WAYANS BROTHERS Becoming white girls was no easy task

An Oscar-winning makeup artist pulled off the transformation.
ZAP2IT.COM
Keenen Ivory Wayans couldn't think of a more difficult role for his brothers. As they were sitting around one day, flipping through magazines, talking about their next project together, the guys who collaborated on "Scary Movie" and "In Living Color" saw an article about white socialite debutantes in the Hamptons.
Keenen decided to turn his black brothers into "White Chicks."
Shawn and Marlon Wayans were both up for the funny idea, but weren't aware at first that it would take up to six hours for them to have the makeup, hair pieces and body paint put on -- and more than half that time to take it off again.
"We expected them to lose it at some point, but they never did," says makeup artist Keith VanderLaan. "It was as grueling taking it off, because you didn't want to hurt the skin."
Makeup artist
VanderLaan teamed up with Greg Cannom, who won an Oscar for makeup when he turned Robin Williams into a nanny for "Mrs. Doubtfire."
They faced the challenge of creating facial prosthetics for the two handsome African-American men with strong chiseled features.
"We couldn't use too much makeup because they became drag queens -- we had to soften them," Cannom explains.
The story is about two FBI agents who try to foil a kidnapping plot by becoming socialites Tiffany and Brittany Wilson. They have to try to fool their friends, family and old boyfriends. The three brothers wrote the screenplay together while the two actors each lost 30 pounds to look more svelte for their new roles.
Producer Lee R. Mays, who worked with Keenan on "Lowdown Dirty Shame," says this hasn't been done before in the movies. He points to how Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis looked like dowdy ladies in "Some Like it Hot" and a black man was turned into a white man for "True Identity," but insists, "I don't think anybody has taken two black men and tried to make them two young attractive blondes."
The actresses
They had to cast two white women who looked like sisters but also had the same basic shape of their male counterparts. "It was the weirdest audition I've ever been on," says actress Maitland Ward, who plays Brittany. They measured the distance between her eyes and nose, her lips, chin and every feature of her face. Anne Dudek plays her sister.
The most difficult makeup challenge was to figure out a way to cover up all of Shawn and Marlon's dark skin. Cannom created a new base to cover the skin and then put Revlon Color Stay over that.
"What happens is when you use lighter makeup to paint over dark skin like that is that it turns gray," Cannom says. "On top of that we spattered on some tiny freckles and reddish dots to break up the skin a bit to look more realistic."
Transformation
When Marlon stood next to him with full makeup, wig and contact lenses in place, Cannom says he was shocked. "It really freaked me out because there was nothing of Marlon there. For a second it unnerved me. I've never had that reaction before so I knew it must be pretty good."
Producer Rick Alvarez recalls, "It was outrageous. They were talking like white girls, dancing like white girls, they literally became white girls in front of our eyes."
For Shawn, it got a bit too much. Some of the actresses on the set forgot that there were guys underneath all the makeup. He says, "We got into some of their private girl talk, and it was gross. Too much information."