They’re Body Builders to the Film Industry : Movies: The KNB EFX Group of Chatsworth is one of the hottest operations going in the special-effects business.

Sure, Billy Crystal is great in his new film, “City Slickers,” but in the opinion of many, the character that really walks away with the movie is Norman, a Bambi-like calf that Crystal adopts while on his cattle-drive vacation in the West.

Several calves starred as Norman in the film, but not all of them were real. Three, among them the newborn Norman and the calf struggling with Crystal in the flooded river, were fake animals, designed and made by Chatsworth’s KNB EFX Group.

It’s one of the hottest operations going in today’s burgeoning special makeup effects business. There are 50 or so companies and hundreds of free-lancers now specializing in makeup effects. Although most got their starts in horror movies, the breadth of their work has grown to include mainstream movies, too.

KNB supplied James Caan’s legs, broken by Oscar-winner Kathy Bates in “Misery”; the “anatomically complete” cadaver passing for the dead Sam Elliott in last fall’s “Sibling Rivalry”; and 24 fake buffaloes used in the spectacular stampede sequence of best-picture winner “Dances With Wolves.”

A major concern of Crystal and his associates in “City Slickers” and Kevin Costner and co-producer Jim Wilson in “Wolves” was for the safety of all the animals in the movies, said Nicotero.

“No one is able to kill or hurt animals for a film, of course,” said KNB partner Greg Nicotero, 28. “No one is allowed to purposely trip animals in stampede sequences any more. In the old days they always used to string trip wire wherever they wanted.”

Nicotero and his two partners founded the company in February, 1988. Their Chatsworth factory is crammed with gargoyles, heads, ripped-open cadavers and a collection of life masks, including images of James Cagney and Vincent Price.

For the “Wolves” project, KNB staffed up with hair technicians, mold makers, sculptors and articulation experts and created the fake dead, skinned, moveable, snorting and charging buffaloes Costner and Wilson needed from an original, 2,000-pound clay sculpture.

“There are a lot of shots of buffaloes flipping over buffaloes,” said partner Bob Kurtzman (the K of KNB ). “A lot of those are real buffaloes interacting with our buffaloes . . . real buffaloes running over fake buffaloes. One mechanical buffalo came back destroyed . . . it was stampeded . . . but it made a great shot!”

“We had real trepidations about the buffalo hunt,” Jim Wilson recalled, “and how to make the scene work. The KNB people were highly imaginative.”

Wilson’s formula for KNB’s success in this sub-industry? “You’ve got to be more resourceful and a little whacked.”

Crazy or not, at the least KNB partners knew what movie they were making the calves and the buffaloes for . . . not the case with an earlier project in which they inadvertently provided the dozen or so cadavers seen in “Flatliners.”

Explained Nicotero: “We sell the image, not the actual piece. Sometimes at the end of a film, a producer will say ‘What do we keep?’ and we have to remind them ‘You have what’s on the film and that’s what you keep.’ ”

Accordingly, most of the time, KNB’s ghouls and gargoyles are returned, but not this time.

“We were contracted to do 16 cadavers for Disney’s ‘Gross Anatomy,’ ” said Nicotero, “and when the last day came they told us ‘Sorry, Disney’s keeping all the bodies.’ I was really mad. Then the ‘Flatliners’ people called and said we had been recommended to do the bodies for their film. After we gave them the price, they rented them from Disney. So we lost the job because of own work!”

Before joining forces as KNB, Nicotero, Kurtzman and their third partner, Howard Berger, had all free-lanced for several years in the special makeup effects field.

Berger, 26, grew up in Los Angeles. Kurtzman, also 26, was raised in Ohio and originally wanted to be a commercial artist. Nicotero was a premed student in Pennsylvania when he was hired as a special effects assistant on 1984’s “Day of the Dead,” which was made in Pittsburgh.

“Ten years ago, when the remakes of ‘The Thing’ and ‘The Howling’ came out,” Nicotero said, “people saw things on screen they never saw before. They were revolted and horrified and interested at the same time. They would cover their eyes but watch through their fingers because they had to see what it looked like for a man to turn into a werewolf because no one had shown it before. They didn’t want to watch but were compelled to.

“You could line up 50 special effects guys, and ask them what they were like when they were kids, and get pretty much the same answers. The will say ‘I used to draw monsters,’ ‘I used to see horror films,’ ‘I used to love making myself up and scaring friends.’ ”

All that is pretty ironic, Nicotero added, “because the major part of our work now isn’t even horror movies any more.”

Starting as a tiny shop, KNB has supplied special makeup effects for more than 25 films, much of it in the horror genre.

A showcase of sorts of their work was “Tales From the Darkside--The Movie.” For its three stories, KNB created a 2,000-year-old mummy; a Cat From Hell that crawls down actor David Johansen’s throat, rummages around inside his body and then claws its way back out; and a spectacular transformation of Rae Dawn Chong into a gargoyle, complete with clawed hands and feet ripping out of, seemingly, her own limbs.

“Transformations like that are really neat,” said Nicotero, “because to convince the audience that you are taking this young actress and turning her into a monster before their eyes is a challenge everyone looks to.”

The price? $4,000 to $5,000 for a generic off-the shelf head, some $20,000 for a plain cadaver that just lies around and up to $100,000 for a fully articulated monster--all determined by the amount of detail and movement required.

KNB is building an army of 50 skeletal warriors for Universal’s “Army of Darkness,” and recently completed two exploding heads for HBO’s production of “Wedlock” starring Rutger Hauer. The firm is also completing a series of prosthetic makeup parts for Wes Craven’s “The People Under the Stairs.”

Actors usually model for the more recognizable aspects of fake bodies or parts. “James Caan modeled his legs for ‘Misery,’ and Sam Elliott for his head in ‘Sibling Rivalry’,” said Nicotero, pointing it out on a nearby table. “When it came back we chopped the head off (of a generic body) and used the body with another head for another film.”

Still, that was a better fate than that in store for most of the “Wolves” buffaloes. They didn’t come back at all. No one wanted them.

Said Kurtzman: “They are still in South Dakota (where the film was made). We put fly attractant on them for the filming, and they also got rained on and moldy. They were a mess. When they called and asked if we wanted them back we said, ‘No thanks!’ ”

And the Normans? Sorry folks.

Said Berger: ‘I don’t know where they are. . . . I think they were all destroyed in making the film.”