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Holiday Special: Lumpy Speaks

Patty Maloney, Lumpawarrump (“Lumpy”)

Patty Maloney is the only member of the Wookiee family still involved with acting [Peter Mayhew has since recounted his role as Chewbacca in Episode III after this interview was conducted]: Mickey Morton, who played Chewbacca’s wife Mallatobuck (a.k.a. Malla), passed away in early 1998. “He was the sweetest man,” remembers make-up effects artist Stan Winston. “He had a good sense of humor” [read more from Stan Winston below]. Paul Gale as Attichitcuk (“Itchy”), Lumpy’s

350-plus-year-old grandfather, has retired from acting. “He was just like being with family,” recalls Patty Maloney. “He was so much fun to work with. Paul had worked for Sid & Marty Kroft. That’s were I first met him. He played Hoo Doo on the road show that we did of Pufnstuf and was in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.”

Maloney has been obsessed with acting since a very young age. “When I was about four years old my mother put me into dancing school and, the minute I walked out onto that floor and looked into the mirror, I went ‘(gasp!) This is it! This is what I want to do!’ I was really, really tiny and I even didn’t know that I was never going to grow any taller, so my dream was that I was going to be a chorus girl on Broadway. I studied dance from then on. That was my life. I would go right from school to dance classes. When the last class was over I went home and slept and got up the next day and did it all over again. I did this five days a week, and on Saturdays I was in dance class all day long. I loved it.”

She has had an extremely fruitful career, having worked on countless ’70s sitcoms and shows such as Charlie’s  Angels and the original Love Boat. “When I came to Cailfornia in 1972 with $500 in my pocket, I figured ‘When that’s gone, I’ll return home to Orlando, Florida. I never left because I never stopped working.” Maloney has played many costumed characters besides Lumpy, including McDonald’s Early Bird, Goofy Gopher, and Bonita Bizarre for a travelling Sid & Marty Krofft show, and Piglet on Disney’s Welcome to Pooh Corner. More recently [in 1998], Maloney was in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. “I had a great time in that. It was an episode called ‘The Thaw’. There wasn’t a mask on my face. It was all done with make-up. We were aliens that invaded the crews’ minds.” When she reflects on her career, Maloney cannot single out a favorite project. “I can’t think of anything that I haven’t liked doing.”

FAX: Do you remember auditioning for the role of Lumpy?

MALONEY: Oh, I sure do. I probably auditioned with ten other people, I was the only female that I’m aware of that auditioned for the part. I was surprised, being a female, that I got it but I was thrilled with it. I just loved doing Lumpy.

FAX: What was it like working with the cast of Star Wars?

MALONEY: I thought it was great! It was like icing on a cake to be able to work with those people. Harrison Ford was just the most wonderful person to work with. He was so nice to me. While we were shooting the scene where Han and Chewie arrive at the Wookiee planet, he had a line were he had to say “My he’s grown, hasn’t he?” and he’dsay. “My she’s grown, hasn’t she?” (laughter) And they say, “Cut! Harrison, Lumpy’s a boy,” and he would say, “Oh yeah, that’s right. Let’s do that again.” And in the next take he said “My she’s grown, hasn’t she?” They would go “Cut! Harrison!” He would go “Oh, I know, but I can’t look at her when she doesn’t have this mask on, and think of her as a boy when she gets into this thing.” He was wonderful, and everyone else was great.

We had Ben Burtt, the man who does the sound effects for Star Wars. He came into the dressing room one day and he had me do a tape of my voice, and then he engineered it to all different sounds: high, low, fast, and slow. He sent me a tape that was incredible, just so that I could hear what you could do, engineering voices. He was so fascinated with my voice that he wanted it just for his own.

FAX: How would you describe Lumpy?

MALONEY: Lumpy was like an impish little boy that was rebellious. Very active and curious about everything. If his mother said “Take out the garbage” he would reply “I don’t want to do that now! I’m too busy doing something else.” He loved his grandfather and adored his father, which was obvious when Chewbacca came home. He was just an inquisitive, active, and happy Wookiee. He was not really afraid of the stormtroopers, but a little timid of them when they would get upset with him.

FAX: You obviously had to convey a lot of information with mime, since the first half-hour of the show involved the Wookiees who don’t speak English.

MALONEY: Exactly. Well they had a Wookiee language, and we even went to a class to listen to it on tapes to educate us on what their language was like, and if we heard a particular sound, we knew what it meant to us. But it was basically doing mime. The feelings had to come from the whole body in order to get across sorrow and happiness. It was just a wonderful experience.

A lot of the scenes — such as where I’m at the holographic chess table watching alien acrobats — were done where I couldn’t see any of it. It wasn’t there in front of me at all. The director would say, “They’re swinging up to your right,” and I would look up, or he would say, “They’re finished so you can applaud” and I would clap. It was all done by being spoken to, not by any visual references, which was really interesting to do because it’s hard to do that. When I saw it all put together I went “Whew! That’s amazing!”

FAX: Lumpy, Malla and Itchy’s faces were more expressive than Chewbacca’s. Also, Lumpy’s eyes conveyed a lot of expressions.

MALONEY: Yes. The only part of me that you saw were my eyes, and the area around them was painted black. So the expression that I had to give came out of my eyes. It was a new experience because they had just started doing electronic faces. Stan Winston had made the mask for me. I had wires that went down my arms with little rings on my fingers that I could pull and make the nose twitch, make the lips curl up and smile a little bit and open up the mouth alittle bit so the teeth would show. Chewbacca, on the other hand, was more solid. I don’t think he had that kind of movement in his face. It was really fascinating to do it. When they wanted to do a tight close-up. and I had to use my hands to pick up props or something, Stan Winston would sit behind me and work the strings for me.

There were so many things to be done simultaneously in the close-ups. In the long shots, I had to control the cables myself because he couldn’t follow me around.

FAX: It must have been difficult operating your facial expressions with your hands, and doing body gestures simultaneously.

MALONEY: Yes, but it was just a matter of coordination. I thought of it as a dance routine: you get a rhythm going and you almost count it. I almost felt the music without the music being there.

FAX: What were your favorite sets?

MALONEY: I particularly liked Lumpy’s bedroom, which was supposed to be upstairs. It was like going up into a tree. I loved all the toys that they put in there for Lumpy. The scene that I liked the most was when Lumpy went upstairs and found that the troopers had destroyed his toys and pulled the head off the Bantha and how sad it was that his favorite toy had been destroyed.

FAX: How long did the filming last?

MALONEY: I think it was about ten days. We worked very hard and we worked very long hours. Sometimes we would work until two or three in the morning but we just laughed and had fun. It was hot being in that costume but everybody was so wonderful to work with that I forgot about it. One of the most wonderful things was that when I finished the show they sent me a bonus, which you hardly ever get in this business. They also had a director’s chair delivered to my house with the name Lumpy on one side and my name on the other. Smith-Hemion, the producers, did the Emmy Awards for a long time and they’re a wonderful production company.

Read on for some comments by make-up effects artist Stan Winston…

Stan Winston, Wookiee Make-up

By Ross Plesset

Just as a FYI, to avoid old posts becoming one with the Force, this post has been republished so it can be a blue glowy thing, it was Originally posted 2022-10-10 16:00:31.