In my determination, these last two months, to celebrate primarily the living and the dead of The Princess Bride, I’ve started delving into areas of filmmaking we haven’t discussed much—that we don’t, as a rule, discuss much. Okay, there are people who talk about stunts more than I, but still; that was a man whose most iconic picture was one where his face was covered—because it didn’t matter who he was, just how he could move. We’ve talked about realistically a pair of women whose work is so underrated that it wasn’t until researching someone else that I found a genuinely interesting story that I would have shared if I’d seen it before. And this week, we are talking about someone whose credits include not just The Princess Bride but Dr. Strangelove and 2001—and who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

What Bob Cuff has, and which provides more information in some ways than IMDb, is a loving obituary in The Guardian by his son David, to which I am grateful. It is from IMDb that I have a relatively (you never can tell in some categories) comprehensive list of his films; it is from the obituary by his son that I have a view of the man. He made commercials but criticized capitalism. The best line, from its first paragraph, is “His skills also earned him a commission to render Jayne Mansfield’s chest more “respectable” for a TV programme in the late 1950s. ” He was a gardener who apparently treated his stepchild from his second marriage as well as his six biological children, and he was with his second wife for 54 years.

And my goodness, the art. I need neither IMDb nor The Guardian to appreciate the art. I mean, IMDb helps locate it, and about the only other resource out there is a website that includes stills from, according to the gallery, “2001Space odissey.” And it’s worth noting that this website is the one that provides me with the the information that Kubrick did not, in fact, want matte paintings and instead insisted on models for the Moon, and that Cuff helped make those as well. Obviously, the film wasn’t made on the Moon—in fact, it doesn’t even look as we now know the Moon looks—but it looks as realistic as Cuff and his associate, John Mackey, could get it.

I love matte paintings. I frankly think they’re an underappreciated artform. Even as a child, I was always stunned by that scene near the end of Mary Poppins where Jane and Michael run into a distant and misty London, a scene I now of course know was done with matte paintings. But I don’t know who painted it and would have to look it up, even as I know the names of the songwriters without hesitation and can even picture them in my mind. Cuff created the castle exteriors of Masque of the Red Death. And then his work blends so seamlessly that you probably didn’t even know that up and down on the Cliffs of Insanity were paintings, or at least notice and think about it at the time.

If not all of his movies were classics, well, I suspect matte painter is one of those jobs where you don’t necessarily get to pick all your own movies. Which honestly makes it all the more remarkable that so many of his were so famous. If it were anyone else whose credits included the Olivier Richard III, The Longest Day, and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, you’d probably know their name. Throw in Christopher Lee’s Dracula Has Risen From the Grave and Life of Brian, and they definitely deserve a Wikipedia page.

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