New York-based makeup supervisors John Cagli-one and Doug Drexler were hired by Warren Beatty to transfer Chester Gould's grotesque comic characters from the printed page to the screen. Cagli-one and Drexler—both of them Dick Smith proteges (Drexler assisted Smith in aging David Bowie as a vampire in THE HUNGER)—cut their prosthetic teeth on such filmsas ALTERED STATES, FX, MAKING MR. RIGHT, ZELIG, and, most recently, THE COTTON CLUB. To this day, neither can quite believe their good fortune at landing what, in more ways than one, was a makeupartist's dream.
"There were a lot of people bidding on this job,"recounted Drexler. And no wonder. With the exception of Beatty as Tracy, and his sidekicks, Madonnaas Breathless Maho-ney, and Glenne Headly as Tess Trueheart—Beatty called them the "feeling" characters—almost everyone in the production wore some kind of prosthetic makeup. At first Beatty himself was said to be intent upon wearing makeup appliances that would afford him the hawk-nosed, square-jawed Tracy that cartoonist Gould had drawn. Caglione and Drexler thought that wasa bad idea for several reasons.
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