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| Name | George Pal |
|---|---|
| Caption | George Pal in 1979 |
| Birth name | György Pál Marczincsak |
| Other names | Julius György Marczincsak |
| Birth date | February 01, 1908 |
| Birth place | Cegléd, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Hungary |
| Death date | May 02, 1980 |
| Death place | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Spouse | Elisabeth "Zsoka" Pal (1930–1980) (his death) 2 children |
| Years active | 1934–1975 |
George Pal (February 1, 1908 – May 2, 1980), born György Pál Marczincsak, was a Hungarian-born American animator and film producer, principally associated with the science fiction genre. He became an American citizen after emigrating from Europe. He was nominated for Academy Awards (in the category Best short subjects, Cartoon) no less than seven consecutive years (1942–1948) and received an honorary award in 1944. This makes him the second most nominated Hungarian exile (together with William S. Darling and Ernest Laszlo) after Miklós Rózsa.
In 1931 he married Elisabeth "Zsoka" Grandjean, and moving to Berlin, founded Trickfilm-Studio Gmbh Pal und Wittke, with the UFA Studios as its main customer from 1931 to 1933. During this time, he patented Pal-Doll (known as Puppetoons in the USA).
In 1933 he worked in Prague; in 1934, he made a film advertisement in his hotel room in Paris, and was invited by Philips to make two more ad shorts. He started to use Pal-Doll techniques in Eindhoven, in a former butchery, then at villa-studio Suny Home.
He made five films before 1939 for the British company Horlicks Malted Milk. He left Germany as the Nazis came to power. In 1940, he emigrated from Europe, and began work for Paramount Pictures At this time, his friend Walter Lantz helped him obtain American citizenship.
As an animator, he made the Puppetoons series in the 1940s, then switched to live action filmmaking with The Great Rupert in 1950. He was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1944 for "the development of novel methods and techniques in the production of short subjects known as Puppetoons".
He is best remembered as the producer of landmark science fiction films in the 1950s and 1960s, four of which were collaborations with director Byron Haskin. His background with the whimsical Puppetoons set the foundation for the imaginative production designs for his films during this period.
He died in Beverly Hills, California of a heart attack at the age of 72, and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City, California. The Voyage of the Berg on which he was working at the time, was never completed.
He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1722 Vine St. In 1980 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded the "George Pal Lecture on Fantasy in Film" series in his memory.
Category:1908 births Category:1980 deaths Category:Academy Honorary Award recipients Category:American film directors Category:Hungarian Jews Category:English-language film directors Category:Hungarian film directors Category:Hungarian film producers Category:Hungarian immigrants to the United States Category:Naturalized citizens of the United States Category:Stop motion animators
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| Name | Ray Harryhausen |
|---|---|
| Caption | Ray Harryhausen at Forbidden Planet, London. |
| Birth name | Raymond Frederick Harryhausen |
| Birth date | |
| Birth place | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Stop motion model animator |
| Spouse | Diana Livingstone Bruce (1963 - present) |
| Influences | Willis O'Brien |
| Influenced | Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren |
| Academyawards | Gordon E. Sawyer Award (1991) |
| Awards | Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards (2006) |
Ray Harryhausen (born Raymond Frederick Harryhausen on June 29, 1920 in Los Angeles, California) is an American film producer and a special effects creator and created a brand of stop-motion model animation sometimes called Dynamation.
Among his most notable works are his animation on Mighty Joe Young (with pioneer Willis O'Brien, which won the Academy Award for special effects) (1949), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (his first color film) and Jason and the Argonauts, featuring a famous sword fight against seven skeleton warriors.
The work of pioneer model animator Willis O'Brien in King Kong inspired Harryhausen to work in this unique field, almost single-handedly keeping the technique alive for three decades. O'Brien's career floundered for most of his life—most of his cherished projects were never realized—but Harryhausen was the right person at the right time, and achieved considerable success.
Harryhausen draws a distinction between films that combine special effects animation with live action and films that are completely animated such as the films of Tim Burton, Nick Park, Henry Selick, Ivo Caprino, Ladislav Starevich and many others (including his own fairy tale shorts) which he sees as pure "puppet films", and which are more accurately (and traditionally) called "puppet animation".
In Harryhausen's films, model animated characters interact with, and are a part of, the live action world, with the idea that they will cease to call attention to themselves as "animation", which is different from the more obviously "cartoony" and stylized approach in movies like Chicken Run and The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.
Springing from O'Brien's groundbreaking work, Harryhausen continued bringing stop-motion into the realm of live action movies, keeping alive and refining the techniques created by O'Brien that he had first developed as early as 1917. Harryhausen's last film was Clash of the Titans, produced in the early 1980s. Recently, he was involved in producing colorized DVD versions of three of his classic black and white films (20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and It Came from Beneath the Sea) and a film from the producer of the original King Kong (She).
Paramount executives gave Harryhausen his first job, on George Pal's Puppetoons shorts, based on viewing his first formal demo reel of fighting dinosaurs from an abortive project called Evolution (an homage to a similar Willis O'Brien project called Creation).
During World War II, Harryhausen was also employed by the Army Motion Picture Unit, animating sequences educating soldiers about the use and deployment of military equipment when that equipment was unavailable for shooting in live action. From this work, he salvaged several rolls of discarded surplus film from which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts. His commander was Colonel Frank Capra, and he worked with Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
One of Ray's most long cherished dreams was to make H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. After World War II, Harryhausen shot a scene of an alien emerging from a Martian cylinder; it is from the story's ironic climax, showing the fearsome man from Mars fatally succumbing to an earthly illness, contracted from the air the natives breathe harmlessly. It was part of an unrealized project to adapt the story using Wells' original "octopus" concept for the Martians.
Harryhausen also produced a variety of other short animation demos during the post-World War II '40s. Harryhausen put together a demo reel of his various projects and showed them to Willis O'Brien, who eventually hired him as an assistant animator on what turned out to be Harryhausen's first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949). O'Brien ended up concentrating on solving the various technical problems of the film, leaving most of the animation up to Harryhausen. Their work won O'Brien the Academy Award for Best Special Effects that year.
It was on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms that Harryhausen first used a technique that split the background and foreground of pre-shot live action footage into two separate pieces of film. The background would be used as a miniature rear-screen with his models animated in front of it, rephotographed with an animation-capable camera to combine those two elements together, the foreground element matted out to leave a black space. Then the film was rewound, and everything except the foreground element matted out so that the foreground element would now photograph in the previously blacked out area. This created the effect that the animated model was "sandwiched" in between the two live action elements, right into the final live action scene. Many shots were embellished with additional elements painted on glass, also sandwiched in between the rear screen and camera, as O'Brien had done on his films.
Most of the effects shots in his earliest films were usually done without resorting to expensive and time-consuming optical printer work. Harryhausen's careful frame-by-frame control of the lighting of both the set and the projector dramatically reduced much of second generation degradation common in most usage of back-projection. His use of diffused glass to soften the sharpness of light on the animated elements allowed them to match the soft background plates far more than Willis O'Brien had achieved in his early films, allowing Harryhausen to match live and miniature elements seamlessly in most of his shots. By developing and executing most of this miniature set wizardry himself, Harryhausen saved money, while maintaining full technical control to achieve a variety of superior and convincing special effects techniques.
A few years later, when Harryhausen began working with color film to make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, color-balance-shift problems required more use of opticals than rear projections. Ray's producer/partner Charles H. Schneer coined the word Dynamation as a "merchandising term" (modifying it to "SuperDynaMation" and then "DynaRama" for some subsequent films).
While Schneer and the film's line-producers organized the film's live action production and hired various directors to develop the film's live action characters, Harryhausen concentrated mainly on the shots that involved model animation, visiting the sets only to supervise the filming of the live action background elements (called "plates" in the film effects industry) into which he would later add animated creatures.
However, Harryhausen was heavily involved in the pre-production conceptualizing of each film's story, script development, art-direction, design, storyboards, and general tone of the his films, as much as any auteur director would have on any other film, which any "director" of Harryhausen's films had to understand and agree to work under. Only the complexities of Director's Guild rules in Hollywood prevented Harryhausen from being credited as the director of his films, resulting in the more modest credits he had in most of his films.
Throughout most of his career, Harryhausen's work was a sort of family affair. His father did the machining of the metal armatures that were the skeletons for the models while his mother assisted with some skin textures. After Harryhausen's father died in 1973, Harryhausen contracted his armature work out to another machinist. An occasional assistant, George Lofgren, a taxidermist, assisted Harryhausen with the creation of furred creatures. Another associate, Willis Cook, built some of Harryhausen's miniature sets. Other than that, Harryhausen worked generally alone to produce almost all of the animation for all his films, until he hired protege model animators Steve Archer and two-time Oscar-nominated Jim Danforth to assist with major animation sequences for his last feature film Clash of the Titans (1981).
The same year that Beast was released, 1953, fledgling film producer Irwin Allen released a live action documentary about life in the oceans titled The Sea Around Us, which won an Oscar for best documentary feature film of that year. Allen's and Harryhausen's paths would cross three years later, on Allen's sequel to this film.
Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures. Their first tandem project was It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. It was a box-office success, quickly followed by Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), set in Washington D.C.--one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 50s, and also a box office hit.
In 1954, Irwin Allen started work on a second feature-length documentary film, this one about animal life on land called The Animal World (completed in 1956). Needing an opening sequence about dinosaurs, Allen hired premier model animator Willis O'Brien to animate the dinosaurs, but then gave him an impossibly short production schedule. O'Brien again hired Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the 8-minute sequence. It was Harryhausen's and O'Brien's first professional color work. Most viewers agree that the dinosaur sequence of Animal World was the best part of the entire movie. (Animal World is available on the DVD release of the 1957 film The Black Scorpion. The Black Scorpion used some previously shot special effects footage and much new footage by Willis H. O'Brien to create a story similar to another sf film of the era, Them! from 1954.)
Harryhausen then returned to Columbia and Charles Schneer to make 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), about an American spaceship returning from Venus that crashes into the ocean near Italy, releasing an on-board alien egg specimen which washes up on shore and soon hatches a creature that, in Earth's atmosphere, rapidly grows to gigantic size and terrifies Rome. Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian Ymir model, creating yet another international box-office hit film.
Schneer was eager to graduate to color films. Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his greatest masterpiece (and biggest hit) of the 50s, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), a major inspiration for Dennis Muren, decades later a long-time multi-Oscar-winning head of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic special effects company. The top grossing film of that summer, and one of the top grossing films of that year, Schneer and Harryhausen signed another deal with Columbia for four more color films.
Harryhausen next made First Men in the Moon (1964), his only film made in the anamorphic widescreen process CinemaScope, based on the novel by H. G. Wells.
Amazingly, Gulliver, Mysterious Island, Jason, and First Men in the Moon were all box office disappointments at the time of their original theatrical release. That, plus changes of management at Columbia Pictures, resulted in his contract with Columbia Picture not being renewed. Also, as the 60s counter-culture came to influence more and more and younger filmmakers, and failing studios struggled to find a new audience, Harryhausen's love of the past, setting his stories in ancient fantasy worlds or previous centuries, kept him from keeping pace with changing tastes in the Sixties. Only a handful of Harryhausen's features have been set in then-present time, and none in the future. As this revolution in the traditional Hollywood movie studio system, and the influx of a new generation of film makers sorted itself out, Harryhausen became a free agent.
Harryhausen was then hired by Hammer Film Productions to animate the dinosaurs for One Million Years B.C., released by 20th Century Fox in 1967. It was a box office smash, helped in part by the presence of shapely Raquel Welch in a cavewoman bikini, in her second film.
Harryhausen next went on to make another dinosaur film, The Valley of Gwangi. The project had been developed for Columbia, which declined. Independent producer Schneer then made a deal with Warner Brothers instead. It was a personal project of Harryhausen, which he had wanted to do for many years, as it was story-boarded by his original mentor, Willis' O'Brien for a 1939 film, Gwangi, that was never completed.
Scripted by William Bast, The Valley of Gwangi is set in 1912 Mexico, in a parallel Kong story—cowboys capture a living Allosaurus and bring him to the nearest city for exhibition. Sabotage by a rival releases the creature on opening day and the creature wreaks havoc on the town until it is cornered and destroyed inside a burning cathedral. The film features a roping scene reminiscent of 1949's Mighty Joe Young (which was itself recycled from the old Gwangi storyboards) and is the technical highlight of the film, which many Harryhausen fans are now rediscovering as one of his best films. The film was released in 1969 but was not a financial success, supposedly since it did not appeal with the counter-culture audiences of that era. But another more likely explanation is that Warner Brothers released the film as a double-bill with a biker film, trying to quickly cash in on the surprise success of the film Easy Rider, and thus Gwangi missed an advertising opportunity to find its rightful audience. Reportedly this decision was made after Kenneth Hyman of Seven Arts Productions — which had merged with Warners at the time and was involved with One Million Years B.C. — was released from his contract with the studio. Warners then threw the film away to second run neighborhood theaters, where kids in these small theaters discovered it, slowly growing up to become fans of the film as adults when the film was finally released to video in the 1980s and DVD in '90s.
Schneer and Harryhausen finally were allowed by MGM to produce a big budget film with name actors and an expanded effects budget. The film started out smaller but then MGM increased the budget to hire stars such as Lord Olivier. It became the last feature film to showcase his effects work, Clash of the Titans (1981), for which he was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Special Effects. Harryhausen fans will readily discern that the armed-and-finned kraken (a name borrowed from medieval Scandinavian folklore) he invented for Clash of the Titans has similar facial qualities to the Venusian Ymir he created twenty-five years earlier for 20 Million Miles to Earth.
Due to his hermetic production style and the fact that he produced half of his films outside of Hollywood (living in London since 1960), reducing his day-to-day kinship with other more traditional, but still influential Hollywood effects artists, none of Harryhausen's films were ever nominated for a special effects Oscar.
In spite of the relatively successful box office returns of "Clash of the Titans", more sophisticated technology developed by ILM and others began to eclipse Harryhausen's production techniques. and so MGM and other studios passed on funding the making of his follow-up story, Force of the Trojans, causing Harryhausen and Schneer to retire from active filmmaking.
In the early 70s, Harryhausen had also concentrated his efforts on authoring a book, Film Fantasy Scrapbook (produced in three editions as his last three films were released) and supervising the restoration and release of (eventually all) his films to video, laserdisc, DVD, and currently Blu-Ray. A second book followed, An Animated Life, detailing his techniques and history, and then The Art of Ray Harryhausen, featuring sketches and drawings for his many projects, some of them unrealized. More books, interspersed with many world-wide tours, appearances, dedications, and career salutes are anticipated.
Harryhausen continues his life-long friendship with Ray Bradbury. Another long-time close friend was "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine editor, book writer, and sci-fi collector Forrest J. Ackerman (who loaned Harryhausen his photos of King Kong in 1933, right after Harryhausen had seen the film for the first time. Harryhausen also maintained his friendships with his long-time producer, Charles H. Schneer, who lived next door to him in a suburb of London until Schneer moved full-time to the USA (a few years later, in early 2009, Schneer died at 88 in Boca Raton, FL); and with model animation protege, Jim Danforth, still living in the Los Angeles area.
Harryhausen and Terry Moore appeared in small comedic cameo roles in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and he has also provided the voice of a polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell film Elf. He also appears as a bar patron in Beverly Hills Cop III, and as a doctor in the John Landis film Spies Like Us. In 2010, Harryhausen had a brief cameo in Burke and Hare, a British film also directed by Landis.
The work of Ray Harryhausen was celebrated in an exhibition at London's Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in 1990.
Near the turn of the 21st century, Harryhausen was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Inducted to the Monster Kid Hall Of Fame at The Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards.
In 2005, Harryhausen released a 2-DVD set of a complete collection of all his non-feature film work, including all his tests, demos, military work, a re-edit of all the biographical material that had been released in the mid-90s to VHS video under the title Aliens, Dragons, Monsters, and Me, and his entire set of fairy tales, including "The Story of the Tortoise & the Hare". The second disc profiles a making of documentary, behind the scenes and interviews with Harryhausen, Walsh, Caballero and narrator, Gary Owens. During this time he also provided commentary for the DVD releases of King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, and was extensively interviewed for documentaries included in the DVD release. He was at the New York Premiere of the 2005 remake of King Kong and was disappointed that some scenes from the original didn't make it into the final film. He was happy again when the Deluxe Extended Edition was revealed.
Harryhausen and a producing partner, Arnold R. Kunert worked on a series of animated shorts based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the first of which was "The Pit and the Pendulum" in 2006.
Harryhausen also worked with Legend Films to reissue some of his early feature films on Blu-Ray in a series of colorized versions using an improved colorization process. According to Legend Films president Barry Sandrew, the filmmaker told him that his original vision was to do them in color, but both limited budgets and limitations of color film stocks back then made it hard for him to do backgrounds and keep them color-balanced the way that was needed to maintain the films' realism. The finished Blu-Ray 4-disk boxed set was released in 2009, and includes Harryhausen's first four films for Columbia Pictures, including "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad". There's also all new commentaries with Harryhausen and a variety of guest special-effects producers who were influenced by Harryhausen's work, an on-camera interview by Tim Burton, plus much in the way of other new bonus features. Other digital clean-up and restoration techniques were performed on this Blu-Ray edition, including a feature that allow you to see the first three films colorized, or in the original black and white form. Other Columbia Harryhausen films will be released in Blu-Ray, starting with "Jason and the Argonauts" released in 2010.
Harryhausen was also involved in the process of colorizing She, produced by Merian C. Cooper, who had originally intended to shoot the film in color, but at the last minute the budget was cut by RKO, forcing Cooper to shoot in black and white. As a tribute to Cooper, Harryhausen color designed the film in a manner in which he feels Cooper would have wanted it exhibited. The colorized DVD includes an audio commentary by Harryhausen and Merian C. Cooper expert Mark Vaz who discuss the film and color choices. The colorized trailer for She premiered at the 2006 Comic-Con. Harryhausen also helped design the color on two further Legend Films releases, Things to Come and The Most Dangerous Game.
In July 2006, it was announced that Harryhausen has licenced Bluewater Productions to create six comic book follow-ups to some of his most famous movies. The first three are "Sinbad: Rogue Of Mars", "20 Million Miles More" and "Wrath Of The Titans", which were realised in May 2007 followed by a further three: "Jason And The Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades", "Back to Mysterious Island" and 10th Muse. Harryhausen will furnish new artwork, but not scripts. All will be five-issue miniseries. A one-shot, "10th Muse/ Shi crossover", is said to be released later this year. A full podcast interview with Ray Harryhausen can be heard at http://animationpodcast.com/archives/2007/08/19/ray-harryhausen/
Ray is currently serving as a producer on the Movie War Eagles which is slated to be released in 2010 per IMDB and Jim Dee on Take Two-The Movie Program. In the late 1930s, while at MGM, Merian C. Cooper (creator of King Kong) promoted a color film epic that would utilize stop-motion and the creative talents of Willis O'Brien to animate giant prehistoric eagles. The project was sadly abandoned. Bob Burns and other "Kong" experts discussed the "lost" War Eagles pitch to fans, he found typewriter documents and even a rough screenplay of War Eagles, and years later an author named "Carl Macek" marshaled the evidence into a book called War Eagles. The first copies were given to Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury (Harryhausen's biggest friend). They thought the adaptation of it was splendid, and so began the working of Mr. Cooper's & Willis O'Brien's lost drafts into the upcoming project.
Fan and film maker tributes to Harryhausen abound in many forms, including a variety of model animation experiments posted on You Tube.
A clay animation short film by Sub-Genius Church founder Ivan Stang, "Martian Peen Worm" (the short title of that film) makes several whimsical Harryhausen references.The ABC TV 90s children's puppet animation series "Bump In the Night" makes a variety of veiled tributes to Harryhausen, also.
The Mythos Games/Virgin Interactive Entertainment computer game Magic and Mayhem (1990) features over 25 stop-motion mythological creatures that were directly inspired by Harryhausen's work. Constructed by special effects expert and stop-motion animator Alan Friswell, the various characters include a dragon, a centaur, a griffin and a fighting skeleton. For the griffin's wing animation, Friswell studied the griffin from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974)
The 2001 Pixar film, Monsters, Inc. pays homage to Harryhausen in a scene where characters Mike Wazowski and Celia Mae visit a restaurant named "Harryhausen's".
The 2005 Warner Bros. film, Corpse Bride also pays homage to Harryhausen in a scene where character Victor Van Dort is playing the piano in the Everglott's home. The brand of the piano being played is a "Harryhausen".
Tim Burton considers his satiric science fiction movie, Mars Attacks! (1996), to be a tribute to Mr. Harryhausen, especially in a scene in which one of the hostile alien's flying saucers chops down the Washington Monument by crashing into it, just as Harryhausen had done in his movie Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956. Burton's movie, and this scene, initially gathered mixed reactions from Mr. Harryhausen, who has a habitually more subdued sense of humor. These differences were congenially resolved in subsequent meetings between the two film-makers for the Blu-Ray boxed set bonus features.
A new big-budget version of Clash of the Titans, with all-CGI special effects, appeared in movie theaters in early April 2010. With Harryhausen initially expressing surprise and wondering why it was even felt that there was any need for a remake of his movie, its fans currently await Harryhausen's reaction to the film itself.
Ray Harryhausen now lives in England. As a ninetieth birthday tribute, he was featured on the BBC flagship current affairs programme Newsnight on Thursday, June 24, 2010, talking about his life's work. In 2010, he had a cameo as one of 'The Distinguished Gentlemen' in Burke and Hare, the British black comedy directed by John Landis. The film is about the notorious Ulster murderers in Edinburgh in the late 1820s.
Anglo/Swedish pop band, the Hoosiers, dedicated their first single, "Worried about Ray" to Ray Harryhausen. During the music video, a it features a character called Ray making films and includes a Harryhausen style monster, which is killed after Irwin Sparks uses his guitar to fire an drum stick into the monster's single eye.
Category:1920 births Category:American film producers Category:Living people Category:People from Los Angeles, California Category:Special effects people Category:Stop motion animators Category:Science Fiction Hall of Fame Category:Worldcon Guests of Honor
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| Name | Linwood G. Dunn, A.S.C. |
|---|---|
| Birth date | December 27, 1904 |
| Birth place | Brooklyn, New York |
| Death date | May 20, 1998 |
| Death place | Los Angeles |death_cause = |
| Education | |alma_mater = |
| Employer | |occupation = Special effects, Cinematographer |
| Title | A.S.C. |
| Predecessor | |successor = |
| Boards | A.S.C. President (1977-1978) |
| Partner | |children = |parents = |relations = |
| Footnotes | |box_width = }} |
Linwood G. Dunn, A.S.C. (December 27, 1904, Brooklyn, New York - May 20, 1998, Los Angeles) was an Academy Award-winning pioneer of visual special effects in motion pictures and inventor of related technology. Dunn worked on many films and TV shows that have helped to shape and define the history of American pop culture, including the original 1933 King Kong, Citizen Kane, and .
By this time, Dunn had been hired as a special effects technician at RKO Radio Pictures, his tenure there lasting from 1929 to 1958.
In the early 30s, Dunn became part of the effects team responsible for the creation of the original King Kong (1933).
Many effects set-ups consisted of miniature Kong models being animated frame-by-frame in front of a rear-screen projected background plate -- of either still or live-action elements. As time progressed during animation—when using moving footage as a background—animators might neglect to advance the projected image (on the rear screen) to the next frame as they concentrated on Kong's movements, spoiling the illusion that the animated model and the plate coexisted in reality, thus requiring time consuming (and therefore expensive) re-takes.
Dunn saved model animators Willis O'Brien and Pete Peterson considerable work whenever possible by photographically compositing images of Fay Wray with model animation footage of Kong after all the best footage of both "elements" had been shot, eliminating the worry of rear-screen maintenance during model animation in many shots. Dunn's work also eliminated the contrast differences inherent in the use of rear-screen projection.
Dunn repeated such work for the sequel, Son of Kong, released in December 1933, and did similar optical/photographic composites for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) and for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941).
Today, computer technology has made it possible for a skilled amateur to create 2-D digital composites, however, in Dunn's day, such shots required a wide range of skills in order to produce believable results. Many of Dunn's optical/photographic composites, especially in less-high-profile non-fantasy films, are so flawlessly done that even today, viewers cannot tell that they are special visual effects shots. In Citizen Kane, Dunn's composites open the film and many "deep-focus" shots that film historians wrongly attribute to cinematographer Gregg Toland are actually Dunn's optical composites.
Dunn also did the optical composites for the celebrated airplane-wing-dance sequence for Flying Down to Rio (1933).
Dunn worked on hundreds of films for RKO, including 1938's Bringing Up Baby, in which footage of Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and a leopard, each shot separately for safety reasons, were photographically combined by Dunn.
Dunn's work became so highly sought after by other studios that he formed his own company, Film Effects of Hollywood, in 1946, working that business at the same time as working at RKO.
Dunn continued to work at RKO after Howard Hughes bought the studio. When production on the 1943 film The Outlaw was halted due to a controversy over how much of Jane Russell's bosom would be visible, Dunn resolved the situation by rephotographing Russell's close-ups with a tiny scrim inserted between the projector and camera, so as to soften the line of her cleavage.
Dunn continued to refine and improve his optical printers during all these years, garnering a technical Oscar (along with machinist Cecil Love) in 1944 for his continued exacting work.
Dunn did the optical composites and title sequence for West Side Story and the elaborate finale fire-ladder sequence at the end of Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), which required 21 different all-color elements to be composited into final images.
Other later large-format and/or high-profile films Dunn's company did opticals for are My Fair Lady (1964), The Great Race (1965), Hawaii (1966), (1966), Darling Lili (1970), and Airport (1970).
During the 3-D and CinemaScope revolution of the early 1950s, Dunn pioneered the use of optical composites using these more elaborate and difficult technical processes, inventing and refining new equipment to achieve it.
In 1956, Howard Hughes sold RKO to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who renamed the studio Desilu. Initially working on smaller projects with lower budgets, mostly filmed for TV, the special effects division of the studio was shut down in 1958 and Dunn focused on his work with his own company.
As Desilu grew as a company, even TV production required the occasional use of optical effects, especially for increasingly elaborate title sequences, and Dunn was one of several optical houses that supplied them.
In 1965, Dunn became one of four optical houses that supplied visual effects for the original classic TV show. It was mostly Dunn who photographed the 11-foot large original Starship Enterprise model, designed by series creator Gene Roddenberry and Matt Jefferies and built by Dick Datin, Mel Keys, Venon Sion, and Volmer Jensen at Production Model Shop in Burbank, California. Dunn also generated footage that could be used by the three other optical houses involved with Star Trek - the Howard Anderson Company, Westhemier Company, and Van Der Veer Photo Effects - all necessary due to the large number of effects shots and tight weekly production schedule. Dunn continued to work on the series until its cancellation in 1969.
Dunn also specialized in optical work for special and large format films, creating the equipment necessary to do the jobs. Dunn did optical composite for several special 70mm films shown at World's Fairs, including the multi-panel tour-de-force film, A Place To Stand made for Expo 67. It was Dunn who did what his associates said was impossible, cleanly blowing up 16mm negative to 70mm prints for George Harrison's Concert For Bangladesh concert film. Dunn's later became the first facility in Hollywood that could do optical composites in the ultra-large Imax film format.
In 1985, Dunn sold his Film Effects of Hollywood company and retired from active effects work. The Hollywood office of Fuji Film occupies Film Effects' old building.
In the meantime, the RKO-Desilu studio was absorbed into Paramount Pictures, located next door, and the past RKO movie catalog was bought by Ted Turner, later sold to AOL Time Warner.
In 1983, Dunn co-wrote (with George Turner) a book on his career and the history of visual effects, The ASC Treasury of Visual Effects.
In the 1990s, while in his 90s, Dunn joined with Japanese engineers in the development of a 3-D television system that used electronic virtual-reality-type glasses that auto-synched to the TV image, to create the most clear and deep 3-D images ever produced. The system was built for hospitals; surgeons in many facilities are now using the system as a key aid in sorting out the nerve-endings during micro-neurosurgery. The system was profiled on an episode of Alan Alda's Scientific American Frontiers TV series.Always keenly interested in technology, Dunn participated in the development of digital projection for theaters. With the potential (not yet commercially realized) for creating images at a higher resolution than even 70mm film, digital projection is now in the process of supplanting film projection in theaters.
Dunn shared an Oscar win for special effects in 1949 for his work in collaboration with Willis O'Brien for the original Mighty Joe Young. In 1984, he received the Gordon E. Sawyer award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as being awarded Honorary Membership in The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers—their highest honor.
Twice elected President of the American Society of Cinematographers, he was also elected a Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in two different branches, and was instrumental in the formation of the Academy's Visual Effects branch.
The Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood was named in honor of Dunn and his innovations and contributions to the Motion Picture industry. The 286-seat state-of-the-art theater at the AMPAS' Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study on Vine Street is The Academy's newest screening facility.
After winning two final special achievement Oscars in 1979 and 1985, Dunn lived in his North Hollywood home until his death in 1998 at age 94.
1949 (22nd) for Mighty Joe Young - RKO Productions
1978 (51st) in appreciation for outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
1980 (53rd) for the concept, engineering and development of the Acme-Dunn Optical Printer for motion picture special effects.
1984 (57th) Gordon E. Sawyer award
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| Name | Peggy Lee |
|---|---|
| Background | solo_singer |
| Birth name | Norma Deloris Egstrom |
| Born | May 26, 1920 Jamestown, North Dakota, U.S. |
| Died | January 21, 2002Bel Air, California, U.S. |
| Genre | Traditional pop, jazz |
| Occupation | Singer, actress songwriter |
| Voice type | Contralto |
| Years active | 1941–2000 |
| Label | Decca Records Capitol Records |
| Associated acts | Jo Stafford, Patti Page, Rosemary Clooney}} |
Peggy Lee (May 26, 1920 – January 21, 2002) was an American jazz and popular music singer, songwriter, composer, and actress in a career spanning nearly seven decades. From her beginning as a vocalist on local radio to singing with Benny Goodman's big band, she forged her own sophisticated persona, evolving into a multi-faceted artist and performer. She wrote music for films, acted, and created conceptual record albums---encompassing poetry, jazz, chamber pop, art songs, and other genres.
She returned to North Dakota for a tonsillectomy and eventually made her way to Chicago for a gig at The Buttery Room, a nightclub in the Ambassador Hotel East, where she drew the attention of Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist and band leader. According to Lee, "Benny's then-fiancée, Lady Alice Duckworth, came into The Buttery, and she was very impressed. So the next evening she brought Benny in, because they were looking for replacement for Helen Forrest. And although I didn't know, I was it. He was looking at me strangely, I thought, but it was just his preoccupied way of looking. I thought that he didn't like me at first, but it just was that he was preoccupied with what he was hearing." She joined his band in 1941 and stayed for two years.
In March 1943, Lee married Dave Barbour, the guitarist in Goodman's band. Peggy said, "David joined Benny's band and there was a ruling that no one should fraternize with the girl singer. But I fell in love with David the first time I heard him play, and so I married him. Benny then fired David, so I quit, too. Benny and I made up, although David didn't play with him anymore. Benny stuck to his rule. I think that's not too bad a rule, but you can't help falling in love with somebody."
When Lee and Barbour left the band, the idea was that he would work in the studios and she would keep house and raise their daughter, Nicki. But she drifted back towards songwriting and occasional recording sessions for the fledgling Capitol Records in 1947, for whom she produced a long string of hits, many of them with lyrics and music by Lee and Barbour, including "I Don't Know Enough About You" and "It's a Good Day" (1948). With the release of the smash #1-selling record of 1947, "Mañana", her "retirement" was over.
In 1948, she joined Perry Como and Jo Stafford as one of the rotating hosts of the NBC Radio musical program Chesterfield Supper Club. She was also a regular on NBC's Jimmy Durante Show during the 1938-48 season.
She left Capitol for a few years in the early 1950s, but returned in 1953. She is most famous for her cover version of the Little Willie John hit "Fever", to which she added her own, uncopyrighted lyrics ("Romeo loved Juliet," "Captain Smith and Pocahontas") and her rendition of Leiber and Stoller's "Is That All There Is?". Her relationship with the Capitol label spanned almost three decades, aside from her brief but artistically rich detour (1952–1956) at Decca Records, where she recorded one of her most acclaimed albums Black Coffee (1956). While recording for Decca, Lee had hit singles with the songs "Lover" and "Mr. Wonderful."
Lee is today internationally recognized for her signature song "Fever". She had a string of successful albums and top 10 hits in three consecutive decades. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential jazz vocalists of all time, being cited as a mentor to diverse artists such as Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Bette Midler, Madonna, and Dusty Springfield. Lee was also an accomplished actress,.
In her 60-year-long career, Peggy was the recipient of three Grammy Awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award, an Academy Award nomination, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Award; the Presidents Award, the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Living Legacy Award, from the Women's International Center. In 1999 Peggy Lee was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
She wrote the lyrics for:
The first song she composed was "Little Fool", published in 1941. "What More Can a Woman Do?" was recorded by Sarah Vaughan with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. "Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)" was no.1 for 9 weeks on the Billboard singles chart in 1948, from the week of March 13 to May 8.
During a time when youths began turning to rock'n'roll, she was one of the mainstays of Capitol recordings. She was the first of the "old guard" to recognize this new genre, as is evident in her recordings of the Beatles, Randy Newman, Carole King, James Taylor and other up-and-coming songwriters. From 1957 until her final disc for the company in 1972, she routinely produced a steady stream of two or three albums per year which usually included standards (often arranged in a style quite different from the original), her own compositions, and material from young artists.
In 1952, she played opposite Danny Thomas in a remake of the early Al Jolson film, The Jazz Singer. In 1955, she played a despondent, alcoholic blues singer in Pete Kelly's Blues (1955), for which she was nominated for an Oscar. After years of poor health, Lee died of complications from diabetes and a heart attack at the age of 81. Her legacy lives on through her daughter Nicki Lee Foster, whom she had with Barbour. She is interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles' Westwood neighborhood. On her marker in a garden setting is inscribed, "Music is my life's breath."
Lee is a recipient of the state of North Dakota's Roughrider Award; the Pied Piper Award from The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP); the Presidents Award, from the Songwriters Guild of America; the Ella Award for Lifetime Achievement, from the Society of Singers; and the Living Legacy Award, from the Women's International Center. In 1999 she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
;Biography
;Album liner notes
Category:1920 births Category:2002 deaths Category:American actors Category:American contraltos Category:American female singers Category:American jazz singers Category:American Lutherans Category:Songwriters from North Dakota Category:Burials at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery Category:Capitol Records artists Category:Deaths from diabetes Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Decca Records artists Category:Disease-related deaths in California Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners Category:Musicians from North Dakota Category:American actors of Norwegian descent Category:American musicians of Norwegian descent Category:People from Stutsman County, North Dakota Category:Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Category:American actors of Swedish descent Category:American musicians of Swedish descent Category:Torch singers Category:Traditional pop music singers Category:Women in jazz
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Born in Mount Moriah, Missouri, he was a child prodigy who was an accompanist for Madame Schumann-Heink.
During World War II, he was radio director for the Southwest Pacific Area with the Office of War Information. He was musical director of the War Production Board (WPB) series Three Thirds of a Nation, presented Wednesdays over the Blue Network.
Leith Stevens was born in Mount Moriah, Missouri on September 13, 1909 and died in Los Angeles, California on July 23, 1970 at age 60 from a heart attack he suffered after learning that his wife had died in a car crash.
The sleeve notes then go on to describe the music thus: ‘The film’s music is as unusual and exciting as the motion picture itself. Leith Stevens, the composer, captures a haunting reflection of the violent yet strangely understandable uncertainties of modern youth. Stevens, whose musical scores have distinguished such films as The Wild One, Private Hell 36, Destination Moon (film) and Julie, describes the loneliness and frustrations, the fury and tenderness of James Dean’s life and the world in which he moved. With his use of such instruments as the recorder, harmonica and bongo drums, and in his unique utilization of the jazz idiom, Leith Stevens produces music with dynamic personal identification, not only for James Dean, but for every boy who’s ever worn a leather jacket and for every girl who’s ever danced without her shoes. Stevens traces the development of Dean throughout his boyhood, his early rebellion against conventions, the discovery of his artistic abilities, and his failure to resolve his personal problems. “Who Am I?” depicts the young Dean groping for self-identification; “Lost Love” is a painful portrayal of a romance without a happy ending; and “Testing The Limits of Time” is a brilliant montage of the moods and actions which Dean experienced in his last few months. Tommy Sands, the nation’s newest singing sensation, sings the theme song “Let Me Be Loved” by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans.’
Category:1909 births Category:1970 deaths Category:Accompanists Category:American pianists Category:American film score composers Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:People from Harrison County, Missouri Category:Musicians from Missouri
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