Ellis 'Sonny' Burman Jr.'s father, Ellis Burman Sr., was a noted mask & prop maker who was head of the lab at 'Don Post Studios' - at that time co-owned by Don Post and Verne Langdon - and Ellis' sons Tom and Ellis Jr. also went to work at the studio, famous for it's commercial 'over-the-head' masks. John Chambers, who had worked closely with 'Don Post Studios', was invited to run the makeup lab for Planet of the Apes and a number of the Don Post staff joined him on the huge makeup team, including Ellis' brother Tom. [1]
Tom Burman and John Chambers designed the makeup for the David Wolper Productions/ABC-TV four-part documentary series 'Primal Man', about prehistoric man's struggle for survival, and fellow-Apes makeup artists Ellis Burman Jr., Werner Kepler, Ken Chase, Ed Butterworth and Fred Blau all worked on the series, while Janos Prohaska and his son Robert designed the costumes. During filming of the final episode, on March 13 1974, some of the cast and crew boarded a chartered plane to return to Los Angeles, but it crashed into a mountain, killing all 36 people on board, including Janos and Robert Prohaska.[2] Only the merest quirk of fate caused the Burman brothers to miss flying back to LA with the rest of the crew on the doomed airliner from location shooting.[3]
Ellis Burman Jr. then worked as a makeup artist on the Planet of the Apes TV series in 1974,[4] and created the special makeup effects on horror movie The Devil's Rain (1975).
Trivia[]
- Ellis Burman Jr.'s nephew, Barney Burman, worked as a makeup artist on the re-imagined Planet of the Apes in 2001.[5]
- His son, Ellis Burman III, is a sound engineer working in the movie industry.