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Background Is Everything
by Scott Essman
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Jennifer McManus in a foam latex costume that she created for a personal project. The suit was intrinsically colored and included thigh-high boots.
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Robert Burman and Jennifer McManus
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Go ahead. Say whatever you want about STICKS AND STONES, an LA- based company which creates innovative props, costumes, puppets and makeup effects. It will take more than names to hurt them. "Man started with sticks and he started with stones," noted co-owner Robert Burman. "Well, that's what we do: we go back to your basics - we invent the future with the past."
 Founded by Burman and his wife, Jennifer McManus, Sticks
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Jennifer McManus in a "Harley Quinn" costume that she created for the BATMAN animated series.
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and Stones offers moviemakers a unique one-stop production studio for virtually anything an art department may require. Prior to their marriage, the two proprietors had known each other for some years, as Burman had been working for a variety of top studios in makeup effects while McManus was a veteran costumer designer. "When we started going together," Burman recalled,
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The myriad costumes, helmets, and accessories created by Burman and McManus for the MIGHTY MORPHIN' POWER RANGERS movie.
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"I realized that the things I needed to know, she knew. And the things she wanted to know, I knew. So, as our art is always overlapping, we started realizing that this was just too good an occasion. We figured it was the perfect opportunity to form a company with both of us."
Along with his brother Barney, also an effects technician, Burman had a decidedly unique entry into the film business: he belongs to athird-generation legacy of Burman craftsmen: his grandfather made plastic and rubber props in the 1940s and 1950s and his father Thomas is still an active makeup effects expert, having got his start as an apprentice on Planet of the Apes in 1967 when Robert was five. "Even as a kid," Burman said, "though my father did makeup, I still looked at the movies and went, 'Wow! I bet somebody had to make that. I've been around it
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A hollow urethane dummy head in the image of its creator — Rob Burman
made it for SURVIVING THE GAME. The hair was hand-punched by Denise Baer.
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my whole life."
After studying theater at the University of Hawaii, McManus came to LA, and worked as puppeteer, hairstylist, and makeup artist on low-budget Garbage Pail Kids movie in 1987. "From there," she said, "I just kept being hired for various different things - everything from props to puppet-making to
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Creatures that Rob Burman created for the movie, SUPER MARIO BROS. The small lizard was a combination overhead mask and makeup, and the largest beast was a rod puppet with radio-controlled eyes and mouth.
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costuming to makeup." Amongst her many prominent assignments were creating two oversize baby costumes for Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (1992), in both 56-foot scale and 112-foot scale. "Normally, in film, you go into miniatures," McManus recalled, "but we were going into blown-up versions. I literally had to learn how to scale the baby; I had never rock climbed before, but it was part of the job's criteria."
After several successful Sticks and Stones projects, including the Super Mario Bros. movie, Rob and Jennifer
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Rob Burman, Jennifer McManus and Scott Essman pose at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum with their new installation about Jack Pierce.
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were approached by the producers of the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers movie in the summer of 1994. At first, they were solely asked to manufacture the identifying character costumes, but eventually, they were also responsible for the gloves, boots, belts, emble
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A Winkie Guard from 1998's A TRIBUTE TO THE WIZARD OF OZ, created by Jennifer McManus using the same method that was likely applied for the original 1939 MGM classic.
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ms, and helmets. "At full strength," Burman recalled, "we had as many as twenty-two people in less than five thousand square feet producing thirty complete costumes and forty-five helmets. And we had three and a half months to create everything." Because the Power Rangers' costumes involved equal parts fabricating, understru
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Jennifer McManus
recreated the original Frankenstein monster costume for the Jack Pierce project.
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ctural work, and exterior finishing, Burman related that he and his wife worked as an ideally matched team. "She couldn't have done it without me and I couldn't have done it without her."
Having completed such recent diverse work as creating miniatures of Robin Williams and Marcia Gay Harden in Flubber, fake heads for the Noah's Ark TV miniseries, and futuristic suits for Star Trek: Insurrection, there seems to be nothing that Sticks and Stones cannot do. "When you go to a bunch of different companies for props, makeup, and costumes," Burman explained of the moviemaking process, "you get all of these inputs and different kinds of looks in a finished film unless you've got one person overseein
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Scott Essman at Hollywood Entertainment Museum's Jack Pierce Exhibit.
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g it all. I'd like Sticks and Stones to be that person."
In the future, Jennifer McManus and Rob Burman wish to continue making Sticks and Stones the one place that moviemakers can turn to achieve their aesthetic goals on film. However, like other talented craftspeople, they also wish to make their own independently-based productions - a tangential career that will start with a short dramatic film. "We're getting to the point now where we've been working on movies for a long time," related Burman. "You can only go so far working on movies. It's time that we actually got to make them."
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