Living with Monsters San Francisco Artist Promotes His Bizarre Vision May 2006

by Danny Soracco
Photos by Russell Byrne

I make my life as an artist but make my living as a baker. My dad operates a bakery around the corner from me that my grandfather started in 1910. Grandpa built the place in order to make Focaccia bread, which is still our trademark product.

I began delivering bread when I was still in high school. My brother, sister, and I all work in the business. I’m one of the morning bakers. I go to work at 3 a.m. and work until 10. We still make the bread completely from scratch using the family’s secret recipe in a brick oven that’s been coating itself with the odors of baking bread for over 90 years. We heat the oven to 1,000 degrees in the evening, and then the next day we use the radiant heat from the bricks for the day’s baking. In the morning it takes six minutes to bake the bread; in the afternoon it might take ten.

I was born and raised in San Francisco. I attended school at St. Peter & Paul’s, which is located on 666 Stockton Street, only two blocks from where I live. I have no intention of ever living anyplace else. I think The City is beautiful, and whenever I go away I miss it. For one thing, I can get around easily even without a car. For another thing, the variety of restaurants is amazing! There may be more quality eating establishments within five miles of my home than in any other comparable area on the face of the planet.

Discovering the Delicious World of Horror
I have always enjoyed fantasy and horror movies. When I was kid I remember watching the movie Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein. My mom says that the movie scared me, but all I can remember is how thrilling the experience seemed. That movie is still one of my all time favorites. A while ago I showed it to my kids by way of initiating them to monster movies. My children enjoyed the movie as much as I hoped and expected that they would.

As I was growing up in the 1960s, I began to develop a great attraction for bizarre images. I was collecting and reading monster magazines and began to put together Aurora models of monsters and scary things of many kinds. I actually started on these before I was able to do the assembly myself; I would get my dad to buy them and then would intently watch while he put them together for me. I remember those were great times. My dad and I were having fun together. There was something magical about seeing the twisted limbs and horrible features take shape beneath my dad’s hands. I guess that’s where I really got the bug; as soon as I had any discretionary income I began making these and collecting them.

I’m an avid collector and have works besides my own, representing many artists. I always collected memorabilia including pictures, vintage toys, artwork, autographs, music, and movie props. I have friends in the movies, and they would trade things with me. For example, I have one of the canes from the Jurassic Park movie, plus collectables from the Bat Man movies, and monsters from the original Outer Limits as well as current horror films.

I enjoy movies, especially horror movies. Most especially the classic horror movies including the Italian horror films by Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. My favorite TV Shows were The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone. I like twisted shows; where the monsters turn out to be more humane than the people. One of my favorite movie monsters is the amphibious horror in the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I actually met Ben Chapman, who played the land version of the creature.

What first whetted my interest in making model monsters of my own was a toy marketed by Mattel called Creepy Crawlers, which was the original toy in a line called Thing-Maker. It came with a set of metal molds, tubes of a vinyl plastic substance called goop, and a burner to heat the molds on until the vinyl would set and I could dump out the little creature I had created. Mattel sold nine different sets of molds with between three and seven creepy things in each. If you bought all nine molds you could make almost 40 creatures – things like toads, caterpillars, spiders, rattlesnakes, earthworms, and scorpions.

In that same Thing-Maker series Mattel also sold a product called Fright Factory, which had molds that let me make things like shrunken heads, skeletons, scars, and long fingernails that let me add ‘claws’ to the ends of my fingers.

Another set, called Creeple Peeple, would let me create a charming family of troll-looking creatures. Actually, the molds only let me make the creatures’ heads, hands, and arms. I then had to attach these to a pencil in order to create a stick figure. I liked making all the objects, but the Creepy Crawlers and the Fright Factory were the best.

Monstrosities for Fun
As I grew older, my collecting activities became much more fervent, and I began to assemble a collection of mostly fantastic images, pictures, and masks. In the mid 1980s I was working in a restaurant and a man walked in with makeup that made him appear to be deformed. I was immediately attracted to him as a kindred spirit and the two of us went into business together. We started a company called Dimensional Designs, and began creating a line of masks and 3-D t-shirts.

We had a lot of fun, but the business was too seasonal. There is no steady market for a mask with a sucking head-wound except at Halloween. I started looking for something that we could market all year long and came across an ad in an issue of Model Figure Collector magazine for a Japanese model kit that was completely different from the kits I was used to – Styrene models made in two halves that you then had to glue together. These new models were solid resin and had no seam line. Some of them were available in vinyl, like a dog toy. They were much nicer than any dog toy, however, because they were highly detailed and had movable joints. You could pose their arms and legs to achieve various looks.

The new creatures were fun to play around with, but I kept wishing that the selection could be larger. I wished someone would make a model of the monsters and creatures from Harry Hausen films, such as the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, for example, or Jason and the Argonauts. I had always been strongly attracted by the fantastic characters that populated his movies. They were models to begin with, but Hausen’s monsters and skeletons seemed to move with character and personality. They were believable! I didn’t know why anybody in the United States wasn’t making these figures, so I started designing models and molds and began making these myself.

At first I mainly did this as a way of increasing my own collection, but before long other collectors began asking for my pieces. I also began getting into contact with fellow modelers and we started to trade pieces with each other. There is a lively sub-culture in America of people who share a common interest in collecting weird and outlandish objects. I kept cranking out my pieces so that I would have something to trade. People began to ask for my pieces who didn’t have anything to trade so I had to set a price. I had no desire at that time to turn my hobby into a profit center so I simply calculated time-and-materials and would sell my pieces for enough to recoup my production costs.

I was at the beginning of a wave of enthusiasts for creating these kinds of collectables. When I started, at the beginning of the 1980s, there were fewer than a dozen of us in America who were making these kinds of objects. The number of serious artists and craftsmen working in this field has grown to more than 300 – and I myself taught more than a dozen of them how to do this. I coordinate with other artists to avoid repetition. On occasion we might coordinate projects together.

Getting Down to Business
I made my first foray into turning hobby into profession when I was nine years old by making a bunch of Creepy Crawlers on my Mattel Thing Maker and would then sell my little creations in front of my house to the other kids in the neighborhood. I would charge whatever the market would bear. A nickel, perhaps, or a dime. Big business!

After a couple decades of just-for-the-fun-of-it activities, I decided to move from hobby mode to serious business. I began filling the market niche created by a large number of people who like to collect figures but who lack either the time or the ability to build and paint high-quality models for themselves. After a while this market began to be impacted by the immense growth of interest in collecting action figures, which has become immeasurably larger than our movie models. That whole business is owned, of course, by the big companies who hold the rights to these things.

Anyway, I would rather concentrate upon older and more obscure movies. Little by little all the movies are all getting done. Frankenstein has been done so many ways that the opportunity to do him again is becoming unattractive. Same thing for the Predator. I’m doing characters from some old 1950s-era movies, like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and The Killer Shrews.

At a collector’s convention I met Sara Karloff, who was Boris Karloff’s daughter. The two of us collaborated on some Boris Karloff kits under license to his estate. I also collaborated with the Bella Lugosi’s and Lon Cheney’s estates and did models based upon characters from their movies. I also did a line of licensed monsters based upon characters from the classic Outer Limits TV show.

I never planned to make things just for profit, I always made things that I like because I figured that other people would be crazy enough to like them as well.

I follow five steps in creating a model for sale:

1. I pick a subject and choose a pose that will capture the spirit of a specific scene the character played in a movie.
2. I make a wire armature to serve as the skeleton of the model, often at a 1/6 scale, which makes the figure about a foot tall.
3. I create the figure on the armature using Super Sculptly, epoxy, putty, or plasticene.
4. After the figure is complete, joints are added to make assembly easier for the builder.
5. I use the figure to make a mold out of silicone.

Once the mold is completed, I pour plastic into it to make reproductions of the sculpture. A mold can make 40 or 50 copies before it wears out. I sell the reproductions through model magazines and mailing lists, take them to conventions, and, of course, offer them on eBay.

I sometimes commission other sculptors to make my models if I am busy with other parts of the business. I would always do the final work of molding and casting.

The process is actually too easy and other people can, and do, copy our inventions. The copycatters hurt the hobby. In response we began creating limited editions, that were signed and numbered.

One of my limited editions was a Dracula ring. These are beautiful rings. They are large, heavy, and are made out of solid silver. I created 250 of them. The price started at 250 dollars, and the price has increased as the number of available rings has diminished. There are only a few left and they are currently going for 550 dollars each. They are going for even more than this on eBay.

We can sell these limited editions to collectors with the expectation that they will increase in value and then offer other things that are more affordable, such as my line of Outer Limits characters.

EBay made big changes in the business. Many of the collectable shows I used to go to have become more like staged events than like venues in which avid collectors trade pieces with each other. Dealers would now rather sit on eBay than go to the conventions for the obvious reasons that eBay doesn’t involve traveling, hotels, and meals. So now the shows are more of an autograph event. They used to be 90 percent about selling models and collectables; now that has fallen to 10 percent.

I would like to get into toys and create something that would be more difficult to bootleg. Perhaps I will make a line of dolls. We created a sister company called Planet Earth Productions to sell items other than monsters. We released a wind-up toy of Robbie the Robot, and a Bruce Lee statue – both fully licensed. Perhaps I’ll get more into jewelry, do some more pieces like my Dracula ring.

This hobby attracts some interesting characters. A number of the people who are attracted to my odd figures are, themselves, pretty odd. One Dracula fan, for example, learned that I was creating Dracula rings and developed an absolute lust for possessing one of these. He hounded me until I finally had these for sale and could sell him one. Getting one of the first rings had become a consuming obsession. At one time I told him, jokingly, that he was too late; I had sold them all. I thought the guy was going to have a heart attack.

One time I saw Michael Jackson come up to my friends’ table wanting to buy the painted displays.

I get a great deal of satisfaction when people thank me for something I’ve made. That always feels good, of course. And I’m always happy to explain to anyone how I do the things I do. This has been a cooperative thing from the beginning.

I enjoy being surrounded by my little monsters. My hobby seems to provide an innocent and friendly alternative to the real world where actual monsters, sometimes dressed in business suits, do things that are too horrible for me to think about.

You can see Danny’s art on display at the Arts Commission Gallery, at the Business Technology Incubator, May through July. Reception May 10, 6-8 pm.