#Max Headroom

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theverge

From our definitive history of Max Headroom: how make-up and visual effects brought the “digital” celebrity to life.

Max Headroom was ostensibly a computer-generated character, but Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel knew early on that the technology wasn’t there to make that happen. The solution was to place actor Matt Frewer in prosthetic make-up with special contact lenses and a fiberglass suit, light him with a single light source that mimicked the primitive computer graphics of the time, and then shoot him against a blue screen so backgrounds could be added later.
Max Headroom
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theverge

Max Headroom: the definitive history of the 1980s digital icon.

On Thursday, April 4th, 1985, a blast of dystopian satire hit the UK airwaves. Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future was a snarky take on media and corporate greed, told through the eyes of investigative journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer) and his computer-generated alter-ego: an artificial intelligence named Max Headroom.
Max became a singular ’80s pop culture phenomenon that represented everything wonderful and horrible about the decade. Max hosted music video shows; Max interviewed celebrities; Max hawked New Coke; Max Headroom became US network television’s very first cyberpunk series. Max was inescapable — and then almost just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.
Thirty years after the premiere, I spoke with the writers, directors, producers, actors, make-up artists, and network executives that helped bring Max Headroom to life. And it all began, like so many things in the ‘80s, with music videos.
max headroomMatt Frewer