We were nominated for an Academy Award for visual effects nearly every year and we won our share.2 One of our supervisors, Dennis Muren, has won nine Oscars alone for visual effects. Dennis holds more Oscars than anyone alive.
The way it worked was that the nominated effects studio was asked to present a film reel of about twenty minutes or so of just the effects from the movie. This reel had to be cut from a standard projection print, so it could not be altered or dressed up in any way from what was in the theaters. Well, this presented problems, because the soundtracks on movies, at least back then, were from an optical stripe printed alongside, but not in sync with, the film images. For technical reasons the sound came about a foot ahead of the images. This meant that when we chopped the picture where we wanted to make a picture cut, we were possibly chopping sound that we didn’t want to lose. We developed techniques, little editing tricks, to make it work, but it meant lots of splices that could break at any time.
When we were done cutting the reels, they were shipped to the Academy, and a few weeks later all the companies nominated would go down for a big screening at the Academy theater that we called “the bake-off.” All the competing studios were there with their reels. The lights went down, and as the editor, you prayed that your splices didn’t break and spoil the whole presentation, possibly costing your team an Oscar. When the lights came up, we went home and waited for the five best to be picked. After that it wasn’t until Oscar night that we knew who had won.
We always kept copies of these reels to show potential clients our work and also to screen for visiting big shots who were getting a tour. My favorite to show people was the one from The Empire Strikes Back. That one always impressed people. It was exciting and contained great work. The funny thing is that almost no one has ever seen these reels and they are amazing because they were all of the “wow” scenes from major effects films cut into a nonstop reel of action.
Sometimes even a bad film could make a good reel. Besides The Empire Strikes Back, probably the best reel I ever saw was for Pearl Harbor, which we worked on in 2000. The effects work in that film was breathtaking when you saw it in one stand-alone reel, having left the lousy acting and the poor storyline on the cutting room floor. That re-creation of the Japanese attack on Pearl was unbelievably real, so much so that I once got complaints from some college history professors about the dangers they saw in what we were capable of doing.
The history professors descended on me at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. How I wound up lecturing a bunch of professors started at Phil’s barber shop. I have been going to Phil for my haircuts for almost thirty years. Phil is one of those guys they call “connectors.” That observation was made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, where he describes a type of person who knows large numbers of people and is in the habit of making introductions. That describes my barber Phil exactly. Phil knows everybody and loves to make introductions.
Needing a haircut, I set off for Phil’s, pondering something I had just read about a famous paleoanthropological find of Mary Leakey’s: early human footprints captured and preserved in volcanic ash from 3.6 million years ago. These prints revealed tremendous clues about how our ancestors walked, yet there was not enough money to properly house the find from the elements.
When I hit the chair at Phil’s, I started to expound about what a shame it was that a mere radio preacher could easily raise millions of dollars, yet Mary Leaky was having trouble with funds to protect a hugely important find, one that revealed valuable information about ourselves.
Phil said, “Bill, Desmond Clark,” gesturing to the gentleman directly across from the barber chair I was sitting in. Dr. Clark was an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, having guided the world’s foremost paleoanthropology program. He had taught most of the leading paleoanthropologists in the world.
This fellow was all class. A British gentleman educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had lived and studied in Berkeley for years. What he said to me was as foreign to an American ear as Swahili. He said, “I am having some people over to my home on Friday for cocktails. Won’t you join us?” Desmond had never seen me before in his life.
That’s the thing about Phil’s barbershop: You never know who will be sitting there on your next visit. Someone once told me there are dozens of PhDs per square mile in my neighborhood. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I can tell you that the person I bought my house from was one of the discoverers of Element 103 in the periodic table, and Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame, is a neighbor. Not to mention the couple who founded and run MoveOn.org, possibly the most influential political organization in the country.
I wasn’t going to miss this gathering, so my wife and I drove to a slightly different section of the Berkeley hills for cocktails. The affair was somewhat similar to some of my professors’ hosting of graduate students at their homes during my college days, except this group also contained what I like to call famous people you’ve never heard of. For instance, I was introduced to Garniss Curtis, who invented potassium-argon dating to precisely date fossils. I also met Nick Toth and Kathy Schick, directors of the Stone Age Institute of Anthropology in Bloomington, Indiana.
Nick and I got to talking, and when he learned what I did for a living, he invited me to give a lecture on special effects at Indiana University, where Nick and Kathy are professors in addition to running their institute for the study of early man. The Stone Age Institute is largely, but not exclusively, funded by Gordon Getty, the oil billionaire from San Francisco. It would not be long before I was flying around on Gordon’s private plane, all thanks to Phil the barber. I will say more about traveling with Gordon later, but just let me say here that his jet is no puny, multimillion-dollar Gulfstream. This is an airliner that Gordon had converted for his personal use.
For the lecture I brought some behind-the-scenes footage from the film Saving Private Ryan, which I had worked on. The scene I chose to illustrate what was possible to achieve with visual effects did not involve make-believe. There were no spaceships or monsters in what I showed, because I wanted to emphasize that things could be done to alter reality in ways that were not well known.
Spielberg had wanted a shot that depicted the scene at Omaha Beach a day or so after the ferocious D-Day assault. It would show an armada of ships, landing craft, German blockade and balloons still up, as well as hundreds of troops, tanks, jeeps, etc., swarming the newly taken beach. It would have the feel of a sort of mop-up operation still in progress.
What we were given to work with was a huge crane shot that slowly revealed a beach with absolutely nothing in the frame other than the ocean and the beach itself. We added everything else. I ran the before and after versions of the shot, which started with a couple of GIs in a passing jeep and then swooped slowly up for an aerial view from a height of maybe twenty-five feet. I didn’t hear a gasp, but the audience I’m sure had never seen such a realistic scene created out of almost nothing. As I found out later, they were just not prepared to see such wholesale fakery in what otherwise appeared to be a straightforward period film.
At the cocktail get-together after the film, I was approached by a serious-looking group of history professors who were disturbed by the implications of what I had just shown them. They thought this was dangerous. It was some kind of a reassemblage of history that reminded them of such German propaganda films as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
“It’s a movie, fellows,” I replied. But they would not be deterred. Why could I not see that the implications here were disturbing? I tried every way I could think of to say, “This is entertainment; we make stuff up for a living.”
It’s not like I hadn’t thought about these things a lot, especially after we made the incredibly realistic-looking dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. I had even made a documentary on the making of that film in which I interviewed one of the principal creators of the effects, Dennis Muren, the man with nine Oscars. Dennis was an especially keen critic of anything visual. He had spent his entire career, as we all had, studying images we had recently faked, trying to make them look, even better, trying to make them look real. What was his reaction to these creatures we had created? He said, “I have studied them and studied them, and I cannot find a flaw.”
Talk about powerful images. These were powerful enough to add creepy to them. These dinosaurs were creepy powerful. I even went out to a movie theater and filmed some of the very first patrons as they came out of the show. “What did you think? How do you think they were made?” Those were the questions I had been thinking about since I had seen what we were about to unleash on the moviegoing public, a year earlier. How will people react when they see something so realistic? Something that they simultaneously know is fake? Something that cannot be real?
Well, they didn’t care. They just didn’t know or care how it was done. To them it was just a cool movie. “I liked it when the dinosaur ate that guy.” That was the most articulate response I ever got.
So no, I wasn’t concerned that our techniques would be used for evil purposes. I did, however, always think we could have made the most incredible UFO film ever captured by an amateur. We would fake it so it looked like some home-movie geek had shot footage of an alien spaceship landing or something, and leave it in an old 8mm camera at a flea market for someone to find. I never could get anyone to go along with me on that, but we did have fun debunking a book of supposed UFO still photos that some conspiracy guy brought in one time.
2. Star Wars, E.T., The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom (Raiders 2), Cocoon, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Abyss, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, The Mask, and The Lost World (Jurassic 2).