All You Need is Paint: Movie FX in the Pre-Star Wars Era
In the 1970s, Universal Studios consisted of two main divisions. The TV side cranked out endless formulaic detective shows for the networks. Colombo, McMillan, McCloud, Rockford, Kojak, they all defended the Universal backlot from evil-doers. The film division seemed to specialize in endless formulaic disaster movies: the Airport franchise, Irwin Allen’s Earthquake, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – all terrorized filmgoers, along with serving up plenty of epic cheese along the way.
So it’s not surprising that in 1975, the studio turned to the Hindenburg disaster of 1937 as a film plot: it’s Airport set in the 1930s! Robert Wise could direct — he knows his way around big movie projects! We could have a detective looking for saboteurs! We can produce the big explosion at the end in Sensurround!
The result was a typical 1970s Universal potboiler — but check out the special effects to bring the dead zeppelin back to life:
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There’s a terrific book from 2002 titled The Invisible Art (I bought my copy at the local Borders a couple of years ago for the cover price after noticing it’s currently going for insane money on Amazon). It’s a coffee table style look at the history of matte paintings, that’s chockablock filled with large color reproductions of the classic matte paintings created throughout the history of cinema. Some shots are simply reproductions of the completed image, but many also include the original matte painting (typically painted onto a large sheet of glass), showing the area left blank for the insertion of actors, typically via rear projection.
The original idea behind matte paintings of course was that it made set production much cheaper — only a small set need be built for the actors to appear in, and the rest of the image painted around them afterward. During World War II, when government mandates forced movie studios into building sets with a minimum of raw materials, films rarely thought of as “special effects movies” such as 1944′s Since You Went Away made extensive use of matte paintings to replace large, free-standing physical sets. Flipping through The Invisible Art, it’s obvious that the aesthetics of old Hollywood also helped to sell matte paintings. From Gone with the Wind in 1939, to the great MGM musicals of the 1950s, films made during Hollywood’s golden era typically had a softer, more painterly look in general. Contrast this more aesthetically pleasing look to the harsh gritty films that became the vogue in the 1970s after Old Hollywood collapsed.
By the 1970s, thanks to his long apprenticeship to Alfred Hitchcock, matte painter Albert Whitlock was one of the unsung heroes at Universal, crafting large vistas of destroyed urban areas for films such as Irwin Allen’s Earthquake and Hitchcock’s The Birds (arguably the predecessor to the 1970s disaster movies) to be produced. Fans of a certain popular mid-1960s science fiction TV series may recognize this classic matte painting created by Whitlock for the show’s second pilot episode.
For Robert Wise’s production of The Hindenburg, most of the long shots of the airship consist of Whitlock’s matte paintings. While a large model of the Hindenburg was built for the movie, many of its appearances are a photograph of the model (which now hangs in the Smithsonian), with extra details painted in by Whitlock, and then glued to a piece of glass, which was then placed atop another Whitlock painting of the landscape below. Via stop motion animation (where the image of the zeppelin was moved a frame at a time) the Hindenburg was made to “fly” over a beautifully painted landscape of 1930s-era New York. (The end of the movie switches to black and white to allow stock footage of the infamous crash to used intercut with Scott and crew on sets; Ted Turner’s crayon-like film colorization techniques mercifully not yet invented.)
The result was one of the last big special effects movies before George Lucas’s Star Wars revitalized the moribund film industry, and revolutionized special effects. Lucas would of course create Industrial Light & Magic, his own in-house effects department, which would bring a host of new techniques to the industry during the following decade.
While the technicians at ILM adored Whitlock and other traditional matte artists, at some point in the early 1990s, traditional matte paintings began to go out of vogue, and were replaced by digital effects techniques in general. By the following decade, it was obvious that some sort of flip-over had occurred in the industry: Hollywood’s special effects technicians can seemingly create anything. It’s the writers who are now so hamstrung these days by political correctness. Stanley Kubrick once said, “If it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed.” But these days, it can’t be written or thought in Hollywood, as Brian Anderson of City Journal wrote back in 2005:
There’s a simple explanation of why Tinseltown churns out so many commercial duds. Elite filmmakers want to make moola, of course—and they still do, lots of it, though not nearly as much as they could be making. But giving the public what it wants isn’t their prime motivation. More important is their wish for recognition as artists from peers, critics, and the liberal elites, says Emmy- and Oscar-nominated writer and director Lionel Chetwynd, one of Hollywood’s most vocal conservatives. “And it has been true from the late sixties on that if you wanted to be seen as an artist, you have to be a liberal—you have to rail against the government, be edgy,” he adds. Having the right artistic vision can mean other social advantages, too. “Making something commercially successful and appealing to a broad public, like The Incredibles, is less likely to get a Rebecca Romijn look-alike to sleep with you than making dark, hard-hitting, critically acclaimed material like Million Dollar Baby,” says longtime Hollywood watcher Medved.
Further reinforcing Hollywood’s leftish leanings are liberal interest groups that monitor script content for “offensive”—read: politically incorrect—content. This pressure can utterly transform a film project, as Tom Clancy will tell you. In his novel The Sum of All Fears, Muslim terrorists explode a nuke at the Super Bowl. When Clancy optioned the book and the film went into development, the Council on American Islamic Relations got to work. The 2002 film villains: white neo-Nazis, not Muslim fanatics. Some Hollywood production companies actually have outreach offices that contact advocacy groups ahead of production to vet potential film scripts. “Keep in mind [that] one of the reasons why the FBI or the government or business are the villains is because everyone else has a constituency,” former Motion Picture Association head Jack Valenti points out.
The PC concerns, internalized in scriptwriters’ heads even before any advocate complains, can produce bizarre incoherence. Novelist and screenwriter Andrew Klavan’s True Crime is about an innocent white man on death row, railroaded because officials needed to prove that the death penalty isn’t racially biased. “The only one who figures this out is this politically incorrect journalist who can see through the B.S.,” Klavan relates. The gripping 1999 movie version, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood as journalist Steve Everett, transforms the innocent death-row inmate into a black man (played by Isaiah Washington). The movie works, even if it takes the anti-PC edge off Klavan’s novel.
Maybe the intersection occurred during a very different Universal-produced disaster movie: 1995’s Apollo 13, which combined some of the first completely digital special effects, with a pro-American plot. Or maybe 1998’s Air Force One, which starred Harrison Ford as a tough on terrorism Vietnam-era vet who knew his way around the controls of a jet aircraft. No wonder Hollywood was so appreciative the following decade when their wish was fulfilled in real life…
We take for granted the special effects employed by a series such as Mad Men — every time you see Don riding the commuter train in from Ossining, he’s sitting inside of a set in Los Angeles with the New York State exteriors greenscreened in behind him in post-production. Even innocuous shots such as the one above are loaded with period, not to mention location detail digitally added. (That’s a bank in Pasadena that was photographed on a blazing hot summer day. All that snow, and the period buildings behind it were digitally drawn and matted in.) But we don’t notice them because the show is character-driven and as exotic as 1960s New York now seems, it’s not outer space.
Moviegoers today often complain about CGI effects and long for the days when films were made via the methods employed by Albert Whitlock and crew. But are the people who complain about today’s CGI instead really longing for the days when movies featured believable adults and competent writing, and the special effects served to advance the story, and not serve as the focal point of the film?
Your going to have to explain to me the line – “Or maybe 1998’s Air Force One, which starred Harrison Ford as a tough on terrorism Vietnam-era vet who knew his way around the controls of a jet aircraft. No wonder Hollywood was so appreciative the following decade when their wish was fulfilled in real life…
What wish, and what were they so “appreciative” of??
On that score, here’s a quote from Air Force One that I actually cut, pasted and carried in my wallet a while back, to put in appropriate faces:
–
“The dead remember our indifference. The dead remember our silence. I came here tonight to be congratulated. But today when I visited the Red Cross camps, overwhelmed by the flood of refugees fleeing from the horror of Kazakhstan, I realized I don’t deserve to be congratulated. None of us do. Let’s speak the truth. And the truth is, we acted too late. Only when our own national security was threatened did we act.
Radek’s regime murdered over 200,000 men, women and children and we watched it on TV. We let it happen. People were being slaughtered for over a year and we issued economic sanctions and hid behind a rhetoric of diplomacy. How dare we? The dead remember. Real peace is not just the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of justice.
And tonight, I come to you with a pledge to change America’s policy. Never again will I allow our political self-interests to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons and to those who would use them: Your day is over.
We will never negotiate.
We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid.
It’s your turn to be afraid.
–
Funny, I have some vague, fragmented memories of a President who talked like that fairly recently… but I can’t quite recall his name. What I do remember is the the Hollywood purveyors of heroism just loved that President to death, boy howdy, just ate him up with a spoon! Couldn’t get enough of him! Uh huh.
I call it hypothetical heroism. Harrison Ford can talk like this, and Hollywood loves it, because there is no downside in the real world. It’s just pretty pictures. The worst thing any President, candidate, or one of us can do, is puncture their fantasty (which is their entire world) with the reality that when you “attack Radek’s regime”, bad and bloody things will happen, and even unfortunate kids will get in the way. Ten innocents may die in order to save 200, and that, to them, is a literal “crime against humanity”.
Speak the fantasy…. they love it. Take it seriously (like adults) and act on it… they will loathe you to the core, and never forgive you.
So why do we listen to these people, anyway?
Andrew X,
When you ask, “What wish, and what were they so “appreciative” of??” I believe you are missing Ed’s dripping sarcasm: a real president — George W. Bush — actually knows how to fly jet aircraft and did so when he famously flew out to the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln to speak under that ill-advised “Mission Accomplished” banner.
The Hollywood Left — living in their fantasy — would never give GWB credit for his real-world skills.
Andrew X
I also remember someone who vaguely spoke like that. He took out some guy named Saddam in Iraq, who also was responsible for over 200,000 deaths of his own countrymen, although mostly of a different religious sect. But because they found no weapons of mass destruction, the MSM and the political left demonized him. If it wasn’t for him we would have two idiots with nukes in the Middle East instead of just one. But, he gets no credit for that.
(Me and HTML have issues….)
I’m not sure Star Wars was a “revitalization” instead of say, merely a non-star, cheap effects version of “the Sting,” or “Godfather,” or “Jaws,” or “the Exorcist” or even a predecessor to “Grease.” All made in the 1970s, all in the top 30 of Box Office Mojo’s all-time inflation adjusted box office champs. Back in the day when Hollywood made most of its money through theatrical and TV sales.
If you look at Box Office Mojo’s list, what jumps out at you is how BROAD (other than say, the Graduate) all those films are. Many standing up well today. Pretty much anyone could enjoy them.
Which makes the point, again, that it is content, and specifically the narrow stuff that prevents Hollywood from being able to move forward confidently in a format change to say, streaming media as DVD sales collapse.
Heck, SCTV said it best about 3-D films in “Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Stewardesses” (a clip is available on YouTube). When Count Floyd jokes about it, you know its not exactly news. Considering SCTV went off the air in 1984. And the films they were mocking were themselves, 30 years old.
Considering the current political climate, I think the SCTV follow-up, “Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Representatives” — complete with Tip O’Neill coming at the screen with a ball-point pen to sign another bill — is more appropriate.
There was an interview with Harrison “PS” Ellenshaw in Starlog magazine. He mentioned (IIRC) that people would say to him or his father, Peter, something like “I really enjoy your work.” He had mixed emotions about this; if he was doing his work properly, then no one would know it was there.
I have that issue of Starlog (along with the rest of the first 100 or so). And I agree with Ellenshaw; if he was doing it right, people wouldn’t notice.
Of course, he had the good fortune (or maybe bad luck
) to be the chief matte artist on “The Black Hole” (1979), which was what the article was about. I saw it in the theater, and found John Barry’s symphonic score and Ellenshaw’s matte work far more interesting than anything the story gave the actors to do.
I agree with Mr. Driscoll about “The Hindenburg”, but I would also suggest not overlooking “Zeppelin” (1971) starring Michael York and Elke Sommer. While there was little matte work per se in it, the model work of the LZ-36 was some of the best ever done. One thing about doing model work of a Zep; it has to be really well done to be convincing, because by nature a rigid dirigible moves very slowly in visual terms, which means the audience is going to have plenty of time to look at every little detail. And spot any flaws. (And the audience is likely well-staffed with aviation buffs who will know when something isn’t right.)
cheers
eon
Actual URL of the Star Trek painting: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Delta-Vega.jpg
Ed,
Spot on about the PC nature of movies like Clancy’s Sum Of All Fears. You knew the movie was a stinker when possibly the worst actor in Hollywood (the dreadful Ben “I hate America as much as my hero Howard Zinn!” Affleck — whose success is a product of ideology, not talent) was cast as Jack Ryan, teamed with lefty James Cromwell as president. Loved the book. Would not pay even to rent the DVD.
Poor Clancy. He must have had a cow. Here he had written a novel that absolutely nailed Islamic terrorists way ahead of the curve and Hollywood reverts the bad guys to tired and long ago defeated neo-Nazis.
On the other hand, you have to hand it to Luc Besson’s Taken. Liam Neeson takes no prisoners (literally) and a filthy rich middle eastern type is mercilessly cast as possibly the rottenest evil ever — and dispatched to much satisfaction.
Then again, Besson is French, not Hollywood.
Dang. Forgot to close the italics after “nailed”….
Peter Parker, a high-school teenager who looks like a 30 years old trying to play a 17 years old high-school teenager, accidentally gets bitten by a radioactive spider, giving him amazing powers that turn him into–a computer animated cartoon.
Before, all you needed was paint; now, computer software makes not only the background but the action itself. Before, you were left thinking “how did they film that?,” now, you know it was done by someone sitting comfortably at a computer.
Sometimes I think of those movies with amazing stunts and special effects (like The Road Warrior, Top Gun, Tora Tora Tora, and yes, the original Star Wars trilogy) and I get the feeling that it is all over: movies won’t be made as good as that again. Seems we’ll be stuck with the plastic renderings of reality of computer animation and its physically inconsistent representation of action.
Absolutely.
I recall seeing George Lucas commenting on the criticism that CGI looked fake. He laughed what was easily the creepiest laugh I ever heard and said that he could not understand how a man in a puppet suit was anymore real than a computer image. Having worked with Frank Oz, he should know better. There is a reason that Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson and a chunk of his mom’s old sweater) is a cultural icon whereas no CGI character yet has reached said point. We can tell the difference, George.
Eon pointed out the difficulty in portraying aircraft through CG. He’s right on. Memphis Belle (1990) may well have been the last film whose aviation effects were largely done with models and the real McCoy. Michael Bay went berserk over criticisms of Pearl Harbor, but besides being a crappy movie, airplanes just don’t move like that (besides actually having moving parts). If they can’t model an airplane – a non-animate object – what makes these people think they can model anything else?
Driscoll hit the nail though when he said it’s the story that counts. I recently watched Public Enemies and enjoyed it, being thoroughly surprised that the director never degraded the film into glory-shots chewing on scenery and sex-appeal. Still, I love going to the movies, but I’ll be damned if they often give a good reason for going.
-Eon
Truly all I can say is thank you to Ed. I was not alive during the golden era of Hollywood, or even when Star Wars first came out. I now have a solid list of classic movies to check out. Truth be told, my first encounter with the better Hollywood came courtesy of Audrey Hepburn and all of her films.
Again, thank you for giving me movies to truly enjoy.
-Zamir
Incredible outcome of such incredible talent.
Poor Clancy. He must have had a cow. Here he had written a novel that absolutely nailed Islamic terrorists way ahead of the curve and Hollywood reverts the bad guys to tired and long ago defeated neo-Nazis. Koblog
Clancy had a bit of satisfaction though. If you listen to the commentary on the DVD, Clancy, the presence of the leftie director, notes the changes and rips them to shreds. The director, Phil Robinson, screeches against Clancy’s criticism only to look like a PC idiot. The commentary and Clancy’s pushback made the movie worthwhile.
Clancy has never really had a good relationship with Hollywood. “The Hunt for Red October” made it to the screen basically intact, mainly because in the time frame that it was made, the studio could approach it as a “historical” piece, sort of like a World War Two movie. (The short prologue seen over a CGI map of the North Atlantic makes this pretty clear.)
The same cannot be said for the second Clancy film, “Patriot Games”. It was drastically altered from the book not so much for time or even politics, as because the studio felt that Clancy’s story was just too complex for the audience to handle. (In fairness, “PG” is probably Clancy’s most complex narrative, bar none.) Add in the replacement of Alec Baldwin (who was at least the right age to play Jack Ryan) with Harrison Ford (who absolutely wasn’t), and the result wasn’t really satisfying to Clancy fans, except for the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as Jack’s best friend, Navy commander Robby Jackson. (Myself, I’d always rather visualized Samuel L. as Robby, going back to the first time I read his first appearance, in the novel.)
But the series spun out of control with “Clear and Present Danger”. To put it bluntly, the movie had even less to do with the original novel than “The Sum of All Fears” did. This was the Oliver Stone version of such a story, not the Tom Clancy version. According to industry sources, the only thing which prevented a lawsuit by Clancy against Paramount was a (literally) last-minute (and uncredited, IIRC) rewrite by John Milius. And even then, the studio and director Philip Noyce insisted that “their” narrative be largely retained. Never mind that it bore little resemblance to Clancy’s story.
After that mess, “The Sum of All Fears” (also directed by Noyce) was more-or-less a pre-ordained failure. The studio decided to “hit the reset button” on the series, completely deep-sixing Clancy’s continuity.
(Yes, the “Jack Ryan” series is basically one, single, very long novel, rather like J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”. This has been somewhat disguised by the fact that the publishers never put the books out in the order Clancy wrote them; “Red Rabbit”, the next-to-last published, was actually only the second written, and sat “on the shelf” for over a decade.)
There were a lot of things wrong with the film, ranging from Affleck as a now-too-young Ryan (this was the right timeframe for Harrison Ford, frankly), to the “re-imagining” of the other characters, notably Morgan Freeman, playing CIA director “Bill” Cabot as the “young” Ryan’s mentor and a “stand-up guy” who tragically dies in the atom bombing of Baltimore, MD. In the novel, Marcus Cabot was one of Ryan’s most frequent problems; an Ivy League elitist, a political appointee who liked the perks of his office, had no interest in the actual work, opposed Ryan at every turn, and was described by Ryan’s assistant Dr. Ben Goodley as “an a$$hole who looks good in a suit”.
The “subplot” of President Robert Fowler and his National Security Adviser Elizabeth Elliot’s campaign against Ryan, culminating in their attempt to destroy his marriage, was completely jettisoned. Never mind that it was central to the novel’s story, as it was part and parcel of the NCA’s refusal to accept that facts they didn’t like were nonetheless facts. Elliot wanted Ryan, whom she saw as a “cold war dinosaur”, gone; Fowler let her try to destroy him. (Word is that in spite of the novel being written in the last two years of the first Bush Administration, Bill and Hillary considered Fowler and Elliot to be a personal insult. I can’t imagine why, unless they routinely choose to act like fictional characters. Oh, that’s right- they do.)
But, as stated above, the film goes completely off the rails right at the start. We are expected to believe that a Palestinian group, recovering a still-usable fission bomb “lost” during the Yom Kippur War, would immediately… sell it to a bunch of neo-Nazis.
Say What?
The first notification that such a group had a “physics package” would be a mushroom cloud over an Israeli, or American, city. And no, they wouldn’t let anyone else know they had it until after they’d used it, claimed responsibility for the deed, and dared the U.S. and/or Israel to retaliate. Period. Dot. Quebec Echo Foxtrot Delta.
But of course, nobody in Hollywood would ever dare to suggest that Islamic radicals might set off an atom bomb to attack people they don’t like. After all, we musn’t offend them. That sort of thing offends the “sensibilities” of the “enlightened elite’”, and we can’t have that, now can we?
Even the detonation in Baltimore, MD was apparently motivated by the “sensibilities” of the elite’. I can almost hear the repartee’;
“Well, we can’t set it off in Denver. I mean, nobody who matters ever goes there.”
That’s “flyover country”, remember? Full of what JournoListers refer to as “F***ing NASCAR retards”.
The result was a typical movie made by the Hollywood elite’, to pander to their soulmates inside the Beltway, in academia, and at their own cocktail parties.
No wonder it bombed everywhere else. Including with Tom Clancy.
Clancy’s deal with Paramount was for four films, and it ended with that one. I do not expect that he will ever allow anyone in Hollywood to “adapt” one of his novels again.
And I don’t blame him one bit if he doesn’t. As Scotty said, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”
clear ether
eon
I find this article interesting from a personal perspective. My father worked at a major studio for a short stint in 1950. He worked in the art department doing special effects work. The one movie he worked on from start to finish is a little known movie called “For Heaven’s Sake” starring Robert Cummings and Edmund Gwen. The movie is about two angels who are helping a girl who is waiting to be born get her parents together so the little girl gets her chance on earth. The movie required the angels to appear to walk through walls, doors, ect. My father was assigned to the special effects of one the angels. He had to literally color each frame by hand filling in bit by bit and frame by frame to make the angel appear or disappear. We have little respect for the time consuming and truly artistic effort it took to create the special effects in the past. I was not really aware of this until my father talked about his movie studio experiences. One of his favorite memories of the studio is that Betty Hutton (Of Annie Get Your Gun fame) was the wife of his boss. Betty Hutton used to come into the office, sit on my father’s desk, and say “Hi, Paul” and start a conversation. My dad said Betty Hutton was as nice in reality as anything you saw on screen.
But these days, it can’t be written or thought in Hollywood, as Brian Anderson of City Journal wrote back in 2005
So the argument is that conservatives aren’t capable of making things?
Making things, yes.
Getting them through the film development system in Hollywood, run by the very definition of the ultra-progressive “enlightened elite’”, no.
Frankly, you’d have a better chance of getting a film made describing the horrors of the Russian famines of the 1930s brought on by Lysenkoism and Stalin’s purges.
By Mosfilm. Under Stalin. In 1937.
clear ether
eon
An American Carol didn’t get released?
SM,
Spot-on. You’ve referenced one of the very few overtly conservative, or at least center-right films in an industry that swung hard towards the left-hand side of the bleachers after 9/11.
Thanks,
Ed
Ever seen “Stairway to Heaven” Ed?