Continuation - The PG Film - Bob Heironimus and Patty

[Vortigern99]

Kit, this entire process is fascinating and much-appreciated, whether Morris supplied the suit or not. Once the interviews are available for all to examine, I hope and trust that some definitive determination can and will be made regarding Morris' claims. Keep up the good work!

ETA: To my eye, the subject's "fur" looks brown in almost all copies, prints, and still images of the film I've seen. A minority of such images show the fur color as dark gray or black, but in those, as in the one Parcher posted, the background is correspondingly dimmer and darker. The logical inference, then, is that in those minority frames, the color has been desaturated artificially and the brightness reduced.

I just am getting back in the door from my interview with Phil and Amy Morris. The entire process lasted from about 7:30 pm to 12:40 am and was shot on two cameras - one tripod, one handheld. We shot three segments - one in front of the Royal BC Museum at Thunderbird Park, one in the executive presentation room at the Victoria Marriott Inner Harbour, and the final segment in his room at the hotel. The interview was a fanatastic experience and both Phil and Amy were extremely gracious and accommodating. I had told Phil that I was really looking forward to talking Amy and would love to get her on camera if possible. Phil said Amy is quite camera shy and that I could ask her about it when they came. Amy turned out to be the sweetest lady ever and after getting to know each other she agreed to participate for the entire interview. Once again, I did not pay Phil a single dime for anything whatsoever. No reimbursement, nothing. Here is a rundown of how things played out...

1) Phil and Amy arrived in Victoria on the Clipper ferry from Seattle shortly after 6 pm. Phil and Amy checked into their hotel and had dinner there while I had dinner at home with my cameraman and discussed the shots for the interview.

2) We met Phil and Amy at the hotel lobby at about 7:30 and had our introductions. We sat down to discuss the shooting schedule and one of the first things Phil said is that he would be fine with not seeing the questions. The main reason he actually said this was he was due to our original plan to have dinner together and let him see the questions then. The timing worked out to be tight with all of us meeting after dinner and not having much daylight to shoot the external museum segment. Phil thought if we stopped to review the questions we would lose the light and therefore said for me not to worry about it. I told him I had no problem with him taking a few minutes to review the questions while we set up the equipment for the second segment in the hotel's executive presentation room after we shot the first.

2) We walked literally around the corner to the museum and set up the shot at Thunderbird Park where I explained the intro segment to Phil. The scene was mostly me talking: Introducing myself, the location, the person with me, and what we were doing there. I spoke a bit about Greg Long's book, the PGF, Don Abbott, Curator of Archaeology of the museum and his connection to the film, and had a look at totem pole carved by Mungo Martin depicting Dsonoqua, The Wild Woman of the Woods. Shooting was fine except for a bus, a rig, and a couple Harley's that rolled by during the shoot and interfering with the sound.

3) We returned to the Marriott to shoot the second segment. The walk to the museum and back I spent mostly speaking with Amy, first chatting and then talking about the first time she saw their suit in the PGF on TV. While setting up the cameras and seating for the second segment, I suggested Phil go ahead and have a quick look at the questions for the interview which I referred to as the "Gotcha! List." There were three pages of questions in this order: 25 from Bill Munns, 4 from Atomic, and 4 from Wolftrax. Phil spent most of those minutes looking at Bill's questions, only briefly looked at Atomic's, and never got to see Wolf's at all. Never at anytime after I took out the question for Phil to review did he leave the room or ask Amy to help him.

Before shooting began Phil and I started having a bit of PGF and general Bigfoot conversation, but I asked that we stop and save it for the cameras. Phil asked if we could first begin shooting with him addressing the camera to discuss some general points. I agreed but explained that once we started shooting, it would be a continuous shot and there would be no stopping until the entire segment was finished. Phil spoke for a bit in a manner in which he tried to lay out his involvement with Patterson and answer some questions he thought the viewers would have. Phil has a tendency to want to elaborate on many things and I know in part this is because of the concept that we are putting his claims under scrutiny. After Phil finished his first talk, we broke into discussing some of the points he raised, mostly where I was correcting Phil on minor things about the PGF and Patterson. An example being that while Phil knew generally about Patterson's '66 book Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? he knew little to nothing about Patterson's '67 fictional Bigfoot film Bigfoot: America's Abominable Snowman. We also broke into discussion about Phil's idea that Patterson made the PGF purely for scam and financial gain and my idea that Patty was originally conceived as a representation of the William Roe encounter for his Bigfoot movie which he then decided to turn into a real encounter.

What ended up happening is a conversation that ate up a lot of camera time and me every so often trying to steer things back to the Gotcha! List. It was all very productive but not exactly according to plan. Then while shooting, the hotel interupted to let us know they would be needing the room soon. We had told them we only needed the room for an hour. We decided to finish up that segment with the rest of the conversation and shoot the Q&A segment in their room.

4) We shot the Gotcha! List in Phil's room with he and I sitting side by side with a small table between us. We agreed for time constraints that the first of Bill's questions would be answered quickly by me with Phil clarifying if need be. I realized there was no way we could keep a reasonable timeframe if I let Phil answer 33 questions in his elaborative way with many of them already covered. BTW, only Bill's initial questions were touched on previously, none of Atomic's or Wolf's. We plowed through all 33 questions with Phil having no trouble whatsoever. There was one or two questions from Bill that were written in a rather confusing way, but those too were fully answered by Phil. Amy weighed in from time to time when the question had to do with certain measurements. We finished at 12:40 and I was profusely thankful to the Morris'. After a brief chat, we said our goodbyes to allow them to get to bed for their departure the next morning. It impressed upon me then that as beautiful a city as Victoria is with so many thing for them to do, they had literally come only to speak with me and do this interview.

What I now have ahead of me is a long editing process for the documentary and to decide which parts of the interview will quickly be released on Youtube. I will keep everyone updated as this continues.

 

[William Parcher]

Here's the Bonney Cibachrome from F352. Is this what brown Dynel looks like under these circumstances?

 

[Vortigern99]

But look at the foliage behind the figure. Can you imagine that was the actual color of sunlit leaves on the day the footage was taken? They appear rather gray and desaturated to my eye. The logical inference is that the whole image has been darkened and desaturated.

The frames in which the subject looks brown have more lifelike background colors.

 

[William Parcher]

Here is a brown one but I think it has had a variety of intentional edits (Photoshopping). It's like somebody wanted to make her brown.

 

[William Parcher]

Bill Munns' scan from Patricia Patterson copy. Patty is not obviously brown here. Brown or black?... toss a coin.

 

[Correa Neto]

Nobody asked me but...

I can see that dark brown wig from the 40's becoming black, depending on the color ballance used during the copying/development processes.

Again, without a good reliable chain of custody...

 

[SweatyYeti]

But look at the foliage behind the figure. Can you imagine that was the actual color of sunlit leaves on the day the footage was taken? They appear rather gray and desaturated to my eye. The logical inference is that the whole image has been darkened and desaturated.

The frames in which the subject looks brown have more lifelike background colors.

This is a crop of a full-frame image I had downloaded from Bill Munns' report, a short while ago.....it's a very good quality image...

Here are a couple of crops, with the brightness slightly increased, and the color-level increased by quite a bit...

The background colors look very full, with a good range of different colors....(and with a good 'gray-scale'...no overall tint, to the image)...and Patty looks rather brown-ish.


Edited to add: Nice find, William.

 

[Vortigern99]

The middle image of those that Dr. Yeti just posted "look" to my eye to be the most lifelike, and the subject is decidedly brown there.

 

[LTC8K6]

There's a huge blowup where Patty looks light gray, I believe.

The color varieties are really amazing depending on the image source.

If only that original film could be studied...

 

[kitakaze]

Was that supposed to be a standard brown Dynel color? Can Morris point you to any other examples of that color in either his gorilla suits, others' suits, or things like bathmats, etc.? Can you post other pictures of this brown Dynel material?

Morris explained to me on camera that with the first gorilla suits he attempted to make, he used fur from furcoats and that the result was wretched looking, just terrible. He said that one day he was in a fabric shop and found a material that looked like fur. He asked the lady in the store what it was and she explained that it was called Dynel. He then changed from fur coats to Dynel which he said was first available in black and then brown which they used for their gorilla suits in the 60's.

 

[HarryHenderson]

While I totally believe (from your accounts) Phillip Morris really is a 'great guy', it appears that, ultimately, he's really no more credible/believable/accountable than the thousands of supposed There Is a Bigfoot witnesses. He still doesn't have any kind of real proof proof of his claims, right? And what he's said has already stirred the pot with the black/brown thang. Just sayin, I'm still not confident of his role or if he had a role at all. Maybe watching your interview will change that though.

And, nevermind any of that. If your project is as honest as I think it is, you had to go-through-the-motions with him regardless, and you had to play it as a straight-shooter. You've done both well it seems. Starting your production off with him was wise too (if not also convenient). A sorta warm-up subject/interview for the Bigger-Fish-To-Fry™ out there. And I await the next word regarding such.

 

[AtomicMysteryMonster]

Phil thought if we stopped to review the questions we would lose the light and therefore said for me not to worry about it.

That's great ne...

I told him I had no problem with him taking a few minutes to review the questions while we set up the equipment for the second segment in the hotel's executive presentation room after we shot the first.

*facepalm*

There were three pages of questions in this order: 25 from Bill Munns, 4 from Atomic, and 4 from Wolftrax. Phil spent most of those minutes looking at Bill's questions, only briefly looked at Atomic's, and never got to see Wolf's at all.

Although this is somewhat contradicted by what you wrote later:

BTW, only Bill's initial questions were touched on previously, none of Atomic's or Wolf's.

I agreed but explained that once we started shooting, it would be a continuous shot and there would be no stopping until the entire segment was finished.

Good idea!

4) We shot the Gotcha! List in Phil's room with he and I sitting side by side with a small table between us. We agreed for time constraints that the first of Bill's questions would be answered quickly by me with Phil clarifying if need be. I realized there was no way we could keep a reasonable timeframe if I let Phil answer 33 questions in his elaborative way with many of them already covered.

That's not ideal, but I guess it was the only way, especially since many of Bill's questions have already been answered.

We plowed through all 33 questions with Phil having no trouble whatsoever.

Gosh, I wonder if that's because he got a preview of them? I daresay something could be up if he showed no surprise at the Verne Langdon reference.

What I now have ahead of me is a long editing process for the documentary and to decide which parts of the interview will quickly be released on Youtube. I will keep everyone updated as this continues.

I recommend posting the answers to Bill's questions last. Also, I hope that a transcript of some kind will be available. I look forward to seeing what Morris said (although I have a sneaking suspicion it involves jargon, denials/shifting blame on others, and a claimed inability to discuss an issue).

Morris explained to me on camera that with the first gorilla suits he attempted to make, he used fur from furcoats and that the result was wretched looking, just terrible. He said that one day he was in a fabric shop and found a material that looked like fur. He asked the lady in the store what it was and she explained that it was called Dynel. He then changed from fur coats to Dynel which he said was first available in black and then brown which they used for their gorilla suits in the 60's.

So if I'm reading this right, he's saying that the costume he's claiming was used to create the Patty suit was brown. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't Morris say that the reason the recreation suit was brown was because he couldn't obtain the same materials he used in the 60's?

That reminds me, what did Morris say about Patty's feet (and tracks) in comparison to the gorilla costume feet his company made at the time?

 

[kitakaze]

While I totally believe (from your accounts) Phillip Morris really is a 'great guy', it appears that, ultimately, he's really no more credible/believable/accountable than the thousands of supposed There Is a Bigfoot witnesses. He still doesn't have any kind of real proof proof of his claims, right? And what he's said has already stirred the pot with the black/brown thang. Just sayin, I'm still not confident of his role or if he had a role at all. Maybe watching your interview will change that though.

And, nevermind any of that. If your project is as honest as I think it is, you had to go-through-the-motions with him regardless, and you had to play it as a straight-shooter. You've done both well it seems. Starting your production off with him was wise too (if not also convenient). A sorta warm-up subject/interview for the Bigger-Fish-To-Fry™ out there. And I await the next word regarding such.

Just to be clear, let me whip it out. I am biased. I think Phil is telling the truth. I think Amy is telling the truth. I started to have deep suspicions Phil may have actually sold Patterson a suit before the first time I talked to him. Then I talked to him. And again. Then more. I asked him everthing I could think of. Then I was satisfied for myself, but not for everyone else. I went to Phil's corner. I said I really wish I had known more and done this sooner.

See, I didn't convince Phil to bring his wife to Canada on his own expenses and do an interview with me full of questions from people who are convinced he is an opportunistic liar by playing tepid well-maybe-you're-ok guy. I got Phil by being on his side and not being an emotionally imbalanced Bigfoot fanatic that can't have a human conversation. I got him to spend his time and money on me by being articulate about how to really show reasonable people who he was and why they should take him seriously.

Yesterday evening I was speaking with Amy Morris separately from Phil on the walk back to the Marriott from the Royal BC Museum. Phil was a ways behind us walking with my cameraman. Amy was very friendly and interested in me and my family experiences and life in Japan. I asked her about Patterson calling them and making the order for the suit and if she recalled the event, which she did not. She told me it was shortly before Halloween of '67 that she first saw the PGF. She was clear that it was not just Phil recognizing the suit and her agreeing. She said they both looked at each other and had a kind of eureka moment. She said she also immediately recognized it as their work even though it was only shown very briefly. They both constructed the suits together. She said that she saw it on their TV. I asked if they were relaxing and watching TV at the time. She said no and that they just had the TV on in the background and were coming in and out of the living room when they saw it.

She said what struck most was that was the first time they had seen there work on national television. She said they were accustomed to making the suits, selling them and not seeing them again. Later when I had Phil and Amy on camera discussing the issue, we got deep into detail about what made them know the suit was theirs and when they first started talking to friends and then publicly about selling Patterson the suit. During this segment of the interview I always asked for Amy's account first before Phil and made it clear I wanted to hear from Amy only. I said what was most important was establishing Morris' claim well beyond and before the context of Long's book. Long's book stated that just before the book was published he realized that he had overlooked a lead. On August 16th, 2002 on WBT-AM Radio in Charlotte Philip Morris had spoken about selling Patterson the suit that was used in his film. During questioning, Phil said to me that he had thought Greg had heard of him from an appearance on Coast to Coast AM where he was speaking about something ghost related and brought up the PGF.

I told Phil that I basically wanted to get right out of the 00's and the 90's. I wanted to know exactly when he started getting public about having sold Patterson a suit and how we go about verifying it. He said the first people they started talking to were people in their business and fellow magicians at conferences soon after the film came out and they realized it was a straight hoax, not some kind of promo. I asked when was the first time Phil started doing radio interviews in which he discussed it. Phil said that he thought it would have been after Patterson's death in '72 when he would tour a show and do a radio spot in the city he was visiting. He didn't discuss it every time to anybody who would listen as Bigfoot simply wasn't ever that big of a deal to him. I told him that I have no problem accepting that, yet how do I prove it to the people that call him a liar? He said he didn't know. I said that I needed people. Not people from anytime recently (last fifteen years at least). I needed someone who would have heard all about his role in the PGF going way back. Phil gave me the name of a young man from New Zealand that they took in many years ago as family who worked with them making suits.

In the end, what really impressed me is that however good a liar Phil has to be, Amy has to be just as good. Every time I had a chance I would get her perspective. If Phil is lying about the claim he sold Patterson a suit and spoke about it from very early on, then so is Amy. If Phil is lying about the experience of seeing the PGF on TV in late October '67, then so is Amy and Phil is so confident in her abilities to pass the lie off successfully, that he will leave her alone to questioning. I will leave it to the viewers to judge these people and their truthfulness themselves.

 

[HarryHenderson]

Excellent Kitakaze! And just so you don't misunderstand me, me calling the project 'honest' doesn't preclude you making judgements (in either direction), not at all, just as long as they're not masqueraded as something else. The whole straight-shooter thingy. I'm also now even more interested in seeing the clips ASAP. I was wanting to be patient, now I'm not so much. I might be underestimating good ole Phil and Don, err Amy.

 

[kitakaze]

That's great ne...

Yes, it really was. Why would he completely wave off the chance to see the questions in favour of getting the intro segment shot done while the light lasted if he was dirty rotten liar?

*facepalm*

I think you're overreacting. He had literally about five minutes. I had three pages and handed him the first which had questions #1-17 of Bill's on them. He took about three minutes looking at those. Look for yourself. GT posted them. They're mostly pedestrian things that anyone informed should already know. I included them and intentionally put them ahead of yours and Wolf's because they served as a good opener to get progressively tougher. He barely had time to look at yours and none for Wolf's when my cameraman announced everything was ready. BTW, I was reviewing the second camera this evening to see what we had on it. I was surprised to find that my cameraman had started recording before he said the gear was ready. We actually have on camera the moment I took the questions out of my case and handed the first page to Phil, explaining that most of what is on there is all stuff we've discussed on the phone. You yourself are going to be able to see what you think would be the minutes Phil has to get his boonswoggling ready.

Although this is somewhat contradicted by what you wrote later:

No, it is not, Atomic. You just didn't understand...

There were three pages of questions in this order: 25 from Bill Munns, 4 from Atomic, and 4 from Wolftrax. Phil spent most of those minutes looking at Bill's questions, only briefly looked at Atomic's, and never got to see Wolf's at all. That's in the executive presentation room of the Marriott.

BTW, only Bill's initial questions were touched on previously, none of Atomic's or Wolf's. That's prior to our meeting face to face. As in only any of the questions Bill had written were asking about things Phil and I had discussed on the phone over the last few months. Nothing you came up with was ever touched upon in conversations between us in the past. Only then and only on camera with him having about two minutes to think about them. You see how you mixed that up there?

That's not ideal, but I guess it was the only way, especially since many of Bill's questions have already been answered.

That was literally the only way you got to have any of your questions answered. If I had tried to do it the way you consider ideal and go over things Phil and Amy had already answered on camera, we would have been there till 3:00 am. We were lucky for the amount of time we got. They were three hours ahead of us. Phil will talk your head off but poor Amy was another story. After the second hour she asked me not to let him yak so much. And my cameraman. I was profusely apologetic and grateful to him after. I told him we should be about two hours. We were 5.

Gosh, I wonder if that's because he got a preview of them? I daresay something could be up if he showed no surprise at the Verne Langdon reference.

I could have popped a bag of popcorn in the microwave longer than he had to look at any of your questions. His time to get conniving was negligible and would have been further diminished by the hours that went by between first seeing anything you wrote and answering anything you wrote. This really may surprise you, Atomic, but they really didn't phase him. The elephant thing, the Verne Langdon thing; he laughed at the Langdon thing and explained everything in clear detail. This is no offence to you, but your Gotcha! stuff just really wasn't Gotcha! You can concede that Phil might actually be telling the truth, yes? And if so, what you think is supposed to put him on the ropes really just isn't going to bother him that much. Well, I'll let you see for yourself what he had to say.

I recommend posting the answers to Bill's questions last. Also, I hope that a transcript of some kind will be available. I look forward to seeing what Morris said (although I have a sneaking suspicion it involves jargon, denials/shifting blame on others, and a claimed inability to discuss an issue).

I'll tell you right now, I'll be doing 142 other things before I start to think about transcribing over four hours of interview. I am sick of all the transcribing I've done over the months. Nobody is paying me to do this and I just don't have that kind of time. I will release a few small 5-10 minutes uninterrupted cuts from the interview to Youtube, save the rest for Walking With Bigfoot, and sometime later make every scrap of it available for those who want to pore over it. You have to understand that I'm done with the years of time and sweat without return for my efforts. I have something important in this documentary project and I'm going to handle it exactly the way I handle my music in terms of creative property.

Now, as for jargon, denials/shifting blame on others, and a claimed inability to discuss an issue: The only jargon was costume jargon that Phil took the time to explain in terms anyone could understand. That would have been some of the elaboration that ate up the hours. You guys wanted the nitty-gritty technical details about molds, latex, bias tape, seams and I went and got them. I made sure that when I didn't understand something, I had Phil break it down for me. He shifted blame to no one and anytime he denied lying, he gave an explicit explanation why. The only issue we couldn't discuss was the legal one I already mentioned and I dismissed it as pink hippopotami didn't matter to me nor were they germane to the conversation of the PGF. Case was dismissed. That's it.

So if I'm reading this right, he's saying that the costume he's claiming was used to create the Patty suit was brown. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but didn't Morris say that the reason the recreation suit was brown was because he couldn't obtain the same materials he used in the 60's?

He made brown gorilla suits in the 60's. A week before the NatGeo shoot he contacted a friend at National Fiber and asked to get some brown dynel. His friend said he had a really good brown. A week later when Phil was at Cow Camp in Yakima, it had a strong reddish tinge under the sun. It doesn't have that tinge under artificial lighting. I've seen it myself and under regular lights, it looks great. Even with the super detailed photos I have now from Cow Camp showing a reddish tinge, it still looks great.

That would be the NatGeo show that Morris paid his own airfare, accommodations, expenses for the suit and never saw a dime for after slimeball Kal Korff took off with everyone's pay. What a douche.

That reminds me, what did Morris say about Patty's feet (and tracks) in comparison to the gorilla costume feet his company made at the time?

Patty's feet are his feet. Patty's tracks are not.

 

[SweatyYeti]

kitakaze wrote:

She told me it was shortly before Halloween of '67 that she first saw the PGF.
She said that she saw it on their TV.

They saw the film on tv, less than a week after it was shot???

She was clear that it was not just Phil recognizing the suit and her agreeing. She said they both looked at each other and had a kind of eureka moment.

They had a mutual iced-tea spraying moment....right in each other's faces??

That's a shame.


kitakaze wrote:

We actually have on camera the moment I took the questions out of my case and handed the first page to Phil,

And since you were in the position of "the fox guarding the henhouse"....we have no way of knowing that Phil wasn't given all of the questions, well ahead of time. Isn't that true?

 

[kitakaze]

They saw the film on tv, less than a week after it was shot???

Go ahead and explain how you worked that out.

They had a mutual iced-tea spraying moment....right in each other's faces??

That's a shame.

As they tell it, Phil saw it first and called her into the room. You can see their exact stories of that experience when the video is released.

1) Do I have an image of Bob in a suit and Patty in which the eyes, elbows, and knees line up?

2) Are questions from an informed person who thinks Morris is a liar and seeks to expose him as such with those questions that of someone on his side of the fence?

3) That "standing height" of Patty would have to have been about 2-3 inches taller than Bob's standing height due to the cone-shaped headpiece "pre- or post-piano?"

 

[SweatyYeti]

kitakaze wrote:

1) Do I have an image of Bob in a suit and Patty in which the eyes, elbows, and knees line up?

Regarding the elbows....(including the upper-body width, 'elbow-reach' and 'arm gap')....NO....you don't.


Reminder.......

You will NEVER produce an image of Heironimus which replicates Patty's 'elbow-reach', 'arm gap', and 'humerus triangle' measurements.

NEVER......EVER.....EVER...

 

[kitakaze]

Hi!

Go ahead and explain how you worked that out.

2) Are questions from an informed person who thinks Morris is a liar and seeks to expose him as such with those questions that of someone on his side of the fence?

3) That "standing height" of Patty would have to have been about 2-3 inches taller than Bob's standing height due to the cone-shaped headpiece "pre- or post-piano?"

 

[LTC8K6]

You will NEVER produce an image of Heironimus which replicates Patty's 'elbow-reach', 'arm gap', and 'humerus triangle' measurements.

Gotta' agree. No one knows what those measurements are...