Revisiting My GalaxyCon Richmond Panel with Ricou Browning
Recently a message started making the rounds on social media:
Mr. Ricou Browning’s health is declining & his daughter is requesting fans send him fan mail to cheer him up. He played The Creature (underwater) in the Lagoon, Revenge, Among Us & also directed MR. NO LEGS. #creature
Ricou Browning
5221 SW 196 Lane
Southwest Ranches FL 33332
Ever since it caught my eye, I’ve been wanting to sit down and transcribe the panel I did with Ricou at GalaxyCon Richmond in February 2020, and despite being in kind of an anxious, depressed mood lately, I finally got myself together and did so…and, boy, am I glad I did.
I realize that February 2020 is a lifetime ago for all of us - it was the last public event my family and I attended prior to all of the pandemic lockdowns - but I still couldn’t believe how much of the conversation I’d forgotten. It was a really great chat, one that covered decidedly more than just The Creature of the Black Lagoon…although, yes, I did make a point of asking about Mr. No Legs, because with a title like that, how could I not? If you’re not familiar with the film, just you wait ‘til you get to that part of the conversation…
Another great moment came after the panel, when his daughter told me I'd done a good job. "You did something different from a lot of other moderators," she said. "You'd bring up things he'd worked on...and that was it. You didn't try to show off what you knew. You just let him talk."
I’m sure you can imagine how much I was beaming at that moment.
Oh, and one last thing: whenever you see a question that’s in italics and a different font, that identifies it as a question from someone in the audience. It didn’t seem right to take credit for a question that I didn’t come up with.
Okay, that’s it. Make with the reading!
I know you were born and raised in Florida and went to Florida State University, but how did you find your way into a career in swimming?
Well... [Hesitates.] It's a long story.
We have a little time.
I went to a place called Wakulla Springs as a teenager, and I worked for a gentleman named Newt Perry, and he taught us all how to hose breathe - to breathe from an air hose - and swim underwater. And we would swim under the glass-bottomed boats, and people would throw money, and we would collect it. And at the end of the day, we would go to the boat captain and share the money. And we made pretty good money!
I've seen some clips of the newsreels of some of the things they did underwater back then, but I had no idea that you were a part of that.
Yeah, we did a lot of things at Wakulla. Johnny Weissmuller played Tarzan, and he did a Tarzan movie there, and we had a joke that we played on him. We had two docks, and between the docks we had a rope going from one to the other. And Newt Perry said to Johnny Weissmuller, "I want to teach you how to use this thing, and I want you to outswim this boy." And he said [Shrugs.] "All right!" Well, they put the boy on therope, and they had Johnny swimming freestyle, and Johnny started swimming...but they pulled the boy on the rope, so the boy beat him! [Laughs.] He couldn't believe it. Anyway, we had a lot of fun there.
I know Tarzan wasn't the only movie they did at Wakulla. Was that how you found your way from being a newsreel star into the actual movie business?
I actually got the job as the Creature of the Black Lagoon by luck. I was going to school at FSU, and I got a call from Newt Perry. He said, "Rico, I've got some people coming from California, and they want to go to Wakulla Springs and check it out as a location for a movie they're going to do. I've got to go out of town. Can you show them around?" I said, "Sure!" So I pick them up at the airport, took them to Wakulla Springs, and they loved it. The location was just beautiful for what they wanted to do for the movie. And the cameraman, Scotty Walburn, said to me, "Would you mind swimming in front of the camera to show some perspective from human being to fish, frogs, alligators, or whatever?" I said, "Sure!" So I did. And then I took them back to the airport, and they left.
And about a week later, I got a call from Newt Perry. He said, "Rico, they're trying to get ahold of you about the movie they're gonna do. They want to know if you'd be interested in it." I said, "Well, yeah, have 'em call me!" So I got a telephone call at that time from Jack Arnold, who turned out to be the director of the film, and Jack said, "Rico, we like the way you swim. How'd you like to be an underwater monster?" I said, "Why not?" [Laughs.]
So I went to California, and they built the suit. And the suit they built made you look more like a lizard than a creature. Anyway, they had to build two suits, and the second suit is the one that I wore in the movie. They made four of those suits for me, and I just about ruined all of them, because when you're fighting, you tear pieces off, and you move around and you rub things against it. So I had to go through all of the suits before we finished the film. The Creature swam the way I normally swim, so I didn't have to learn anything. And I had a lot of fun doing it! We did three movies - The Creature of the Black Lagoon in '54, Revenge of the Creature in '55, and The Creature Walks Among Us in '56 - and when they released the first movie, I lived at that time in Ocala, Florida, so I had to pay to go to the movie! But I saw the movie, and I liked it! I thought it was a pretty good movie.
Well, I didn't hear anything about the movies or anything for about 20 years, and after 20 years I got a letter from a fan, asking me for a picture. Well, I didn't have any pictures! But somebody finally sent me a picture, so I had it duplicated, so that when somebody asked for a picture, I could send them that picture signed. I think I charged $5.00 a picture at the time.
How long did you have to hold your breath?
It depended on what I was doing. In other words, I held my breath for three or four minutes if I wasn't doing anything and just stayed still. But if I was fighting or swimming fast, you use up a lot of oxygen, and it cuts it way, way down, to maybe a minute or so.
I heard they had to warm you up at one point because it was so cold in the suit.
That was really interesting. The weather was really cold that year. The water temperature was 71 degrees. The air temperature in Tallahassee at that time of the year was 49. So it was pretty chilly! We would rehearse the scene on a barge and then go in the water and attempt to do what we'd rehearsed. And then I'd come out of the water and take off the head and take off the hands, and I'd sit down and wait for the director to decide what else we were going to do. But it was pretty chilly, and the crew felt sorry for me, so one of 'em would come up and ask if I'd like a little shot of brandy. I said, "Sure!" But other members of the crew didn't know that the other members had given me a shot of brandy, so they gave me a shot of brandy. Well, after a few dozen shots of brandy... [Laughs.] They had a drunk Creature on their hands! So they had to cut out the brandy, which they did.
I know that you went on to work in television a fair amount, but I hadn't realized how many episodes of Sea Hunt you'd worked on.
Sea Hunt! Ivan Tors was a producer in California, and he came to Silver Springs to look at it as a location to shoot Sea Hunt, and he saw it and liked it. And they hired me to play the bad guy in most of the scenes, and any time Lloyd [Bridges] would fight somebody, his double - [Courtney] Brown - would fight me, and I'd lose. And I lost an awful lot of fights! [Laughs.]
How was Lloyd Bridges to work with?
Lloyd was very easy to work with, and he didn't do too much of his own swimming in the first year, but in the second year he did it a lot more. But he couldn't do the underwater sequences because they shot the topside sequences in California, and we shot the underwater sequences in Florida. So they had the script clerks communicating with each other to get the scenes correct about which direction we're swimming in and to where and so forth, and it worked out pretty well.
You worked on a film of his some years later called The Daring Game.
[Long pause, then starts to laugh.] Yeah. I was trying to remember! We did a lot of different films. The Daring Game, Don't Give Up the Ship... That one was Jerry Lewis. I doubled Jerry, and that was a lot of fun. And we had an octopus that was supposed to grab me around the waist and ring a bell and swim to the surface. It was a fun film to do, and Jerry liked it so much that he sent me an 11" x 14" photograph and said, "Don't ring the bell!"
How did you get involved with Flipper?
I was working somewhere in the area of the Miami Seaquarium, and I remembered when I was in school that we had a Greek coin with a man riding a dolphin. And I bought the coin when I went to New York, and I brought it home. But when I came home one afternoon, the children were watching a movie, and it was Lassie. And I sat down with them and started watching it, and I got the bright idea, "Why not do a movie about a boy and a dolphin?" And I wasn't a very good writer, but I was a pretty good thinker. [Laughs.] And my brother-in-law, Jack Cowden, was a pretty good writer. So we got together and spent a whole week, maybe a week and a half, writing a story called Flipper.
And I went to New York with my last two hundred bucks, and I went to different book places and tried to get them interested in publishing it as a book. And I got 'em interested, and I had some drawings done with Flipper laying up on a bank with a spear stuck in him, and laying on a bank with a Band-Aid over the spear wound, and I thought, "Oh, boy, I've got it made!" So I went home...and I never heard from the book company.
So I called Ivan in California, and I said, "Ivan, I've got an idea for a story about a boy and a dolphin, and I went to New York and tried to sell it as a book, but they didn't get back to me. Can I say you, as a producer of movies, are considering it as a feature film?" He said, "Yeah, go ahead...but send me a copy!" So I mailed him a copy. But I never heard from the book companies. So I called Ivan again and said, "I haven't heard from the book companies." He said, "Hold on, hold on... I didn't read the book, but my wife did, and she loved it. So she made me read it, and I love it. I went to MGM, and we'll raise the money and make a movie called Flipper!" So we did!
And it was successful enough to be turned into a TV series.
Yeah, it became a TV series later on.
When did you first try your hand at directing?
I started directing when we did Sea Hunt. I started directing the underwater scenes at Silver Springs. And then Ivan knew that I'd been to the Bahamas working, and he said, "Do you know any locations in the Bahamas that we could use for Sea Hunt?" I said, "Sure!" So he and myself and his wife went to Nassau, and I took 'em around the islands and showed 'em different locations where we might shoot some Sea Hunt. He loved it, and we formed a company called Underwater Studios, and we began filming all the Sea Hunt shows underwater in Nassau. We shot a lot of other movies underwater in Nassau and became a production company there, and I lived there for about three years, and my daughter and my other children went to school there. They came home after it was over with, but I had to stay for another three or four months to show that I was a resident of the Bahamas in order to take advantage of taxes.
Were there any locations other than Wakulla Springs and Silver Springs where you worked in Florida?
Yeah, we filmed at the Miami Seaquarium. We had a pond that was just to the left of the main building, and we built a house there and a dock. We put Flipper in the water there, and the house is where Porter Ricks and the two boys lived, and we shot a lot of the scenes right there on that dock. And we had another pond that was next to that, and we also used that as some of the other locations for Flipper.
We worked on other locations, too. There's a place called Golden Key, and then there was another place north of Florida where we shot a lot. But, yeah, we shot all over Florida.
At Silver Springs, were the monkeys on site ever any trouble for the crew?
I believe that when they made the first Tarzan movie, they had four or five rhesus monkeys that they used in the film. Well, they escaped, and they went down river and moved into the woods, and they couldn't catch 'em, so they became permanent residents there. And they multiplied. Quite a few.
One interesting thing is that they had a gift shop, and the monkeys got loose, and they broke into the gift shop. And when they got into the gift shop, they were tearing up everything. So we went into the gift shop and chased them out. This is at Weeki Wachee Springs. They went out of the gift shop, and they all dived into the water. And I didn't know this about rhesus monkeys, but they swam down, and they would hang onto eel grass, and they would just sit there. And I thought, "Well, that's the most unusual thing I ever saw! They're holding their breath!" So we had to grab 'em behind the head and pull them up, and they would hold onto the grass or pull the grass up with them, and we'd return 'em back to where they belonged. But they were something else.
The guy that owned the monkeys, he had one little rhesus monkey that was paralyzed. His back legs, he couldn't use 'em. His name was Punky. And I could go back to his compound, and I'd yell, "Punky!" And this little sucker would come running with just his front legs and climb up on your body and hug you. It was the cutest thing you ever saw.
With your film production company, you also worked on Thunderball.
Yeah, I guess Thunderball was probably the most interesting and best thing I ever worked on. One of the main reasons is that when I was hired to do the job, I flew to London to meet Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, who were the producers of the film. I didn't realize it, but Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli were both Chicago guys living in London!
We talked for awhile, and they said, "We're considering hiring Jacques Cousteau to do the underwater scenes for Thunderball. Why should we hire you?" I said, "Well, I think the main reason is everything we shoot is phony, and everything Cousteau shoots in for real. And what you're doing is all phony, so you should hire me." And they did! [Laughs.] The fortunate thing about Thunderball is that I didn't have a budget. I could spend all the money that was necessary to make the film...and I think we spent about three months filming the underwater sequences for Thunderball.
Did you have an opportunity to hang out with Sean Connery at all?
Sean Connery was there, yes, and in Thunderball he didn't do a whole lot of his own swimming. We had a double named Frank Cousins who looked very much like him and did a very good job doubling him. But when we did the next movie with Sean, Never Say Never Again, Sean did a lot of his own work - he did most of it himself - and he was a pretty good swimmer then.
Did he seem to enjoy Never Say Never Again? Because he hadn't done a Bond film in awhile at that point.
Yeah, that's the reason it had that title: because he said he'd never do another Bond film. Never say never! [Laughs.]
Your first feature film as a director was Salty, correct?
Yeah, Salty was a love of my own. It was a sea lion, and I bought it as a pup. They mailed him in a cage by airline from California to Florida, and I picked him up at the airport. He was just a little thing. I'd feed him a bottle so he could nurse and drink milk, and I kept him and trained him at my home until he grew up to be a big sea lion.
We had some strange things happen while he was there. We had four bedrooms, and my son had just joined the Marine Corps, so when he moved out, I moved the sea lion in. And the sea lion slept in the bed! They're very clean animals, in the sense that when he had to go to the bathroom, he'd throw his tail off the side of the bed, poop on the floor, and put his tail back. Well, I finally got a shelf, and when I put him to bed, I'd pull the shelf out, and he'd poop onto the shelf. So we could just clean off the shelf and then close it back. So it was pretty clean.
He'd go into the bathroom, and he liked to get into the shower, but he'd sit on the drain. And all the water would come down onto him, fill the bathtub full of water, and it wouldn't drain because he was sitting on it. And all of sudden, he'd get off the drain, and he'd slide from the bathroom out into the hallway, and then the hallway... It went all the way from one side of the house to the living room, so he'd slide all the way to the living room! It was a mess.
[At this, Ricou's daughter argued, "It was fun!"]
And we had to feed him in the kitchen, so I'd cut his fish up, and he would sit there and yell and holler and scream, waiting for the fish. Once while I was feeding him, the phone rang, so I picked up the phone, and it was someone calling for my wife. And I said, "I'm busy right now, I'll have to have her call you back." And they said, "Well, what's going on?" I said, "I'm feeding my sea lion!" And they said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah..." So I kept feeding him...and then I noticed these lights circling my house. Police lights were circling my house! I thought, "What are these cops doing at my house?" So I quit feeding the sea lion and went to the back door and opened it, and I stopped one of the cops, and I said, "Hey, what's going on?" They said, "We just got a call that you were beating your wife!" I said, "Thanks a lot!" [Laughs.] So I explained to them what was really going on, and they left.
How'd your wife feel about having a sea lion in the house?
She...didn't like it. [Laughs.] At first! But she got used to it.
Another funny story is that I had all kinds of pets. I had an octopus in a tank. But what I didn't realize is that the octopus didn't like staying in the tank. He would climb out of the tank, crawl across the floor, crawl on top of my ping-pong table. He also ate a baby duck! I said, "I can't believe this!" Anyway, I put him back in the tank, but I had to put a top on it!
I had a bear that was declawed, and he lived in the living room, but he'd come into the bedroom at night, and he wanted to get in the bed. And he'd pull the covers, but instead of getting in the bed, he'd end up just pulling all the covers onto the floor. What a mess!
I also had a pet skunk, but I didn't realize that skunks are nocturnal, so we'd go to bed, and you'd hear this scratching. And it was the skunk trying to open the closet door! He'd scratch, scratch, scratch...and finally you'd open the closet door, and he'd go inside. And I thought, "Now you'll shut up!" Sure enough, he'd scratch to close it! I couldn't believe it. So I got up, grabbed the skunk by his neck, and I was going to take him through the living room and into the kitchen to put him in a cage I had in there. So I started walking in there...and when I got into the living room, the skunk bit my finger! And I mean, he really laid it open. So I grabbed him with my other hand, and I was shaking my hand that he'd bit...because it hurt! And I walked into the kitchen and put him in the cage, and I came back out, and my wife followed me out because she saw the blood. All over the curtains, all over the floor...everywhere! She thought I had killed the skunk. [Laughs.] I said, "I didn't kill the skunk! The skunk tried to kill me!"
So, yeah, we had all kinds of pets. That's just a few of 'em!
You also worked on a portion of Caddyshack.
Oh, yeah, that was a lot of fun! Caddyshack was a film where I had to direct the second unit, and when I'd go out on this boat... It was called a striker - a beautiful boat - and it would run and do everything you wanted to do. Well, the first unit would go down inside the cabin, and I was topside getting ready to shoot our scenes. Well, I'd open the cabin door, and this smoke kept coming out...and it had a very funny odor, this smoke. So I said to the director [Harold Ramis], "Look, I'm getting ready to shoot the second unit. Don't you want to come out and watch?" He said, "Close the door, shoot your second unit, get it over with, goodbye." And he slammed the door. [Laughs.]
Anyway, that was at the beginning of it, but then we did all kinds of different things, like blowing up the trees and limbs and everything.
[At this point, Ricou's daughter gently nudged him to "tell them about the bird."]
Oh! Well, there was a scene that called for them to hit a golf ball, and then the golf ball is supposed to hit a bird on a limb, knock him off, and that's it. So in order to try and shoot that, I had a friend who had a tamed crow, so he brought the crow out, and I was going to use the crow. So we put the crow up on the limb, and Jack Johnson, the guy that was helping me with the second unit, had a long tube, and he'd blow the ping-pong ball, and it was supposed to come out, hit the bird, knock him off, and that's scene. So we got ready to shoot, the crow was on the limb, and Jack blew into the tube, the ping-bong ball came out...and it stuck right on the end of the crow's nose. [Laughs.] And he just turned his head and walked off!
Well, they'd do screenings in the projection room of the stuff we'd filmed, and we were getting ready to watch all of the footage...and sure enough, this scene came up. And after the crow walked off, the director said, "How'd you do that?!" I said, "I don't give my secrets away!" [Laughs.]
I have to ask you about a film you directed called Mr. No Legs.
[You'll just have to trust me on this, but the look on Ricou's face when I asked him about this was absolutely priceless.]
There was a gentleman in Tampa, Florida - Mr. Roberts - and he called me and said he wanted to do a film about a man who has no legs, and would I be interested in getting involved? I said, "Sure!" So first off he said, "We need a script." Well, as I said, I'm not a very good writer, so I sent my brother-in-law Jack over there, and they sat down and wrote a script called Mr. No Legs. And then I went over and started filming it. It was a lot of fun, and we had a lot of interesting things happen. When the film was finally completed, it was too short, so we had to extend it. So we extended the car chase...and we had car chases going on for a good 15 minutes! [Laughs.] And you could unbelievably see these cars rolling and turning over and all different things. Well, we finished the film, and they were going to release it here in the States, but they didn't. And the guy who was producing it released it in France, and as far as I know, that's the only place it's ever been officially released.
[Fortunately for you - or maybe not - someone has uploaded Mr. No Legs to YouTube in its entirety, so if you’ve got about 85 minutes to spare, have at it!]
I know we're going to need to start wrapping up, but I wanted to ask you about working on a film called Lady in Cement. I know the film starred Frank Sinatra, but did you actually get to work with Sinatra?
I did! It was a story about a woman who was drowned, and her legs were cast in cement, and she sank to the bottom. Well, I had to cast somebody for that part. And I couldn't really find anybody who would fit the bill! But this one girl showed up, and she was, I believe, a ballet dancer or something in Miami Beach, and she was well-built. [Laughs.] So she got the job, and she had to learn to swim underwater and learn to hose-breathe. So we had her cast her feet in cement, and we had two sharks on either side of her which were supposedly going to eat her up. We filmed about a week, but we finally got the footage shot, and it worked out really well. Sinatra said, "Boy, I like that!" [Laughs.]
And just to wrap up, The Creature of the Black Lagoon is obviously one of the most famous movie monsters of all time. Does it ever amaze you to realize that you're part of that legendary Universal Monsters story?
Yeah, it does. And I say that because, as I mentioned before, after we made it, I didn't hear anything more about it, and I actually had to pay to go see it. [Laughs.] Other than that, it was probably twenty years before I ever heard another word about it!