Wow. Talk about a movie lost down the memory hole. A Gnome Named Gnorm, directed by makeup and special effects legend Stan Winston.

Due to the talents of Winston and his crew, Gnorm emerged as a funny, unique, and thoroughly dynamic character, both on screen and off. “Gnorm became a very real character to all of us,” Richard Landon commented. “In the beginning, Stan would come up to us and say: ‘Who’s controlling the eyes? You? Okay, I want the eyes to do this as the head moves this way.’ But as we got further into the shoot, Stan stopped talking to us and started talking to Gnorm directly! You always know you’re doing a great puppeteering job when the director starts talking to the puppet instead of you.”

Who knows whether the movie was any good, but very cool puppetry. Too bad about its fate…

The film was briefly retitled Upworld, a reference to Gnorm’s word for our surface world above ground, but the hoped-for theatrical release never happened. After being shelved for three years, due to the downward business turns of the production companies behind it, the film finally went to direct-to-video in 1992 with the title, A Gnome Named Gnorm. To Winston’s mind, Gnorm’s fate was just more evidence of what he refers to — only half-jokingly — as the ‘Winston Curse’. “The movies I direct have a tendency to take whole companies down. Just before Pumpkinhead was released, Dino DeLaurentiis’ company went into bankruptcy and closed. The company that made Gnorm was Vestron Pictures, and just before we figured out when that movie’s release would be, Vestron went belly-up.”

Poor Mr. Winston. At least he could cry himself to sleep at night cuddling his four Oscars, not to mention the knowledge that he was one of the greatest and most influential effects artists in the history of the medium.