1939: The Man Who Turned an Actor's Brown Eyes Blue — 80 Years of Hollywood Special-Effect Lenses
Spring 1939, the MGM lot.
William Tuttle, head of the makeup department, was handed a problem.
Change an actor's eyes from brown to blue.
Dye was out of the question. They were eyes.
Lighting could not do it either.
Tuttle was introduced to an optometrist in Beverly Hills.
Reuben Greenspoon.
He had run a practice on Wilshire Boulevard since 1935.
Firing a ceramic ring onto a glass lens
Contact lenses at the time were glass scleral lenses that covered the whole front of the eye.
Greenspoon did this.
He made a ring out of blue ceramic material.
Glazed it.
Placed it on the glass lens.
Put it in a kiln and fired it.
To see whether the ceramic would fuse to the glass.
It did.
The actor who wore the lens was Henry Hull; the film, released that summer, was Miracles for Sale.
Histories of film makeup call this the first recorded use of contact lenses to change an actor's eye colour.
Two years later, Greenspoon consulted on Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.
The son takes over
Reuben's son, Morton Greenspoon, graduated from the Southern California College of Optometry in 1951 and took over the special-lens side of his father's practice.
Over the next half-century, a few of the eyes that passed through his hands:
**1960, *Flaming Star*** — Elvis Presley's blue eyes turned brown for a mixed-heritage role. Morton remembered Elvis as "friendly and cooperative."
**1967, *Wait Until Dark*** — Audrey Hepburn's eyes made to look blind. She sent him a Christmas card every year afterwards.
**1968, Planet of the Apes, The Exorcist, An American Werewolf in London, the Star Trek films, and, in the 2000s, the *Twilight*** saga.
The American Optometric Association describes him as having "fit more actors and actresses with cosmetic contact lenses than any other person."
The hardest lens: a vertical pupil
The job Morton Greenspoon called his most difficult was Michael Jackson's 1983 video Thriller.
The eyes in the werewolf transformation.
Yellow ground, and a pupil stretched vertically, like a cat's.
The material was an acrylic scleral lens.
The problem was not the shape of the pupil. It was orientation.
A round lens rotates on the eye.
Let a vertical pupil rotate even slightly and it becomes a diagonal one.
"The pupils had to be vertical, and we had to make sure the lenses didn't rotate."
That is his whole account.
The same problem that toric lenses for astigmatism are engineered to solve, he was solving forty years ago for a music video.
The era of the hand-painted lens
Firing ceramic onto glass disappeared long ago.
Today's film lenses are painted by hand, one at a time, onto soft lenses.
Iris texture, capillaries, the glint of light.
Every actor's cornea has a different curve, so when a character is recast, the lenses are remade.
The Greenspoon practice, the AOA reports, still draws 15–20% of its work from film and television special-effect lenses.
When the lenses leave the screen
When an eye becomes famous on screen, people copy it off screen.
Cat eyes for Halloween, white-out pupils, red irises.
The problem is that on a film set, an optometrist measures the actor's cornea, fits the lens and manages how long it is worn.
Party lenses skip that entire process.
So in 2014, the American Optometric Association, the FDA and the Entertainment Industries Council launched a safety campaign on decorative contact lenses.
The industry that created the trend stepped forward to warn about it.
Why even zero-power coloured lenses are medical devices is covered in Why Do Zero-Power Coloured Contacts Still Count as Medical Devices?.
From the kiln to the brush
In 1939 the tool was a kiln.
Today the tool is a brush.
One thing has not changed.
Whenever something was placed on an eye, there was always someone who knew eyes in between.
Elvis's eyes, Audrey Hepburn's eyes, Michael Jackson's eyes — all measured and fitted by an optometrist.
Eyes off screen deserve the same.
References
- American Optometric Association, Hollywood's eye experts — the 1935 practice, the 1939 MGM request and method, Elvis, Hepburn, 'Thriller', the 2014 campaign
- Review of Optometry, The History of Contact Lenses in the Movies (2012)
- TCM, Miracles for Sale — the 1939 production and Henry Hull
- Los Angeles Times, Morton Greenspoon Obituary (1929–2018)
This article provides general information. Decorative and special-effect contact lenses are medical devices; do not buy or wear them without an eye examination. The lenses seen in films were made for the actors' eyes by professionals who also managed wearing time.