Offering considerably more authentic spacesuits than your local Spirit Halloween store, Chris Gilman’s Global Effects is a one-stop shop for Hollywood directors, set decorators, and costume designers when it comes to projects requiring both Advanced Crew Escape Suit (ACES) gear or Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) suits.
“The company was started really in 1986 under the Diligent Dwarves name,” Gilman, Global Effects’ president, told Space.com. “In 1991, when we were doing ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula,’ I changed it to Global Effects because too many Hollywood people would call and ask, ‘Hey, is Dopey there? Is Sleepy there?'”
For nearly 40 years, Gilman’s Southern California prop and costume emporium has supplied spacesuits for movies like “Space Cowboys” “First Man,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon.”
The copmany has also dressed countless actors on the small screen, in series such as “From the Earth to the Moon,” “For All Mankind” and “Space Force.” If you’ve watched any space-based TV show, commercial, or big screen movie with space-bound voyagers, chances are it’s featured a Global Effects suit.
The son of a Connecticut aerospace machinist and himself a skilled metal fabricator and welder, Gilman came to Hollywood in the ’80s to work as a stuntman, prop designer and armorer. Gilman’s meticulously constructed replica spacesuits are so accurate that they might fool NASA engineers, as extreme care, detail and research is put into each precision outfit.
“In our spacesuit collection for movies, we have replicas of pretty much every historic spacesuit that’s been into space and many prototypes that were developed along the way,” he notes. “All the Apollo suits, Gemini, Mercury. The only one I don’t think we have is a soft Gemini suit. And then we have our science fiction suits that we’ve created. I try to design those using a real element, but they can be pretty crazy. Like, we did an armored spacesuit that was in ‘Firefly’ and ‘Serenity.’ I think we have close to 300.”
At Global Effects’ warehouse headquarters, the aisles and shelves are brimming with an incredible selection of fashionable outer space gear patterned after actual NASA artifacts.
“We have Ryan Gosling’s ‘First Man’ suit. A lot of our suits have been used in multiple projects. For our ACES suits, I’ve had Ron Perlman, Aaron Eckhart, Hillary Swank, Clint Eastwood, Jim Garner, Donald Sutherland, all of Aerosmith. Tons of people have worn our suits. We had Buzz Aldrin in one of our Apollo suits for ‘The Late Show.’ I almost put Al Bean in one of our suits, too,” Gilman said.
“There was a BBC interview done with James May, and they asked too many astronaut questions and not enough artist questions, and the interview was cut short,” he added. “I ended up dressing James May in an Apollo suit in a parking lot in Texas. That was kind of fun.”
There are restrictions on renting these special suits, and the general public can’t just drop by and walk out the door with one. You must have liability insurance and replacement insurance. A general homeowners’ policy is not going to cover a spacesuit.
“The real EMU spacesuits have 19,000 parts, and I’ve heard figures of $12-15 million per suit ,and that was figured by the entire program divided by the number of suits they delivered to NASA. Our suits have about 1,600 custom-made parts and cost about $130,000 to produce. I tell producers that, for 1% the cost, you get 99% the look. I’ve had our ACES suits and EMUs next to real ones, and I’ve had a number of NASA personnel come up and think that the one that was theirs was ours, and they’re shocked.”
What drives Gilman nuts about inauthentic spacesuits, and what does Hollywood often goof up in its attempt to depict astronauts in their signature wardrobes?
“The general public doesn’t understand that a full spacesuit is a personal spacecraft,” Gilman explained. “It has to be pressured. It’s only 4.3 pounds per square inch, but when you pressurize a suit for the first time and it’s cracking and popping and straining on the bench, you kind of turn away expecting something to let go. The biggest mistake I see is not pressurizing the suit.”
“The other one is lights inside the helmet,” he added. “That makes me crazy. Ridley Scott in ‘Alien’ is one of the first to do this. He’s filming at night with cameras that are shooting film that couldn’t shoot in very low light, and you want to see actors in there. Since then, we’ve got digital cameras you can use by lighting a scene with a match. We do our best to keep the suits light, but like on our EMUs, it’s Teflon fabric and it’s so bloody heavy. The new ‘Fantastic Four’ movie has some interesting-looking suits. But you wouldn’t have straps or shoulder things hanging out, because they’re going to get caught inside a spacecraft.”
With so many spacesuits in his inventory, one wonders exactly what Hollywood designs Gilman favors.
“I probably like ‘2001’ the best,” he said. “I think the suits were quite iconic and handsome. I actually had in my possession a real one for about nine months, and we patterned it and made replicas. A friend of mine owns the original red Bowman’s helmet from ‘2001,’ so we were going to make some replicas of that. I like the fact we got to use the Mark III suit in ‘Deep Impact.’ It was nice that the director went with that suit. We were working on ‘Armageddon’ at the same time, and it was funny being in the middle and looking at the two. A friend of mine said the physics in ‘Armageddon’ are only slightly more realistic than The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine.’ I love that.”
