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Show PET CAT BECOfTlES BEAST OF PKEY "it's all a matter of relative size," explains Arnold. "A man standing next to the Great Pyramid Pyra-mid in Egypt is dwarfed by it. But a man standing beside an orange crate can make the crate seem amost as large as the Pyra-mid--if the man happens to be less than two inches tall." An unlikely comparison? Not at all, for in "The Incredible Shrinking Man" Grant Williams spends about a third of his time as a man less than two inches tall. In the course of the film he shrinks from 6 feet to a half inch in height. Since the studio couldn't actually actu-ally shrink Williams, it had to enlarge every item on every set on which he appears, the enlargement en-largement being scaled to whatever what-ever size he was supposed to be at that point in the story. Some of the articles were merely mere-ly doubled in size, others were built 25 times as large and on many the work order read: "Duplicate "Du-plicate on a scale 100:0." . The set representing the basement base-ment of Williams' home, for a long sequence during which he is two inches tall, was so large that it had to be distributed over nine separate sound stages. Had it been put together as a single unit it would have measured over a mile long and nearly three quarters quar-ters of a mile wide. To create such monstrosities as a paint can 55 feet high, a wedge of stale sponge cake 18 feet high, a pair of scissors 25 feet long and a three-penny nail that was seven feet long, and other oversized replicas of such ordinary objects U-I had to allot a budget to "The Incredible Shrinking Man" that was higher than any ever expended ex-pended on a science-fiction thriller in the history of the studio, |