Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics

The projected era of the special effects star never really came into being, due largely to Lucas’s streamlining approach at ILM and Lucasfilm and his reinstating the producer system, which downplayed the role of all others who answered to him. Feature productions hiring the new independent effects houses were not interested in reordering the production hierarchy to give more prominence to effects “stars.” To win bids, ambitious effects supervisors had to tame their rhetoric. So, paradoxically, as special effects became more and more essential to big-budget features, producers like Lucas and his counterparts at studios and production houses insured that special effects supervisors would remain more or less anonymous technicians. To demonstrate Lucas’s and other producers’ success in repressing the rise of the star effects artist, it is striking that if one can name a special effects artist today, it is likely the same names Future lists in 1978: Trumbull, Dykstra, or Harryhausen. One is hard-pressed to name the visual effects supervisor for recent effects films like Avatar (Cameron, 2009) or The Avengers (Whedon, 2012). Instead, the special effects auteur has been reabsorbed into traditional auteur definitions: credit remains with directors like James Cameron or with directors/producers of effects houses, like Lucas’s ILM and Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop.

Along with asserting control over effects personnel, ILM has been very successful in establishing its particular house style as the style of cinematic photorealism. If ILM has been so influential since the late 1970s, then it stands to reason that ILM’s homogenization efforts stifled alternative styles and approaches. The domination of ILM’s particular special effects aesthetic has meant that, since the early 1980s, some long-held techniques were left behind and some other approaches tried and abandoned. Some alternative approaches indeed flourished in the 1980s until digitization in the 1990s, including Jim Henson’s and Frank Oz’s puppet-animation style in The Muppet Movie (Frawley, 1979) and Labyrinth (Henson, 1986), and large-scale practical makeup effects, as in The Thing (Carpenter, 1982) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984).2 More revealing, however, are the styles and approaches, most notably special effects stop-motion animation, that were made impossible or unfeasible by the impact of special effects on the economic reorganization of big-budget filmmaking and the changed expectations the new style of photorealism brought with it.

Nevertheless, in the early 1980s a few important styles resisted the ILM approach. At least for a short while, these personality-driven styles also promoted the special effects auteur as a new cinema star. The first, traditional stop-motion animation as a special effect (composited into a live-action context rather than in an all-animation context), enjoyed a renewed prominence in the proliferation of techniques in the early 1980s, as seen in films such as 1981’s Clash of the Titans (Davis) and Caveman (Gottlieb). As a “not-too-realist” approach, as Ray Harryhausen put it, stop-motion animators made an argument for the pleasure and delight in what would now be considered “fakey,” or clumsily artificial and awkward effects. This approach is different from the special effects techniques that were reabsorbed in modified form by ILM technicians as both an aesthetic model to motion control and also Go-Motion creature animation on The Empire Strikes Back, and by others on films like RoboCop (Verhoeven, 1987).³ Instead of attempting to smooth the edges and hide the “clumsiness” long associated with stop motion as a special effect, traditional stop-motion animators like Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, and David Allen, in the early 1980s, accentuated what they saw as the handcrafted charm and the endearingly gawky movement of stop-motion animation effects.

Conversely, Trumbull thought the expanded blockbuster had not gone nearly far enough in renewing the moviegoing experience, and he therefore introduced Showscan, an ambitious reimagining of cinema production and exhibition. Trumbull believed that rather than offering new stories or new techniques in the same old 100-year package, Showscan heightened and intensified cinematic imagery overall, transforming both production and exhibition practices. Showscan is not, strictly speaking, a special effects technique or a special effects technology. Showscan combined the capture and projection in high frame rates with large film—70mm and IMAX—formats. Since at least the 1930s, high-frame-rate capture (running film through the camera at faster than 24fps) was a well-known technique of special effects artists to manipulate the perception of moving miniatures and models: if shot at a higher frame rate (following a scale-based mathematical formula), the model would appear in playback to have the appropriate weight and movement.4 Through this method, a miniature car falling off a cliff would not look like a toy car tossed by a child, but instead would appear to be a full-scale automobile accident. Trumbull applied this perceptual effect to image capture and projection in general, which when combined with the image quality of large-format film, would, in his rhetoric, minimize or eliminate the flicker effect, optimally sharpen the image, and intensify realism and heighten absorption by removing the sheet of glass between us and the world filmed. With the windowpane removed, the viewer, in stadium-style seats in the thrall of a large IMAX-style screen and the enormous images on it, would experience something like entering the diegesis.

Juxtaposing these two alternative approaches provides conceptual foils for ways more special effects were forcing productions to think futuristically and nostalgically at the same time. Stop motion provided a “not too real” pushback to the mainstream ILM photorealist style, while Showscan moved beyond special effects techniques that interacted with live action and, in effect, became the experience.

For Lucas, the sense of a shared cinematic experience is group wonder generated by the “wow” factor of photorealist special effects, executed within a fully realized, explorable diegetic world, and propelled by a simple, archetypical narrative. Furthermore, at a time of burgeoning home video, cable, and the shrinking screens of multiplexes, Lucas considered the traditional cinema theater space as a privileged site for his audience to gather. Lucas has had a long history of courting his fan base to get them into the theater, but thwarting any “unauthorized” (meaning not authored by Lucas) fan activity. However, as Henry Jenkins has argued, another way big-budget and low-budget films have long encouraged an ancillary sense of community is through ‘unofficial” fan and cult activities.7 One fan group that had long been catered to by producers of cult movies is stop-motion animation enthusiasts. Rather than primarily meeting in the cinema (like big-city cinephiles), stop-motion fans in the 1970s and 1980s were served by many publications such as Cinefantastique, Photon, Starlog, and Cinefex, along with other more specialized mailing groups.

Fandom around stop motion as a special effect has long coalesced around the particular talents of a few animators: most prominently, Willis O’Brien of King Kong fame, Ray Harryhausen of Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts (Chaffey, 1963), and Jim Danforth of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (Guest, 1970). Early on, of course, stop-motion animation was one of the few options (along with man-in-suit costuming and puppetry) to realize fantastic monstrous or impossible creature special effects, such as King Kong or the fighting skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts so beloved of special effects fans. Taking a cue from Harryhausen, I am calling the cinematic fantasy aesthetic that combines conventional live-action moviemaking with “unrealistic” animated material “not-too-realism.” “Not-too-realism” interrogates how stop motion balances the animated object with live-action footage. It engrosses the viewer into the diegesis not through its seamlessness, but by riveting the viewer through an amazement and appreciation of the artistry and effort of its handcraftedness.

When Vincent Canby says, “Clash of the Titans is not a movie to be recommended to anyone except moviegoers who have the capacity to be endlessly fascinated by Mr. Harryhausen’s none-too-convincing animated monsters,” he is voicing a typical mainstream critical stance.8 Despite a number of critics’ dismissal of stop motion, the early 1980s remarkably saw a brief resurgence of traditional stop-motion animation in feature filmmaking that would not have recognized ILM’s Go-Motion tweaks to stop motion as “improvements.” Interestingly, this nostalgic revival arose at the very moment when stop motion transitioned from a possible special effects technique, as it had been since the earliest cinema, to a niche animation technique. In spite of the 1970s efforts toward a seamless photorealistic aesthetic, the small flurry of feature films making use of traditional stop motion suggests that there was something of a practitioner backlash against ILM’s homogenization stance. Clearly, some filmmakers and fans preferred many of the qualities of traditional, “unrealistic” stop motion. What did these filmmakers and fans see in stop motion?

Three examples from the same year (1981) help to mark a historical moment when stop motion began to definitively transition from possible special effects technique to specialized animation technique—Clash of the Titans, Caveman, and The Howling (Dante). In Clash of the Titans, stop motion is used traditionally (somewhat wistfully) as a special effects technique, as in 1933’s King Kong or earlier Harryhausen films such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Juran, 1958). In Clash, Harryhausen’s hand-animated menagerie of mythological creatures populate nearly every sequence of the film. The creatures are meant not only to be part of the same diegesis as the live-action actors, but are an essential part of forming the enclosed fantastic world of the story and characters. The stop-motion creatures enrich and deepen the diegesis. In the case of Caveman, the cartoonish live-action comedy (in which actors’ motions are often as jerky as the stop-motion creatures) provides a forum for cult stop-motion animators Jim Danforth, David Allen, Randy Cook, and Jim Aupperle’s mostly stand-alone dinosaur animation. Caveman is an already nostalgic attempt to re-create the expert animation combined with fakey compositing found in traditional stop-motion special effects, and thereby recapturing those sequences’ particular old-fashioned charm.9 The Howling offers a negative example of stop motion as a special effect. David Allen designed and animated several werewolf creatures that were supposed to serve within accepted special effects photorealistic parameters. Like Clash of the Titans, Allen’s werewolf creatures were designed to fit in and enhance the diegesis of the live action. However, after elaborate special effects animation sequences were edited together with the live action, director Joe Dante decided that the stop motion was not convincing enough and detracted from the horror mood he was trying to achieve.¹⁰ All the stop motion (with the exception of a few seconds) was cut from the final film. In the case of Clash of the Titans, it was the last mainstream feature film of its kind to use traditional stop motion “straight” as a special effect, albeit in a highly complex form, tinged with the longing for Harryhausen fantasy films past. The Clash of the Titans production illustrates two things in particular—that the ILM model had not quite yet fully established dominion over the effects industry, and that 1981 was the year stop motion as a special effects technique (rather than an animation choice) became impossible.

Stop motion as a special effect—that is, conceived with efforts to cut together more or less seamlessly with the principal photography into a composite mise-en-scène, rather than as a stand-alone animation sequence—was never seamless or invisible, but always a specialty effects technique saved for special cases.¹¹ Even the most famous single example of stop motion as a special effect in King Kong in 1933 was deemed “not convincing” (more specifically, “jerky” or “awkward”) at the time. Variety’s review, for example, states: “It takes a couple of reels for ‘Kong’ to be believed, and until then it doesn’t grip. But after the audience becomes used to the machine-like movements and other mechanical flaws in the gigantic animals on view, and become accustomed to the phony atmosphere, they may commence to feel the power.”¹²

However, as the Variety reviewer suggests, stop motion was not historically considered a particular problem for engagement with the film. The example of King Kong is instructive: the enduring popularity and influence of King Kong is not that the animation is especially convincing—it is not. ¹³ Rather, it has a double impact on the viewer: Kong combines the appreciation of handmade technical proficiency with, as Harryhausen has put it, an emotional attachment to a “mass of metal and rubber.”¹⁴

By the 1980s, as photorealism standards shifted, so did the attitudes toward stop-motion special effects in mainstream films, and the technique’s obviousness began to be seen as a liability, even by its fans. To others, it created a fascinating dissonance when composited or cut together with live-action photography. Stop-motion animators take pride in their characters and design them to be appreciated apart from live-action photography, as a cinematic trick. Rather than hiding its work or masquerading as live-action photography (as in the case of Go-Motion), stop motion has always served the purpose Olivier Assayas recognized: creating “magic à la Méliès.” The Méliès connection is instructive. Since nearly the earliest cinema, stop-motion animation has been used in live-action film to highlight film’s uniquely cinematic capacity for animation. Put more bluntly, stop motion parades the extent to which cinema and animation are both equally manipulated and manipulatable. As with Méliès, part of the magic comes from both seeing and demonstrating what is possible in cinema and witnessing what creative and dedicated artists can achieve with the medium. This can be seen as the opposite pole of the wonder of photorealism, which attempts a parallel enchanting effect using an aesthetic that magically blends into the live-action image capture.

Ray Harryhausen trained under Willis O’Brien, initially on Mighty Joe Young (Schoedsack, 1949), and was most active animating sequences in live-action films in the late 1950s to the early 1980s.15 As attested to in countless interviews with contemporary directors who grew up watching his films, Harryhausen’s animation has had a substantial influence on the development of contemporary CGI effects.¹⁶ By introducing purposeful “not too realism,” Harryhausen’s aesthetic working model of stop motion provides a fascinating alternative theoretical stance to the way special effects are typically discussed. For many, the stop-motion aesthetic when applied to more photorealistic approaches brings much-needed qualities to “mechanized” effects work, such as expressivity, empathy, and handcraftedness, as we saw previously with ILM’s use of stop-motion techniques to program motion-controlled camera moves.

Interviews with Harryhausen reveal his focused perfectionism.17 He rarely worked with assistants and spent months at a time animating his stop-motion sequences by hand. There is certainly nothing haphazard or careless in animating the often unbelievably complex Harryhausen sequences—for example, the six battling skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. Nevertheless, when asked about CGI effects, Harryhausen was given to complaining that they’re “too perfect,” or even (see quote above) “too real.” But too real for what? Harryhausen prided himself on his fully handcrafted sequences. He believed that in his hands-on approach, he transferred some of his own “acting” (and therefore his humanity) to his creatures. Harryhausen often credited his personal (albeit limited) acting experience in providing his creatures with expressivity. Instead of insisting on his model’s “true-to-life” movements, he instead emphasized their representation, or their “actor-ness.” As he has said, “I have a chance to act through my models.”¹⁸ Furthermore, achieving this kind of expressivity is clearly more important than perfect mimicry: “I feel I’ve gotten my best animation by a feel for the acting rather than the quest for technical perfection.”¹⁹ For Harryhausen it is at least in part this expressivity that makes the sequences resemble recognizable movie actor behavior, despite what might be seen as the technology’s shortcomings.

One can extrapolate Harryhausen’s aesthetic goals as working toward creatures that move “appropriately” to their kind, in a way that reflects their character. They should act with expressive physical and facial gestures, easily recognizable as congruent with conventional movie notions of human emotion. Animation should be staged to mimic traditional continuity editing of live action through the variations of camera angle and distance, camera movement, and pace. Ontologically, it is important that the world of reference is the diegetically created movie world, not the “real” world as such.²⁰ All of these characteristics of Harryhausen’s aesthetics seem to fit within conventional ideas of special effects, yet the look of the final product creates a tension that is difficult to reconcile, creating a cinematic fantasy aesthetic of not-too-realism. It is important that this tension cannot be attributed solely to the “datedness” of the effects vis-à-vis contemporary standards. The effects in Clash of the Titans looked equally “dated” to its 1981 audience, which was already used to Star Wars’ and The Empire Strikes Back’s new photorealistic standard for effects work. Variety’s review suggests as much:

Were, in fact, mainstream traditional stop-motion special effects possible after Star Wars? Many people remember Clash of the Titans as a low-budget picture and therefore conclude it should not be held to the same “blockbuster” standards as, say, Star Wars, or The Empire Strikes Back.22 However, Clash of the Titans was considered by its studio MGM to be a high-profile release. It had a relatively high budget (higher than Star Wars’) and, exactly like Star Wars, was aggressively marketed as a premier release to the science fiction and fantasy market.²³ However, it is not a coincidence that Clash of the Titans was Ray Harryhausen’s last film, despite its surprisingly successful box office take (more than $100million worldwide). When Alain Garsault in Cahiers du Cinéma asserts, “Without Harryhausen, would Star Wars have been possible?,” he is, like Assayas, certainly talking about the precedent of the “magic à la Méliès,” an aesthetic precedent rather than a technological one.²⁴ The obviously visible special effects in Clash of the Titans strongly test the limits of what constitutes a “convincing” cinematic diegesis (especially in the early 1980s), which convinces or absorbs by means other than seamless representation of a photorealistic world. Clash of the Titans offers a fascinating case for the possible variety of forms the aesthetics of special effects might take in a mainstream film, even if it is the last of its kind.

The climactic sequence in Clash of the Titans presents a good example of the impressive and elaborate not-too-real effects on display. In it, Perseus rides Pegasus to save Andromeda and defeats the sea creature the Kraken by wielding the head of Medusa, along with a little help from the mechanical owl Bubo (fig. 8.1). By the standards of contemporary special effects (both then and now), it is certainly true that the stop-motion figures—for example, the Kraken—are too shiny and their movements are a bit lurching. Furthermore, in the stop-motion and live-action composited sequences, the lighting between the creatures and the live-action actors is inconsistent; in fact, the stop-motion creature is often lit more brightly than the actors, giving the animation visual priority. Indeed, along with attaining the kind of actorly expressivity described above, the stop-motion figures also have a textured quality that arrests the eye.

That the shinier foregrounded Kraken puppet is markedly brighter than the grainier background should not be understood as simple incompetence or failure to adapt to changing times and technology. Rather, Harryhausen and the filmmakers wanted their effects to be to some degree in relief to the film, not absorbed seamlessly into it. For Clash of the Titans, in 1981, that tendency became exaggerated in the face of, and in opposition to, the development of more photorealistic special effects as inaugurated by Star Wars and others. Harryhausen and his team seemed to believe that there was still room for the alternative aesthetics of not-too-realism. Harryhausen in particular wants us to see the seams and contours of the effects—in short, to see the layers of the filmic material and to be amazed by the technical virtuosity and film’s ability to bring such creatures to life.

This approach is certainly counterintuitive in the study of special effects in mainstream cinema. I argue that stop-motion animation’s “laying bare” of the cinematic layers aims to rupture the idea of absorption in the diegesis.25 If one is pulled out of the diegesis, it is not in order to undertake an elaborate testing of reality versus fiction. Conversely in fact, stop-motion animation’s rupture works instead to heighten the distinction between “regular” live-action sequences and stop-motion sequences, thereby increasing the wonder (the “wow” factor) at the cinematic work. The not-too-real aesthetic accentuates the evidence of the special effect (sometimes subtly, sometimes flamboyantly) in order to retain the specifically cinematic dreamworld effect Harryhausen prizes. The point is, one is supposed to experience the stop-motion sequences as special effects and be “wowed” by it as a movie handcrafted frame by frame by the animator.

Harryhausen’s stop-motion films in general, and Clash of the Titans in particular, afford a strong corrective to reductive notions of the role that special effects play in either contemporary or past films, in terms of technology, economics, and aesthetics. Clash of the Titans had significant success with audiences, even without especially photorealistic special effects. However, as already noted, in that same year Joe Dante’s The Howling (1981) cut out its filmed stop-motion effects, largely, it seems, because of the filmmaker’s dissatisfaction with the convincingness of the animation work. Instead, that film relied on elaborate makeup and practical mechanical effects, as did many of the films in the 1980s. Clash of the Titans therefore seems to mark exactly the moment where “mainstream” stop-motion /live-action composite films became no longer possible and instead had to wait to become “reference material” for CGI effects.

Assayas’s invocation of Méliès’s “movie magic” could be understood to mean that Harryhausen’s “pure” (i.e., low-tech) handworked effects preserve a connection to the technological “magic” of early cinema. And, furthermore, that Clash of the Titans reinstates the material’s cinematic “filmness” in a time of increasing technological encrusting over the film layer. I believe Assayas does mean something along these lines. However, rather than overliteralizing his statement and requiring it to conform to the specific context of early cinema, it is more interesting to think of the word “magic” as a heuristic for describing a feeling of “innocence” or simple cinematic wonder—or, even further, the cinema as a wonder. Such a conceptualization suggests that stop-motion animation taps into some sort of foundational myth of early cinema as an animation technology, which provides a “better than real” fantasy of the experience of cinematic pleasure. Moreover, stop-motion special effects reveal how viewers even desire the “failure” of photorealistic special effects, since seeing the seams shows the human intervention in a highly arcane technological area of production. As already described in relation to Go-Motion, what might be characterized as a stop-motion approach to special effects also shows precisely how ILM’s concepts of photorealism have a strong basis in stylization and caricature. A central ethos in stop motion is that technological perfection does not necessarily mean a more desirable end result. In other words, when applied to computer-assisted motion control, the frame-by-frame handwork of stop motion introduces a necessary imperfection in both the creature’s and, in this case, the camera’s movement. Even more importantly, the stop-motion approach provides effects work with the visual evidence that human manipulation (however subtle) adds both visual interest and, conversely, greater believability. The commitment to these two seemingly contradictory approaches—photorealism and a touch of what I have called not-to-realism—form an important cornerstone of the overall digital special effects aesthetic, and especially the ILM aesthetic, as it exists today. Namely, filmmakers known for their creative, innovative, or at least aggressive use of special effects, such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron (not to mention Jan Svankmajer) are on record as strong admirers of Harryhausen films, and especially credit his ability to create expressive, memorable, animated characters.26 However, one might say these filmmakers’ drive for more convincing photorealistic effects techniques means they have misunderstood, willfully or not, Harryhausen’s aesthetic.

In the 1983 film Brainstorm, directed by Douglas Trumbull, the movie’s tagline asks the long-fantasized-about question, “Suppose it were possible to transfer from one mind to another the experience of another person.” In the film, scientists played by Christopher Walken and Louise Fletcher are developing a device that would allow “playback” of emotional and physical experiences, even facilitate the transfer of skills and memories. Conceived as a “communication breakthrough” with “travel, education, and news applications,” in short order the government appropriates the device for interrogation and torture. The film explores the positive and negative potential applications of a new technology, and a new imaging technology in particular. Most vividly, Brainstorm thematizes the dangers of too much intensity, but more specifically, too much individualized, subjective intensity visited on a single human brain, individually and socially.

For many years before Brainstorm, Douglas Trumbull had been pondering the limits of human sensorium and how, like Kubrick, to use visual filmmaking more effectively in order to more directly and intensely transmit experiences to an audience. Brainstorm represents the speculative narrative version of Trumbull’s wonderings. However, another longer-standing project of Trumbull’s, Showscan, was his dream in more real-world, material form. For Trumbull, new technology, and new media for communication (and as Brainstorm suggests, he did indeed see art as a communication medium), was needed to convey artists’ messages more directly and immediately. Trumbull had some conflicts over the years with Stanley Kubrick.27 However, Kubrick’s words in 1968 could also be Trumbull’s own: “[2001 is] not a message that I ever intended to convey with words. 2001 is a non-verbal experience. … I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, the message is the medium.”²⁸

Trumbull shared the conviction with Kubrick that the movies were dying, and that they needed new technologies, aesthetics, and exhibition practices to remain both financially and artistically viable as a mass entertainment product. Also like Kubrick, Trumbull believed that the benefits of research and development in entertainment technologies went well beyond making money for the movie business. Trumbull shared a belief in the power of technology and imaging systems to expand consciousness and impact human knowledge. Both Kubrick and Trumbull, in the spirit of Gene Youngblood, “convolute” McLuhan-esque media theory to suit a repurposed notion of nonverbal communication, in which the visual image, as Kubrick put it, “directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content.”²⁹ When Trumbull proclaims (as quoted in chapter 3), “I’m interested in pure experience rather than linear plot … an experience that almost transcends plot,” he is proclaiming his intention to take Kubrick a step further, beyond narrative cinema into new realms of entertainment experience.³⁰

In addition to remaking cinematic narrative strategies, Trumbull also agreed with Kubrick that a major key to the advance of visual filmmaking was first to improve the moviegoing experience for audiences. Like Lucas, Kubrick publicly denounced the poor exhibition conditions of 1970s cinemas. In an attempt to counter these conditions, Kubrick also took precautions to ensure the image quality of his movies, in spite of small screens, weak projector bulbs, and monophonic sound.31 It is likely that in the case of 2001, for example, Kubrick chose in part to shoot on 70mm Cinerama so that it would lose less image quality in nonideal exhibition circumstances. George Lucas would also take up the call for better exhibition practices in the 1980s and 1990s.³² However, Lucas was much more successful in pushing through the initiatives for better exhibition, especially in forcing theater owners to upgrade to his own THX sound systems. Lucas had the power to withhold the “content” theater owners wanted (initially in the shape of Return of the Jedi) if he did not get his way.³³

Trumbull also saw the need for cinema to remake itself by reimagining its foundational exhibition and production technology. Trumbull began a side interest as public media critic as early as 1971, when he wrote a letter to the editor, published in the Los Angeles Times. After a screening of a re-release of The Bridge on the River Kwai (Lean, 1957), Trumbull was appalled by the way his experience was diminished by the poor projection technology, the physical condition of the cinema, as well as the low quality of the print. He complained, “It’s no wonder moviegoers lost enthusiasm.”³⁴ In intervening years, Trumbull took this pet cause to interviews, often railing about the poor exhibition conditions of 1970s theaters and the movies’ future lack of viability. While doing so, he hardly missed a chance to promote his dream of future entertainment concepts or push his latest venture in 70mm, ride films, IMAX, or even HDTV. In interviews promoting Close Encounters, Trumbull proclaimed to Newsweek, “Close Encounters is one of the last big-time features as far as I’m concerned. It’s become too expensive to make movies.” The movie business was “dying a horrible death.”³⁵ As early as 1984, he started blasting Hollywood’s technological stagnation and resistance to what we now call digital technology more generally: “Perforated, sprocketed, plastic film is not where it’s at. … 35mm and 70mm are obsolete. I’d like to come up with a technique to develop thinner film stock and combine film with the new electronic technology.”³⁶

Throughout, Trumbull maintains an implicit thread that he made explicit in much later days: “Film has always been and is still about shared public experience.”37 This, in short, is the largely unarticulated polemic of many filmmakers of what I call expanded blockbusters, such as Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg and Ridley Scott, who promote the power of communal immersion of the cinema, that is, the physical theatrical space of the cinema, as collective space.³⁸ That, he implies, is the reason the cinema needs big screens, specialized exhibition spaces, and more dazzling images: they combine forces, in the spirit of Expanded Cinema, to encourage community and counteract the individualized alienation of “small screens.”³⁹ Trumbull initially introduced his Showscan concept in relation and in contrast to terms familiar to conventional filmmaking and exhibition. However, for Trumbull, his particular dream of expanded visual technologies could not be fully realized in “films” or even “the cinema” in its traditional institutional structure.

Kubrick and Lucas were powerful directors near the top of the filmmaking hierarchy. They were therefore largely in control of their “movie messages” and were mostly content to fine-tune existing cinema conditions. Trumbull’s more marginal position as occasional director and a special effects supervisor certainly motivated him to think more boldly beyond moviemaking into the broader mediascape, and toward new models of entertainment. In 1977, Spielberg described Trumbull as “a new Walt Disney.”⁴⁰ Trumbull as early as 1971 also thought of himself as a new kind of entertainment auteur: “I think I’m closest to Disney. I’m trying to come up with a new Disney-type concept of entertainment. Not strictly film-oriented but incorporating various kinds of multi-media experiences. I’d like to blend the capabilities of film with sound and other physical experiences.”⁴¹

What Trumbull envisioned was a multisensory and multimedia engagement that harnessed film’s cultural power toward a “future-oriented” imagination. While feature filmmakers like Kubrick and Lucas tended to think in terms of “message,” even if it was to be delivered “nonverbally,” Trumbull’s innovations were more about how imaging technology might jack directly into the human sensorium.

Specifically, what was Trumbull’s technological intervention? As we have seen in the case of ILM, Boss, and Apogee, many filmmakers thought in terms of representation as simulation, and saw strengthening a sense of photorealism within traditional narrating systems as the way to increase a sense of audience absorption. As his previous special effects examples of Close Encounters and Star Trek: The Motion Picture suggest, Trumbull, inverted that trend. In the case of Showscan (and in contrast to how Richard Edlund used it), Trumbull did not draw on the conventional use of 70mm equipment to reinforce the traditional aesthetics of photorealistic effects, such as a crisper “single-generation look.” Trumbull instead believed that tweaking the existing 70mm and special effects technology invested the image with a sense of what he called “liquid realism.”42 The new imaging system would intensify the audience’s sense of spatial experience not based solely on the illusion of movement (as in Star Wars’ hyperspace or Belson’s Allures), but through “an immersive, participatory illusion of 3-D space.”⁴³

Trumbull believed he found the key to this kind of more direct impact in a surprising technical quarter: the frame rate. Special effects artists had been manipulating the standard 24 fps frame rate of the camera’s image registration for different effects since its earliest days. Trumbull, however, found an interesting surplus in images shot and then projected at 60 fps: “We … made a major discovery: at higher frame rates you tend to approach reality in the sense that the real world is not a series of still photographs.”⁴⁴ Technically, what that meant was that the “distracting” flicker was minimized. Experientially, he likened the effect to “looking out a window.”⁴⁵ Soon, Trumbull’s rather amorphous dream of a new entertainment concept was beginning to take a specific shape: a system at first called “Super 70,” which involved “projecting 70mm film at 60 rather than 24 frames per second.”⁴⁶ By 1978 he was calling it “Futurex,” a “sound and projection system.”⁴⁷ Finally, it took the name Showscan, and he began touting it as “3-D without the glasses.”⁴⁸

Like many inventors before him, Trumbull backed up claims of “improved realism” from 60 fps with biological science. “This has been demonstrated by experiments using electrocardiograms, electronic ephalograms, galvanic skin response sensors, and muscle tension sensors.”⁴⁹ Or, more specifically, as Cinefantastique reports: “The frame rate was chosen after a series of physiological tests showed that brain waves, pulse and skin responses rose as the frame rate rose. Responses leveled off at 60 fps. ‘We think the 60 fps rate approximates the same speed at which the eye normally senses reality itself.’ Trumbull explains.”⁵⁰

Not only was “realism” improved, but at 60fps, “All kinds of magical functions started to happen. We didn’t change the lens or the film stock, the print stock, projection or the screen: we just changed the frame rate,” Trumbull claimed.⁵¹

In addition to modified frame rates in image capture and projection, Trumbull hoped Showscan would redesign the theatrical space:

Finally in 1981, after much anticipation in the trade press, Showscan was ready to debut. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reviewed the preview screening, a ten-minute film called Night of the Dreams, screened in Westwood (home of many high-profile movie premieres). According to the newspaper review, “The results have to be seen to be believed: interior scenes have the eerie reality of videotape magnified a hundredfold, and swooping exterior effects are as dizzying as Cinerama on speed.” The newspaper also notes, ominously, that Showscan “will require investment in new projection equipment.”⁵⁵

According to Roger Ebert, Showscan was, “incomparably more realistic than anything I had ever seen before on a movie screen.”⁵⁶ Other reviews were more mixed. A long account of the premiere of the film New Magic (Trumbull, 1983) appeared in Cinefantastique. The reviewer recounts the film beginning with old-fashioned showmanship: a simulation of an old 35mm print coming on the screen, which then begins to “burn,” complete with screams and calls for help from an offscreen “projectionist.” After this old showman’s trick:

Though Cinefantastique’s editorial stance is notoriously skeptical about new products, it was not alone in its judgment. Although 1981 saw Showscan’s official premiere, it apparently languished for another several years. After the attempted relaunch with the Showbiz Pizza chain as a financial partner in 1984, Showscan still could not get past the “beta” testing stage. In 1985, Trumbull tried to adapt Showscan to the ad world and commercial production, since, he said, “Commercials are the pace setters for features,” and “Showscan transfers better to video.”⁵⁸ In the meantime, Trumbull took a special effects job for a Chanel spot directed by Ridley Scott. He continued to try selling Showscan at international expositions and world fairs.⁵⁹ Through a combination of practical considerations and idealistic dreaming, it is probably not surprising that Trumbull was not able to make Showscan financially viable. The New York Times ran down the financial costs needed for Showscan: “A change-over to Showscan would not come cheaply. It would require extensive theater modifications that could cost several hundred thousand dollars each. The changes would include new or modified projectors, improved sound systems and reconfigured seating to allow a bigger screen. Moreover, the extra film the high frame rates required meant Showscan would add about 17% to movies’ production costs.”⁶⁰ These changes did not seem likely to the Times, since “existing products are not clearly deficient.”⁶¹

Perhaps the New York Times was right. The problem with Showscan was that it was not markedly different enough from existing systems, especially since in the 1980s theaters had begun upgrading facilities to a sufficient degree.62 Trumbull spent the rest of the 1980s and 1990s trying to apply aspects of Showscan to other entertainment concepts, with mixed success. He adapted Showscan to his ride films, which were initially seen by many to be the next new phase of virtual entertainment.⁶³ Through his company Berkshire Ride films, in 1991 he debuted Back to the Future—The Ride at Universal studios (ironically based on a conventional feature film) and In Search of the Obelisk at the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas.⁶⁴ Indeed for a while, Trumbull had a good deal of success as the designer of ride films.⁶⁵ In 1994, Trumbull tried to get back to filmmaking. He bought IMAX with a group of financial partners, seeking to merge his Showscan technology with what was seen as his major competitor.⁶⁶ However, that partnership did not last long, ending in 1997.⁶⁷ Trumbull then developed an arcade-friendly version of a ride film, which would hold six people and “can be installed anywhere.”⁶⁸

Trumbull’s dream constantly confronted the harsh realities of the movie business. Looking back ten years after the debut of Showscan, at the splashy debut of his Las Vegas ride film at the Luxor casino, Trumbull explained the “catch-22” of new technology: “Hollywood won’t make movies in a non-standard format unless there are 20,000 screens out there, and exhibitors won’t put in 20,000 screens until Hollywood says they will supply movies for the new theaters.”⁶⁹ Trumbull attempted to readjust to the market so many times that he eventually whittled Showscan, initially conceived as a sweeping remaking of visual experience, down to an arcade game—hardly the kind of communal or participatory experience he had first envisioned.

Just as ironically for Trumbull, his Showscan has generally been chalked up as another cinematic gimmick that promised more realism, absorption, and participation than it could deliver. What is interesting about Showscan, however, is the seemingly heartfelt utopian conviction underlying its technological innovations. Though many have seen the desire to directly access the human sensorium as potentially dangerous and morally corrupt, Trumbull’s attempt to build a benign version perhaps did not go far enough. Or it could be that the dream of Showscan shows us that movies as we have known them for a hundred years are exactly realistic, absorptive, and participatory enough. Perhaps Showscan demonstrates how attached we are to the existing cinematic product, and that there are limits to how much stimulation we truly want from our entertainment. After making the film Leonardo’s Dream in the early 1990s, Trumbull appears to have resignedly come to the same conclusion:

Like the characters in Brainstorm (originally meant to be shot in Showscan), Trumbull believed there was only so much intensity a moviegoer could handle, and there were limits to how much sensory stimulation it was appropriate for entertainment to provide. The final climactic sequence of Brainstorm involves Christopher Walken’s character finally getting to experience the playback of Louise Fletcher’s character’s death, the sequence upon which much of the marketing for the film hinged. Certainly Trumbull knew how to deliver an intense sensory experience, but way the sequence is organized also suggests he believes there are limits. Trumbull repeats the pattern set with 2001’s “Star Gate” sequence and Star Trek’s “V’Ger” sequence where periodic cuts to Walken’s awestruck response and to action happening “outside his head” temper the streak-animation’s strong illusion of forward momentum, while at the same time giving the spectator a break from the vigorous deluge of pulsing lights, sounds, and colors, which closely resemble the cosmic imagery from 2001 (fig. 8.2).

In fact, though the aesthetics of the film do not make the same mistake, the narrative message of Brainstorm suggests not only that there are sensory limits to what the human brain can handle but also that sensory intensity on a too subjective or too individualized level is equally dangerous and alienating. One character becomes morbidly addicted to experiencing another’s sexual encounter, and Walken’s character’s son is sent to the hospital with a psychotic break when he accidentally plays back a torture tape. However, when used as a way to bring people together, the technology can also have a positive effect. Most notably, the memory playback technology allows Walken to make a “mixed tape” of his memories for his estranged wife, played by Natalie Wood, of the high points of their marriage. Because she can experience his emotions and, in effect, merge with them, she can bypass the inadequacies of awkward human communication, and they are reconciled. Thus, although experiences and memories are individual and subjective, the playback technology provides the ability to share them without an intermediary, thus increasing intimacy and human connection.

Like many films dramatizing technology as a topos, Brainstorm’s “message” is quite mixed: the memory playback can have interpersonal benefits, but it can also be co-opted by those with questionable purposes.⁷¹ Nevertheless, while acknowledging that all new technology has positive and negative uses, Brainstorm presents, in somewhat contradictory form, Trumbull’s argument that technology also provides the enormous potential for encouraging collectivity and connection, and lessening the sense of human alienation.⁷²

However, more recent events suggest Showscan’s time may finally have come. As this volume was going to press, Peter Jackson, after consultation with Trumbull, had shot and released the first of his three Hobbit films (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Jackson [2012]) in 48 fps to mixed response, and James Cameron was planning to shoot and project his Avatar sequels at 60 fps. This is in part due to the fact that while Showscan proved to be unrealizable in the 1980s and 1990s with film technology, digital image capture and projection allow higher frame-rate capture and projection without changing cameras or projectors. Both, as Trumbull has put it, only require modest changes to the servers and format of the media.⁷³

As big-budget Hollywood filmmaking has been driven almost entirely by special effects production over the last several decades, big-budget Hollywood filmmaking and the special effects aesthetic have largely merged to mean the same thing. Typically, special effects–driven blockbusters are discussed primarily as marketing products: they are seen as a way to lure spectators into the theaters and away from their smaller (though ever-larger) TV screens at home, and as expensive ads to sell ancillary merchandising and promote corporate synergy across other entertainment platforms, such as video games or Internet content.74 Special effects aesthetics, when discussed at all, also tend to be viewed in economic terms. Albert LaValley, for example, has convincingly argued that special effects provide one of the major ways that Hollywood promotes its economic dominance by showing off its state of the art.⁷⁵ As others such as Brooks Landon have pointed out, a new technique is typically self-consciously displayed in long takes near the beginning of the film, exhibiting to the awe-struck spectator that “here is what movies can do now.”⁷⁶ Visual evidence supporting this approach abounds, for example in the flyover at the beginning of Star Wars discussed in an earlier chapter, or the transforming cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Cameron, 1991), or Trinity hanging in the air at the beginning of The Matrix (Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski, 1999). Since, of course, the movie industry has always been a business, the production of special effects–driven blockbusters plays into this logic: as of 2013, ten out of ten of the all-time worldwide moneymakers out of Hollywood could be categorized as “special effects pictures,” while nine out of ten are effects with creatures (Cameron’s 1997 Titanic being the lone exception). Fifty out of the top fifty can safely be categorized as narratively relying on or marketed on the basis of their effects or animation as well. Therefore, it seems economic good sense that special effects films keep getting made because they are seen to repay their expensive investments.⁷⁷

However, there is a surprising creative upshot to big-budget filmmaking, albeit one circumscribed by these same economic considerations. It may be an obvious point that contemporary filmmakers, and even many executives who produce special effects blockbusters, also see themselves as part of a creative and artistic endeavor, albeit one usually compromised by economic demands. For many contemporary filmmakers, perhaps surprisingly, the special effects–driven blockbuster carries a certain desired artistic benefit: Hollywood’s economic power and dominance to deliver a communal, collective viewing experience. This certainly means ideally delivering a film to a large, fully equipped cinema enjoying full-house capacity. In addition, saturation booking (releasing the film on thousands of screens on the same day) and international unified release dates mean that the most popular blockbuster movies are seen by millions of people around the world more or less at the same time, or at least over the same weekend. In this way, the filmmaker can envision his or her film reaching an enormous imagined cinema-going community. For an artist-filmmaker (or at least someone who fancies him or herself one), this global reach is a powerful motivation to make popular special effects–driven blockbusters, and no doubt one of the reasons Hollywood has long been so successful in luring American independent (Sam Raimi, Jon Favreau, Katherine Bigelow, and Doug Liman) and global auteurs (Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass, Guillermo del Toro, Michel Gondry, and Christopher Nolan, to cite a few contemporary examples) to direct and work on big-budget action, science fiction, and fantasy films that are Hollywood’s primary export.78

With this global reach in mind, I argue that contemporary Hollywood’s formation of the “tentpole” blockbuster has grown out of a distorted reflection of the 1970s ideal of the expanded blockbuster.⁷⁹ The big-budget film was not only meant to dazzle the senses while stimulating the mind, it was also meant to bring people physically together in the theater, and also socially in discussion. What began as a hippie fantasy of communities formed by multimedia technology was made rather strikingly actual, in an altered form, by Hollywood’s economic tactics of marketing and distribution.