10 Things I Learned: The Incredible Shrinking Man

Production Notes—

Nov 3, 2021

1.

Jack Arnold was a prolific genre director over the course of his many years as a filmmaker. He started as a cinematographer in the Army Signal Corps during World War II, and after the end of the war started a production company that made promotional films for nonprofit organizations. His early film With These Hands (1950) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The movies he went on to make in Hollywood as a contract director for Universal Pictures—among them It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Tarantula! (1955), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)—became his best-known works. Even late into his career, Arnold kept an office on the Universal lot.

Actor Grant Williams (left) with Jack Arnold on the set of *The Incredible Shrinking Man*

2.

With The Incredible Shrinking Man, the special-effects department at Universal had its work cut out for it. As discussed in an interview with visual-effects experts Ben Burtt and Craig Barron featured on our new edition, this included crafting oversize furniture and household items as giant props, to be combined with split-screen and rear-projection techniques to create the illusion of a diminishing Scott Carey.

3.

Director Joe Dante added character actor William Schallert to his repertory troupe mostly because of his work in Arnold’s films. (Arnold’s daughter Susan also worked with Dante as a casting director.) The instantly recognizable actor can be seen in such Dante movies as his segment of the omnibus Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Gremlins (1984), and Innerspace (1987), in which Schallert plays a doctor (as he does in The Incredible Shrinking Man) to whom Martin Short goes for help, after a shrunken Dennis Quaid gets accidentally injected into his bloodstream.

4.

The Incredible Shrinking Man’s Butch the friendly house cat is played by feline screen star Orangey. By the early 1960s, Orangey had been in around five hundred films and won two Patsy Awards (the four-legged Oscars). He had the titular role in Rhubarb (1951), got on-screen billing as “Cat” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and was flown to Paris for Gigot (1962) with Jackie Gleason. There were at least twenty-four cats billed as Orangey through the years, which helps explain his long and prolific career.

Orangey with Audrey Hepburn on the set of *Breakfast at Tiffany’s*

5.

In order to help sync up the composite footage of the spider in the basement and the scenes with Butch the cat, Jack Arnold used a metronome in order to time actor Grant Williams’s cues and reactions.

6.

Author Richard Matheson wrote the novel The Shrinking Man, on which the movie is based, in the basement of a Long Island home. “Every morning, I would go down into the cellar with my pad and pencil and I would imagine what my hero was up to that day,” Matheson told his fan Stephen King, who writes about The Shrinking Man in his 1981 reflection on the horror genre, Danse Macabre. “I didn’t have to keep the environment in my mind or keep notes. I had it all there, frozen. It was intriguing (when I watched them shoot the film) to see the cellar set, because it reminded me a good deal of the cellar in Sound Beach. And I had a momentary, enjoyable sense of déjà vu.”

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The Incredible Shrinking Man

Jack Arnold

7.

Matheson’s novel was also the basis for Joel Shumacher’s 1981 film The Incredible Shrinking Woman, starring Lily Tomlin, Charles Grodin, and Ned Beatty. It was Schumacher’s first outing as a feature-film director, after having designed costumes for Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky and written the screenplays for Car Wash (1976) and The Wiz (1978).

Lily Tomlin in Joel Schumacher’s *The Incredible Shrinking Woman*

8.

The original Incredible Shrinking Man trailer (included on our release) was narrated by Orson Welles, then soon to make Touch of Evil for Universal. The trailer was put together while Arnold was directing Welles in Man in the Shadow (1957); the two had a contentious relationship at the start of filming but eventually became friends.

9.

Not long before he starred as Scott Carey in The Incredible Shrinking Man, Williams made his big-screen debut in Arnold’s western Red Sundown (1956), as the psychotic gunslinger Chet Swann. Viewers may also remember Williams as Biff Miley in Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama Written on the Wind (1956), but his career never really took off the way this start seemed to promise.

10.

No spoilers here, but the philosophical ending of The Incredible Shrinking Man was considered quite controversial for a seemingly lighthearted studio science-fiction movie of the time. The finale certainly fits alongside some of those penned by Matheson in the sixties as a writer for the Twilight Zone TV series. See it for yourself!

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Susan Arosteguy is a producer at the Criterion Collection.

10 Things I Learned: The Incredible Shrinking Man

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