I suppose, by extension, Gorgo itself…) takes place within the Hellboy fictional universe.

M.J. SIMPSON

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