In Hollywood, Dental Technicians Are SFX Artists Creating The Practical Magic We Simply Eat Up

In 1993 the call came from a dentist who had Oscar winning prosthetic makeup artist Greg Cannom in his chair. Having won an Academy Award for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ the year before, Cannom wanted to know how he might get false teeth to fall out during a scene in a comedy he was working on called ‘Mrs Doubtfire’.

We love movies. We’ve loved them since their silent selves had us plonk down before them to watch black-and-white imagery unfold in a way that has never lost its mesmerism and mystique.

It all began in a box.

The Edison ‘Kinetoscope’ opened its first parlour on 14 April, 1894. Customers peered through a hole in a machine to view about 30 seconds of sequential images on a strip of perforated film. Run at between 18 and 24 frames a second on 35mm film, the high-speed shutter and light source produced the illusion of movement that had one person at a time happily stoop over to experience it.

Firstly in New York City, in a rented store front. The princely admission was a nickel for one, a quarter for five, or 50c to look into all ten machines, each running a different film. This lifelike representation of objects and people in motion was the culmination of a six-year Edison Manufacturing Co. project, overseen by assistant and part-time photographer William K.L. Dickson at the New Jersey Studio – part of the Edison Works.

It was a year when the average wage was $US1.66 for a 10-hour day. It was the same decade that American dentist Willoughby Dayton Miller published ‘The Micro-organisms of the Human Mouth’, that proposed tooth decay as the result of bacterial activity.

Giving yourself a few minutes respite from the problems of New York City for literally the price of a ham and egg sandwich wasn’t such a bad idea. At the time 2.7 million people lived there, along with 150,000 working horses hauling people and freight every day. An incredible 1400 tonnes of manure hit the streets daily, and there were 3500 people for every square kilometre of space.

The first film to be publicly exhibited that was more than a few feet in length, followed a lecture at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences the year before. Audience members lined up to see ‘Blacksmith Scene #1’ in Edison’s kinetoscope. Ten seconds of title preceded 30 black-and-white seconds of three Edison employees, including Charles Kayser and John Ott around an anvil. Two wield a sledgehammer each, the third a cross peen, their rhythmic blows mesmerising and anticipatory. A bottle is then passed between them, and work resumes; all accompanied by the almost vaudevillian sound of a piano, based on a segment of the ‘Anvil Chorus’ from Verdi’s 1853 Il Trovatore.

It’s the first instance of screen acting and the format – 35mm wide film; four sprockets per frame – remains the standard. It means that remarkably, this very first work from 132 years ago can be played on a contemporary projector.

Try doing that with a floppy disk.

Although you’ll no doubt be surprised to know that this largely forgotten format is still used by certain factories, governments and parts of the airline industry. Boeing 747s rely on floppy disks to load critical navigation and avionics software updates. With 2025 being the 55th year of their existence it’s interesting to note that only Air China, Korean Air, Lufthansa and a division of Aeroflot, Rossiya still fly the fabled first ‘jumbo jet’ that revolutionised commercial flight by cutting per-seat operating costs.

It was Pan Am with the first order that launched the 747. In December 1965, Boeing President William McPherson Allen (1900-1985) met with Pan Am President Juan Terry Trippe (1899-1981). Reportedly, their conversation was succinct.

“If you’ll build it, I’ll buy it,” said Trippe.

“If you buy it, I’ll build it,” Allen replied.

With an agreement to buy 25 planes at $US20 million each, the deal was done in April 1966.

Hollywood mainstay Alec Baldwin portrayed Juan Trippe in the small role afforded him in 2004’s ‘The Aviator’ starring Leonardo DiCaprio as industrialist Howard Hughes. A known germaphobe, Hughes had an 18-month relationship with movie icon Katharine Hepburn that began in 1937.

In the late 1980s, renowned dental materials expert, lecturer and academic author Dr Ralph W. Phillips had “a copy of a copy” of a 35mm colour slide of dental treatment carried out on Katharine Hepburn’s maxillary teeth. It was an image he used in his lectures to demonstrate the effectiveness and potential longevity of well-rendered precision cast gold work and gold foil tooth repair.

It was a slide he believed he’d acquired from Los Angeles ‘Dentist to the Stars’ and creator of dental veneers, Dr Charles Pincus. He also noted that at least some of Ms Hepburn’s treatment was under the care of the great researcher, teacher, and dental clinician Dr George M. Hollenback. Culminating in a close friendship, he also treated the dental injuries Hughes suffered as a result of the near fatal 1946 XF-11 maiden flight plane crash that indelibly changed the remaining 30 years of his life.

One of the three houses damaged or destroyed by the gigantic plane built specifically for photographic reconnaissance work, was occupied by dentist Dr Jules Zimmerman. More than half the roof was torn off the two-story dwelling at 803 North Linden Drive, Beverly Hills.

Dr Pincus’ work means veneers are ubiquitous in Hollywood. Creating certain character looks has become increasingly challenging for special effects artists because of the broader smile, and increased tooth length and width the cosmetic changes bring.

In the field of dental prosthetics, pulling off a visual magic trick in film and television involves a lot of trial and error.

Being that they’re not permanent, Hollywood production houses can skirt American Dental Association guidelines requiring a licensed dental technician to create and apply prosthetics. Although there is astounding lack of regulation, if it’s not done properly there’s an increased risk of tooth damage and studios choose to use qualified professionals.

For Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone to look “like a bulldog” in 1972’s ‘The Godfather’ to provide the necessary jowls a custom mouthpiece was created by legendary special effects makeup artist and author Richard Emerson (Dick) Smith (1922-2014).

The actor decided that the foam prototype made his face appear too soft and droopy for the physicality of his character, and had what was ultimately used in the film remade in metal and resin.

The current Godfather of FX Teeth in Hollywood is Gary Archer, who’s worked on 200 advertisements and 350 films and tv shows since the early 1990s. Prior to that he’d been thinking about a career in IT when after a heart attack, his father asked him to help out at his AA Dental Labs. It specialised in dentures, partials, crowns and other restorations and Gary apprenticed as a dental technician.

And so it was that in 1993 the call came from a dentist who had Oscar winning prosthetic makeup artist Greg Cannom in his chair. Having won an Academy Award for ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ the year before, Cannom wanted to know how he might get false teeth to fall out during a scene in a comedy he was working on called ‘Mrs Doubtfire’.

It all began in a box.

Now there are hundreds of them. Small white boxes stack his workshop walls, each identical but for the name on the side: Helen Mirren, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Michael Douglas, Russell Crowe, Ralph Feinnes, Drew Barrymore, John Tutturo, George Clooney, Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst. Each box holds the measurements, data and dental mould Archer made. Few stars and character actors are absent. Somewhat eerily comforting still sit the cast impressions of the likes of Robin Williams, Betty White, Brittany Murphy and Ray Liotta.

Vastly different to when it began, lightweight, resilient dental moulds now set in less than a minute. Digital dentistry provides the means to design and construct teeth transformations without even meeting the actor via intraoral scanners. This camera-lined wand is run along the teeth to remotely capture an image that can be 3D printed.

Each set of character teeth can only be worn by the actor in that particular role, and the knock-on effect of improvements in CGI means practices have changed. A set of dental prosthetics might now be duly painted and used as a green screen, giving post-production the responsibility for designing and executing the desired characteristics.

Although all the pointed cuspids needed for 1994’s ‘Interview with the Vampire’ were the work of Archer, who later followed up with ‘Blade’, ‘Deadpool’ and ‘Wolverine’ films, his colleague Dominic Mombrun of ‘Bitemakers’ in Oxfordshire, UK is now the specialist for monster mouths and frightening fangs.

Of the thousands who paid to see Edison’s Kinetoscope, some must have considered it far preferable to see these moving pictures on a screen like a magic lantern show, rather than individually bent over looking into a box. A few had the means to have a crack at it. Frenchman Léon Bouly was one. It was fellow countryman and photographer Antoine Lumière, along with his sons Auguste and Louis that made the opportunity of Bouly’s lapsed patent their advantage and ours.

Movies synchronise our thoughts and emotions within the universal motifs and archetypes of the collective unconscious. We love them because in separating us from reality for a while, they bring us closer to understanding who we are. Prosthetics, performers and makeup artists close that gap between reality and the impossibly possible.

It’s a blend of art and science. Like dental technology itself.

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