While known mostly for his literary works, there can be no question of Ray Bradbury’s powerful cinematic connection – he has a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame – and so the celebration of his 90th birthday is entirely appropriate at Films In Review, which was actually first published the year before he was born.

An American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. In 1938 he was selling newspapers on the corners of LA while pounding the library and typewriter keys at night. By 1943 he was a full-time writer of published short stories. By 1947 his first anthology, DARK CARNIVAL, was published and was a hit.

1950 saw the novel that would establish him, THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, which tells the tales of earthmen attempting to conquer and colonize Mars.

It was, interestingly, his Saturday evening Post story, THE FOGHORN which jump-started the separate motion picture careers of himself and his best friend for some 70-something years, now, Ray Harryhausen, with the release of the movie based on that story, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. Harryhausen created the groundbreaking special effects, and the prestige awarded Bradbury from the film’s smash box office hit status, in Bradbury’s words, “Changed my life” in 1954.

Part of that continuing change included writing the script for John Huston’s 1956 classic film adaptation of MOBY DICK, which seems like a funny kind of aesthetic connection, because while the two films in style could not be more different, both deal with titanic monsters of the ocean depths. Given the chance to write the screenplay here, however, Bradbury shows he’s very much more than the movies’ monsters: he cuts the fat from the lengthy (700 page!) Melville novel and focuses down on the moments from the book that bring not no much the whale, but the characters to full-blooded and engaging life. It’s an astonishing piece of creative editorial work and screenwriting, filled with rich moments and an appropriate mix of raw reality and unapologetic sensitivity that makes the period of the film seem so vivid and authentic.
Cinematic translations of Ray Bradbury’s own novels have not always been so successful, however – not because Bradbury’s original works are difficult to translate to the screen (they can be) – but often because producers have entirely missed both the point and style of Bradbury’s works. THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, one of Bradbury’s most famous novels was realized as a hopelessly slow mini-series that somehow managed to wring all the gold out of the mining pan and present us instead with little more than the desert dust of the red planet. Likewise, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is only partially successful in the eyes of many.

Perhaps no work of Bradbury’s saw such a fruitless squandering of initial potential, however, as the Disney’s realization of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES. This novel in the original form was a unique and truly sensitive coming of age story about the relationship of a father and his son, developed through the nightmare experiences of a conflict with a carnival of the “dust people” – evil spirits who use people’s needs and fears to draw them into a Faustian pact of damnation, leading them to become themselves sideshow exhibits for all eternity in this carnival that arrives from nowhere, and vanishes without warning. The sometimes brutally honest recreation of coming of age in the heartland of this country in more innocent times, combined with the sort of evil that could otherwise only have been imagined in the Victorian era, makes for a mesmerizing tale.

For SOMETHING WICKED, Jack Clayton, whose brilliant film, THE INNOCENTS, made him a – probably literally – perfect choice to direct, was engaged. Jason Robards was appropriately cast as the father and in the performance of his career (as “Julian Karswell” was to actor Niall MacGinnis ) is Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, the dispassionately evil proprietor of “Dark’s Pandemonium Carnival”. With a solid script by Bradbury, this film could have and should have been everything for which one could have hoped.

But, the story goes, in a maddening moment of an eye-to-brain disconnect, the executives at Disney apparently failed to comprehend in a rough cut what the film was about stylistically and perceived it’s strongest values as negatives. For example, they felt the film was “too claustrophobic”, so they had FX artists direct new shots to “open the film up”, not understanding that Clayton’s claustrophobic cinematic style, which was so perfect for THE INNOCENTS, would have had the same – and very appropriate – effect in SOMETHING WICKED. Eventually so many cartoon-animated special effects were inserted at the whim of the uniquely Disney special effects people, who had none of Bradbury’s and Clayton’s sensibilities, that at times the film is a confusing mess in which we don’t even know whose point of view we are supposed to favor. But the brilliance is still there, and through the loud and over-saturated cartoon animation and poorly re-shot replacement scenes, one can still see that brooding, dark and claustrophobic motion picture masterpiece demanding to be viewed and heard in the explosive dramatic form that would have resulted in its original measured and deliberate restraint. Let us hope that sometime soon the executives at Disney will use a little marketing acumen and release a “restored” version of SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES the way Universal seized on the errors of their meddling predecessors and restored Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL to its rightful state as a brilliant film noir masterpiece. SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES deserves to be seen as originally intended. Doubtless the footage still exists to restore it. They should.

Such situations led to Bradbury producing his own TV series for several years, RAY BRADBURY THEATER, in which he maintained control over all and in the process provided TV with some truly outstanding moments.

There are more happy exclusions to the poor cinematic treatments, and, for this writer, saving the best for last, there is FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). Produced and directed by acclaimed French Director Francois Truffaut (Jules and Jim), the British film is a medium-budget futuristic story in which Bradbury’s cautionary tale of television reducing the mass public consciousness down to it’s lowest common denominator is presented full-bore. In that story a totalitarian Government burned all books. It is often assumed, then, that because of the shocking image in that story of great works of literature being burned, that Bradbury was warning the world of the dangers of censorship. But as Bradbury himself is quick to point out, that was only one small piece of the puzzle. In the vernacular of today, his primary warning was one of the Dumbing-Down of the population by pop culture. The original novel, written in 1953, is a bit of clear-headed, prophetic thinking that must rank among the great analytical moments in literature. More striking is that, to the greatest extent imaginable, his warning has come true. Blathering talking heads, endless remote control audience participation of nonsense programming and a relentless focus on the glossy and superficial instead of more significant thought are more the fact of the world we are in then was ever true when Bradbury wrote the tale in the fifties. Indeed, if you had to pass through several walls of internet news and pop culture to get to this site, you just lived the unnerving reality of Bradbury’s cautionary tale.

The final 15 minutes of FAHRENHEIT 451, with highly sensitive cinematography of the Book People among the first light snowfalls of winter, punctuated by one of the most stirring moment’s in music composer Bernard Herrmann’s career, make this sequence, in this writer’s view, one of the finest moments in cinema in the second half of the 20th century.

Let’s take the opportunity of his milestone birthday to learn a thing or two from the undeniably prophetic Ray Bradbury, as common a man in his unabashed love for cinema and the creative as he is deservedly world-renowned for his skill and ability to take a simple today and foresee the complex reality of tomorrow while keeping the reader glued to the page. Still writing and creating and doing a million things behind the scenes that both change and anticipate the whim of destiny, the world is still young and the future vast and welcoming for Ray Bradbury as he celebrates his 90th year.
This author and Films In Review wish him a very Happy Birthday and many more to come.

Ray Harryhausen and Medusa, whose sequence is one of the great fantasy moments in all of cinema. Photo by the author.

On June 29th, 2010, depending on when you read this, Ray Harryhausen will or did celebrate his 90th birthday.

To the geek squad of science fiction and stop motion animation enthusiasts (yours truly included), Ray Harryhausen is a name which is more than respected; it’s revered.

However, the more general readership at FIR perhaps should be told from the outset that his importance is so great that the following can be legitimately understood to be true: in the long-term perspective of things, so influential has Ray Harryhausen been that he – to a great extent literally single-handedly – changed the face and direction of motion pictures, probably for all time.

Quite a claim, to cite a single individual who by sheer enthusiasm and dint of effort changed with small films an entire industry operating on many times the GDP of legitimate free nations and run by often ruthless powerbrokers by the hundreds, but thus it has come to pass.

To those who may not know, Ray Harryhausen, known primarily for his stop motion special effects, is the auteur of approximately 18 feature films, many of which sprang, initially unscripted, from theme-based drawings created by him years before and put away before being eventually presented to his long-time producer, Charles Schneer. Among these is a small “children’s fantasy”, THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, which was the hit of 1958 and, in historical hindsight, truly changed everything.

Ray Harryhausen’s history, in a nutshell, goes like this: influenced in 1933 at the age of 13 to the point of obsession by the stunning visuals in the original KING KONG, he worked tirelessly, at first as a hobbyist, and then eventually as the head animator under his hero, Willis O’Brien (creator of the animation and many designs and scenarios of KING KONG) on the feature MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, which could be described as “KONG Light”. Short films, both as an employed animator and creating his own educational works followed in what was sometimes a family affair, with his skilled machinist father creating rigs and steel articulations for his figures while his mother created miniature clothing and other artistic touches. Eventually this led to his first feature solo FX assignment, THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), a low budget film in which his visual effects were so realistic for the time that the modestly-produced film was an industry-changing runaway smash hit. In that film, an atomic blast test in the arctic releases a enormous prehistoric beast who winds up eventually surfacing off a pier in New York City, leading both to panic in the streets and, at the time, a motion picture riot of copycats of variations on the theme.

Here begins Ray’s turning of the motion picture industry into an imitation of his own imagination: this single film ignited the science fiction movie craze of the 1950′s like a brushfire, and in so doing, created by proxy a media empire for Toho studios in Japan started with GODZILLA – which continues to spawn sequels and is a multimillion dollar merchandizing juggernaut even today – a clear though fanciful knock-off of THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. That industry-wide frenzy to cash in on the success of BEAST would not have likely happened had Ray not infused the film with a standard of realism and special effects dramaturgy that can be plainly said to have exceeded by far anything that had come before, regardless of budget.

20 Million Miles To Earth - The Ymir

Warner brothers demonstrated it clearly understood what Ray had created when they advertised it with such lines as, “They couldn’t believe their eyes – and neither will you!” – an unambiguous reference to the realism of Ray’s achievement. This he did through his own sheer artistry and ingenuity, as his budget allowed for little else.

Somewhat sadly, in this one premier effort, Ray essentially eclipsed his idol and mentor, O’Brien, who would find himself playing catch up several years later, creating the visual effects for even lower budget knock-offs of the BEAST and not faring at all well in the head-to-head competition. O’Brien was a man of large budget operations, like KING KONG, who simply failed to demonstrate the artistry to turn on a thin dime like his young protégé.

THE BEAST caught the attention of Charles Schneer, a young and ambitious producer at Columbia Studios, who contacted Ray about doing a similar version of that very film, only this one about a giant octopus. While not the runaway smash of BEAST, IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA made a great deal of money for Columbia and started a relationship between Ray Harryhausen and Charles Schneer that would last for three decades and leave indelible impressions on hundreds who would come to matter a great deal in Hollywood in every possible aspect.

At this point something needs to be said to enrich the record: producer Charles Schneer, who passed away last year, is generally and correctly credited as being the man who made it possible for Ray to bring his visions to feature film life. The industry otherwise was very staid at that point and had not yet been influenced by Ray himself, quite frankly, to be receptive to his unbridled imaginative and fanciful ideas. Schneer saw the artistic and commercial value in Ray that few others had and thus continued to make possible platforms on which Ray could express himself. While there is no lack of truth to this, another name has been overlooked.

Hal Chester.

Hal Chester was a rough-around-the-edges producer from New York and originally a tough-guy child actor. Turning to producing later on, he in fact made not one but two genuine classics of the genre: The sublime NIGHT OF THE DEMON (UK) and the aforementioned THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. While it is indeed readily known that Chester hired Ray Harryhausen, placing enormous faith in the talent he recognized, this producer, for whom a reported lack of personal sophistication has led to often near-character assassination by smarmy aesthetes, also gave Ray an extraordinarily good deal, essentially setting Ray up as an independent special effects creator for life.

When Chester met with Ray, Ray owned only his 16mm equipment (35mm was the standard of the day, as it remains). After a few meetings and a signed contract, Chester started an unusual process with Ray: he took the trouble to find what Ray needed. This was not a terribly common method for producers of the day. Ray suggested to Chester that the sometimes custom-created equipment from MIGHTY JOE YOUNG might still be available at RKO. RKO was looking to dump it, and offered it to Chester for $6,500.00 (approximately $50,000 today), which was a fraction of its actual value (approximately a full half million today adjusted for inflation). It needs to be known that most producers would have simply set up shop with the equipment under their ownership, have Ray use it, and then sell it off for far more than the price for which he bought it (Schneer himself did that on some abandoned camera equipment on location left behind from another feature by other producers, and used it to partially offset the costs of one of Ray’s features). This was some of the finest equipment of its kind anywhere, and had a pedigree to boot, in that MIGHTY JOE YOUNG won an Academy Award for best special effects. So good was that equipment that Ray continued to use it for the entire length of his career, through his last film, 1981′s $20 million CLASH OF THE TITANS.

Ray Harryhausen and two seldom-seen friends from his early, storybook days. Photo by the author.

In other words, when Charles Schneer approached Ray, Ray was already set up and ready to go with some of the finest equipment the era had to offer, thanks to Hal Chester. Would Schneer, then young and on very low budgets, have been able to get what Ray needed with the finance available if Chester had retained ownership of that equipment, as was the common practice? Would Schneer have done it if he could? And would he have offered ownership of it to Ray as part of the deal, knowing how he handled the situation with the abandoned camera equipment? We can only speculate. But Chester’s basic altruistic decency might have made all the difference between what Ray’s career ultimately became and what we might speculate it could otherwise have been. Hal Chester has become a footnote in the career of Ray Harryhausen and the fact is that he deserves more praise than history has thus far allowed.

Eventually, more amazing films sprang from Harryhausen’s imagination, each filling the screen with sights and ideas that were so amazing that he was – never, mind you – nominated for an Academy Award. We can only speculate on that, too, but the reason seems clear: Hollywood was still operating with large studios, and most had a special effects department, filled with people who punched a union time card every day and went home to wives and kids whose lifestyle depended on that job. These were also the men (primarily) who voted for the Special Effects Oscars. Knowing the world as we do, how can anyone believe that they could not see the artistry in work that left millions of common ticket holders in theaters in absolute jaw-dropping awe while their own collective efforts, with large overheads and overtime, were sometimes met with unintentional laughter? The almost certain probability is that Ray was perceived as a genuine threat (as a good example of this mindset, Bud Westmore, in the early 50′s, apparently demanded, until Universal Studios nixed, the continued personal and television appearances of artist/ actress Millicent Patrick who designed THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON for Universal, opting to lay claim to the creation himself. As the makeup department head from a prestigious family of makeup artists, he could make the demand and have Universal decide in his favor).

So they didn’t nominate Ray. Not once. Until he retired, that is, whereupon Tom Hanks, who said that Ray’s JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS was the primary influence that made him decide to be an actor, handed Ray his lifetime achievement Oscar, presumably when it was safe for all those union effects department workers to vote for him. In other words, after Ray had retired and was no longer a threat, though the prestige of that award when it was deserved for individual films could have helped his career enormously.

However, even being passed over for Oscar after Oscar, Ray was having an impact that would reshape motion pictures. Throughout the 60′s and into the early 70′s, artists of all cinematic varieties were growing up fancying themselves to be next-generation Harryhausens (the author sheepishly raises his hand in admission), and Ray’s reputation grew, not only as an artist delivering fantasy with the passion of a religious convert, but as an underdog folk hero as well. “How could he not even be nominated?!”, the cry would go every few years when a new Harryhausen film would be passed over by the Academy. “How could this happen?!” And indeed, most were at a loss to explain it. As I sat as a student in the late 70′s in the auditorium classroom of one of the most celebrated film historians ever, the late William K. Everson, even he went on at length about the insane injustice of such a situation with a passion that left many of us amazed, as this portly, old-school English gentleman was not prone to dramatic outbursts.

Admittedly, it is this author’s unconfirmed speculation alone that he was regarded as too great a threat to be nominated for an Oscar, since to nominate Ray would prove to the department worker’s bosses that they and their large operations were mostly superfluous. Should anyone have a more conclusive answer, this author is open to suggestions. Ray’s films were occasionally box office smashes and therefore impossible to ignore and everyone understood his primary stop motion technique. There has been speculation that his techniques were so well executed that fellow special effects technicians and artists simply did not understand what they were looking at. Had that been true, however, it would have been all the more reason to nominate him, not less.

Jason Battles The Skeletons

And thus his underdog folk hero status, combined with his obvious passion for his art showing with each new and more technically improved film, and the pure inspiration of his fantastic internal vision, began to make the folk hero a legend – and a legend of the rarest variety – a legitimate one who deserved the designation.

Then in the late 70′s, the “Children Of Harryhausen” had grown up and were beginning to make an impact. People with names like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg readily admit Ray’s significant artistic influence on them, and that influence is readily apparent in some of their films. More to the point, the large number of people they first needed in the beginning, Lucas particularly as he set up his own special effects shop called Industrial Light and Magic to produce a little movie called STARWARS, were available and skilled and passionate and ready to work long weeks for very low wages because they, too, had been impassioned from their teenage years by Ray’s singularly unbridled imagination coupled with his stunning technical virtuosity.

A bronze of “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms”, the one and only film that started the “giant monster craze” of the 1950’s, also at the Harryhausen home. Photo by the author. While the bronze was a separate sculpture not related to the original animation model, the lighthouse is the same prop used in the film. – DR

Though inspired by many sources, these eclectic individuals from diverse backgrounds were mostly all coming from one primary artistic influence: Ray Harryhausen, and they were and are more than happy to admit it. Many of them even have photos and 8mm films available from their formative childhood years, and over and over again you see clay variations of the Beast, the Cyclops from THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD and other childhood creations patterned after Ray’s designs. Even if Lucas had decided to make STAR WARS and had not been inspired by Ray Harryhausen, the chances are that the homegrown special effects fanatics he needed to work long and to get the ball rolling probably would not have existed to do it. Remember, without Ray, not only would his films not exist, but the 1950′s science fiction craze almost certainly would not either, and all that was the fertile breeding ground for most of the people who in time would turn STAR WARS and similar films into stunning visual realities. And without the STAR WARS franchise breaking box office records at every turn in the late-seventies through the mid-eighties, everything would be entirely different today. Of that there can be no discussion.

Had Ray not done what he had done, then, so far we can count the following: probably no science fiction boom of the ’50′s, no GODZILLA mythology and probably no STAR WARS, or at the very least, not remotely realized to be the stunning achievement that broke all records and changed the way motion pictures looked an felt initially from the 1980′s and onward.

But Ray was still not through. CLASH OF THE TITANS, his final feature released in 1981, boasting a cast of some of the finest actors ever to grace the screen, was, along with E.T., one of the two smash hits of that year.

Lucas, Speilberg, James Cameron, Tim Burton, other directors, special effects technicians and artists, cinematographers, writers, actors, the list of people very directly influenced and to a great degree set on their professional paths by Ray Harryhausen is almost endless, and much of their work still bears the imprint of his influence. From video games with sword fighting skeletons to a myriad of design features which often have some mark of someone having grown up to want to be Ray Harryhausen, there is no escaping his brilliant and exciting shadow. Tim Burton’s CORPSE BRIDE, for example, shut down the entire animation production one afternoon when Ray visited in order to show him around and offer some inspirational thanks. He has had exhibitions of his art and animation figures at some of the world’s most prestigious museums, including the New York Museum of Modern Art. Turner Classic Movies occasionally runs a night, and once in a while a weekend, of Ray Harryhausen films. And DVDs of his motion pictures continue to be strong sellers.

From Harryhausen’s home, this magnificent bronze is an interpretation of the classic scene in which Kong slays the Tyrannosaurus. Note the beautiful completion of the composition in the piece by the Ann Darrow character in the lower left. Photo by the author. A more studied shot of this sculpture from a different angle, can be seen in the very highly recommended book by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton, “The Art Of Ray Harryhausen” on page 219. The full painting in the background can be seen on page 25 of the same book. – DR

Today, Ray continues on with his fine art sculptures and restorations of his favorite classic films, both from his hands and those of others. He remains enthusiastic, tireless and a champion. He has written three large, coffee-table size books heavy enough to put behind the wheel of a car in lieu of an emergency brake, and watching long lines of people of all ages, from teenagers to men in their sixties, make the rite of personal passage for an autograph at a book signing is a wonder to behold. As each person makes their acquaintance, you hear the same words repeated endlessly with little variation: “I love your films”, “You changed my life”, “I became a professional (fill in the blank) because of your films”, “I’ve introduced my kids to your films and they love them as much as I do”. It is almost unbelievable. (Naturally, I, too, have said those same words, of course, so take that sense of disbelief with a grain of salt, please) It is truly wondrous, heartwarming, and utterly astonishing.

What makes this a pleasure to write is that Ray himself is so personally pleasant and unassuming, as anyone who has met him can tell you. In a cynical world, it gives one hope and comfort that a man so revered is so personally appreciative and yet unaffected by the adoration. When my wife and I had the pleasure of visiting he and his lovely and charming wife Diana in their London home a couple years back, as I learned in times past, you could rest assured that you’d never spend an afternoon with a more relaxed and easygoing gentleman, not at all miserly with a smile and a laugh, with not an ounce of ego or pretension, even as he pointed out the occasional offerings from highly-placed followers, such as a stunning four-foot long bronze sculpture of a Tyrannosaurs on the run personally created for Ray by Phil Tippett, one of Hollywood’s biggest Oscar-winning FX players, yet another “child of Harryhausen”.
The famous writer and Ray’s childhood/lifelong friend, another “Ray”, author Ray Bradbury, once said, “Ray and I agreed to grow old, but vowed to never grow up.” Meaning, of course, to never give up a love for things that a child, too, might love. Ray’s enthusiasm is contagious not only in his presence, but much more importantly, that enthusiasm has proved to be contagious through his very work on the screen. And in and through those amazing moments and images and places, millions of people have followed suit and also consciously decided that they, too, shall never grow up, either.

And that, perhaps, is his greatest legacy.

A Happy Milestone Birthday to Ray Harryhausen, and many more to come.

FIR ADDENDUM TO THIS ARTICLE (08/08/2010): In the Forward to the book, “Ray Harryhausen, A Life In Pictures”, George Lucas has confirmed David Rosler’s bold theory – published here before the book. Lucas writes, “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars, “ and for the same reason David theorized: without Ray Harryhausen’s influence, the “grassroots” special effects enthusiasts would not have been available for Lucas to hire to set the foundation for his eventual motion picture empire.

It may indeed have taken a seasoned professional with David’s intimate knowledge of the arts involved in fantasy filmmaking and access to certain top-level participants to make that bold, on-target analysis where others failed. Therefore, a special FIR thanks to continuing Guest Contributor, Producer/Director/Animator David Rosler for providing the oldest film journal in the United States with another in its continuing 91-year legacy of breaking, inside-the-industry firsts.

Frank Frazetta has died.

Most film aficionados won’t recognize the name. Only occasionally was he directly involved in film production. Frank Frazetta was an artist and illustrator, but his influence on the mediums of film and television cannot be overestimated, perhaps because his powerful vision crossed over so many genres and avenues of expression, while he, himself, remained essentially unseen by most of the public.

Born and raised in New York, Frazetta was a startling child prodigy, and the death of his professor halted plans for him to be schooled in Europe as one of the great fine-artists of the time. Looking to earn a living at the age of 16, he started drawing for major comic books (already an extremely significant accomplishment for a teenager) – but with an aptitude that essentially eclipsed the medium. Then he was offered the assignment to create the satirist/comic poster for the comedy WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT in 1966, earning in a day what he did otherwise in a year. And while the strains of that famous film’s pleasantly optimistic pop-song theme played endlessly on car and transistor radios all over the country to some modest acclaim, and the focus was on the film’s stars and music, people passed by and smiled at the movie poster created by a man who would, within a decade, be regarded already then as one of the finest illustrators the world had ever seen.

It was, however, his assignments to paint the paperback covers for Conan the Barbarian and the fantasies of Edgar Rice Boroughs, and for which he established a powerfully sweeping, intensely rugged yet colorful signature style, that struck right into the core consciousness of the vast majority of genre fans of that time. Many of these people so influenced by Frazetta would become extremely powerful in some areas of Hollywood – and thus the obvious string of dominoes was firmly set to proceed.

His designs and ideas – entirely original to his imagination – were often lifted willy-nilly by producers who so regarded him as a national treasure that they seemed to think his work was, like a national park, admission-free.

The singular motion picture in which he is listed as a co-producer and into which he had direct directorial input, FIRE AND ICE, was a poorly-distributed and undeserved flop, though reasonably produced and directed by experienced pro Ralph Bakshi, yet another lifetime fan. The film is almost entirely rotoscoped – meaning staged with live actors and the animation traced, image by image, over the frames of live action film. It’s the one film that truly brings Frazetta’s style as fully to life as the hand-drawn medium could capture on a budget, and is generally entirely successful as an animated action film and shows the promise of what could have been had more been made.

Off and on he continued to contribute to films while establishing himself further as a fine artist of very significant renown. The book cover paintings, while commissioned by the publishers, were photographed and returned to Frazetta, who retained ownership of the originals. Recently, the only “Conan the Barbarian” painting sold by Frazetta and his estate to date went for $1 million to a private collector.

Animation producer, production designer, poster creator, cover painter, significant fine artist and one of the most powerful influences the world has ever seen on all the imagination-centric visual genres and mediums, has passed away at the age of 82.

On a purely personal note, Frazetta, along with Ray Harryhausen, for me like millions of others, had by far the biggest artistic influence on my childhood, and my sense of loss at his passing in my experienced middle-age is surprisingly striking. My own feelings, probably like those other millions, no doubt, are somewhat randomly collected into a scattershot internal scrapbook of feelings and images that whisk me back in time:

So many paperbacks I never read because there was never enough time in the day to study Frazetta’s cover art as the impact of that work always seemed to demand…. I never got to the written words inside.

A rare lone lion in a world of tomcats. Endlessly imitated, never equaled. A painter who could draw and vise versa with equal style, power and originality. And in those action scenes for which he is most famous, always the apex of the action, somehow always the very highest peak of dramatic tension and never a millisecond less one way or the other. The moment of life and death action caught at the very definition of the struggle.

Brilliant. Original. Powerful. Exciting. Fun. Grand. Intimate. Imaginative…. the language hasn’t enough words to do him justice.

He’ll be teaching drawing and painting in Heaven, and still his students won’t come up to his shoe tops.

Rest In Peace.

* Editor’s Note: My old friend Al Kilgore, who created the Bullwinkle comic strip for Jay Ward, was a close friend of Frazetta’s for a time during their careers, and when he’d visit the artist at his home, the floor would be littered with drawings and paintings. “Al, would you just take an armful of these out of here! Just help me get rid of this stuff!”, Frazetta would plead with him, but Al never did. As the decades passed, and Frazetta’s stock rose, Al came to look back on that decision with a certain regret…

With the CGI remake of Ray Harryhausen’s original stop-motion special effects CLASH OF THE TITANS doing well in theaters, the stop-motion special effects vs. computer animation special effects battle, which has been a passionate one in the industry among old and new practitioners, has been framed with a new and unique sense of clarity.

This isn’t just a geek squad topic of conversation; it has more general implications across the entire spectrum of motion picture visual aesthetics.

To set the ground rules: stop motion is the process by which – for special effects applications – reasonably realistic miniature articulated figures are moved one frame at a time and photographically combined with live action (the classic though somewhat technically primitive example of this would be the original King Kong, still an artistic powerhouse). Even today, the effect can be occasionally stunning. In the opposing corner, CGI, which means “computer generated imagery”, is a technique whereby the figures and often-greater parts of the worlds they inhabit are created within the computer by artistic and design wizards. Stop motion is by necessity usually the work of a lone or nearly lone craftsman performing all the duties under intense concentration one frame at a time while CGI special effect sequences tend to have small armies devoted to their specialized tasks.

In the larger debates, stop motion generally wins with traditional artistically-biased aesthetes because its handcrafted nature does more than telegraph its traditional art history background of design and sculpture, but it’s also a magic show in which actual physical material objects have been handled in a way which produces an illusion. CGI is an abstract technological computer world of zeroes and ones, and while the artistry is there to be sure, the traditional special-effects-man-as-magician magic show is not. This forces special effects practitioners in the CGI realm to be better artists to compensate for the lost magic-show wow factor, but when it works, it’s a detail-enhanced and roller coaster with a wow factor all its own.

It would be a mistake, however, to simplify the discussion into being about one of Paintings (CGI) vs Sculpture (stop motion) – the details are too nuanced for that.

One additional mistake we should not make, which won’t go down well with stop motion people, is that we need to keep a perspective on the stop motion medium in the totality of the examples that exist . To say that something Ray Harryhausen created decades ago does or does not hold up well does not speak to the entire medium. There have only been a few geniuses in the stop motion field of special effects and Ray Harryhausen sits alone at the top.

Additional to Harryhausen’s often-flawless live-action/animation matching was a powerful directorial talent that often left people mistaking that it was the animation that made his FX sequences so interesting when it was often Ray’s direction and cutting that ultimately sold a scene. Put it all together and we have a unique singular talent who will probably never be equaled for generations yet to come.

The point is that just because Ray Harryhausen = stop motion animation does not mean that stop motion animation = Ray Harryhausen. Stop motion proponents often remark about the stop motion technique in a context divorced from the artist who made it most interesting and believable. Some stop motion enthusiasts might even feel that the stop motion special effects from the non-Harryhausen JACK THE GIANT KILLER (1960) are superior to the best current CGI (and such people do exist), but with that film’s animated creatures looking like little more than refugees from a play-doh factory, that’s going to be an extremely hard sell outside a very tiny and specialized group of fans and practitioners.

Speaking for myself, CLASH OF THE TITANS, both versions, reminds me that I don’t miss stop motion special effects. I miss Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion effects, specifically, combined with his design and scene set-up, direction and cutting. While stop motion enthusiasts will agree that what we need, really, are fewer computer render farms, that only works for stop motion if those render farms are replaced by brilliantly imaginative lone geniuses, regardless of the technique and technology. The problem is that computer render farms can be bought. Not so with lone geniuses.

Ultimately this reality should satisfy no one on a schedule and a budget, but has the advantage of making the very occasional lone genius all the more special when he or she arrives. A toast, then, to Ray Harryhausen and the very, very small, exclusive club of occasional lone geniuses, regardless of the technology. It’s been officially proven: assembly lines and render farms cannot replace them.

Here’s a little overview about our making of H.G.WELLS’ THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON in 3-D. This is not to be confused with the very recently announced BBC 4 version of Wells’ tale in standard 2-D reportedly still being filmed and coming out as quickly as late spring or summer of 2010. Our H.G.WELLS’ THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON in 3D is just completed after more than two years from inception to finish. Why would I tell the following tale before distribution even commences? Because this magazine’s owner and editor, Roy Frumkes, asked me to, quite frankly, and as he’s one of my former teachers from long ago at the School of Visual Arts, a now long-time friend and quite plainly one of the nicest and most talented guys in the motion picture business, I simply cannot refuse. Who could?

My own tasks on FIRST MEN were screenplay adaptation, co-producing, direction and handling both the art direction and visual effects. One person doing so much is nothing new even for larger-budgeted pictures, but it requires a true love of both the medium and genre to get through it on a somewhat modest budget considering the very elaborate material presented in Wells’ Victorian novel.

FIRST MEN got off the ground when the executive producer, who I knew from another film, called me entirely out of the blue and said, right out of the box, “I wanna make a movie with you,” in exactly those words. Once I realized that this lightning-bolt offer was legit, we quickly and painlessly agreed on terms, including the idea that the film – whatever it would be – should be made based on pre-existing family-friendly material. A couple of weeks later we agreed on the story, and then we got cracking in earnest.
THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON has always been in my mind the best narrative in the Wells’ cannon.

Fascinating stories like “The Time Machine” are staggering in their mental imagery, but are somewhat the literary equivalent of “special effects movies on paper”, in which the concept and mental images take precedence over a solid story structure. Not so with FIRST MEN. The story concerns the recollections of an aging Mr. Bedford who recounts his adventure with an archetypical eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor, in 1895, who, thanks to his anti-gravity paint, allows the two men to embark in a glass and metal sphere on the first sojourn to our nearest neighbor in space which is filled in the book with a society of ant-men-like creatures called Selenites, giant slug-like mooncalves, and a plethora of fantastic scenes and moments, all built around a solid adventure structure with good character arcs. It should be noted that the characters’ first names are never mentioned in the book. While, “Hey, Cavor” is considered potentially rude in the US, it’s been a common way of speaking in the UK, especially in Wells’ day, and so therefore we stuck to the book even in that, and it does lend an authenticity that helps to balance the more fanciful elements.

A Mooncalf: a gigantic invention from Wells' gigantic imagination.

The one story problem for the adaptation was that some of the science contained in the novel, especially the notion of there being a thin atmosphere on the moon, was so at variance with current science that suspending audience disbelief seemed almost insurmountable. Until, that is, we hit on an idea for a story wrap-around: in 1945, the aging Bedford, reading of the atomic explosion of Hiroshima, recounts his secret tale on paper at last, for he fears that just as the Selenites had destroyed the moon through war (in the novel) leading to a barren, airless world (*as we know it today), so, too, could mankind do the same to earth. At that point, with a little of the disbelief shaved away, we could then stick unerringly to the Wells book, outdated science and all, if we played our cards right. That hurdle being done, it was simply a matter of producing the film itself on a TV movie budget – at best.

MOVING FORWARD

The casting was straightforward except for the problematic role of eccentric scientist, Mr. Cavor. Veteran character actor Bob Cummins was both known to me and ultimately fit the part well. Indeed, he looks like he could even be related to Wells himself, which I took “as a sign” once that fact was discovered after shooting started. We were lucky to have him; he gives a nuanced and credible performance full of gentle humor, sympathy and occasional pathos in what otherwise could have easily been a cartoon character as written in the book.

OLD ENGLAND

As was true throughout the film, some good fortune was had in the location department, as well. The reality of doing a period piece is that you can’t just gather up some antiques in an old house, do some mattes, and expect people to really feel an 18th century environment, even a rural one. Such productions almost all look like what they are: pretty collections of antiques shot a year or two prior. On a suggestion, we scoped out a place in Western New Jersey called Waterloo Village (the scenes shot there are not to be confused with the wrap-around “old Bedford” mansion scenes which open and close the film, that were shot on the stunning (President) Lincoln family home estate “Hildene” in southwestern Vermont).

Waterloo Village is a maintained – not simply “restored” – English-style town from the1850′s with everything kept as it was back then, in immaculate condition. Generally, the exteriors at Waterloo were open to negotiation for filmmakers but interiors were essentially off limits because of the very delicate nature of the furniture and original rugs and tapestries. Amazingly, however, the gentleman who ran the operation turned out to be a science fiction and fantasy film buff, and flipped when he found out that we were doing THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, and so FIRST MEN’s first 20 minutes, through delicate tip-toeing through the interiors on the part of the crew, is filled with both exteriors and interiors which are almost a celebration of the simple, elegant authenticity of the time. No art director could hope to match it with conventional means.

Travelling Weightless

THE SURFACE OF THE MOON

Very simple: an absolutely gigantic disused limestone quarry which seemed to reach in every direction forever – one of the largest anywhere, we were told – with white and yellow-white rock serving very nicely for an otherworldly place when combined with stronger fantasy landscape elements added in post production. Be forewarned about using limestone quarries, however: in the bright sunlight limestone quarries are both blindingly bright and impossibly hot, leaving everyone continually dry and exhausted, and the dust will follow you around for years. It does, however, look terrific.

THE CAVES OF THE MOON

Naturally, this environment in which most of the story takes place (The First Men In The Moon) was the biggest concern. Phony cave sets with rock outcrops emerging from smooth floors is simply unacceptable. We investigated several actual large cave locations but none would do the trick because they simply looked like earth caves, not moon caves. Natural earth caves with interesting formations invariably look smooth, and sometimes wet, and always dark, while for us the moon caves needed to seem crusty and chalk-dry and much lighter in tone so the film would have a spatial sense the audience could understand for some of the complex action. Ultimately, we chose the route we really knew we were originally headed anyway: a very large warehouse with large sets and green-screen combinations, and very careful advance planning (a conventional studio would be much too delicate for the very rough and gritty environment we intended to create, as well as in all likelihood nowhere near large enough).

At this point I suppose it needs to be said what my background is to justify all this. As the now-clichéd story so often goes with genre filmmakers, I was enamored of the science fiction and fantasy films of Harryhausen and Pal since childhood, and the genre films from Universal from the 30′s through the 50′s many of us grew up watching on TV (one would be hard-pressed to argue, for example, that TARANTULA is not the GONE WITH THE WIND of giant spider movies.) Eventually this led professionally to design, special effects, and stop motion. Between animation and FX assignments I found myself doing quite a lot of design, illustration and ultimately a very great deal of storyboard work including much for some of Madison Avenue’s largest Ad Agencies and animated TV programs – you get the picture.

My feeling was – and is – that this particular film needed to be visually straightforward and the storyboards loose. Straightforward because animated/special effects creature scenes and overtly artsy camera work can prove to be an aesthetic jumble, though we still wound up with crane, trucking and high and low angles aplenty just to be able to tell the story coherently and in an interesting way. Loose storyboards because when composition, perspective and physical reality converge, what feels right drawn lovingly on paper sometimes misses the mark in terms of visual flavor when put before the camera, and that can be everything. And it’s a good thing the storyboards were loose, too, because improvisation often proved imperative, such as when rigs for weightless scenes proved obvious on the screen and we wound up filming the actors occasionally sideways with mechanical rigs which changed the composition requirements drastically (weightless green-screening of actors in close confines would simply have felt phony, as it always does, no matter how good the technology).

SELENITE CREATION PROGRESSION

This is a good time to mention one of the unsung heroes of the film, Associate Producer Gregg Jacobis, who simply would not take no from fate as an answer. For instance, one time when a necessary prop broke and couldn’t be repaired and we were planning on having to change direction, costing us a day’s shooting, Gregg said, “Give me one hour” and took some raw Styrofoam from a corner and an assistant and in an hour re-emerged with a near-perfect copy, painted and ready to go. You cannot tell the difference on-screen. You simply can’t hope to hire someone like that by design – it’s just dumb luck.

Not all the luck was with us, however. A development had occurred between the time we procured the warehouse to when we started filming and was truly impossible to predict: along the eaves, very far up away from everyone, where the warehouse opened to allow venting (this place was very big), with the advent of warm weather, untold numbers of birds had built nests and very noisy families by the score. On the first day of warehouse shooting we realized that the endless echoing noise of the birds was going to make it impossible to record any dialogue, and we all agreed that post-syncing delicate performances on that scale would make no sense. We hired animal-friendly pest control people, but they may have been too friendly, because their efforts did nothing to eliminate the birds. So we simply did the only thing we could: we shot at night, arriving at around 7 pm and prepping and so forth until the birds went to sleep around 8:30 pm, and shot until they awoke between 4:30 and 5:00 AM. Bear in mind the sets were built and everything arranged; to change locations at that point would have been a disaster to the budget. And while shooting overnights is nothing new, it was new to me and I have to say that the sense of concentration knowing that nothing else was going on in the world outside really did help the production. If nothing else, not a single cell phone rang on-set, ever: a miracle by any standard.

There was good luck in the warehouse, too, however, on a par of unlikelihood similar to that which we had had with Waterloo: The warehouse was utilized for long-term storage by three other businesses in smaller, lesser areas, and with their eager enthusiasm the production wound up with – for free – a plethora of antiques (used for the observatory set); enormous, 2-story scaffoldings on wheels with stairwells that, once we began to use them, became invaluable for anything requiring getting to awkward heights quickly with light or camera; and, amazingly, an outfit that used an off-section to store hundreds of garden steppingstones of endless size and shape that they manufactured. These latter people volunteered the use of as many of the hundreds of stones as we needed to vary and make more credible and craggy some areas of our cave flooring, an otherwise prohibitively costly option for just about anyone, and the additional cave flooring worked beautifully. One has to wonder: what are the chances that all three outfits would be storing such equipment and material under our same roof at the same time as we had scheduled use of the majority of the place? You decide.

Amazingly, the film came in very slightly under its original budget, the biggest miracle of all.

VISUAL EFFECTS

A good hour and fifteen minutes of H.G.WELLS’ THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON in 3-D consists of special effects. We were determined to tell Wells’ story more or less as written, something never done before, including the weightless state, always, while traveling in space in the sphere. Wells was not writing with a budget in mind, so the scope and complexity of the tale to be told was an interesting challenge.

The concept of shooting on cave sets presented an interesting problem dynamically. The good news is that such sets are always re-used (or risk bursting any budget, particularly ours.) The bad news is that sets that can be re-used with modification tend to have a sameness by their design nature that not only makes for dull extended viewing for the audience, but additionally for this production particularly some of the complex blocking of the action needed to be crystal clear for the viewers – not always what one can expect from the sameness of generic cave sets. There were three solutions, eventually, usually used all at once: the endless interplay of shadows (making it a little “arty” after all); bold areas, often miniature or CGI, as visual anchor points; and most importantly, very precise and linear colored lighting schemes which stretched seamlessly from live action to CGI and/or miniature. This last part was the most important, so on things like the scene in which the Selenites descend on Bedford and a hectic swordfight ensues, or Cavor and Bedford weave their way through the caves being chased, we could cut loose with the camera a bit and the broad color areas and directions would keep the audience orientation firmly anchored so that annoying visual confusion didn’t erupt.

Cavor and Bedford watch the impossible - again.

The Grand Lunar

Naturally, films like this require a great deal of rehearsal on the part of the actors so the creatures can be put in seamlessly after the fact. The mention of a swordfight is certain to raise comparisons with Harryhausen’s films, but the narrative forced us to take a very different approach: Harryhausen’s films are piled with swashbuckling heroes, but our Mr. Bedford, while physically fit, is no hero, so “swashbuckling moments” were sparse and we kept more to hectic, point-of-view shots. On retrospect, I have to admit a possible weakness there, because the swashbuckling shots came out quite well, and Bedford still does not play like a hero. We might have been able to sneak in a couple more after all. Live and learn.

Actors often remark about the difficulty of “playing to nothing”, as the FX are added later. Determined to give the actors a hook on which to hang their performances to the creatures, Styrofoam cut-outs with carefully illustrated features were placed in their sight-lines and occasionally within frame, and matted out later. It also helps to sell the CGI creatures as being in the scene when the actor’s sight-lines match up perfectly. Additionally, actors off-screen performed the creature voice parts for the actors instead of us just arranging for them to be “read” by a script person, to further sharpen the performances on-screen (having actors on-screen react to a reading off-screen and not a full performance, which is common in production, has never made sense if one values the effect of good performances).

Rest assured just about every trick in the book was needed and used, some old, some new, including CGI creatures, practical effects such as steam and fog and smoke, green-screen, miniatures, forced perspective, and a few tricks we’re keeping up our sleeves for now; suffice to say that a few shots should hopefully raise eyebrows among FX aficionados when they least expect it (some of the integration of the creatures with the live action is very integrated, indeed, even in the current CGI age).

3-D

Choosing to go this route was essentially a no-brainer, but on this aspect I don’t know what to add that isn’t already known. 2 cameras in reality, 2 virtual cameras in the computer. Care did need to be taken during many of the human-Selenite interactions (with the animated Selenites added later), because while to the 2-D eye of the normal camera distance is not an issue (indeed, forced perspective capitalizes on this fact), it is very much an issue in 3-D, so if you have animated Selenites sword fighting with Bedford for example, it’s critical that Bedford and the creatures appear not only in close interaction in all other respects, but existent in the same physical plane along the z axis (in line with the camera) in 3-D, as well. Likewise, scale of environments needs to be carefully considered, because 3-D just gives it all away when it isn’t right.

3-D EXAMPLE (selenites) - Click to enlarge photo

As a director, I found very few instances where I did anything different directorially in 3-D than I would have done in 2-D. A good image composition is a good image composition, and invariably this means foreground and background. As far as POV shots of Selenites swinging swords at the camera or the mooncalf snapping at the audience and the like, these are shots that simply would have been done anyway regardless of being in 2-D or 3-D. Is there a lesson, here? I don’t know, except that a good 3-D film is almost certainly simply a good 2-D film, only in 3-D.

Personally, it’s difficult for me to not want to do everything in 3-D now. It’s more than a novelty for me, after this experience, it’s a natural extension of the cinematic narrative process, and easy to love for that reason.

THE MUSIC

No discussion of THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON IN 3-D would be complete without enthusiastic kudos to our composer Daniel Godsil, whose love of the greats – Herrmann, Goldsmith, Williams and Copland – speaks for itself in his work. He is capable of wildly exciting orchestrations of the strange and beautifully composed and orchestrated sensitive melodies when the scenes demand it. Chosen from an open call in every venue we could find for an orchestral composer who could actually deliver what a film of this type, with it’s lofty aesthetic aims demanded, he was chosen immediately after already culling through over 300 respondents. Even some of the better-experienced composers whose work you may hear often on TV didn’t cut it. Daniel, trained among other places in Vienna as a composer/conductor, with his own symphonic works performed before large audiences and conducted by him, did, and we’re looking forward to working with him often. (You can hear his work loud and clear on the trailer)

THE STYLE OF THE FILM

It was always our intention in FIRST MEN to revisit those films of days gone by, but not cheaply. The spirit – the essence – of those films is what we wanted to capture without doing a camp send-up or weak imitation. There was simply a different style of storytelling in those days: it was clear, it was direct, both visually and in story structure… murky did not equal ambiguous and ambiguous did not equal sophisticated. Suspense was sought, crafted and maintained through a combination of character development, carefully explained circumstances and adroit camera handling, not attempted as it seems to be as of late through a series of expectations for the next moment that “pushes the envelope”.

This isn’t just my view; I find it said by film fans of all ages. As this magazine’s editor, who immerses himself a couple of days a week in the classroom as a teacher can attest, more excitement is generated among his students by the older than the new. Chalk it up to retro-novelty if you will, but there is no question in my mind that it goes deeper than that. The immutable fact is that back in the day they just made better films on average, and that can be attributed to any number of things, some formulated, some instinctive. For FIRST MEN this director simply chose to go instinctive in that direction. It’s up to you as to whether we succeeded. I will relate this though: One person not directly associated with the film saw a rough cut of the landing scene and, much to our amazement, she seemed to instinctively confirm what we sought for the film and gave the scene the best compliment we could hope for from someone not in the film business: “It reminds me of the great movies we grew up watching on television as kids, only with modern special effects.”

From this director’s perspective, if most people agree with her, then we’ve succeeded as much as we could have ever dared hope.

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