Gary Thompson: No disguising the expertise of makeup master Tony Gardner

IF YOU'RE ONE of the folks who fainted during "127 Hours" last year, you can thank a guy named Tony Gardner.

He's the Hollywood effects artist (you can see his latest work in "Beastly") who built the fake muscle and bone for the arm that James Franco self-amputates during the movie's most notorious scene.

"Yeah, we just put a little carbon fiber in the silicone muscle to make it look like a real muscle," he said, with a dude-like California drawl that belies his formative years in Cleveland. (Gardner actually sounds like one of the Geico caveman - a creature he's also done the makeup for.)

So don't feel bad about getting queasy.

"I built it, and I can't watch it," he confided.

And don't feel bad about being fooled. Gardner was once investigated by Arizona State Police - they were convinced he'd shot a homeless person to recreate the authentic bullet wounds in "Three Kings." Actually he built an organ-by-organ model of the human torso, covered with silicone muscle and skin - something he does today as a training aid for hospitals.

Over the years, he's made Darkman's face, and has had some truly weird gigs. For example, he designed Ben Stiller's zipper-caught cojones for "There's Something About Mary," and came up with the, um, substance that drips from Stiller's ear and eventually winds up in Cameron Diaz' hair.

It's all been kind of an accidental career for Gardner, who was at University of Southern California writing a thesis about movies when he interviewed Oscar-winning makeup artist Rick Baker and mentioned he'd done some makeup and modeling work. Baker asked for some samples, then offered Gardner a four-week job as a gofer. That job became a decades-long career.

His first big job was helping to design and apply the monster makeup for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, an assignment that had him on set with Jackson, shooting the breeze.

"I was 18, and I thought he was 16, because he was so shy, and polite and naive. When I realized he was, like, 28, I couldn't believe it," said Gardner, who plays one of the zombies in the film (and who designed the zombies for "Zombieland.")

His most important job, career-wise, was probably "Darkman," the Sam Raimi cult classic about a deformed hero. Gardner had to create multiple layers of overlapping, synthetic skin, a complex mask that Liam Neeson had to comfortably wear for hours at a time.

"I basically lied to get that job. I said, 'Sure, I can do that.' The truth was I'd never done anything like it."

The half-man, half-phantom-of-the-opera face he created made him the ideal artist for "Beastly," a beauty- and-the-beast update about a handsome, arrogant teen cursed to live as an ugly dude until he learns how to give and receive love. The trick was to create a look that could fascinate but not alienate a tween romance audience.

"We didn't want traditional disfigurement, this couldn't be Quasimodo," he said. "It had to be effective, but kind of more subtle."

They came up with a mixture of scars, cuts and tattoos that are not only physical marks, but expression of the "beast's" attributes, and some of the movie's themes - there are even embedded shards of mirror to suggest the character's vanity.

Gardner's next job is not so mytho-poetic.

It's "The Three Stooges," for the Farrelly Brothers, with whom he collaborated on ". . . Mary" and "Shallow Hal" (the fat suits).

"This is their dream project. They've been talking about it ever since I've known them."