JIM DANFORTH: Matte art's last individualist
It’s with great pleasure that I present today’s NZ Pete
Visual Effects 'special edition'.
For decades fanzines, journals and books have dedicated a great
deal of effort – and rightfully so – in covering Jim Danforth’s iconic stop
motion animation work as well as the convoluted circumstances surrounding the
various un-realised features which Jim has tried so hard to get off the
ground. Regrettably, no article nor
author to date had attempted to cover Jim’s other, quite considerable area of
expertise – that being the highly skilled art of movie matte painting which has
occupied a significant portion of Jim’s time professionally for around four
decades. I suspect that most of Jim’s legions of fans possibly aren’t even
aware of the major contributions and vast output that Jim has undertaken in his
glass painting effects work. Today’s
article will reveal all.
The following conversations originated as just a few
isolated matte shot questions in the first instance and quickly developed into
a full blown career interview. It didn’t
take long before my overly inquisitive ‘nosey parker’ line of questioning would
be fulfilled by Jim’s comprehensive and detailed responses, where no cinematic
stone was left unturned.
Jim loves
the artform, probably even more that I do(!!), and loves to talk about not just his
own matte shots but those of industry veterans and even classic effects films
that we share a common respect for.
Jim’s enthusiasm was such that he “wrote off” at least one computer
keyboard in the process of typing up material for me! Now that’s dedication.
I want to thank Jim most sincerely for donating so much of
his time to furnish this author with so many answers to matte matters I’ve
always been curious about as well as many great anecdotes surrounding the personalities and politics of the movie business. Not only was
Jim generous with his time and knowledge, but also with diving into his
substantial archive of 35mm frame enlargements and behind the scenes photographs,
the great majority of which appear here for the first time anywhere.
A word too of thanks to Jim’s wife Karen, who not only assisted Jim on many effects shots over the years, but tolerated his spending so much time on line to a certain blogger in the South Pacific while his dinners got cold. Thanks are also due to David Stipes and Harry Walton for additional photographs and stories of "the good old days".
A word too of thanks to Jim’s wife Karen, who not only assisted Jim on many effects shots over the years, but tolerated his spending so much time on line to a certain blogger in the South Pacific while his dinners got cold. Thanks are also due to David Stipes and Harry Walton for additional photographs and stories of "the good old days".
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| Jim Danforth and Karen Tuttle (before she became Mrs. Danforth) working on THE BLUE AND THE GRAY at their company, Effects Associates, Inc.. This shows Jim's very simple matte stand and his electro-mechanic controller that synchronized the camera and up to two projectors. Karen is holding the miniature flag that was photographed in front of a real sky, with smoke blowing past it. That image was projected behind the upper part of the painting, with the image of an Arkansas street and actors projected below. The various elements are shown later in this article. |
Q: Firstly let
me say what a pleasure it is to interview you Jim. I’m most grateful for your time and
willingness to share your cinematic experiences.
It goes without saying that I’ve been a huge fan for many
years, with probably old, well thumbed through issues of Forry Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland being the
initial exposure to your work as best I can recall, as it was for presumably
tens of thousands of like minded film buffs.
Just before I launch into a multitude of matte and effects questions
perhaps you’d like to comment on Forry and his huge influence on legions of not
only genre fans, but fully blown effects people such as yourself and many
others like Phil Tippett, David Allen and Dennis Muren?
JD: Forry
Ackerman was very influential for me and many others. He was, for a long time, the only
readily-available source of information about genre films and those who made
them.
Q: There really
wasn’t any other source for us sci-fi and monster hungry youngsters to find
info and behind the scenes pictures on visual and make up effects – even less
so far away in the South Pacific isolation of New
Zealand, I can tell you! It has always been with great regret that I
never visited The Acker-Mansion when
I had the chance on numerous visits to California. Of course it’s all gone now – dispersed to
the four winds.
JD: Yes, the
Ackermansion was… well, unique. Forry’s
collection began to be dispersed even while Forry was alive—sometimes without
his knowledge. I’d like to know where some
of his original Willis O’Brien art work is now (and a couple of my
contributions, too).
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| Visiting the Ackermansion |
Tell us Jim, what sparked ‘the film bug’ in
you, and what was that first breakthrough movie which ‘lit the trick photography fuse’ as it were?
JD: The fuse had
been smoldering for a while with home-movie and stop-motion experiments begun
when I was twelve, but the explosion occurred
when I saw a reissue of KING KONG.
Q: It really couldn’t have been any other. A great many effects technicians, including very prominent figures such as Ray
Harryhausen found their inspiration (to
put it lightly) in the Cooper/Schoedsack masterpiece KING KONG, while many
of the next generation of effects people were seduced by Ray’s own films, most
notably THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD and JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, which
both seem to figure prominently in so many effects bios of guys like Bill
Taylor, Richard Edlund and Dennis Muren.
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| A very early glass painting Jim made for his proposed version of 20'000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. The glass here is positioned so that a real sky and clouds show through. |
JD: Yes, which stop-motion film was most
influential seems to be dependent on the age of the respondent at the time the
influence was first exerted. For me it
was KING KONG, but THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD also had a big impact on
me. I was already working in the film
business when I saw 7TH VOYAGE.
Q: Pioneers such
as John Fulton, Willis O’Brien, David Horsely, Percy Day, Fred Sersen, Emilio Ruiz del Rio
and Jack Cosgrove have entranced this author since I don’t know when. Any personal views on these, or any other
‘old style’ effects men Jim?
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| Early Danforth multiplane matte art . |
JD: When I was younger, the work of the
Lydecker brothers made a big impression… in addition to that of Willis O’Brien,
Mario Larrinaga, Ned Mann, and Peter Ellenshaw.
David “Stan” Horsely was the cinematographer on JACK THE GIANT KILLER, a
film on which I worked, but I didn’t have any direct contact with Mr. Horsely.
Q: Yes, Howard and Theodore Lydecker were in a class of their own. If I may, could I ask you your thoughts on successful trick shot design. What makes a good shot work? How do you ‘think’ out a prospective visual effect?
JD: Since my primary interest has always been
on making films with an emphasis on visual effects rather than effects just for
themselves, I usually think first about the arrangement of a sequence—particularly in the case of
stop-motion animation sequences—how the shots will be edited, what the tempo
is, and so on. But even with matte
shots, I tried to interject some of my own philosophy about sequence
design—tried but rarely succeeded. It
seems to me that having only one spectacular matte shot in a sequence calls
attention to itself in an undesirable way and could result in what Al Whitlock
referred to as “the JOHNNY TREMAIN
problem” —small live-action sets combined with spectacular painted
vistas. My view was that it would be
better to include one or two matte shots that weren’t spectacular—just enough
painting to suggest that, the sets or locations were larger than they actually
were. In that way the ‘big’ vista would
be less jarring.
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| A practice matte Jim did in 1959 just for his own education—no attempt to composite it. |
Q: I’ve had many
industry people remark very positively about your VFX ‘shot design’ ethic.
JD: I have heard
a few of those comments—usually from other effects people rather than from
producers or directors.
Q: If I put a
few effects film titles to you, I would be interested to hear your professional
visual effects evaluation in a capsule:
THE INVISIBLE MAN…. IN OLD CHICAGO….
KING KONG…. GONE WITH THE WIND…. THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO…. THE THIEF OF BAGHDAD….
QUO VADIS…. DARBY O’GILL AND THE LITTLE
PEOPLE…. THE BLACK SCORPION…. 20’000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA …. GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD…. COLOSSUS – THE FORBIN PROJECT….. BLADERUNNER.
JD: Please keep in mind that my judgements tend
to be harsh.
THE INVISIBLE MAN: Crude but effective—crude when compared
to the very subtle effects in DEATH TAKES A HOLIDAY,
made at about the same time.
IN OLD CHICAGO:
one of the very best ‘disaster’ films—along with THE RAINS CAME.. Beautifully integrated effects.
KING KONG: Ground-breaking despite some obvious effects
flaws. A triumph of shot design over
some technical limitations. Later
refinements did not result in similar films with as much impact and artistry as
KONG.
THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO: Very well done, all around.
GWTW: Highly variable matte
paintings, that result in an overwhelmingly wonderful cumulative effect—one of my favorite films. Nice design work by William Cameron Menzies.
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD: Poetic, with
utterly superb matte paintings and hanging miniature shots, plus the first-ever
three-color traveling matte work (which permitted the story to be told, despite
some technical flaws.)
QUO VADIS: Spectacular, in all departments—superior matte
paintings and traveling mattes.
DARBY O’GILL: The
best mixed-scale effects I’ve seen, plus beautiful matte paintings and real solarization effects.
20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA: In
my opinion, the best-designed miniature ship scenes ever. Great integration of painted tank backings
and glass and matte art. The Nautilus
lying in wait for the nitrate ship at sunset is unforgettable. But what else would one expect with Peter
Ellenshaw and Ralph Hammeras collaborating—plus Harper Goff’s design of the Nautilus.
THE BLACK SCORPION: A great example of how to create mood
with a restricted effects budget. If
only the ants in THEM had been as exciting as those scorpions.
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: highly variable effects, with some lacking in
subtlety—the burning bush being an exception.
The excellent designs may have been beyond the capabilities of the time,
although I think if Gordon Jennings had done the effects (as was planned), I
would have liked the results better.
THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD: Disappointing, although the
choreography of Kali is very well done.
COLOSSUS-THE FORBIN PROJECT: A very intelligent film.
Whitlock’s daring original-negative computer start-up shot is famous in the
world of matte paintings.
BLADERUNNER: Not a film I liked, although the matte work is
excellently done.
I think the art direction and the
paintings totally achieved the desired effect.
It’s just not an effect I happen to like.
Peter Jackson’s KING KONG: I can think of nothing good to say about that
film, except that I liked the introductory shots of New York.
Q: Well, that was interesting.
Most of those I’d have similar thoughts, though I loved GOLDEN VOYAGE
myself – a light year ahead of the very poor final Sinbad picture EYE OF THE
TIGER, which followed it. I actually really liked the latest KONG and
thought Andy Serkis made an amazing and unique contribution to this and the
recent Planet of the Apes picture.
There are many articles and interviews over the years with
you Jim where the key area of interest has centered on your stop motion
animation projects, yet very few
journals (if any) have covered your quite substantial matte painting
career. I’d like to kick this off with
the question I’d like to present to all matte painters: if you’re able to recall, which was the
glass painted shot which made that impact and triggered off that ‘love’ of the
artform for you? (film/shot?)
JD: First, I
think I should point out that my animation work got more attention than my
matte work because animation is part of the story,
which is what most people are interested in.
Secondly, animation calls attention to itself because it is inherently
‘phoney’ of theatrical. A well-done
matte painting recedes into the background, although mattes can be very
memorable and evocative.
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| Monoclonius drawing is from Jim's production TIMEGATE. The film was not finished. Drawn in graphite and reproduced as a brown-line print for presentation. |
But, to answer your question, I suppose it would be KING KONG and the
arrival at Skull Island
shot. The setting is almost a character
in that film and was created largely by glass art. Of course, when I first saw it, I had no idea
how it was done.
Q: Oh yeah, that shot is iconic, though I thought the similar
establishing glass shot in SON OF KONG to be even better both in terms of
composition and a far cleaner composite.
I just loved the Orville Goldner animated birds doubled into the former
shot.
I absolutely adore the matte painted effects shots from The Golden Era, with probably late
twenties through to late forties encompassing the artform at it’s most
essential and‘magical’… the proverbial Dream
Factory. The use of the matte
process was at it’s peak, with vast visual effects departments and large
numbers of artists turning out hundreds of mattes per year. Would you have liked to been a part of that
era Jim where the painted matte was so extensively used and highly valued?
JD: No.
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| A full frame matte that Jim painted for a television commercial where an actress would magically slide down the bannister via travelling mattes. Jim expressed a degree of dissatisfaction at his perspective work here, though I can't see a problem. |
Q: You are
generally acknowledged as one of the effects industry’s most ‘individualistic’
visual effects creators from my understanding, so would you feel comfortable as
part of a large stable of matte painters, such as the Warren Newcombe unit at
MGM or Ray Kellogg’s team over at Fox for example?
JD: No.
Q: From my
research, Walter Percy Day, England’s
most eminent matte painter based at
Denham Studios, would control each and every step of the process for his stable
of painters where they were required to paint only as expressly directed
by the master with no room for individuality.
It was almost a ‘paint by Pop’s
numbers or not at all’ scenario it
seems.
JD: I suppose the idea was to get the Walter Percy
Day look that the customer was paying for, and only Pop Day knew how to get
it—or thought so.
Q: There’s no
disputing Poppa Day was the master in
my book, with a phenomenal catalogue of glass shots over a very long period,
with much of his best work in the silent French cinema. I lost count of how many ornate ceilings and
ballrooms Day must have painted.
JD: I wish I knew more about Day’s entire
career. I really, really like the work
he did for Korda and on BLACK NARCISSUS, but some of his later work, such as
THE BLACK ROSE is, in my opinion, not very good.
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| Jim at work on a foreground painted matte on hardboard for EQUINOX. Jim says he wasn't too happy with this painting, but again, it looks great to me and I'd happily own it. |
Q: I’m
interested in your thoughts regarding the various Golden Era matte departments’
styles and technical methods?
JD: I think there was a certain amount of “not
invented here” in effect during those years—meaning that methods used effectively at one studio might be
shunned by another. In part that was due
to the type of equipment in which a studio had invested. In part it was due to the preferences of
whoever was in charge of the matte department at a particular studio (which, of
course, influenced the equipment that was constructed).
Clarence Slifer at MGM refused to believe that Al Whitlock
did most of his mattes on the original negative, so Matt Yuricich phoned Al and
put Clarence on the phone. Al explained
to Clarence how he did his shots. After
the conversation ended, Clarence turned to Matt and said “Well, maybe he does and maybe he doesn’t.” What was an everyday procedure for Whitlock was inconceivable for
Slifer, even though Slifer had used the same procedures in earlier times. Sometimes one can ‘brainwash’ oneself.
My understanding is that Jack Warner liked clouds in the
matte shots of his fims, so that was an influence from outside the matte
department. Also, I was told that at
Warner's it was common to use matte paintings to improve the apparent focus on
the foregrounds of miniature sets. When
shots of miniature trains had out-of-focus foregrounds, the foregrounds were
matted out and replaced with sharp, painted versions of the miniature.
The quality of mattes sometimes changed within a studio as
the department head changed. I thought
the mattes done at MGM during the period when Lee Le Blanc was in charge were
not as ‘artful’ as those done by the Newcombe department.
At Fox (and at Film Effects of Hollywood), precision-machined
aluminum grommets were pressed into holes drilled in the hardboard panels on
which the mattes were painted. The holes
in the grommets fit over pegs on the photographic easels. At Universal, Al Whitlock simply slid his
paintings into a channel on the matte stand and pushed them until the wood
frames encountered a ‘stop’ on the matte-stand frame. When Al did dupe composites, he used the
un-illuminated opaque painting on glass as a hold-out matte when duping the
live action from separations while photographing a brightly-lit white
background positioned behind the painting.
Then the painting was illuminated and photographed over a black
background to double expose it onto the film with the live-action dupe. The painting and the ‘matte’ fit
perfectly. At Fox, registration
pegs were necessary because the board with the painting was not the same board
used to dupe the live action. A duping
board was created by placing the board with the painting on a tracing table
with identical registration pegs, then lowering an aluminum frame, to which had
been taped a large sheet of translucent plastic tracing ‘vellum’, then tracing
the matte line from the painting board onto the vellum. The painting board was then removed. A new board, painted pure white and fitted
with the same type of grommets, was the placed in registration on the tracing
table, and the matte line position was transferred onto the duping board. The duping board was then painted gloss black
in the area corresponding to the area to be occupied by the painting. The painting board was painted gloss black in
the area to be occupied by the live action.
The visibility of the matte line was dependent on the accuracy of the
tracing, transfer, and blacking in. Which system do you think was faster, the
Universal system or the Fox?
RKO may have had the most versatile matte department, in the
sense that they used different methods for the composites, depending on the
requirements. Linn Dunn told me that at
RKO they had one artist who specialized in doing the blends for all the
paintings. As I recall, that artist was
Paul Detlefsen (who later painted fine-art illustrations in a neo-Currier &
Ives style).
Many of the mattes at RKO were put together using the same
rear projection process patented by Willis O’Brien in 1928 (granted 1932).
Disney utilized the ‘O’ Brien’ projection method for most of
the matte shots done at the Burbank studio by Peter Ellenshaw (with equipment
modified and/or engineered by Ub Iwerks) up until they switched to projecting
separations (around the time that Alan Maley took charge of the department, I
think) But that was well past the
‘Golden Age’.
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| "Dreams of Power" is a wonderful piece of concept art for JONGOR—a 'pulp' jungle adventure property Jim optioned from the author's estate in about 1983. The 'maguffin' is Lemurian levitating crystals. |
Q: Some studios
seemed to hold the high ground, with Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s enormous resourses
no doubt a prime factor in the quality of the output from Newcombe’s matte
department. Fox and Warners both had
huge effects staff, with the latter employing some eight painters at their
peak. Universal on the other hand, by
all accounts had a tiny matte department as far as I know, with just the one
painter, Russell Lawson, for several decades.
Some of there large matte shows must have surely seen additional
painters brought on board to turn out the number of mattes required, and I’m
thinking here of Hitchcock’s wonderful and exciting SABOTEUR – a huge matte
shot show. I heard somewhere that well
known Art Director John DeCuir may have painted mattes on that film with
Lawsen?
JD: I really don’t know anything about the mattes
on SABOTEUR. I thought they were
variable in quality. I remember the
Statue of Liberty mattes as being very good.
Q: There
were an awful lot of mattes in that show, some really invisible such as the
stuff with the ship at the docks as well as several ceilings. Could you tell us a little about your own earliest
experiments in glass painting Jim?
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| An early glass painting by Jim for a non-professional version of 20'000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA. Even at a young age the skill is readily apparent, as is the drive. |
JD: When I was
about fourteen or fifteen, I started
painting ‘tests’ for my own amusement and education. Originally, I used water-soluable tempera
paint (poster paint), because I didn’t know any better. After the paint dried, it tended to flake off
the glass. I did some glass paintings
for an amateur version of 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA that my friends and I
worked on for many months but abandoned before any ‘principal’ photography was
done. Then I did a painting on bristol
board to be used as an establishing shot for a 16mm version of THE PIT AND THE
PENDULUM (this was several years before Roger Corman made his film). I based the layout on the famous painting “Toledo in a Storm” by El Greco. Holes were cut in the bristol board so I
could backlight the windows of the buildings.
(This was before Al Whitlock taught me that was unnecessary—that if one
painted in the correct key, painted lights would photograph bright
enough.) I abandoned PIT for a more
interesting idea: GERALDINE IN JEOPARDY—a humorous 16mm silent serial set in
the time of the American Civil War. For
that project, I painted a house on glass and also tents and a canon and a watch
tower for a scene of General Grant’s camp.
The house shot was filmed in a local park, with ‘Geraldine’ running
toward the non-existent house, but the glass of General Grant’s camp fell over
and broke while we were setting up on location.
Then I did a “Hall” hardboard shot of a jungle setting which
I photographed in 35mm with me moving
cautiously toward the jungle area. This
was for a test involving a phororhacos.
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| Jim and Karen and part of the crew at Snowbird, Utah, filming the plate for a matte shot for John Carpenter's MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN. Ted Rae was the cameraman. That's his camera. |
Q: Was there
ever a time where you saw yourself as becoming purely a studio matte artist or were your cinematic interests far too varied
to allow you to settle into just one creative slot?
JD: I didn’t want to do visual effects; I wanted
to make films (with visual effects). Visual
effects—particularly stop-motion effects—seemed to be the entry-level job most
related to general filmmaking.
Q: I’m very
interested in your early ‘cold call’ encounter with Disney matte department
head Peter Ellenshaw? That must have been one unforgettable
experience?
JD: Absolutely right. I’ve described that experience in my
memoir. The three things that impressed
me the most were: A) the realistic effect
of Peter Ellenshaw’s paintings compared to their very loose style on close
examination. B) Ellenshaw the man—very gracious and charismatic. C) The clarity
of the rear-projected 8-perf. (VistaVision) images used in Ellenshaw’s
department for compositing most of the mattes.
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Not all mattes are spectacular. This is from JOHN CARPENTER'S THEY LIVE. Jim added fictitious advertising paintings to several existing buildings. The challenge in this shot was to get the effect of old, weathered paint that was slightly faded and absorbed by the concrete. For the background of this Panavision film, Jim used dual-interlaced rear projection, which yielded more detail than a VistaVision frame would have for a 'scope extraction. The advertising signs were camouflaged subliminal messages. Those messages were also matte paintings that wiped on or were intercut when the protagonist used his alien dark glasses.
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Q: How many
painters and cameramen did Ellenshaw have with him at that time?
JD: In addition
to Ellenshaw, the only other artist I saw was Al Whitlock, although I
understand from your blogs that Jim Fetherolf may also have been at Disney
during that time. Peter also introduced me to an assistant who worked in the
room where the paintings were photographed.
I don’t remember his name.
Ellenshaw mentioned that the man had worked on KING KONG.
Q: Was there
ever the possibility of you taking up a matte painting position in Peter’s
department? Would you have done so had the
invitation been forthcoming?
JD: It was never mentioned, and I never thought
about it. Remember I was VERY inept at
that time. I was nineteen. I suppose that if the opportunity had
presented itself a few years later I would have jumped at the chance.
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When is a matte shot a backing and vice versa? Jim with a backing he painted for TIMEGATE— an uncompleted feature. The backing didn't need to be detailed, because it got matted into the live scene at a reduced size—an example of the "big brush" approach. The live-action scene with the area to be occupied by the backing matted out (from a faded daily print). Test composite showing that backing ties into live action quite well. The softness of the blend can be seen at the left, where the foreground cliff edge will later be sharped by a small strip of glass painting.
The backing was used so that miniature dust could be shown drifting out of the canyon, following a rock avalanche. |
Q: Peter’s son
Harrison told me recently of an occasion in 1964 in which he temporarily worked
as an intern in his father’s department and he got to know artist Jim
Fetherolf. Jim was, according to
Harrison, an excellent artist, but sometimes very frustrated working at
Disney. Fetherolf would say: “I don’t know why I even bother to do this,
as Peter will just walk in later and change it all with a big brush and make it
better”. As I understand the
situation, Albert Whitlock had similar issues and wanted to break free.
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| Peter Ellenshaw |
Q: Harrison
also mentioned to me that although various artists painted the shots on Disney
pictures, there were probably few instances where the painting left the easel without
Peter having dabbled away upon it with his brush or changed things. How would this sit with the average artist I
wonder?
JD: Well with a fine-art painter, not well, but
matte painting was more of a craft than an art, in some ways, so many junior
artists probably accepted it.
Q: Would I be
correct in suggesting that the Disney effects operation was very much a tightly
run factory with a regimented and
conservative structure with the accent on ‘pure painting’ and nothing more for
the artists?
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| Albert Whitlock |
Q: I’ve heard
that some Disney artists were also frustrated at the embargo imposed on trying
new gags and styles, such as Alan Maley wanting to experiment with Front
Projection for compositing and Al Whitlock wanting to develop his split screen
moving sky animation, which of course he mastered once he moved over to
Universal.
JD: I don’t know
about Alan Maley’s frustration. Possibly
the reluctance to change was due to the investment in time and money that had
been put into developing the VistaVision rear-projection
and masking system, which I understand was perfected by Ub Iwerks. Personally, I’d choose rear projection over
front projection for a matte painting situation.
Q: Were Disney
still using oils to paint or was all of the matte work being painted with
acrylics by this time?
JD: In 1959, when I visited Ellenshaw, the
paintings were done in oils. As I
recall, acrylic paints for artists didn’t make an appearance until several
years later.
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| Jim Danforth and Tom Corlett painting a convention hall full of refrigerators for a projection pull-back shot as part of a Cascade TV commercial |
Q: You have had
a long association with Gene Warren, Wah Chang and Tim Baar and their effects
house Project Unlimited. At a time where
effects units were primarily big studio based departments with a considerable
chain of command and power politics, was an independent operation like Project
Unlimited seen as an oasis of creative freedom in what was then a very ‘front
office and mogul’ run industry?
JD: I suppose so,
but then I’d had no experience at that time with the “mogul-run” industry. Later, Project Unlimited did seem to have
more freedom, particularly since the restrictive union policies of the major
studios were not rigorously applied, even though Project was a union signatory
shop and we all belonged to the IATSE.
Q: Could you
tell us about your role at Project Unlimited.
I understand you were involved with assisting Gene Warren on some of the
special effects shots for one of my favourite films THE TIME MACHINE?
JD: I didn’t assist Gene, except in the sense that
all the employees assisted him to get the jobs completed. Gene only rarely did any hands-on work by the
time I started at Project Unlimited. I
did assist Bill Brace with some lighting manipulations during the TIME MACHINE,
but I didn’t do any painting (except for a black matte with which I assisted
Wah Chang).
Q: Would you
like to describe the facilities and equipment at PU? Were they set up for all aspects of optical
cinematography for example or were such shots farmed out elsewhere?
JD: Project
Unlimited could do NO optical effects when I started. They were primarily a prop-making shop and
stop-motion facility. At first, all the
optical work was farmed out to optical companies or sent back to the optical
department of the studio making the film.
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| A Bill Brace matte from THE TIME MACHINE. |
JD: What went wrong was Project not having any
compositing facilities, nor a
thorough understanding of how to approach compositing. That may sound like a judgemental view from a
nineteen-year-old, but I had spent hours in the AMPAS library and other libraries, making a careful study of
effects techniques.
Bill’s paintings that were intended to be composited with
live action were painted on black and white photo enlargements. They were photographed just as they looked,
with the black and white photo visible.
The film of the painting was delivered to The Howard Anderson Company
where a film matte was created to block out the live-action area. A negative print of this matte was use to
block out the area of the live action into which the painting would be
inserted. There was no way for Bill to
blend his painting to the live-action photography. All join lines had to be hard-edged. Because of the nature of the shots, I don’t
think it was necessary for Bill to make any composite tests. All the color balancing and matte fitting was
done on the optical printer.
 |
| TIME MACHINE split screen. |
Q: What method
did PU favour for their matte composite photography?
JD: Having someone else do it…until I convinced
them otherwise for THAT FUNNY FEELING.
 |
| The destruction of London from THE TIME MACHINE |
JD: I agree. Those scenes were finished before I arrived,
but then they wouldn’t have listened to me anyway.
Q: The Academy
oddly didn’t seem to mind – though I’ve had so many problems with strange AMPAS decisions over the years I suppose
it doesn’t surprise me. It’s still a
great little film though.
JD: It’s a film that didn’t capture the feeling or mood of the
Well’s novella, but it became a nice film on it’s own, as did 7 FACES OF DR LAO.
Q: I understand
that Bill Brace did most of the matte painting for PU, with former Roy
Seawright matte artist Luis McManus painting on some projects. Did you ever undertake any matte painting
during your time at PU?
JD: Luis McManus did some paintings for JACK
THE GIANT KILLER, but he did them for The Howard Anderson Company, as did Al
Whitlock (who did three paintings that I can remember).
 |
| JACK, THE GIANT KILLER unused shot |
Later, I convinced Gene Warren to let me do an original
negative composite shot for THAT FUNNY FEELING.
I did the small amount of painting required by that shot.
Q: I understand
that Gene Warren had some background in matte painting, or to be more precise, matte ‘blending’ -
having been taught the ropes by the once legendary Jack Cosgrove while
working for Jack Rabin and Irving Block on zero budget pictures in the 50’s
such as MONSTER FROM THE GREEN HELL.
JD: I never
heard so much as a whisper about that.
As far as I know, all the Rabin-Block mattes were painted by Irving
Block. Gene never revealed any interest
in, or knowledge of, matte painting. He
was primarily an animator—a very good one.
Q: Yes, Gene did some nice work in Tom Thumb as I recall. Project Unlimited were constantly in demand
throughout the 1960’s. Were they
perceived as being a sort of “ILM” of
the day who weren’t afraid to tackle new and innovative effects that may have
been outside of the sphere of the more traditional big studio visual effects
departments?
JD: Perhaps.
The studios didn’t get involved in stop-motion animation much, so
Project got a lot of jobs that required stop motion. Wah had a good reputation as a costume
fabricator, so Project got jobs for Las Vegas
shows as well as for film creatures.
Project made dummies for SPARTACUS, Shields for THE WARLORD, and
costumes items for CLEOPATRA. However,
Project Unlimited didn’t do composite work, at least not initially. The really big effects work was done at the
major studios, as when Buddy Gillespie filmed the submarine shots for ATLANTIS,
THE LOST CONTINENT in the tank at MGM.
MGM also handled the matte paintings for ATLANTIS. Project did only a
few animation shots for that film..
 |
| A staff portrait of Project Unlimited - sans Jim. Photo from Jim's 2011 memoir 'Dinosaurs, Dragons and Drama' |
Q: With so many
studios closing down their special effects departments in the early sixties I
guess there were a lot of matte artists seeking work. The competition for freelance assignments
must have been great?
JD: I wasn’t aware of any of that because I
wasn’t trying to compete as a matte artist.
The matte artist’s union kept
refusing to let me join, so, whenever an opportunity arose to paint a matte, I
just went ahead and did it secretly.
Q: So was the cave shot that was deleted from JACK THE GIANT
KILLER your own first professional glass shot?
JD: Yes. Of those
that actually made it up
onto the screen, THAT FUNNY FEELING was my first.
 |
| Gigantipoids was a pre-production illustration for the last feature film that Jim contemplated, titled KRANGOA. (the family of ape-like creatures) |
Q: In your own
matte art are you an oil painter or an advocate of acrylics?
JD: Originally, I
painted all my professional mattes in oils.
About 1975, I developed some sort of allergic reaction to the paint
chemistry and had to change over to acrylics.
That required a completely different technique and a re-learning
process.
With oils, I blended skies by using cloth or polyurethane
pads to pat the color after it had been brushed on in bold strokes. With acrylics, I found I needed to use a
spray gun, with cross-hatching or stippling in some areas. My acrylic paintings (viewed in person) never
had the impressionistic looseness of my oil paintings, but they photographed
satisfactorily in most cases.
I’m now back to painting in oils without turpentine and
without cobalt drier. So far, no allergy problems, of course, I’m now painting ‘fine art’ not mattes.
 |
| A full frame painting from PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN |
Q: Take us
through the typical time frame of the average glass painting Jim. How do you begin? Do you project a 35mm frame onto the
pre-primed glass and trace from original first unit photography or do you
approach it differently? Are there dip
tests of short lengths of test negative and so forth? How many tests are on average required until
a final acceptable match?
JD: There are many variables. First, only a few of my matte paintings have
been done as latent-image composites.
For those, I usually projected a developed film clip to trace off the
blend-line position. If architecture
needed to cross the matte line, those features were also traced.
Tests were made each day as the work on the painting
progressed. Sometimes hand-developed
dip-tests were made during the day to speed things up (but those produce only a
monochromatic image). The number of
tests varied. Usually, I could get a
blend with four to six tests, but some jobs were problematic. I think I did about twenty tests for the
MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN beach-house shot, because the lab was having
problems and kept shifting my jobs to different printers. That caused major shifts in the overall color
and made it difficult to evaluate the basic lay-in as to sky color. Then the editor wanted changes, and so on.
 |
MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN latent o-neg matte composite with the actual beach location seen at top. John Carpenter kept 'jumping' Jim's cue for action when he was running the safety footage at the start of each take. As a result, the test development required before each comp take (to be sure the 35mm neg is threaded on the correct perforation) showed that Ms. Hannah was already in action. It was Jim's last latent action take—sweaty palms on that one.
|
 |
| The original matte painting for the above shot. |
Sometimes, I painted on dark
“greylight” glass. This enabled me to
put the process screen in contact with the back of the matte glass, so that
there was virtually no parallax between matte glass and projected image. The light illuminating the painting was
reduced in intensity as it passed through the glass and was reduced in
intensity again when the resulting ‘fog’ on the screen bounced back toward the
camera.
But the image from the rear
projector was reduced only once on its way to the camera. Furthermore, the light on the painting went
through the glass at an angle, making the light path for the ‘fogging’ light
longer than for the rear-projected image, with the result that the glass had
greater dark density for the front lights than for the rear-projected image.
Once proper filtration had been
established for the system, the paintings could usually be balanced by eye, but
some critical matches required film tests.
I did one two-projector composite
with very little painting over one weekend, after an initial wedge test.
Q: I’ve always
been of the belief that a successful matte shot can only be as good as the
cinematographer shooting the plate and tying the composite together. Is that too simplified a statement do you
think?
 |
| Hilltop monastery painting for the action film NINJA III |
It’s really not the job of the
camera person to ‘tie the shot together’.
The matte artist is responsible for the marry-up. In most cases, the camera person is
responsible for only the dupe and maintaining it’s consistency (unless one is
foolish enough to be making the composites on an optical printer by using
filmed black mattes and counter mattes).
I agree that the success of a shot may depend in large part
on the original photography. I have had
to do some very ingenious ‘corrective’ printing to rescue live-action
photography that was underexposed by the cameramen—even very good directors of
photography. I was able to do this on
one occasion by bi-packing a ‘plus-density’ mask that restored shadow density
on a shot that had been underexposed.
That may seem backwards, because “underexposure” sounds as though it
would make the shadow areas darker. Film has a limited density. When a scene is underexposed, The highlights
and mid tones get darker, but the ‘blacks’ don’t, When the mid-tones and highlights get
corrected back to a normal density, the ‘blacks’ become grays and require
additional density to be added synthetically.
On another occasion, I had to print the projection plate
with a special traveling matte that lightened only the underlit actors in the
foreground. In a similar case, I had to
use a traveling matte to enable me to print the characters in shadow at one
exposure and the meadow behind them (in sunlight) at an exposure that brought
the two portions of the scene into a better balance. All that must
happen before the painting can be started. If the artist doesn’t get these problems
ironed out at the start, the artist can sometimes end up “Chasing the Dupe”—a phrase I first heard from Matt Yuricich.
 |
| An FX shot from the 'Hard Water' episode of the tv show SALVAGE 1 with painted iceberg and Whitlock inspired 'slit gag' effects for the approaching missiles. |
JD: I would always bow to Matt’s superior experience, but as it happens, I agree with him completely.
Q: I think
you’ve tried to shoot as many of your own mattes personally. Is that right?
JD: Yes, for the
reasons I just stated. Plus, some of my
procedures involved animation at the time the painting was being filmed. It’s also less expensive.
 |
| A 16mm latent-image matte painted comp from Jim's THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN reel. |
Q: Tell us how
you met and became longtime friends with Albert Whitlock?
JD: I met Al in 1959 when I visited Peter
Ellenshaw at Disney studios. Al was at
work on a house painting for POLLYANNA, which I think was a latent-image shot.
I ran into Al again several times when he was painting for
JACK THE GIANT KILLER at The Howard Anderson Company.
 |
| Painting a foreground glass for PAUL BUNYAN |
That job lasted only about a month, because Al got into a conflict with the Universal management about how to charge off my salary (Al was afraid that if my salary was charged against his matte shots—of which I was not yet painting any—he might lose out on jobs). But Universal kept me on the payroll and shifted me to another part of the art department. Al and I remained on good terms, and we began to discuss a project that each of us had been intrigued by independently: THE LOST WORLD.
In addition to staying in touch with Al and having dinner
with him and his wife on numerous occasions, I worked for Al again during I’D
RATHER BE RICH (stop-motion animation of shoes) and, years later, when he was
at work on DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER and was also doing matte shots for the GUNSMOKE
TV series.
Al recommended me for several of the jobs I did over the
years.
Q: I’d
love to have seen that Danforth-Whitlock LOST WORLD.
JD: I thought I would
too. However, as the years passed, Al
realized that the dinosaurs would inherently be more memorable than the matte
paintings, so he took over the creation of the dinosaurs, and I was out.
 |
| Another PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN matte shot. |
JD: The independent houses usually had a way to photograph the paintings, and a matte artist doesn’t take up much space. I think Al painted at home on the Butler-Glouner jobs and on some of the Howard Anderson jobs. But, on occasion, Al painted at Howard Anderson’s facility on the old RKO lot in Hollywood.
Q: I think many
of those Poe films from American International such
as PIT AND THE PENDULUM and I think COMEDY OF TERRORS used Al’s talents
to great effect. I’ve often wondered too
about another Butler-Glouner show THE DEVIL AT 4 O’CLOCK which has several
mattes that look very much like Albert’s.
JD: I never asked
about THE DEVIL AT 4 O’CLOCK.
Q: Terrible
blue screen work with Spencer Tracy’s silvery hair becoming totally transparent
at times due to blue spill or problems pulling the mattes. Great Larry Butler miniatures though and some
pretty bold epic composites shots for the time.
JD: The miniature volcano was built in large scale on Butler’s ranch. It’s been
said that Larry wanted a lake on his property, and dredging out the dirt to
build the volcano was a good head start.
 |
| THAT FUNNY FEELING - An actual LA Freeway masked plate and the miniature of the traffic congested opposite lanes complete with off the shelf toy cars and some subtle glass painting to tie the model and location elements together in a brief tour de force effects sequence that is simply wonderful. |
Q: I’m very
interested in one particular project you undertook, THAT FUNNY FEELING, which
although a Universal film with photographic effects by Al Whitlock, your own
contribution was through Project Unlimited as I understand it. The opening LA freeway traffic jam effects
shot was a stroke of genius Jim, not just in the wonderful stop motion, but
also in the precisely calculated camera elevation
done back at Project Unlimited on the miniatures as well as the flawless
blending of live action freeway against your impeccably lit and photographed
miniature set. One of your best effects
shots ever. Would you like to
tell us about that?
 |
| Frames from the final original negative composite with stop motion traffic perfectly lit, photographed and blended with the live action plate. One of Jim's best ever effects shots where each and every aspect falls into place with precision. |
JD: I was
actually involved with two shots for THAT FUNNY FEELING—the head-on train
crash, for which I painted a large sky backing and the traffic-jam shot you
mentioned. My main contribution to the traffic-jam shot was
to steer Project Unlimited away from their plan of turning the element over to
some optical department to composite (no more giant matte lines, thank
you). I composed the shot, placed the
black matte in front of the live-action camera, and did the minimal painting
and the primary animation. Other
animators handled the background cars. Ralph Rodine did the lighting and camera
work. We
looked through a film clip of the live-action scene that was placed in the
movement of the animation camera, then moved the miniature set and the camera
around until it matched the perspective of the real freeway lanes. When the
shot was finished, Gene Warren took it to Universal, where they spliced it into
a loop and screened it over and over, pondering how it had been done. Not bad for my first professional
latent-image composite.
 |
| The miniature head on train collision by Project Unlimited from THAT FUNNY FEELING with Jim supplying the painted sky backing. |
Q: Not bad!……it was technically and
artistically as good as it gets Jim.
Definitely one for the showreel and to be proud of. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone who’s ever
seen the film aside from me?
JD: Well, of course I went to see it. It was exciting to realize that, right in the
opening sequence with the trains and the cars, there was also a great Al
Whitlock painting of a New
York Street. My work was in good company.
Q: As
photographic effects supervisor, was Albert in any way involved in the design
or ‘look’ of that shot, or was it totally sub contracted?
JD: No, Al was
not involved at all, except for the fact that I had recently worked with Al and
felt comfortable about doing original negative work.
Q: You secured a
short term apprenticeship in Whitlock’s matte department around 1965, which I
imagine was an eye opening experience for you?
Can you share with us some of the effects work Al and his team were
working on at the time?
JD: As I recall, it was in 1964. MARNIE was in work at that time. I think SHIP OF FOOLS followed soon
after. THE WARLORD was on the planning boards in the art
department, but no filming had been done and Al hadn’t started on the mattes
yet. I
visited Al during the time he was working on mattes for THE WARLORD.
 |
| From THE HIT MAN, a TV movie and pilot for Columbia. Danforth added scintillating light patterns in the glass columns. It's all painted except the trapezoidal room and walkway. |
Q: I’ve heard
that one of Al’s mattes around the time you were there, the one of the ship
docked with city background for MARNIE was really
disliked by the head honcho’s at Universal for some reason and they requested Al pull those shots from his showreel. Can you elaborate?
JD: Yes,
apparently there was a general dislike of that shot (and all the matte shots
from MARNIE). I thought it was a
particularly nice shot except for the improbable ‘God’s viewpoint’, which
Hitchcock seemed to use in several films.
(What is the camera supposed
to be supported by?) I think the real
problem was with a dreadful ship cut-out in a forced perspective set used for
lower angles. Perhaps viewer complaints
about a dreadful ship shot were not interpreted correctly. If I owned that Whitlock painting, I’d
proudly hang it on my wall. The effect of afternoon light was beautiful.
Also for MARNIE Al painted the interior of a tithe-barn stable with a bright glare of light
coming in the window. The glare was very impressive. It was just a thick streak of pure white
paint). The specific shot Al was primarily
working on when I arrived showed Sean Connery and Tippi Hedron walking to the
barn. Al pointed out that the shake roof
of the barn was created by alternating lines
of reddish and greenish shades of gray.
Q: That
barn interior tends to slip by totally unnoticed. The thing looks like almost all of it’s Al’s
paint excepting the actors and horse?
Can you recall it?
JD: My memory is that the painting showed the entire interior of
the vaulted, beamed ceiling, plus the top third or so of the support columns. My guess is that there was action filmed in
the foreground of the set—later edited out—and which required more of the
interior to have been constructed than would have been necessary for the shot
as it was finally edited.
Q: According to
Bill Taylor quite the opposite occurred with COLOSSUS-THE FORBIN PROJECT where
the studio brass were over the moon with that amazing ‘super computer boot up’
matte set piece and were keen to show it off.
Apparently that was Al’s most difficult shot from what Rolf Giesen told
me. I think it’s one of his best – and
all on original negative too!
JD: Yes, very impressive. Al said that he
missed the precise timing from his stop watch by about eight frames. That’s so close that no one would notice the
‘error’.
 |
| Whitlock's 95% oils / 5% real COLOSSUS matte shot |
Q: I
have a before and after on that matte shot.
The amount of paint is remarkable.
It must have been something like 95% Whitlock and 5% genuine set! I think that must have been something Al
possibly picked up from Peter at Disney – not to get fiddly with demarcations
and preserving most of the ‘real’ set – just paint the whole damned
thing, which Ellenshaw was a genius at.
So many of his Disney shots were ALL paint –right around into the
immediate foreground with incredibly courageous brushmanship. Peter would just ‘slot’ in the actors somewhere
amid all that oil paint, and to beautiful effect. Things like DAVY CROCKETT and JOHNNY TREMAIN
are wonderful examples of this “ballsy” approach which most wouldn’t have the
guts to tackle.
JD: That’s
certainly true. Of course, the
projection system used at Disney made it easy to place the actors and a small
envelope of background into the paintings. (I once had to totally alter the set
an actor was standing on, when the director decided to change the shot design after the live-action was filmed. You can’t do that with a latent-image matte.)
Al didn’t like the rear projection system, and he managed to do shots of type
you’ve described with latent images. But
then he usually had great control of the photography and shot design.
 |
Just when you thought mattes couldn't get any stranger... A full painting of a baseball stadium Jim did for a heat pump commercial. The idea was that heat pumps could be used to condition the air of many different kinds of buildings. Jim painted four different buildings—all designed to somewhat resemble the outside configuration of a back-yard heat pump. Jim also lit and filmed the actual product heat pump, then projected the contours onto four glasses and painted a 'bank' heat pump, a 'drugstore' heat pump, air 'airport-hanger' heat pump, and the 'stadium' heat pump. All but the stadium had live-action that needed to be blended in.
|
 |
| The 'Bank heat pump'... |
 |
| The airport had two sections of live action (workers in the hanger and an airplane coming in for a landing, which Danforth created on film using a bas-relief plane on a sliding glass. The stadium had moving crowd effects. All four of the paintings were connected by dissolves made by Jim in the camera. This short-schedule job was completed with a forty-hour non-stop stretch of work, during which Jim's wife Karen brought him breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. Some of the work (like pre-filming the plane landing and all the color balancing of the projection plates had been done prior to that. Jim also filmed the background plates and printed them prior to that. |
Q: Didn’t Albert
even ‘pirate’ some classical gallery
masterpieces in his spare time so that his old pal Alfred Hitchcock could have
duplicate paintings?
JD: Hitchcock maintained two homes, but the
original masterpieces in Hitchcock’s collection could be at only one location
at a time, so ‘Hitch’ asked Al to duplicate the classic paintings.
Q: A
friend of mine in Germany (who’s also a big matte fan) actually owns an original Whitlock gallery
piece, and it’s exquisite Jim. Lucky
guy!
JD: One of my regrets is that I never asked Al if I could acquire
one of his paintings. He had two hanging
in his home that I particularly liked—a view of the ship Cutty Sark under full sail, and a scene of a stately English home
in late afternoon light.
 |
| One of those "invisible" mattes— basically a split screen with only a little painting to make it blend. THE SHADOW RIDERS. Tom Selleck, etc. were filmed in Sonora, California, some miles from the ocean. |
Q: Virtually
nothing has ever been written on Al’s long time cameraman, Ross Hoffman, who
had been with the studio since the early thirties non stop through to
EARTHQUAKE in 1974 – by all accounts, an amazingly versatile and skilled
cinematographer who occasionally got an on screen credit. If you can, please tell us more about Ross?
JD: I don’t know
too much more about Ross, I talked to
him a lot when I was working with Al or visiting him at Universal, but mostly I
asked Ross technical questions, not about his career, per se. Ross showed me the
set-ups used for printing the rotoscoped mattes that were the norm at Universal
for years. The mattes were painted on
cells, using opaque white paint. The
cels were placed on a frame with registration pins that was positioned between
an optical printer and a large studio
lighting unit. With the lighting unit on, the silhouetted cel formed an
aerial-image matte, printing the background scene threaded in the printer but leaving an unexposed area for the element to be added. When
the lighting unit was turned off and the cel was illuminated from the front,
the cell printed the portion of the live-action scene that was being matted
into the duped background.
Q: I just think
back to the huge numbers of mattes and opticals that Ross put together over 40
years and my mind boggles. Aside from
his many ingenious black velvet density matte opticals for all the INVISIBLE
MAN sequels for John Fulton, his truly phenomenal SON OF DRACULA mist morphing transformation
optical effect has to be one of the all time great trick shots.
JD: I’m not a big fan of horror films so I
can’t contribute anything to that topic.
Q: Maybe
so, but Ross was definitely one of
Universal’s unsung heroes who more than earned his keep. Gee Jim, how can you not love TARANTULA or THE
INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN?
JD: like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, but I don’t
care much for TARANTULA as a piece of drama, and then some of the mattes are
‘keyed’ incorrectly, with the result that the spider doesn’t always fit behind
the rocks correctly.
 |
| A full painting which functioned as the background for a THEY LIVE travelling matte shot (a shot I could never locate in the DVD myself??) |
Q: It’s such a
shame that the authors of the excellent book The Invisible Art – the Legends of Matte Painting didn’t interview
Hoffman who lived on into the mid 90’s.
Can you tell us anything at all about the longtime rotoscope artist,
Millie Winebrenner who was also a
mainstay at Universal for decades from those 50’s sci fi pictures through to
EARTHQUAKE or THE HINDENBURG I think?
JD: I met Millie
but didn’t really know her. I had worked
closely with her former assistant, Nancy van Rensellaer during JACK THE GIANT
KILLER. The hand-drawn mattes at
Universal were created on special drawing tables that had camera/projectors
under them, projecting from the bottom the
image to be traced. This eliminated the
shadows of the artist’s hand that occurs when the scene is projected downward
onto a drawing table from above. At
Universal, when the cells had been painted and were ready to be photographed,
the camera/projector was rotated from below the drawing table to a position
above the table, permitting the artwork to be photographed. Sounds like a major engineering challenge to
me, but it obviously worked.
 |
| One of the mattes painted and composited by Jim for the tv series SALVAGE 1. Several of the shots involved a sliding painting of the giant moving iceberg augmented with artificial 'wake'. The sea is a plate of the Pacific Ocean and the tugboat is real. Additional shots were achieved by Harry Walton with stop motion animated miniatures and process projection. |
Q: Al
once wrote for American Cinematographer that Millie used to paint full size
sheets of glass for some roto shots against his paintings, requiring sometimes
70 or so individual full sized matte glasses for a single pass in the days
before cels. That must have been some
major undertaking?
JD: The
use of glass seems odd, since ‘cels’ have been around since before Al Whitlock
started painting mattes. Perhaps it was
due to the heat of the lights. I remember
that when Al first told me he was going to try rotoscoping live action and
matting it in front of his paintings using out-of-focus cels, I was dubious,
because when I had asked Nancy van Rensselaer to make cels for an animated spilt screen during JACK THE GIANT KILLER we
had gotten a very noticeable dark matte line because Nancy didn’t make
complimentary cels with a gap between them as I requested (usually necessary
when doing out-of-focus splits against light backgrounds). I know that, initially Al planned to use only
one set of cels. I don’t know how he
solved the non-linear reproduction of out-of-focus images. One of Al’s tricks was to film the actors in
front of a crudely-painted backing that had colors and tones similar to the
matte painting in the area behind where the matted actors would appear. That way, the slight intentional oversizing
of the out-of-focus matte would not clip into the actors but would blend with
the background. It certainly worked
well.
 |
| A pair of fully painted matteshot frames from John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS. The top image is a somewhat discoloured clip in Jim's collection that I have deliberately included here as the unique sun and moon view is clearly seen, whereas the release print as transferred to DVD below tended to 'blow out' all of the highlights, completely obliterating the whole narrative point of the matte painting. Having compared the two images Jim leans more toward the upper frame as being closer to how he recalls painting the shot. Jim commented: "I saw the preview screening of PRINCE OF DARKNESS, and I would have gone ballistic if the scene had been printed like this second frame version. My version still has a little too much green lurking around the sun, but it's MUCH closer to what I did for the film. The overall tone was cool, not warm." This goes to show just how shots can and often do show up vastly different on varying viewing platforms. |
Q: I found out
recently that both incoming and
outgoing Universal matte painters, Al Whitlock and Russ Lawsen respectively,
painted on the same 1962 feature – TARAS BULBA, which was Lawsen’s only on
screen credit that I’ve ever been able to find.
The photographic effects were split between 3 providers: Universal,
Butler-Glouner and Howard Anderson, so I’m not sure just where Whitlock fitted
into this jigsaw puzzle as he worked for all three. Al painted those chasm shots while Russ
handled the city paintings I’m told by Al’s friend Rolf Giesen.
JD: All I can add
is that I saw one of Russ’s TARAS BULBA city paintings at Universal around
1964. But I
recall that Howard Anderson was involved with some of the chasm scenes, so it’s
possible that Al painted for The Anderson Company on TARAS BULBA.
Q: I’ve
never met nor read accounts from anyone who has actually seen one of Lawsens’ paintings, at least someone who’s still
around. I don’t think even the authors
of that terrific matte painting coffee table book came across any of them. I asked Bill Taylor whether any of Lawsen’s
mattes still existed at Universal and he told me that by the time he had joined
in late 1974 there were no mattes that pre-dated Whitlock’s work. My readers would be most interested in your
memories of Russell’s matte if you can stretch your memory back that far Jim?
JD: Regarding the Russ Lawson painting: It didn’t make much of an impression on
me. I remember it as being smaller than
Al’s paintings. It wasn’t stashed in the
back somewhere. Al just reached down and
lifted it up from somewhere near by. It
seemed to be ‘flat’ in terms of
reflectivity, but that may be a trick of my memory. Al’s paintings always seemed glossy (because
they were). I’m sorry I don’t remember
more, Peter. Like many things I’ve
encountered through the years, if I’d known it was going to be of interest
later, I would have paid more attention.
It was a wide view of a city.
 |
| An excellent example of Jim's rear screen process as applied to composite matte photography - with this scene from PLANET OF THE DINOSAURS. |
Q: I remember a
fascinating story you told at the Visual Effects Society a few years ago for
their tribute to Albert about his need to “fix” a certain SHENANDOAH matte painting – even though it was some time
after the film had been released. Would
you like to expand on that Jim?
JD: Apparently there had been something about
that SHENANDOAH shot that Al felt was not right, even though he had approved it
for use in the film. Later he realized
what the problem was and pulled the glass out of the storage rack and quickly
made a correction. As I recall it was a
matter of the brightness of a house in the distance. Al lightened it with a few deft strokes, stood
back, looked at the painting and was satisfied, at last.
Q: Can you
remember the shot? There were around six
mattes in that film – one of the many shows he painted on for director Andrew
V.McLaglen.
JD: It’s the last
one in the film.
Q: Oh yes, I know the shot very well – with the horsemen
crossing the stream to the farmhouse, right? Would you tell us the most valuable lesson(s)
you learned from your time with Albert?
JD: That’s
complicated. I cover that at some length
in my memoir. But in essence Al taught
me to “be fearless and to paint the truth”.
 |
| Composite shot from THE STUFF. The McDonald's stand is entirely a Danforth painting. The other buildings are miniatures (because they blow up). Jim designed this shot while his company Effects Associates hired the 'extras',and filmed them in the parking lot of the industrial complex where they were located. Jim directed the shot and did the composite. (all rear projected.) |
 |
| The Effects Associates crew with miniature set for THE STUFF |
Q: Bill Taylor
said that Al always painted very “flat” – avoiding any build up of excess paint
which might cause shadows or pin points of light.
JD: Yes, the glints from the micro bumps in the
paint were sometimes a problem for Al.
One of my first assignments for Al was to scrape down the surface of one
of his paintings, using the flat edge of a razor blade, so Al could repaint
that area. That was fairly daunting, but
it didn’t do as much damage to the painting as I thought it might.
Q: I
shudder at the thought Jim….new ‘green’ matte assistant armed with razor blade
and doing his utmost not to do the unthinkable?? Must have been a palm sweating occasion?
JD: first time I did it I was very worried.
Q: Come
to think of it, I can recall several old time mattes, always colour shows,
where ‘glints’ and ‘pops’ seemed incongruous with the painted part of the scene
– especially in night skies.
JD: Yes,
it’s always difficult to get the lights at an angle where that doesn’t
happen—probably impossible. Of course
polarizing the light helps (as is done in cartoon cel photography) but a lot of
light gets absorbed by the polaroid filters.
During EARTH II at Fox, we oiled Matt Yuricich’s star-field paintings
immediately before photography. This
helped eliminate any specks of dust that would show against the black of outer
space.
 |
| A wonderful example of Jim's fine art - THE NAUTILUS UNDER CONSTRUCTION was painted for fellow Cascade staffer Tom Scherman. Some time later the painting was returned temporarily to Jim for some artistic changes, at which time Scherman sadly passed away. The artwork is now owned by miniature pyrotechnician Joe Viskocil. |
Q: To the best
of your knowledge, was the original negative matte process utilized elsewhere at that time or was Al the
only real advocate of the method?
JD: Disney did some
original negative mattes on occasion (as in the shot in which Sean Connery and
Janet Munro run down the hill in DARBY O’ GILL). I had done a 16mm latent matte composite test
earlier, and I started doing it again after working with Al.
Q: Some effects
departments such as MGM were staunch advocates of that complicated duplicating stock process weren’t they –
the method later adopted by Doug Trumbull and co for Matthew Yuricich to use on
all of those projects?
JD: I think you are referring
to color interpositive dupes a.k.a. color intermediate stock dupes.
There may be some confusion here as to the complexity. Running a single interpositive is less
complex than running three black and white separations in three separate
passes—less complicated for the cameraperson.
However, for the artist, color interpositive dupes could be difficult,
because that stock ‘skewed’ the colors and contrast of the painting.
Clarence Slifer at
MGM had an interesting variation on the use of this stock. That variation originated before IP stock existed, when
Slifer used positive Technicolor prints to dupe certain elements during GONE
WITH THE WIND by photographing the aerial image formed by what amounted to a projector
without a lamp house. Later the
interpositive stock yielded a better color reproduction than duplicating a
viewing print. It was also easier to
repeat moves twice instead of four times, as would have been necessary if color
separations had been used. Clarence’s
big ‘gimmick‘ was using the precision lens-move capabilities of an optical
printer without a lamphouse to scan across the film being duplicated, and to
then repeat the same moves with the interpositive and the printer movement
removed from the printer, this time photographing only the painting. The duping and hold-out mattes could be on a
foreground glass (for soft blends) or incorporated into the painting as a clear
area, through which a white duping board was
photographed with the painting in silhouette. Or through which a black
background was visible while the painting was illuminated and being
photographed.
Not many studios used aerial-image dupes (although those
were popular for cartoon work). More
often, inter-positive stock was bi-packed in a
standard matte camera, but moves on paintings could not be made that way.
 |
| One of Jim's mattes from the film BUGSY. |
Q: Poor
Matthew had to be!
JD: Yes. He occasionally complained about the fact
that he was obligated to use that system in many of his employment
situations. I remember him saying that,
to get the right shade of green trees he had to paint in “baby-shit brindle brown” tones
Q: Yes,
I’ve heard that delightful turn of phrase from Matthew. I don’t think Windsor & Newton have that particular hue on the market any longer! I sure don’t have any in my box of oil
paints.
 |
| Jim's painted prison complex as seen in the excellent under rated Jon Voight film RUNAWAY TRAIN |
Q: Film Effects of Hollywood has been a major
contributor on the LA effects scene for many years and I know you worked there
for a time on IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD.
Linwood Dunn had a long history at RKO with Albert Maxwell Simpson – did
you happen to know Simpson by any chance?
I ask because there is so little known about the man and he was one of
the veteran artists who, like Jan Domela who had an epic length matte career
spanning way back to the twenties. I
learned recently that Simpson painted some of the many glasses on KING KONG,
along with Henry Hillinick, who was Matt Yuricich’s mentor.
JD: No, I didn’t know Simpson,
unfortunately.
Q: Bill Taylor
told me of a wonderful Al Simpson oil painting which used to grace the wall of
Linwood Dunn’s office at Film Effects of Hollywood. Do you recall that?
JD: There was a
painting from THE GREAT RACE that Lin said had been painted by Simpson. That was on the stage and showed an Alaskan
dock and trading post. . In the front
hall of Film Effects was a large painting from WEST SIDE STORY. I don’t know who painted it.
By the way, the most impressive painting I ever saw hanging
in a Hollywood office was a western landscape done by
matte artist Jack Shaw (but this was a fine-art painting). It was in the office of Producers Service
Company—suppliers of optical and effects equipment.
Q: Yes,
Jim Aupperle has that GREAT RACE painting now, though the previous owner sawed
off the black matte across the lower area.
A nice painting though. Jim sent me some great close ups of Simpson’s
brush work from that one. That show was
jammed with good matte art. On Jack
Shaw, I wonder if that painting you referred to was one of the ‘War Eagles’
conceptual oil paintings which Harryhausen spoke of as being “still around somewhere”? Apparently Jack painted a couple which
totally impressed Ray and Willis O’Brien!
JD: The painting at Producers Service Company was a view of a
western plain, so don’t think it was for WAR EAGLES. Perhaps it was something done for GWANGI, but
I tend to think it was art for its own sake.
 |
| Effects assistant Roger Dicken, producer Aida Young and Jim at Bray Studios England for the lengthy shoot of WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH - a film which would bring a second Oscar nomination to Jim. |
Q: Would I be
correct in suggesting that WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH was your first full on visual effects project? Could you tell us, briefly
about the origins of that assignment and how it evolved?
JD: That very complicated story is covered in
detail in my memoir, where it consumes many pages. It started with Lin Dunn recommending me to
Warners
Q: To what
extent did you have control over the design and direction of the sequences
involving stop motion and other types of effects?
JD: The
screenplay had been almost completely written by the time I joined the film, so
my control over basic content was limited.
However, I had a lot to do with the fine tuning of the sequences,
including the shot design. I was the
second unit director. I directed or
co-directed all the scenes that would have stop motion added to them, and I
also directed some scenes that did not involve animation (usually with doubles
for the principle actors).
Q: I’m aware of some misinformation surrounding the matte work on
WDRtE, with even this very blogger getting the story wrong in a recent Hammer
Films matte article. based upon incorrect information published elsewhere.
Could you clarify the situation for us Jim?
 |
| One of the many spectacular glass paintings Jim executed for WDRtE. |
JD: I learned of
the misinformation only through your blog on Hammer Films. Prior to that, I hadn’t realized there was
any misinformation. My short answer is
that I did most of the glass paintings used in the film. Les Bowie or his company did the final shot
in the film. No other paintings by Les
appear in the film, unless he helped
Brian Johnson, who did the insert shots of the rising sun and the
forming moon at the Bowie facility. Ray Caple collaborated with me on one glass
painting and did another entirely himself.
I did the composite photography.
The very wide establishing shot of the sand tribe village was done for
me by the Shepperton matte department. I
don’t remember the name of the artist who did the painting. That painting and the composite were very
good.
 |
| Two different matte paintings executed by Jim for a particular shot in WDRtE. The first volume of Jim's memoir goes into extreme detail on the making of WDRtE (and is almost a book in it's own right). |
Q: That other artist was probably Doug Ferris as I think he’s
included it in his filmography. I
was always under the impression that WDRtE was a stressful experience for you –
having to wear so many hats. How much
scheduling pressure was there to pull off so many stop motion, matte and
process shots?
JD: The problem
wasn’t having to wear so many
hats. Not being allowed to wear many
hats is what creates stress. The
problem was not having enough time to plan and budget the production. Six weeks is not enough time to plan a film
with over 125 effects shots—particularly when, at the
time I joined the film, the
script still needed much alteration to make things feasible. There was enormous pressure, due to the
addition of over twenty unplanned glass paintings. The original plan was to have two or three. Then, a high-speed water miniature sequence
that I was told was scheduled to be filmed in a tank at Shepperton ended up
being filmed by me in stop-motion because the cost of the tank lighting crew
proved to be too expensive for the producer’s budget. The delay that followed was not due to the
stop motion but to the numerous
location-scouting trips I was required to go on in an attempt to find a body of
water where we could film in sunlight.
Eventually I refused to keep looking and did the shots with stop motion
and rear projection. And so on, and so
on.
 |
| Foreground glass painting and stop motion set up for a scene ultimately deleted. |
Q: Ray Caple is
a bit of an enigma for me. I tried to do
a profile on his career in one of my blogs, though information is hard to come
by. He apparently started as Les Bowie’s
apprentice at age 15 and did much of Bowie’s
painting on the Hammer films, always without credit. Ray was reportedly a very private and
insecure fellow who preferred to do all of his own camerawork and compositing
at his home studio. Can you tell us more
about your interactions with Ray?
JD: Well, I liked Ray a lot. I wish Al Whitlock had recommended him
sooner. I think we would have had fun
working on the film. Ray didn’t seem
insecure to me. However, at the time of
WDRtE, Ray was involved in some serious life problems, and I don’t think he was
able to give his full attention to the work he did for me.
Q: Ray was one
of those all too familiar uncredited matte artists for much of his career, with
I think THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
being his first on screen credit billing.
Brian Johnson told me that Ray was an amazing painter and someone with a distinctly ‘Welsh’ sense of humour. His ‘Fortress of Solitude’ painting for
SUPERMAN is one of my favourites.
JD: Yes, and
other paintings of Ray’s I saw later were VERY impressive.
Q: The workload
on WDRtE was great and you were forced more or less to seek assistance with
some of the mattes and other effects shots.
Among the people you sought the services of was Peter Melrose who had
learned the artform alongside Al Whitlock and Cliff Culley back at Rank Studios
in the very early fifties. Could you
comment on Peter and his brief tenure on your film?
JD: The short
answer is: Peter was a good artist—very professional. He started a painting for me using the same stage at Bray Studios that I was using. The producer laid him off during the
Christmas holiday to save money—thinking she could rehire him later. Peter was offered NICHOLAS AND
ALEXANDRA. He accepted that assignment
and we lost his services. This started
my ‘never ending’ quest for other matte artists.
Q: Peter was an
occasional matte artist at Shepperton, alongside Gerald Larn and Doug
Ferris. Much of his work was as a
freelancer who hired Wally Veevers’ shop and equipment for his projects. His work on Polanski’s FEARLESS VAMPIRE
KILLERS was phenomenal, with his multi plane massive pullback title shot being
a real eye opener. Did you manage to see
that shot?
JD: I saw the
film but don’t remember the shot.
 |
| WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH beach set piece, with Jim's glass painting seen at Bray. |
Q: You also met
with artist Bob Cuff didn’t you? At the
time Cuff was painting with Caple and others on the huge matte filled western MACKENNA’S GOLD and all of the mattes were 65mm
shots. Do you recall that visit?
JD: Yes, but I
didn’t realize Ray Caple was working on MACKENNA’S
GOLD.
Q: I heard
somewhere that Whitlock was initially approached to supply the many mattes for
that film but had a major disagreement with either the director J.Lee Thompson
or the production designer Geoffrey Drake over the bizarre script concepts
where the sun rises over the valley and they wanted the shadows to become longer
and longer the more the sun went up, which of course is ridiculous. I think Whitlock’s own motto “never paint a lie” came into play here?
JD: Exactly
right. The entire film was based on a
colossal misconception. I also thought
the production design was terrible, but then I haven’t seen the film for many
years—might have a different impression now.
Q: Just getting
back to WDRtE, I haven’t seen that in a long while and can’t find it on DVD,
but I recall the stop motion as being terrific.
You featured some fairly complex set ups as I recall, with multi-
element composites, such as the beach sequence.
JD: Thank
you. The most “multi”-element shot was
the establishing shot of the sand tribe village, as seen from the sea. I took
that one to the Shepperton matte department for painting and compositing. For that shot I had filmed four elements.
I combined the plesiosaur and one close shot of the village, then gave
the Shepperton department that ‘precomp’, plus two other shots of villagers
moving in the village set, plus a shot of the ocean I made in the Canary
Islands. They blended it
all together with their painting, using miniature rear projection. They did a good job of it, but I couldn’t use
them on the other shots, because those had to be started and finished ‘in
situ’, as part of the animation set-ups.
Q: Now, I hope
this isn’t treading on sacred ground Jim, but do the words “Unfair to men in Dino suits” register with you … Tom Scherman…a foam rubber dinosaur suit and
your Cascade cohorts at an airport? Any
comment?
JD: Ha, ha,
yes, A bunch of my friends met me when I
returned to the U. S. A.
following WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH.
I remember the dinosaur suit made by Tom Scherman, but I’d forgotten the
protest sign until you reminded me. The
camaraderie of those days was wonderful.
 |
| A painting of a girl on a giant lizard was part of Jim's conceptual art for HIERO'S JOURNEY, a Columbia film, based on the novel by S. Lanier, that was not put into production. |
Q: WDRtE saw
your second Academy Award nomination for special visual effects. Did you see your picture as likely to take
home the Oscar or was it a case of ‘bigger studio, more clout’ for the Disney
co-nominee?
JD: I thought
WDRtE might have a chance, but I had to overcome some problems caused by Warner
Bros desire to have ZEPPLIN win.
Q: I
never knew ZEPPELIN had been put forward?
Some good model work by Wally Veevers as I recall?
JD: Yes,
ZEPPELIN was submitted. I remember
thinking the effects looked good. My
frustration was that the editor at Warner’s didn’t want to cut the WDRtE reel
for submission, because Warner’s wanted ZEPPLIN to win. Nor did Warner’s do anything to promote WDRtE
for the award. Someone (I suspect Al
Whitlock) paid for trade-paper ads after the film was nominated.
Q: I liked the
matte work in BEDKNOBS, but I’ve a real passion for Disney’s effects work
anyway. I think WDRtE was the better
film though and had a good chance at Oscar time.
JD: There were
some who agreed with you.
 |
| From a commercial for the not-yet-constructed Texas Commerce Bank. The clouds and sky are rear projected and 'colorized' from a black and white separation. There is a small area of live action at the lower right (the church and parking lot. There is another glass behind the main building, on which Jim painted the iron girders of the building. Filming in reverse, the foreground painting was scraped off in sections joined by in-camera dissolves. This revealed the iron work, which was also scraped off in sections connected by dissolves, slightly trailing the building's 'skin'. This was not a job for the faint of heart. Jim's wife Karen couldn't stand to watch. It all worked fine, and the building appeared to 'grow' upward, in a stylized way. |
Q: The effects
committee made some strange judgement calls in those days. Do you know who actually made up the VFX
committee? I ask because I’ve read some
scathing reports of just how the AMPAS
operated. A wonderful Howard Lydecker
picture FLYING TIGERS with John Wayne was a nominee in the early 40’s and
apparently at the Academy screening of the fx showreel, Farciot Eduoart who was
a member of the board of governors dismissed the miniature effects out of hand
to Howard Lydecker as not even being miniatures, rather real airplanes and a
waste of his time, which so incensed the Lydecker brothers that they stormed
out of the projection room.
JD: Because I was
a member of the nominating committee, I did know who the members were when
WDRtE was nominated, but it’s not really relevant. There have always been problems of perception
and politics within the academy. Some of Al Whitlock’s mattes for SHIP OF FOOLS
were dismissed as miniatures. Through
the years, there have been many changes in the way the AMPAS worked with regard to effects awards. As I’m sure
you know, originally the award was given in the name of the film that
won, not to the creator(s) of the visual effects. For many years the entire academy membership
voted on the effects award (after it had been nominated by the committee). I’m told that there were some influential
members of the committee who were so upset that WDRtE failed to win that they
got the rules changed for a while so that only the committee members could vote
for the award. The feeling was that the
general membership would always vote for the more crowd-pleasing film rather
than the film with the best effects.
There had always been pressure to drop the effects award
entirely because it (and some other technical categories) were perceived as
slowing down the presentation show.
Eventually the Academy somewhat achieved that goal for a time by having
the effects awards removed from the main event. The technical awards were
presented at a separate,
earlier event (which I referred to as “The Children’s Table”), then tape of
that event was edited into the televised awards presentation. I was lucky that I was nominated twice before
those changes took place, I was permitted to attend the the main event both
times.
Back to your point about Farciot Edouart and the Lydecker
brothers: Some of the committee members seemed to have a very limited
perception of things. On the other hand
some were very aware of what was
going on. I guess that’s the nature of a committee.
Q: The odd
choice of winning sub-categories often gets me.
Prime example was BEN HUR which took home the effects Oscar but only for
miniature, process and physical effects – with the matte art category
omitted, yet this clearly was the most substantial and worthy effects
contribution in the film overall. Your
thoughts Jim?
JD: I think the
introduction of the Petro Vlahos color-difference blue-screen system was
equally important. Of course a film like BEN HUR could not have been made
without matte paintings (or, alternatively, hanging miniatures). So, when the matte paintings were omitted, I
suppose the implication was that they were not good examples of the craft,
which does seem to be perplexing. As to the categories: There was a
point system. Categories got eliminated
if they didn’t get enough votes, even though the film might have enough
combined votes to qualify for a nomination.
For years, there was no category for stop-motion animation, and it was
classed as “miniatures.” After the award
for TOM THUMB went to only Tom Howard (bypassing Wah Chang and Gene Warren),
the apparent unfairness led to lobbying that resulted in having stop-motion
animation included as a nominatable category.
When 7 FACES OF DR. LAO was nominated, my name was entered in the stop
motion category, with other Project Unlimited and MGM people entered in other
categories. Only the animation received
enough votes to qualify. That meant that
if the film had won, Wah Chang and others would not have received the
award. That, too, seemed unfair.
 |
| Jim's matte of the Clipper for the television series TALES OF THE GOLD MONKEY was one of numerous collaborations between him and former Cascade colleague David Stipes. |
Q: Of
course, and you’ll agree with me I’m sure, DARBY O’GILL’s inexplicable absence from that illustrious line up of Oscar winners
(or even as a damned nominee at
least) is a crime against recognized excellence in creativity! I cannot believe
this show missed the boat….they don’t get much better than DARBY.
JD: Now that you mention it, that must be the most egregious oversight of them all. Perhaps Fox had a bigger block of voters than
Disney, resulting in JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH being the runner up—BEN
HUR was the obvious choice for first place, in terms of the politics. The JOURNEY effects were nice, but not
groundbreaking. Then again, there was no
AMPAS category for “great
leprechauns.” They weren’t
opticals. They weren’t miniatures. They were…
too mind-boggling to categorize.
So what could one vote for? Matte
paintings, of course, but that’s not enough to take the award.
Q: While on
‘Oscar injustices’, one of the effects boys on NEVER ENDING STORY-PART 2, Steve
Begg, mentioned an occasion where he observed Al Whitlock and Derek Meddings on
the set, where Whitlock said to Meddings “You
were robbed mate”, apparently in reference to Derek’s excellent miniature
and optical effects for JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN being rejected by
the effects selection committee some two decades earlier in favour of the
Hollywood space opera MAROONED, which to everybodys amazement actually took
home the statue. The manner in which Al
casually commented suggests to me that it had possibly been a running ‘joke’
between the two effects giants for years.
JD: When Doug
Trumbull’s SILENT RUNNING failed to qualify in the projection process category,
I said “Doug, you were robbed.” When Randy Cook was prevented from making an
acceptance speech, Robert Redford said to Randy “You were robbed, pal.”
There seems to be a lot of ‘robbing’ going on at the AMPAS, but those
are always subjective views.
 |
| A shot that Jim liked but which he did over for some reason for the tv show BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE 'Seven Keys to Singapore' episode. |
Q: Your feelings
on the ludicrous AMPAS decision with the De Laurentiis version of KING KONG
have been well documented. Just before
we move on, do you have any last word on that highly questionable event? The mere thought of dual winners was
incredible, not to mention outright misinformation on giant mechanical apes.
JD: I’m not sure that having
two winners was, in itself, incredible, but those two…? The nominating committee chose not to
nominate KING KONG. After some
“pressure” from the De Laurentiis camp, the Board of Governors decided to
override the nominating committee’s recommendation. That is the prerogative of the Governors, but
it would have been nice if they had told us before we read about the KONG award
in the newspapers.
Re the mechanical Kong:
When I was asked to come in for a discussion re the effects for KONG, I
told John Guillermin, the director, that there were several ways that the giant
ape could be done and that each had strengths and weaknesses, but that the only
way that would not work was a
full-size mechanical Kong. Guillermin
said, “We have no intention of doing
that.” Later, I was on the set (as
an extra) when the full-size Kong broke down and the shooting was
cancelled. After the film was released,
John Guillermin was quoted as saying, “They
told me it would walk down Fifth Avenue.”
Q: In
it’s favour, John Barry’s exquisite main title theme for KONG was
sublime and among his best scoring work ever… but oh my God did I hate
that art direction with a vengeance!
Talk about a crude high school stage set for Skull Island! Pitiful Jim…just
pitiful!
 |
| Conceptual art for a proposed film project DAGAR |
Q: Any idea of
just what the other titles were which were in selection that year that never
made the grade? I think there were five?
JD: I don’t
remember.
Q: Didn’t KONG
matte artist Lou Litchtenfield work with you at one time? I’m most interested in learning more about
Lou.
JD: Lou and I didn’t actually work together. When I was in
charge of the effects department at Cascade Pictures, I asked Lou to paint a
matte that needed to be completed during the time that I was scheduled to be on
vacation in Europe. I knew I could relax with Lou on the job, due to his years of experience. I liked Lou. He was always well-dressed and
soft-spoken. I thought of him as the ‘gentleman matte artist’. Of course he was more than just a matte artist.
Q: I’ve
heard that too. Matthew Yuricich said
that when Lou was loaned out to MGM to paint mattes for AN AMERICAN IN PARIS he
wasn’t even allowed to view the rushes of his own matte shots – such was the
regime under Newcombe. I’m told by Craig
Barron that even after Lou’s very long career he never managed to save a single
matte painting.
JD: Late in Lou’s life, I asked him whether he was willing to do a
filmed interview. He agreed, but the
producer failed to follow through. Then
Lou died. Very sad—a missed opportunity.
Q: Lou had an
extensive background in film going back to GONE WITH THE WIND as a sketch artist, and later in matte work on MIGHTY JOE
YOUNG and a lot of Warner Bros pictures.
JD: I hadn’t
heard about Lou’s GONE WITH THE WIND work.
I believe Lou was, for years, in charge of the effects department at
Warner’s, including second unit filming and all other types of effects.
 |
| Glass painting in progress and the final invisible result as seen in THE SHADOW RIDERS. |
Q: I can sadly
report that two of Lou’s more recognized 70’s glass paintings were accidentally
destroyed in a matte storeroom mishap at Van der Veer Photo Effects. The Skull Island wall painting from the ’76
KING KONG and the one of the Saturn V rocket on the launch pad from CAPRICORN
ONE both hit the floor loudly and shattered into a million pieces when persons who shall remain nameless got a
little too careless one day. Upon
hearing the almighty ‘explosion’ Frank Van der Veer rushed in with a loud“What the hell was that?”, with
which the dazed, accident prone perpetrator responded in all sincerity“I can glue it back!”. Frank and his assistant Barry Nolan just
cracked up laughing despite it all. The
poor employee not only had to clean the mess up but was required to clean
Frank’s Oscar each and every day for a time.
That’s a true story, told to me by the unfortunate fellow at the centre
of it himself who has never lived it down.
JD: That’s funny
but sad. Van der Veer used lightweight
aluminum frames for their mattes. So did
I from about 1977 onward. However, I
think that if Lou’s paintings had been mounted in heavy wood frames of the type
used by Al Whitlock, they might have survived the impact.
Q: The
fellow in the middle of that referred to the matte glasses as ‘shower doors’.
JD: They
weren’t actually shower doors, but they were made by a company that made shower doors. The glasses were framed using aluminum
shower-door moldings with vinyl gaskets that cushioned the glass (but
apparently not enough).
 |
| The gigantic painting for PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT which sadly was left behind once filmed, no doubt due to it's immense size and fragility. |
Q; Among the
freelance jobs you did after WDRtE was that amazing zoom out matte shot for the
abysmal Richard Benjamin picture PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT. I believe the painting measured some 12 feet
across. Was that matte executed at Film
Effects of Hollywood? Do you still have
that beautiful painting by any chance?
JD: That matte
was executed on a stage on Western Avenue
that I rented. Film Effects of Hollywood
was not involved in that matte shot. I
got the job due to a recommendation from Al Whitlock. The production designer for PORTNOY was Al’s
friend Bob Boyle. I no longer have the painting. I left it at the rental facility.
 |
| Castle matte shot from EQUINOX |
Q: Typically, do you photograph all of your own mattes – both
plate and composite?
JD: During WDRtE
and then from about 1975 onward, I have photographed almost all my mattes. I photograph the plates too, when can get
away with it, which is not often, due to union regulations. In those cases, I try to be on hand to
‘guide’ the set-ups. Often I supplied
one of my registration cameras to the Director of Photography for the
production. Some of the paintings I have
done were for live-action scenes that had already been photographed before I
got the matte assignment.
 |
| Full painting of the fort at sunset for the unfinished WEST OF KASHMIR. For the actual shot, there was a hole scraped in the fort wall, into which Jim projected a horse tethered in front of the fort. The matte 'hole' has been painted in for this photo. |
Q: I’m intrigued
as to how you became involved with the Bond film DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER,
especially with it being the ‘odd man out’ effects wise, from the rest of the
series with an entirely new roster of effects people instead of the usual EON
Films regulars John Stears, Cliff Culley or Derek Meddings. This time around the visual effects were
split between the UK
with Wally Veevers and the US
with Albert Whitlock and yourself brought on board to supply one sequence. Can you tell us how this came about?
JD: Not a clue,
mate. Al asked me to help him with some
work at Universal, and it turned out to be DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER (plus the
“Gunsmoke TV series).
Q: There were
several totally invisible Whitlock mattes in that film aside from those big
missile battery shots. Did you happen to
see any of those in preparation?
JD: Yes, most of
them, including The Whyte House shot with the moving outside elevator.
 |
| The spectacular 'City of Light' matte with effects overlays from THE DAY TIME ENDED. Jim wasn't terribly happy with the shot as it was done at a time prior to him having the equipment to print his own plates, though he did tell me the animated monorail seen in the distance helped to sell the effect. |
Q: I must be the
only one in the world with this, but I often comment: “Music maketh the matte” – where in this example John Barry’s mesmerising
score (“007 and Counting” on the soundtrack album for any other movie score
buffs like me) totally sells Whitlock’s missile warhead mattes . That particular visual and accompanying audio
has stuck with me ever since seeing the film in 1971 with my father.
JD: I agree that
music is very important to films and
visual effects. Try to imagine KING KONG without Max
Steiner’s score. I think the pterodactyl sequence in WDRtE would have
been far more effective if it had been scored.
Q: You
are so on to it Jim…. A
masterpiece of film scoring. The Steiner
score together with those Larrinaga jungles will live on in my psyche
forever. Unforgettable.
Some of that same score pop up
again in other RKO shows, did you know that?
I think BACK TO BATAAN is one? As
an aside, back in “the day” when I first saw KONG here on TV in the early 70’s
I recorded the whole film onto my Dad’s old AIWA reel to reel tape recorder and
would re-play this ‘film’ audio over and over – knowing all the dialogue, music
cues and Murray Spivack’s sound fx cuts perfectly! Now if
only I had approached high school math and science with such gusto………….. My
parents never forgave KONG.
JD: I
had similar ‘parental’ problems. Isn’t
some of the Steiner KONG score also heard in the Randolph Scott LAST OF THE
MOHICANS? I have a vague recollection
that it is.
 |
| One of three paintings executed by Danforth for a Dodge Monaco commercial. The idea here is that there is a road from New York to Monaco in the South of France. The road is a VistaVision projection. Ocean plates were added on either side of the road and Jim did a slight tilt down as the car approached. |
Q: There was a
time where you worked in the 20th Century Fox effects department, I
think around 1970. Could you tell us a
little about the project and some of your memories of what was one of the
industry’s proudest photographic effects departments?
JD: Howard
Anderson had purchased the Fox Effects facility (as it had done with the
RKO-Desilu-Paramount effects facilities).
I was hired by Howard Anderson to handle miniatures for a TV movie
entitled EARTH II. Then Howard
discovered that the IATSE (union)
wouldn’t permit me to work on the miniatures, so Howard assigned me to be the
effects co-ordinator. I communicated
between the Fox miniature department and Art Cruickshank, who was handling the
photographic aspects of that show for Howard.
We also did some of the work at MGM where Ed Hammeras was handling
process projection, along with Carroll Shepphird.
At Fox, in addition to Art Cruickshank, there were Bill
Abbott and Matt Yuricich, plus printer operator Jack Caldwell and assistant
Eddie Hutton (with whom I had previously worked at Film Effects of Hollywood).
 |
| An odd matte shot assignment for DOMINICK AND EUGENE. Said Jim: "The object was to take a shot of the boys' room and put carefully-arranged covers on the bed at the left, which had been filmed unmade. This also required cleaning up a small amount of the carpet, as I recall". |
Q: Matt
Yuricich remembers you there as being “that
kid with the front projection” – or words to that effect.
JD: Well, this “kid’ was thirty years old, but it’s nice that Matt
remembers me.
When I was at Fox I tried
to be a responsible employee, with the result that I didn’t do what I probably
should have done (posterity-wise), by which I mean slipping away to explore the
recesses of the Fox effects department—a missed opportunity.
There were some old paintings lying around. I remember only one in particular—a full
‘painting’ of the Eiffel Tower
at dusk, which was a black and white photo enlargement that had been thinly
overpainted with color glazes.
I was told about, but didn’t see, the Fox beam-splitter device for viewing
superimposed three-strip Technicolor black and white separations in full color,
nor did I see the special 35mm film enlarger with registration pins that
enabled several sequential frames of static scenes photographed on
motion-picture film to be superimposed to create grainless enlargements.
Bill Abbott told me of the ‘joys’ of using false-sensitized
duplicating stock in the days before later forms of duplicating negative were
produced by Eastman Kodak. In order to
get the maximum sharpness, the positions of the three color-sensitive layers
were altered from what is now the norm, and non-complimentary filters were used
to print each color layer.
During my younger days, the large backing of the Fox tank
could be seen when one drove through what is now Century
City (along with Fox’s real oil
well). I think by the time I worked at
Fox, the tank had been moved, but the oil well remained for a while.
 | |
| Upper frame: The television pilot for KUNG FU live-action exposure after it has had a black matte added in the optical printer by Bill Taylor. Note that the matte slices through the set and location without following any precise edges. Lower frame: Jim Danforth's painting double-exposed onto the latent dupe live action. (From a faded 35mm print.) |
Q: Of course Fox
had commanded the high ground on many big projects under Fred Sersen such as
THE RAINS CAME and IN OLD CHICAGO – two amazing effects films which still stand
up surprisingly well even today. Bill
Abbott worked on both of those and was still running the dept when you were
there 3 decades later – quite an epic career.
JD: It definitely was. Actually, Bill wasn’t exactly running the
department when I was there. Howard
Anderson was the ‘big boss’, with Art Cruickshank in charge below that. Bill was in an odd position that I would call
“genius emeritus.” He was doing various optical printing jobs in
an unchallenged way. I worked with Bill
briefly later on three other projects; JOHATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL, PORTNOYS
COMPLAINT, and EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC
The Fox effects department apparently didn’t have miniature
projection capabilities for compositing matte shots. When Art Cruickshank was filming a Matt
Yuricich painting for the Rod Taylor TV series BEARCATS, using black and white
separation dupes, he said that the
better way to composite the shot would be with miniature rear
projection, as was done at Disney (Art’s former long-term employer). With the separation contact dupes, parts of
the live action kept ghosting through the painting due to a phenomenon
involving bounce light inside the lens of the matte camera (this is true for
most lenses.)
|
Jim while at Cascade Pictures roughing in a painting on 'black' glass. The dark glass enables the rear projection screen to be placed close behind the painting without the projected image being washed out by the lighting on the painting. (photo courtesy of Harry Walton)
|
 |
| The completed shot for a detergent commercial—'proving' that life is sunnier for those who use the product. |
Q: In the early
seventies, among the projects you engaged in were several television shows and
tv movies with a range of matte work and other effects. You seem to have been quite heavily in demand
with other people’s shows while still trying to get several projects of your
own up and running. Could you tell us
about the shows – both made and unrealized?
JD: Unfortunately,
I was never “heavily in demand.” But
I did manage to eke out a living during this period by doing a variety of
things.
I did a matte painting for Howard Anderson for JONATHAN
LIVINGSTON SEAGULL This was a painting
about seven feet wide, done on a photo blow-up—in front of which I also
animated very small stop-motion seagulls perched on a cliff. My part of the job worked perfectly, but I
don’t think the Anderson Company ever managed to get the composite finished—one
of the experiences that made me dislike having others handle the composite work
for my paintings.
On the ‘upside’, this job was done at Anderson’s
Paramount facility, so I was able to poke around in John
Fulton’s old optical room, where there was still a box of filter set-ups and
notes left over from THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
Fulton and his optical team had installed pegs at the filter position of
the VistaVision optical printers. Small
animation cells about five inches wide were punched to fit the pegs. Each cell was designated for a particular
shot set-up and had color-correcting gels glued to it in areas that
corresponded to the position of the elements for that shot. This enabled the filter set-ups to be
precisely repeated every time a test was made or a shot composited. I discovered that some of the TEN
COMMANDMENTS shots were far more complex than I had realized.
 |
| THE TRUE STORY OF ESKIMO NELL: The frame at left shows the release print version of the matte, whereas the frame at the right shows the prior unsuccessful attempt to do the shot as a dupe-latent composite where matte line blending issues necessitated altering the black matte on the masonite by painting over it (on a cel) with white snow for the final successful version. In Volume 2 of his memoir Jim discusses ESKIMO NELL and numerous other matte assignments. |
For Film Effects of Hollywood, I did some pre-production art for a planned
film entitled THE BLACK PEARL. I don’t
think this film was made.
Also at Film Effects, I did two paintings for THE
REINCARNATION OF PETER PROUD. These were
done using the cumbersome Film Effects duping board system (the same as the Fox
system). Also at Film Effects I did
matte paintings for THE LEGEND OF ESKIMO NELL and the TV movie KUNG FU. All the matte painting jobs were done in
conjunction with Bill Taylor, whom I think attracted the attention of director
Richard Franklin and got us the ESKIMO NELL job. For the latter two jobs Bill and I avoided
the duping-board system.
 |
| Jim's original ESKIMO NELL painting prior to the additional snow on an overlying cel being added to facilitate a smoother blend. Photos courtesy of Harry Walton. |
 |
| Close detail of Jim's ESKIMO NELL matte. |
 |
| A rare close look at Jim's colour handling. |
At home, I did some
design work for a TV movie based on Asimov’s I Robot. This was being
produced by John Mantley, who had produced the seasons of GUNSMOKE for which Al
Whitlock did matte shots. Al recommended
me to Mantley. I ROBOT was canceled
after I finished one design rendering and some preliminary robot design sketches.
 |
| Multi plane glass painting for 'Gift For a King' commercial. |
Another Cascade job was for Zenith radios and required a
multi-plane shot of Neuschwanstein castle in Bavaria. I did the painting.
Also at Cascade, I did a full painting of a lunar-landing
module on the surface of the moon. This
served as the background plate for an infrared traveling matte of
astronauts. The shot was for a Fruit
Loops breakfast cereal commercial. While
I was working on this painting, Al Whitlock dropped in, looked at my
painting and said “You paint better than anyone else in this town.” I was speechless. I’m still not sure why Al would have said
that. There were many matte artists
better than I.
I also did a test for Cascade of a moving matte shot (the
Shangri-la shot).
And during this time I was
thinking about several projects of my own, including FARNSWORTH’S FOLLY, and
TIMEGATE.
 |
| Final composite of the Zenith 'Gift For a King' tv commercial. The foreground trees have been painted on a separate glass |
Q: Were you
already at Cascade Films when the infamous FLESH GORDON came along?
JD: Yes and
no. I was no longer on Cascade’s
permanent staff, but I did work for them when they needed me. Some of the FLESH GORDON paintings were
composited at a small facility Cascade had set up for me on their property, in
which I had done the Shangri-la shot. I
rented that facility for the FLESH GORDON work.
 |
| My favourite FLESH GORDON matte shot. |
I’m intrigued about your screen credit –‘Mij Htrofnad’….is there a good story behind that?
JD: Initially the film was a hard-core porno film (but with laughs). I asked the producers not to put my name on it. The producers decided to use my name spelled backwards, and said I would probably be happy later to have the credit. After the film was re-edited to ‘soften’ it, I was happier.
 |
| FLESH GORDON: Jim is seen here using a grease pencil to draw Dr. Jerkoff's rocket on the matte glass, using Greg Jein's miniature as a guide. This shows the size of the matte glasses used for that film. This painting had to match a full-size section of the hatch area, so that actors could be shown leaving the ship. |
I was originally asked to work as Mike Hyat’s assistant
animator. That wasn’t an assignment I
wanted, so I declined. Later the
production got behind, so the producers asked me to do some of the animation
for them, without Mike Hyatt’s supervision.
This wonderful crew didn’t all work together in the same
facility. Tom, Dennis, Joe Musso and Joe
Viskocil worked in a rented sudio in Eagle Rock. I did some of my matte paintings there, some
at Cascade, some at Raleigh Studios. The
animation I did was done on part of a stage at Raleigh Studios, next to the
stage where the FLESH GORDON live action had been filmed.
 |
| The smoke rising from the brazier in the FLESH GORDON throne room matte shot is the smoke element Jim shot for the plesiosaurus sequence in WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH several years earlier. |
Q: The film was
shot on 16mm wasn’t it? I’ve read that
all of the effects material was shot on 35mm.
JD: True, but
some of the animation was initially done in 16mm. Those shots were redone in 35mm.
Q: Didn’t one of
the producers take visual effects screen credit on FLESH?
JD: I think
Howard Ziehm may have.
Q: Justified
credit?
JD: Let’s
just say that without Howard the effects would probably have fallen apart. There were a lot of effects personalities
that had to be managed.
Q: I loved the
effects work, with the ‘Great God Porno’
being a real giggle. Were you involved
with any of the stop motion for that sequence?
I believe the voice over by Craig T.Nelson was an afterthought – but it
sure was hilarious.
JD: I was
involved with only some process composite set-ups, plus the animated rays fired
by the passing space ships. I animated
the rays on glass while Jim Aupperle and Rob Maine were animating the Great God
Porno. In
addition I animated all of the ‘Beetleman’ sequence.
Q: Very
‘7th Voyage’ in style as I recall?
JD: Yes,
I suppose so—except that there are no laughs in 7TH VOYAGE. I didn’t conceive or design that
sequence. Bill Hedge had directed all
the plates before I took on the animation
Q: Your glass
shots are really great in FLESH GORDON.
Can you talk a little about those, especially the long shot with those
massive trees and a river running beneath and the one with the spacecraft on
the launch pad with the moon above.?
 |
| An atmospheric painted matte from FLESH GORDON |
JD: The matte
paintings I did were inexpensive—$250 above my costs for each shot. The shot with the trees that you mentioned
was more difficult because I had to match the painted trunk to my cut-out
painting of a section of tree trunk, in front of which Dennis and Tom flew the
miniature space ship.
Another difficult shot was the tilt-down from the throne room
to the cross-section view of the drainage system, into which I added Flesh and
his friends swimming. Also tricky was
the “Royal Flush” shot, for which I had to create an expanding oval traveling matte in perspective, which I bi-packed in my projector while
compositing the shot that showed the floor opening near the actors’ feet. That shot also required me to create a floor
‘thickness’ painting that I had to expand in sync with the matte. The producers got a lot of ‘bang’ for their
buck.
 |
| Jim's flaming Swan Ship scene for FLESH GORDON |
I particularly
enjoyed painting the down angle of the palace tower that was supposed to evoke
memories of a shot of the witch’s castle in THE WIZARD OF OZ.
Q: Yeah… I liked
that shot too. What sort of time frame
was given to you to finish all of those matte shots?
JD: The film was
sort of “on again, off again” so there wasn’t much time pressure for my
work. But at those prices, I didn’t want
to spend much time on each shot.
Q: I’ve seen
some good behind the scene stills of a couple of multi plane glass shots with
miniatures. Did Joe Musso paint those?
 |
| FLESH GORDON matte shot reminiscent of MGM's 'OZ'. |
JD: Yes.
Q: The American
Trade Unions, being what they are, have been a stumbling block for you as I
understand it. How easy was it to secure
freelance effects jobs under such a regime?
JD: I had to keep
a very low profile, which made it difficult to attract jobs. Sometimes I was given overflow work from a
company with a union contract, so I suppose you could say I was a “ghost
artist.”
Q: I’m very
interested in learning about Cascade Films and your tenure there. Give us if you will, a summary of the talent
pool of personalities you worked with at that studio.
JD: The most
famous was probably Tex Avery, Head of Cascade’s animation department, formerly
an MGM cartoon director. Phil Kellison,
the head of the Cascade effects department, was formerly with Howard Anderson
and George Pal. Roy Seawright was formerly Hal Roach’s effects guru. Max Morgan
handled cell animation photography and
had formerly done animation camera work for Disney, including the very
complex horizontal multi-plane work for the Ave
Maria sequence of FANTASIA.
The Cascade effects department was known as “Stage Six”. On the Stage Six staff, at various times,
were Ralph Rodine. (who also ran the camera department for the entire studio),
Dave Allen, Dennis Muren, Bill Hedge, Mike Minor, Harry Walton, Dave Stipes,
Jon Berg, Tom Scherman, Laine Liska, Ken Ralston, Tom Corlett, Sigbert
Reinhart, and others.
Cascade had full filmmaking facilities, including four sound
stages, a large set-building ‘mill’, editorial department, sound recording
facilities, a casting department, directors, producers, an optical department,
a transportation department, plus secretaries and receptionists.
I worked there from mid 1965 until I left to do WHEN
DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH in late summer of 1968. I then worked for Cascade intermittently from
1971 through 1974, at which point I replaced Phil Kellison as head of Stage
Six. I also directed several commercials
for Cascade.
Q: David Stipes
worked with you at Cascade and on other later visual effects projects. David was telling me in quite ecstatic terms
of some of the matte paintings you made while at Cascade, with particular
mention of the ‘Shangri-La’ styled
glass shot for a Volkswagon commercial.
As David recalls it, the painting was made initially as a test shot from
which the Cascade management sold the commercial clients on the already
existing painting. Is that correct? |
| Jim's oil sketch of the Shangri-La matte. He would flop this viewpoint for the execution of the final matte after choosing the actual location where the bridge would be built and put up the small backing that covered the action of the actor on the walkway as shown in the frames below. |
 |
| The VistaVision live action element of the Shangri-La matte shot. The final effect would be a 180 degree 'panning' shot across the mountain pass, with Cascade effects staffer Laine Liska playing the part of the Ronald Colman-esque explorer. Jim explains: "We started with the camera looking through a notch toward a raging snow storm beyond (2nd projection plate). The man was visible at the left of the initial composition. He was in an area sheltered from the storm. As he turns way from the storm and walks left, the camera pans to follow him. He pauses when he sees something ahead, then strides forward. The camera pans ahead of him and zooms back slightly to show what he saw—the trail leading to the monastery and the valley below. The man then enters the scene again from the right and walks down the path. You will see a small backing at the end of the pathway. I added to this to give the effect of middle-distant mountains beyond the man. Most of the panning motion was built into the VistaVison plate. I panned the matte camera from the initial composition (two projectors) until I was copying the VistaVision plate at approximately 1:1 for four perf. This left extra image area on the 8-perf plate, left and right of what the matte camera saw, so I could have painting overlapping the projected image without obscuring the primary copied area". |
JD: More or less
correct, although I’d heard it was for a chicken
restaurant commercial. As I understand
it, what was sold was only a portion of the shot I did. The original shot was a complex pan from a
miniature snow storm seen beyond a cleft in a cliff, to follow an explorer
resembling Ronald Colman in LOST HORIZON, as he walks forward, sees something
ahead of him, then walks along a dangerous bridge-like pathway that clings to a
cliff, as he heads toward the lamasery.
My conception was good, but my execution of the painting was not.
My deal with Cascade was to do shots like this for less than
my normal rate, with the understanding that I would get an additional payment
if the shot was used commercially. I
never received any payment and only heard through the ‘grapevine’ that part of
it had been used. I don’t know which
part.
 |
| The final part of the beautiful Shangri-La matte final composite. Although not visible in this particular frame, the explorer character will come into the shot on the flimsy looking walkway at right. Jim explanation continues: "The painting of the monastery did not line up with the left side of the projection at the start of the shot, only the rock cleft lined up at the start, but we weren't yet copying the left part of the plate—only the part to the right of that.. I panned off of that initial composition until I was copying only the main part of the 8-perf projection. At that point, the pan incorporated in the background plate started. I decelerated, then stopped the pan of the matte camera so that the panning speed seemed to be continuous with the pan incorporated into the plate. When the pan on the 8-perf plate slowed to a stop (man approaching left of frame), I again started panning the matte camera, slowly increasing the speed until it matched that of the plate during the main pan. I also dollied the matte camera away from the screen and the glass to simulate a zoom back. Then I brought the matte camera to a stop, with the man still visible (but on the right of the frame). The end position of the pan incorporated into the background plate aligned with the painting of the valley. That's what I call a MATTE ON THE MOVE (and people got all excited about Disney's later Matte Scan system.) To do a shot like this, one needs a flawless rear screen (which I had)" . Incredibly, Jim was far more satisfied with his direction of the live action than the actual painted matte which he felt was too overworked in the rock cliffs beneath the monestary.. Heck, I'd hang it on my wall! |
Q: Did a similar
thing happen with David Allen’s King Kong
test stop motion footage?
JD: That was slightly
different. Dave Allen did the shot on
his own initiative, at his own expense, but using some of Cascade’s stage
space. When a King Kong-themed
commercial came along coincidentally, Dave’s footage was shown to the agency
and helped land the job. At that point
Dave was replaced as the creative force, and department head Phil Kellison took
over. The shot in Dave’s test reel was
much better photographically than the shots filmed by
Cascade.
Q: What was the
set up at Cascade? Was it what could be termed
a one stop shop for special visual
effects? Could you describe the
facilities and the connection with former Hal Roach effects man Roy Seawright
and his son Ron?
JD: The original
principals were Barney Carr and Roy Seawright.
Another ‘major player’ at Cascade was Vaughn Paul, formerly with
Universal Studios. Vaughn was the one
who seemed to run the company on a daily basis.
Ron Seawright came along later.
I previously described the facilities, but I failed to explain that
Cascade did only TV commercials and industrial films, although there was always
talk about producing a feature film.
Cascade certainly had the facilities to do so. One of the feature projects considered was
PAUL BUNYAN. Interest in that subject
followed a test I made to demonstrate an in-camera compositing system I had
devised.
 |
| Two frames and a schematic diagram of the inventive use of the Shufftan process for 16mm tests for PAUL BUNYAN |
Q: Another name
David Stipes mentioned often to me was that of Phil Kellison. Was Phil with Cloaky or Cascade?
JD: Phil was the
head of Cascade’s effects department from about 1962 or 1963 until the latter
part of 1974.
JD: I don’t think
many visual effects names got noticed because
of Cascade. I think they were at Cascade
because they had already been
noticed.
Q: Although not
a member of Cascade as far as I’m aware, visual effects cinematographer Bill
Taylor worked closely with you on several projects as I understand it, such as
ADVENTURES OF MAJOR MARS, DARK STAR and THE TRUE STORY OF ESKIMO NELL. Of course this was prior to Bill becoming Al
Whitlock’s cameraman.
JD: I don’t think
Bill worked on THE ADVENTURES OF MAJOR MARS, but certainly on the other two
films you mentioned.
Q: You seem to
have had a long association with director John Carpenter – from DARK STAR
through to THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS with several of his other pictures in
between. I take it that the relationship
is very symbiotic?
JD: Actually, my
association with John Carpenter ran from DARK STAR through to MEMOIRS OF AN
INVISIBLE MAN. I liked working with
John.
 |
| The marvellous opening shot from John Carpenter's THE THING with Jim's Earth painting, Sue Turner's miniature alien spaceship and in a few moments Peter Kuran's fantastic low-tech main title... and all to the repetitive yet haunting rythym of Ennio Morricone's score. |
Q: Among those
Carpenter films, I really liked your painted Earth which opened THE THING – “painted squeezed over a weekend” according to Cinefantastique. Wonderful motion control Sue Turner miniature
spacecraft and Peter Kuran’s sensational low tech main title perfectly
complimented by Morricone’s theme. It all looked fantastic up on the big scope
theatre screen. Did you get a screen
credit there?
 |
| A 35mm film clip of THE THING's Earth painting. |
Q: Tell us, if
you will, about the origins of your own effects house, Effects Associates. When did you start the company and what sort
of set up was it?
 |
| Jim during the CAVEMAN project. |
After CAVEMAN, I relocated Effects Associates to Van Nuys,
which was where I lived. The Van Nuys
facility was less ‘grand’—
it looked like an industrial auto-body shop from the outside. We eventually added a nice matte stand, a small effects track, and a very nice rotoscope stand that I custom made using my Bell and Howell 2709 camera.
it looked like an industrial auto-body shop from the outside. We eventually added a nice matte stand, a small effects track, and a very nice rotoscope stand that I custom made using my Bell and Howell 2709 camera.
 |
| The treasure vault painting (plus flame) for WEST OF KASHMIR in which Jim did a slight dolly-in. The flame was a projection, but reflected in from a screen at the same distance from the 'ghost glass' as the painting. That way both elements stayed together during the camera move. |
 |
| A scene from WEST OF KASHMIR that Jim directed at Effects Associates. |
 |
| A youthful Mark Sullivan |
JD: I’m still astounded whenever Mark sends me
images of things he is working on. His
work is definitely superb. Mark painted
his first professional mattes for me, starting in the summer of 1982. He worked for Dave Stipes after that. It was Dave (bless him) who suggested to Mark
that he should call me.
 |
| Among the numerous mattes Mark Sullivan executed at Effects Associates with a great deal of finesse was this superb shot from BUGSY - a shot that Jim told me he loved. |
Q: Have you had
a chance to view Mark’s marvelous 20 years
in the making MRS BURMA
stop motion short – or at least the small portion of it that’s finished? Beautiful work and very hilariously Tex Avery
inspired. I just wish Mark would finish this one.
JD: I have seen
some of it. I think it’s absolutely
marvelous. Mark has a delightfully
quirky sense of humor, and the animation and paintings are perfect.
 |
| Mark Sullivan working on a painting for the TV series BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE at Effects Associates, Inc. Both Mark and Jim worked on areas of this painting (but Jim says they didn't paint over each other's work). |
Q: David Stipes
has very fond memories of engaging Mark Sullivan, Matthew Yuricich, Sean Joyce
and yourself on some of his projects at different times. “The
good old days” I think he once called it. I don’t know where you made the
shots – maybe at Cascade - but David mentioned some terrific tests you did for
a project called A COLD WAR IN A COUNTRY GARDEN, as well as PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN.
JD: Well I have
fond memories of Dave. The test for A
COLD WAR IN A COUNTRY GARDEN was done on the same stage space I was using for
some of the mattes for FLESH GORDON. I
made an arrangement with the producers to rent back the space for a few weeks
while I did the ‘COLD WAR’ shot. Bill Taylor and I were involved in that
self-financed attempt to get work on the film.
Most of the mattes for THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLINS were
composited in my small ‘studio’ behind my parents’ garage. They were 16mm latent-image composites.
One projection composite was done at Cascade. All the shots I did for Dave were painted and
filmed at my Effects Associates facility in Van Nuys, if I remember
correctly. He sent me one of the first
jobs I did after I relocated to Van Nuys.
It really came at just the right time.
Q: According to
David, the footage you shot for COLD WAR IN A COUNTRY GARDEN was, in his words,
“an amazing demonstration of shot design
along with flawless rear screen projection compositing – just amazing design
and execution”.
JD: Thanks to Dave for his compliment. Actually there were some flaws in the
rear-screen work, caused primarily by the blotches inherent in sprayed-vinyl
rear projection screens. I had to do the
shot in three passes (repeating the tilt moves each time, with the screen
repositioned between each pass, to even out the blotches. They were less noticeable, but they still
showed. Incidentally… well not incidentally, Bill Taylor not only
made the initial contact with the producer of the film, he also was involved in
live-action plate photography and in combining several images onto single
plates, so I could get the effect of three projectors when only two were used..
 |
| Effects Associates' dual projector set up for matte painting compositing. The shot, from the tv show BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE consists of a rear projected plate of extras photographed on the backlot of Warner Bros while the second projector contains the as yet un-projected water plate. |
Q: Effects
Associates engaged in other types of visual effects in addition to matte shots
didn’t they?
JD: We did ‘everything’…
well, almost everything. I avoided doing blue-screen traveling
mattes. I handed those off to optical
companies that specialized in that work—Illusion Arts when they were available,
or Van der Veer. I also didn’t do pyro
work myself. When I needed that done, I
worked with Sue Turner or Joe Viskocil.
They had the necessary state licenses (in addition to being skilled).
Q: This would
have been right on the cusp of the boutique effects houses popping up
everywhere – Dream Quest, Illusion Arts, VCE as well as the bigger outfits like
Boss Films. Was it tough going in that
competitive climate, or were each of the smaller effects shops able to survive
on their own niche specialty – such
as Illusion Arts with matte art and Stetson Visual Services on miniatures?
JD: Actually, I
was doing free-lance work prior to the creation of Effects Associates and prior
to the advent of many of the boutique effects houses. I wasn’t aiming for the Big Shows but sometimes I stumbled into them. When Warners asked me to be effects
co-ordinator on THE HERETIC, I ended up having to do some of the work
myself. I filmed ‘locusts’ in my
backyard (vibrating grass seed), and did a bunch of cell-animated locusts, some of which several of my effects friends helped me
paint. The animated locusts
appeared—almost subliminally—over close shots of Max Von Sydow and other
actors. Usually, when I got work on one
of those big shows it was a referral from a larger, overloaded company. In the case of MEMIORS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN,
John Carpenter asked me to do several shots,
but most of the work on that show was done by ILM
 |
| Another stunning painting from BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE. Mark Sullivan painted this matte, with Jim helping out on the palm trees. Aside from the many mattes I've seen, I'd never heard of this show before. |
Q: That’s very interesting Jim…I had no idea you were involved
with those excellent locust shots.
I’ve been told that the smaller operations survived a lot better than
the big ‘magic factories’ where the overheads were massive. I’m told that one particular high flying firm
priced themselves out of the effects market completely by charging clients
astronomical sums just to run showreels and meet prospective clients.
JD: I’m not sure what firm you are referring
to. I was told
that Doug Trumbull got so tired of going to meetings that resulted in no paying
jobs that he started charging for meetings.
I didn’t blame him. Much of the
effort we made at Effects Associates resulted in no paying jobs. For a King Kong-themed commercial, I flew to San
Francisco (at my own expense) to
photograph the planned locations, then did retouched-photo story boards. I had a producer friend at Paramount
do the budget (which included the costs for dropping a full-size car into a San
Franciso intersection, and I arranged for the Talmantz aviation company to do
the bi-plane fly-bys with full-size planes.
All this because the ad agency had said: “If you aren’t going to do this absolutely first-class, don’t even
bid.” When they got my bid, they
said it was too high, and that they had never intended to use Effects
Associates; they just needed a comparison bid.
The company that did the actual commercial filled a stage with a miniature
set and had an actor in a gorilla costume walk around in it —not my idea of first
class.
Q: The
firm I referred to did sensational work on Woody Allen’s masterpiece ZELIG and
later on PREDATOR.
JD: Normally, we tried to be very reasonable in
our pricing. I usually charged
approximately one tenth of what ILM was charging for a matte shot—that’s about
all my customers could bear. When I was
asked to do a few matte shots for MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, I told John
Carpenter that I had given him low prices on his independent films but that I
wanted to get the going rate for this big Warner’s project. I think John knew that we had almost gone out
of business doing the optical, animation and matte work on THEY LIVE at bargain-basement prices, so John said
“Okay.” And, Karen got to produce a second-unit shoot in Utah
for that film. Sometimes things work
out.
 |
| The sprawling mini series THE BLUE AND THE GRAY featured some fine work from Danforth. This courthouse matte shot consists of actors Geraldine Page and John Hammond on the Arkansas location, a painted courthouse. miniature flag and separate smoke elements. |
Q: At it’s peak,
what size operation was Effects Associates and how many staff did you employ?
JD: There were
two ‘peaks’. Initially the Westlake Village
facility was in a moderate size modern industrial building with nice offices —about 4,000 square feet of space,
as I recall. I had six employees, plus
sub-contract machinists. The Van Nuys iteration of Effects Associates, Inc.was
2,400 square feet of space. Our
permanent staff consisted of me and Karen, except during the time Mark Sullivan
was with us. The number of employees
increased as needed, For an Effects
Associates ‘underwater’ miniature shoot, we had to run the camera dolly tracks
out the door, into the parking lot, and film at night. We had about eight employees on that job.
For one project we probably had 20 employees, including the actors, camera and
sound crew, and wardrobe and make-up people on our payroll. That was for our subsidiary company Noonday
Sun Productions.
 |
| The first of two versions of the same shot from THE BLUE AND THE GRAY. According to Jim: "This version with the sinking side-wheel steamer was rejected by the producer because it was "too drawy." He was right—not impressionistic enough. When the foreground cannon fired, it was necessary for me to scrape away the painting, so the smoke wouldn't be obscured. the scrape-off is a little crude in this first take, but in the final version it is much better feathered' around the smoke puff". |
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| The final version with modified painting. This was a two-projector shot. The entire width was visible on the matte stand. The matte camera simply panned across the composition. Of course all the moves had to be repeated for the aerial explosions and the flames in the city. The dark smoke from the mortar boat funnels was printed onto the plate, as was the dark smoke rising from Vicksburg. |
 |
| The smoke and fire elements. |
Q: Of course
it’s all different now. Spread across
the globe and linked via internet.
JD: Different
and, in my opinion, no fun.
Q: It
had initially been my ambition to get into this sort of work in the mid 70’s,
but back at the time New Zealand had no film industry, let alone an effects industry, so it
all never eventuated. Now NZ has Peter Jackson
and WETA and all of that, which is world class and then some…. But the new notions of ‘desktop workstations’, vast
committee styles of visual effects interest me not in the slightest, and nor,
in most cases, do the films containing them.
I gave up reading Cinefex years ago when it all turned Mac’s, bytes, rendering
and the rest of it…. All the hands on
instinctive creativity has gone Jim with visual effects now so fatally over used by spotty faced film makers
who’ve learned their trade on one music video or one television commercial. I just can’t watch most of this junk nowadays.
I tried to watch AVATAR and was relieved
when it was finally over whereby I put on Coppola’s brilliant THE CONVERSATION followed
by John Frankenheimer’s astonishing SECONDS to remind myself of real
film making at play……. Anyhow, I
digress….
 |
| Mark working on the filming of a waterfall plate. Effects Associates used this for several BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE shots (and other projects) Mark built the cliff. |
Q: You were
fortunate in 1980 to join one of your idols (for want of a better word) Ray
Harryhausen on his CLASH OF THE TITANS.
Much has been documented on the animation aspects but I’d love to talk
with you about the methods Ray employed for his matte and scenic
composites. Ray I think, has never been
overly enthusiastic about matte paintings in his films, rather tries to utilize
scale models and perspective foreground tricks, would that be correct?
JD: I think
so. He got some really good results by
using miniature in the way that painted mattes would normally be used. One advantage was that equipment wasn’t tied
up while a painting was being done. The
miniature was simply fused with the background using Ray’s usual
rear-projection split matte techniques.
On some of the shows for which Ray used painted mattes, the
results were not good. I’m thinking of
MYSTERIOUS ISLAND and THE VALLEY OF GWANGI.
With JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, the results were better.
 |
| On this shot, Jim said to me: "Okay, mate, here it is—the only matte I ever did for a New Zealand TV commercial: BP Petroleum for New Zealand. It's not my best painting, but shooting the Low-Altitude Parachute Extraction drop on the salt flats of Utah was interesting—especially when they lost the load by mistake and heavy equipment crashed to the ground. The idea was that planes were bringing pre-fabbed petrol stations to rural areas of New Zealand. Does New Zealand even have terrain like that?" (Pete- "No") |
Q: On CLASH Ray
worked closely with British matte artist Cliff Culley and his assistant Leigh
Took to create large establishing shots – mostly I understand as split screened
miniatures and a few only as glass shots.
JD: I wasn’t
aware of the glass shots, but then I was on CLASH for only a little over three
months, near the end of the production.
I believe it was Brian Smithies who did the split-screened miniature
composites.
Q: Cliff’s
assistant, Leigh Took told me a very funny story about that temple miniature
which gets devastated by the tidal wave.
They had spent days setting this thing up and had a huge dump tank
positioned above it on the Pinewood backlot.
As things were slow going for other crew members one of the effects
grips used to sleep up in the empty dump tank – out of sight – during the day. Well, time comes when the shot is ready to go
– the now vacated tank is filled – high speed cameras rolling – it’s ‘blast
off’. All went well, the temple
collapsed and the shot was perfect….until that is the rushes were viewed the
next day. Right in mid shot was this
giant bloody ‘Twix’ candy bar wrapper floating through the deluge, which nobody
had noticed during the torrent of water.
Some very pissed off reactions, with the whole set requiring a
rebuild and and costly reshoot!!
JD: Oops!
 |
| An iconic matte shot to genre fans, George Romero's CREEPSHOW featured this memorable matte. Jim told me about the assignment: "It wasn't a shot I was involved with to any great extent. I just made the painting and did the dupe and composite. The point of this shot sub-contracted to me my David Stipes was to enhance the amount of vine growth. One challenge was to get a green vine color that was alien and unnatural without it being so 'pure' that it looked implausible. The painting and the location scene were composited on my rear-projection system. The dark area on the right is not a missing element; it was a natural result of the sun position in the original photography." |
Q: Ray used
mattes quite extensively back on MYSTERIOUS ISLAND but I’ve heard that he
wasn’t terribly happy with those?
JD: I certainly
hope he wasn’t. But then a big part of the problem was Ray’s designs—same
problem with THE VALLEY OF GWANGI. It
might have been better to give the artist some reference photos and then describe
the mood that was needed. That’s what I
did when I had the Shepperton matte department do a shot for WDRtE .
With THE VALLEY OF GWANGI there was also the “JOHNNY TREMAIN
problem.” It’s pretty hard to have just
one shot that is so different from any other in the film without it standing
out in an undesirable way.
Q: Ray’s
GWANGI matte artist Gerald Larn told me he
too had wished GWANGI would have utilized more mattes to expand the
storytellers’ canvas. Gerald was given a
huge stack of photos of, I think, Monument
Valley by Ray for reference of textures and form. I believe mattes also were used in the arena
sequence later on, mostly split screens by Doug Ferris to ‘fill the seats’.
While on GWANGI I consider that exterior of the burning Cathedral miniature split
screen to be a masterpiece.
JD: If Willis O’
Brien had done GWANGI, it would have had many glass paintings. They would have become the ‘reality’ of the
lost valley. The single painting Ray
used clashed badly with the location photography. I remember that painting sitting in the
Shepperton matte department when I was working on WDRtE. It made me worried about giving them any of
the matte work, but the one they did for me was just fine.
Q: Some nice
‘storybook’ artwork in MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, I believe by Ray Caple and Les Bowie
– with a nice KONG-esque log over the
ravine glass shot which was entirely painted with actors added via sodium
matte. I think what damaged the mattes
in that film was the astonishing amount of grain and evidence of duping – quite
extreme in comparison to most similar work.
I tend to think that the damage possibly came about as the mattes often
occurred during dissolves, with an additional dupe being required to obtain that
optical on top of the already duped painted comp. Would that be about right?
JD: I never
noticed the grain, just the bad designs and washed-out color. Of course, as you say, re-duping a dupe
greatly increases the grain. When I did
mattes for TV shows where the work-print was ‘locked’ and showed that there was
to be a dissolve to the next scene, I sometimes made the dissolve to the next
scene, as an integral part of the matte composite. To do that, one needs the co-operation of the
producers, the editor, and the post-production department. But first, I had to know
that the improvement in quality was worth campaigning for.
 |
| One of Jim's mattes from THE DAY TIME ENDED. The mattes were painted squeezed and the anamorphic plates were projected with spherical lenses, allowing a sharper image quality. Disney Studio's career optical effects cinematographer Bob Broughton once said "Cinemascope and all her variants was like shooting film through the bottom of a soda bottle and a nightmare for optical guys to contend with." |
Q: Of course
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS had a few, with the treasure vault under Talos being a
favourite of mine. I believe you were
fortunate to view that painting in Les Bowie’s studio some years after the
fact?
JD: Yes, that was
among the collection of paintings the Les had kept as a sort of portfolio of
his work. I noticed that a photo from a
magazine or some other source had been glued down on the painting to add to the
jewels.
Q: 7th
VOYAGE OF SINBAD had two mattes, one of which was ‘borrowed’ from an old Columbia
programmer – the one of Baghdad. I’m certain a shot of the headland with the ship coming
around is a glass shot – or maybe I’m off track here? FIRST MEN IN THE MOON also had some nice work by
Bob Cuff and Ray Caple.
JD: I remember only the stock-shot Baghdad matte painting
in THE 7th VOYAGE OF SINBAD. I originally thought the other shot that looked as
though it might be a matte painting was actually a split-in miniature of
Colossa. The shot Ray referred to as a plastic model ship actually was later replaced by the stock matte painted shot of the headland and the ship. You are completely correct on that shot being a matte shot, Peter.
Q: I think things really picked up for Ray when
he brought the great Spanish effects craftsman Emilio Ruiz del Rio
on board for a few shots for THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD. That wonderful foreground painting of the
walled city is one of my all time favourites, and even has a camera move upon
it while being shot latent image…. You can’t ask for much better than that can
you Jim?
JD: I agree
completely about Emilio Ruiz del Rio. And you might be right about that
headland. Ray told me the ship was a
plastic model of the Santa
Maria.
 |
| George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD required several additional buildings added between palm trees and on right. Moving palm foliage was retained from background plate—within painted leaves around edges. In another cut, the zombies were painted out to give the effect of the same street deserted. |
Q: A constant
stream of matte and visual effect contracts appear to have come your way from
the late 70’s onward with a wide variety of genres and trick shots. I’d like to ask you about some of those, firstly the unusual request to
matte over another matte for CONAN THE BARBARIAN – a film I did not care for in any way, shape or form.
JD: For CONAN THE
BARBARIAN, I wasn’t asked to paint over another matte shot. I was given a roll of negative and asked to
add shifting rays of dawning light and show sunlight flooding over the valley
in the scene. To do this, I needed to
re-create the valley and the edges of the rocks in front of the valley as a matte painting . As I studied the scene, I realized that the
valley was already a painting. It
seemed to be a glass shot or a hardboard shot. I later learned that it had been
done first by Emilio Ruiz del Rio. His usual method didn’t make it possible to
increase the sunlight in the valley during the shot. But he probably could have figured out a way
if he’d been asked.
 |
| The best part of CONAN.....'The End' (...and Jim's very Whitlock-esque painted matte of course complete with soft split screens to facilitate cloud and light movement) |
JD: Absolutely.
 |
| Jim kindly supplied me with this never seen before out take from CONAN, and he had this to say: "Here's a weird-color frame from a faded print of my Conan test —no sun
rays yet. (Talk about a rare shot —with John Milius at the left.)
Before I get credit for a great sky: The sky is real. I went out after a
rain storm and photographed the moody sky and some mountain tops in
'scope". |
Q: It’s so
reassuring to effects fans like myself that Emilio’s honest in camera effects shots were still in
high demand, even near the end of his long life.
JD: One couldn’t
ask for more.
Q: You may like
to know that there is a biography of Emilio’s long career in progress,
and from the snippets I’ve seen it’ll be terrific and a proud part of my book
collection.
JD: Great
news. I’ll look forward to it.
 |
| BRING 'EM BACK ALIVE jungle bridge painting by Jim, with Mark Sullivan adding the foreground foliage. To aid in blending Jim would utilise plastic ivy in shots such as this. |
 |
| The final rear projection matte composite. |
Q: I read once
that when Linwood Dunn was once asked who the best matte artist around was, his
response was “Jim Danforth”.
 |
| The motorcycle is stop motion, gorge painted, waterfall flour! |
Let me give my most honest appraisal of my matte-painting
work: A few of my shots were excellent,
but only a few. Most were slightly
better than adequate. But many of my shots
were decidedly substandard when compared to the work of Al Whitlock, Peter
Ellenshaw, Mark Sullivan, Syd Dutton, Robert Stomberg, Ray Caple, and so on.
Q: During the 1980’s and beyond you found yourself painting mattes for some big ILM shows such as EWOK ADVENTURE, NEVER ENDING STORY and MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN. With Industrial Light & Magic having a large matte department, how did you become involved? Were you an actual member of the ILM staff?
JD: I was never a
member of the ILM staff. I was disappointed to see that ILM had stuck my name
in with their staff matte artists for THE NEVER ENDING STORY, even though I
did my work at Effects Associates. They got the credits right on THE EWOK
ADVENTURE; that was also a subcontract to my company. I had no connection to ILM during MEMOIRS OF
AN INVISIBLE MAN.
 |
| A beautiful photograph of Jim's magnificent NEVER ENDING STORY painting of the Crystal Valley - definitely my favourite of his mattes. This is one of five shots he painted for the popular show. |
Q: In my
opinion, your NEVER ENDING STORY crystal valley matte is magnificent, and
possibly one of your best ever glass shots.
I think it’s now at the Deutsch
Film Museum
in Berlin and I was hoping to see
it in 2008 when I was there but it wasn’t on display at the time and was stored
in the basement with several of Whitlock’s Hitchcock glass paintings, out of
sight sadly. The only matte on display
was Chris Evans’ last traditional shot for TITANIC. They did however have a large Harryhausen special
collection on display, which was great.
JD: Thank
you. The crystal valley shot is one of
the few I’m very proud of from my matte career.
Q: I love the
remarkable feeling of transparency within that NES glass painting. How did you achieve that?
JD: By studying
the way light refracts and reflects around inside glass-like shapes, then
trying to reproduce that with paint. One
of the painted crystals was actually transparent, so that I could let the boy
on the horse show through it. I used
thick glazes to create a slight distortion of the transmitted rear-projection
image.
 |
| A comped frame from a non-anamorphic 35mm print. |
JD: I used both
VistaVision and standard plates, depending on the job. For the crystal valley shot I used the
VistaVision plate that Brian Johnson had filmed (in Spain,
I think), although I reprinted the plate that ILM sent to me, because it was
not up to par. I then filmed a stream
plate in standard 4-perf.
Q: Does the
resolution stand up?
JD: The
resolution of rear projection? Yes, when
it’s done correctly. Eventually, I was
able to improve things to the point where I was getting better results on the
dupes than Disney was with their rear projection shots. Several factors helped: The most important
was my use of ‘unsharp masking’ when I printed the plates from the original
negative. This had the effect of increasing
the apparent sharpness of the plate, in addition to reducing the contrast and
slightly correcting the color, so that the plate reproduces more like the
original photography. (Disney often ran
a black and white negative print with
their color plate in the projector(s). That made it possible to photograph the dupe
so the shadow tones didn’t get too dark, without having the highlights ‘burn
out’, but it did nothing to get more ‘information’ from the negative onto the plate.)
By using a black and white positive
mask at the time I printed the plate from the negative, the color of both the
highlights and the shadows prints ‘richer’ and more within the contrast range
that can be reproduced in the dupe. In
addition to masking, I started using air-spaced camera lenses on my projectors
(No glue to burn in the intense heat).
Camera lenses are usually sharper than projection
lenses. I eventually settled on a 135mm
Leitz lens. Then I stopped using vinyl
process screens and ended up with glass
screens with a hand-applied emulsion.
Those screens were manufactured by Uniscreen. Art Cruickshank told me Disney used a product
known as “planished vinyl” sold by Cadillac Plastics. When I bought some, I couldn’t believe how
much grain and ‘hotspot’ it had. Then, for filming my paintings, I used a
Nikkor 105mm lens—one of the sharpest in the Nikkor line at that time. My final little trick was to focus directly
on the process screen. In my matte
stand, the paintings were about a foot in front of the screen. I used f
stops that kept the painting in reasonably good focus but allowed the
screen image to be slightly sharper.
Paintings are always too sharp compared to a
duped image of any kind, unless something is done to soften the painting. The
slight out-of-focus softness I used took the ‘curse’ off the paintings
and kept them from making the projection look soft in comparison. When I had to do scenes in which the screen
was immediately behind the painting (and in the same focus plane), in order to
avoid parallax during a pull-back, it was always difficult to get rid of the
harshness of the painting.
 |
| A panning composite shot from BRING 'EM BACK. ALIVE painted by Jim. The Mark Sullivan constructed waterfall plate appears in the distance (twice). |
Q: Most mattes
it would appear tended to be assembled using YCM separations as a means of
controlling colour balance and adding a degree of security over the final assembly,
with very few practitioners going the Whitlock route of latent image first
generation matte comps. Was that purely
a situation of original negative matte photography just being way too daunting
an avenue to pursue for most matte people?
JD: Too daunting today, perhaps. Some effects workers have become ‘wimps’
compared to those who worked in the film business in earlier generations. In the silent days, all dissolves and split
screens were made in the camera on the original negative. The out-going part of a dissolve was canned
up, labeled, and stored until the in-coming scene was ready to be shot—perhaps
weeks later. Sometimes several scenes
were linked together in this way. It was
the norm.
But one of the main reasons original negative, latent-image
composites went out of favor was the loss of control that occurred when studios
began to shut down their effects departments, and when directors became more in
control of filmmaking. With no one on
the crew to control the making of the original exposure, how could an original
negative matte shot be done. I was
shocked to learn that many camera assistants in the 1980s couldn’t even thread my Mitchell Standard registration
camera. In those cases (when I was on a
union shoot) the Directors of Photography had to thread
the camera instead of having the assistant do it, because they were usually
older and remembered how. We
laughed about it.
Q: I’ve read
that many of the mattes in GONE WITH THE WIND were original negative composites
shot in 3-strip Technicolor. Given that
this was 1938/39 and few Technicolor features had been made, I’d imagine this
to be an incredibly challenging operation for Clarence Slifer and Jack Cosgrove
to pull off?
JD: Not at
all. Two-color Technicolor mattes had
been done at Warner’s ten years earlier.
Walter Percy Day had done them in three-strip Technicolor the year
before for THE DRUM, so had the matte department at Warners for THE ADVENTURES
OF ROBIN HOOD. I’d say it was standard
operating procedure. The big challenge
during GWTW would seem to me to be the large number of mattes to be done.
Duping methodologies (if there had been any) would have been more time
consuming than the original-negative system.
(Although I think Cosgrove’s rear projector saved them some time.)
Q: Apparently
Technicolor had a deal where they had total control of the cameras and film
which meant that they and only they were allowed to rewind the negative
at their lab for the next pass, which would mean an unacceptable day or so
delay. Cosgrove and Slifer took it upon
themselves to pull the mags off and rewind the neg themselves in the Selznick
Studio darkroom to keep the matte production line from grinding to a halt as
the deadline was punishing.
JD: Good for
them.
 |
| The delightful painting and finished composite from THE EWOK ADVENTURE. The painting-only photograph of the glass shows one area of blending with a translucent see-through stipple. The painting was sold recently. |
Q: One aspect of
matte art and it’s subsequent camerawork which has forever fascinated me
Jim is the ‘blend’ – that hopefully
imperceptible ‘join’ between fact and fiction which can make or break a matte
shot. Could you talk a little about the
processes you have used to blend plate to artwork and the challenges you have
faced?
JD: I like your phrase “the join between fact and fiction.” The method of blending depends on the
shot. An original-negative matte is
usually a soft-focus split. The standard
procedure was to run the matte just inside
any architectural edges, so that the hard edges of a building could be painted
and didn’t need to be followed precisely by the matte. With projection shots, you have several
possibilities. Paint strokes can be
unconnected daubs of paints near the matte edge, so that areas of the
projection can be seen between the paint strokes. Disney seemed to use this approach. I tended to use a razor blade to scratch
cross-hatch lines in the paint, allowing some background to show through. In order for this to work, it was necessary
to avoid putting a heavy ‘ground’ under the painting. On one occasion, I used very transparent paint. For a scene in which it was necessary to
blend a small projected area of miniature flag and sky into a painted sky, I
used heavy diffusion on a foreground glass to mix the two sky colors together.
I suspect this is similar to what was done in the shot of Gary Cooper
standing on top of the building in THE FOUNTAINHEAD.
Q: – a shot I’ve just learned from Matt Yuricich was worked on
by Lou Litchtenfield by the way. I spend so much time studying before
and after images in my collection from old mattes, looking closely at where the
paint trails off on the original art and where the cameraman has merged things so
well in the final shot. I have scores of
ancient Jan Domela before and after Paramount mattes
dating from the late twenties onward where the blends are quite amazing.
JD: Well, given
enough time and money and skill…
 |
| One of the few surviving glass paintings that Jim still possesses - the highly detailed temple/monastery from the cheap Cannon Films (remember them?) 80's actioner NINJA III - THE DOMINATION |
Q: I’m fortunate
to own two old MGM Newcombe paintings from the late 30’s and mid 40’s
respectively. The older matte is a black
and white painting of a manor home from an unidentified W.S Van Dyke film. The artwork is interesting as it appears to
be mostly pastel crayon – a favoured technique in the Newcombe department for
decades. The detail is quite remarkable
Jim, although I’d imagine pastels to be fraught with problems camera wise such
as tiny surface lumps and reflective bumps?
JD: Lucky you! The pastels
I’ve seen seem to be very matte and not likely to reflect highlights. They probably made graduations from one tone
to another one easier to achieve than with oils. I too, have been amazed that Newcombe’s
department got such wonderful results with pastels.
Q: The black
matte on that Newcombe painting is quite bold, and passes through the painting
in a very unusual way, not conforming to any straight lines or angles. I’ve never managed to locate a composite of
the painting so I don’t know how it shaped up, but knowing Mark Davis
–Newcombe’s matte cinematographer for decades – I’d be sure it would blend
perfectly on screen. I look at those MGM
paintings each and every day in awe.
JD: First, the matte cameraman
usually wasn’t responsible for the blends—just
the dupes (if any). Al Whitlock didn’t
seem to worry much about following an edge—often going right through a
sky. On the dupe latent-image shot I did
did for KUNG FU, Bill and I ran the matte through a roof and hillside without
much concern.
 |
| Filming promotional scenes for WEST OF KASHMIR on the Effects Associates stage. That's Jim manning the camera. |
Q: I’ve seen
some beautiful Matthew Yuricich glass paintings which David Stipes photographed
and comped for THE THORN BIRDS that are wonderful studies in skillfully razor
scraped oil paint, sort of fethering
of painted edges in irregular patterns which tie in invisibly with the location
plates. The final shots are
invisible. An artform all in itself I’d
say Jim?
JD: Yes.
Q: I love the
old style soft blends where such skill was evident that soft matte lines often
ran straight across the mid frame, through trees, walls etc and yet the artists
almost always blended the painting to plate perfectly – just how, I don’t
know. A true joy to study such shots,
which of course Warren Newcombe’s unit at MGM were geniuses at.
JD: Well,
experience, plus many tests helps.
 |
| The Charles Band sci-fi show THE DAY TIME ENDED required several matte shots. The unusual glow from these structures was introduced as a second exposure over the painting. |
Q: According
to Slifer and Yuricich, veteran artist Albert Maxwell Simpson was the go to guy when it came to skilled
blending.
JD: I would trust their information more than my memory of what Lin
Dunn said about Paul Detlefsen.
Q: Some of those
don’t even seem to follow lines of
architecture, rather just ‘slice’ through the set, almost arbitrarily by
the cameraman, with the artist left to ‘make it all work’ – which most of the
time was staggeringly well done!
JD: I think
slicing through the set is the better way, in most cases, when working with
latent composites.
 |
| Another of Jim's NEVER ENDING STORY mattes - and a terrific one it is too, though the release prints were less red! |
Q: Interestingly,
so many matte blends of the fifties seem mismatched and stand out like a sore
thumb to me, whereas the forties and thirties were more often precision marry
ups by comparison. Why was that Jim?
JD: Wimps.
No, actually probably a matter of time and money.
Q: Of course,
Technicolor and Eastmancolor were not as generous in concealing matte lines,
and hues seemed to jump all over the place on occasion, but I can’t but help
feel that aside from people like Ellenshaw and Whitlock the artform hadn’t
maintained that ‘quality control’.
JD: For one thing
Whitlock and Ellenshaw were the heads of their departments at a time when most
matte shots were under the control of cameramen. But not all the older studio
matte shots were better. There is a
painting of a house in Fox’s HELLO,
FRISCO, HELLO that looks decidedly like a painting (although that’s not a
matte-line issue)..
Q: Which brings
me back to THE TIME MACHINE and the quite poor joins between Bill Brace’s glass
art and the plates. Would I be remiss to
say those were inexcusably sloppy matte comps?
JD: I’d say you
were exactly right (except that Bill didn’t paint on glass for any of he
composite shots).
 |
| The Danforth mattes far outclass the ILM mattes in NEVER ENDING STORY in my opinion. |
Q: The popular
fantasy yarn NEVER ENDING STORY was, as I understand it, a very international
affair with Brian Johnson supervising the effects in Germany,
ILM supplying mattes from California,
as well as several of your own glass shots appearing on screen. How did this situation come about Jim?
JD: I don’t know
the history of the production arrangements.
ILM sub-contracted a few shots to me.
 |
| NEVER ENDING STORY |
JD: Nice of Bill to say so. I thought so, too—if you will excuse
my immodesty. Generally my work couldn’t
compare with that of Al Whitlock and Syd Dutton, but something seemed to go
wrong on that show.
Q: Of course you
had worked with N.E.S effects supervisor Brian Johnson way back on WDRtE at
Bray. Brian, like Ray Caple and many
others was one of “Les Bowie’s boys” who found fame through Kubrick and George
Lucas.
JD: Brian
deserved the fame. And he’s a nice
fellow.
 |
| MEGAFORCE painted cliffs and sky. |
JD: Whoa, THE PRIMEVALS was a Dave Allen project.
Q: Ooops…sorry
Jim. Could have been a worse example,
like “Attack of the Crab Monsters Meet The Killer Tomatoes” or something like
that.
 |
| Schwarzennegger's COMMANDO |
ZOO SHIP was never shot, to my knowledge.
JD: I don’t think
I did any mattes for Charles Band. Oh,
wait. Did he produce THE DAY TIME
ENDED? I did four mattes for that film.
”Notable” may be the stumbling block here. I did several for a two-part TV episode
of SALVAGE 1 entitled HARD WATER. Quite a few for the
series BRING ‘EM BACK ALIVE (of which
Mark Sullivan did many). One for a TV
show called MANIMAL. One or two passed
to me by Illusion Arts for the TV series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.
 |
| TWILIGHT ZONE painting and camera sideways mounted. |
I did a full painting of a city at night which I filmed in
VistaVision. I don’t remember what the
film was. The job was subcontracted to
me.
I did a complicated painting and composite for TWILIGHT
ZONE: THE MOVIE. Mark Sullivan did some
of the painting and all the miniature work on that job
 |
Pre-comp on TWILIGHT ZONE shot. The top third is a separate painting fused to the lower third with a very soft split. Danforth dollied over the lower painting, but held the top stationary—a variation on Al Whitlock's moving cloud system. Jim did the top painting. Mark did most of the lower painting with all the lights. Jim then matted wispy clouds over this (on which they also dollied). On top of this pre-comp, was matted a miniature wing (made by Mark) which had moving shadows on it. More cloud was added on top of that. Slit gags were used to create moving lights on the runway
|
 |
| Karen Danforth working with the fiber-fill clouds used for the matte shot of the approach to the airport for TWILIGHT ZONE—THE MOVIE. |
I did several paintings for
Pacific Art and Title, including one
minimal one for the logo of CASTLE ROCK FILMS, and one for one of the many
remakes of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
 |
| The Ultimatte assignment: a full painting for chromakey. |
Q: As the
industry turned it’s head on the conventional methodology and went down the
digital route, did you find things tough?
JD: The “tough”
had more to do with changing studio attitudes, politics, and federal laws
affecting film financing, rather than the newly emerging technologies.
Q: Given the
fate of so many magnificent works of art from matte departments over the
decades, did you manage to save many of your glass paintings? I know of a few from FLESH GORDON and ESKIMO
NELL which are still around – how about any others?
JD: I have a few
stored in my garage. Two were auctioned last year by Profiles in History.
 |
| Jim's painting of the Los Angeles cityscape for the end of JOHN CARPENTER'S THEY LIVE. The light brown area above the buildings is actually board behind the glass painting showing through the clear area when this photo was taken. For the process plate the sky lights up when an explosion goes off on the roof of the Cable 54 building. |
 |
| A frame from the 35mm print just prior to the 'action'..... though considerably more 'action' than Jim would prefer, as he explained:.... "When we were filming the explosions at night, a sniper started shooting at us. All I heard was a strange whizzing sound, but a vet on the crew said "Get down!. we're being fired at." I've been in the seedier parts of LA myself and this does not surprise me one bit! |
Q: Any
professional regrets Jim?
JD: Only that I
never managed to get any of my film projects completed—got close though
with TIMEGATE. At least I sold my
screenplay and got signed to direct and co-produce the film. I worked on the film for a year or so,
including doing a lot of location filming, plus some miniature scenes, some of
which included my painted backings. To attract funding for my proposed production WEST OF
KASHMIR, a period film set in India, I directed quite a few live-action dialogue scenes, plus
some matte shots and stop-motion animation.
That was a lot of fun
 |
| An invisible hanging miniature shot for WEST OF KASHMIR built on the badminton court of Karen's mother's house. |
Q: How would you
sum up your career, and what would be your high point?
JD: Well, I
actually achieved all the things I wanted to do when I was a teenager, except
finish a complete professional film.
Many of the things I achieved were things that detractors told me I
would never be able to do or be permitted to do.
I don’t know what I would consider the high-point to
be. It’s all part of the pageant of
life.
 |
| An exquisite glass painting for MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN. The resulting composite would be undetectable. |
 |
MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN chalet shot. This is a rear-projection composite projection shot filmed in 'scope but using a flat, four-perf plate (because the action area was a reduction). Jim, Karen and a small crew went to Utah for this shoot. Just as they were about to leave, the producer asked Jim to get some non-effects shots to fill out the last sequence. Didn't have time to rent Panavision equipment, so they used the same Kowa anamorphic attachment that Jim used for filming paintings. It tested sharper that the Bausch and Lomb scope attachments). All skiing shots were directed by Jim and produced by Karen. They have end credits running over them. Jim tried to get the dark 'alpine' sky that he had remembered from one of Peter Ellenshaw's paintings for THIRD MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN.
|
Q: With current
visual effects in my opinion seriously overplayed, exasperatingly ill
conceived and just plain over the top I feel the ‘special’ we once anticipated
in a big film back in the day just isn’t there – or maybe I’m feeling my age?
 |
| Private art now in the hands of a collector. |
Q: Could you
offer us your opinion on just where you feel the visual effects industry is at
right now?
JD: Technically,
at a high point. Artistically, at a low point.
Q: Do you still
paint for pleasure and have you had any gallery shows?
 |
| NINJA III - THE DOMINATION |
JD: I paint for pleasure every day, whenever
possible. I haven’t had any shows, but I
have sold several paintings to friends
Q: Well, I’d
better let you get back to your easel then.
I want to thank you most sincerely Jim for your generosity in sharing
all of these memories, events and matte
painting images with us. It’s so
important that visual effects history is recorded and not lost to the
sands of time, don’t you think?
JD: That’s why I
like your blogs.
Do you ever feel, Peter, like one of the monks in LOST
HORIZON—attempting to preserve knowledge until civilization needs it again?
 |
| One of Jim's fine-art paintings: NAVAJO LAND—SHIP ROCK. This is actually a giclee´ print - he sold the original. |
Pete here.... I'll be taking a well earned vacation so things might get pretty quiet around here for a bit... but I will be back.
Well, you've done it again, Pete, another tour de force of an article! Massive, fascinating and comprehensive, it makes a great companion piece to Jim's DVD book!
ReplyDeletePete, that's just SENSATIONAL!
ReplyDeleteI haven’t been able to read the whole interview (yet), but I can tell right now, that this is like easter an christmas falling on one day for me.
Thank you so much!
And thanks to Jim Danforth for taking the time and letting us take a look over his shoulder. Jim, I hope you left over something for your next book ;-)
Many thanks for getting this up, Pete. Jim's work in ALL areas has always served as a great inspiration to me. His inventiveness and creativity are amazing. And as we know, Jim's expertise in painting is always a thrill to see.And thanks to Jim for going into such depth and sharing his insights and knowledge.
ReplyDeleteFantastic entry! They're all fantastic really, and I anticipate each one, but this one was outstanding. Thanks to Jim for the memories.
ReplyDeleteThanks guys.... I do appreciate the feedback as it almost makes this 'hobby' worthwhile. Just don't get disappointed when I slip in the occasional 'little' article between these mammoth undertakings. They can be exhausting.
ReplyDeletePeter
Superb as usual! Thank goodness for cheap laser printing...
ReplyDeleteExcellent as always but you forgot to ask him the most important question - when will volume 2 of his e-book be available !
ReplyDeleteAs Nick Hilligoss pointed out over at stopmotionanimation.com, this blog on Jim is wonderful, and more like a book!
ReplyDeleteAnd as I was re-reading and enjoying it again, I realized that many would be interested in Jim's new book. So if anyone is looking for even more insights and details, they can go to www.archive-editions.com to purchase 'Dinosaurs, Dragons & Drama.' It goes into incredible length and detail to delineate Jim's matte painting,animation and effects career. The only caveat is that I found I could not stop reading it. But I had to break at about one third the way through the 800 pages because there is just so much there in terms of text and behind-the-scenes photos.
Steve,
ReplyDeleteJim did talk to me about Volume II, though I'm not at liberty to go into detail. I have had a 'peek' at some of it though and it looks great.
Rick,
On the e-book: The content and overall TLC of the memoir is outstanding without question, but I found the e-book concept to be so cumbersome and awkward to read. I would have happily paid up for a traditional 'bound book' anyday in preference over a PDF format.
Maybe my age is showing through here, but for me the 'format' left me cold as I struggled through the technology page by page - taking me 4 times (or more) longer to 'get through' it than it would have had as a proper hardcopy book.
Oh I agree, Pete.
ReplyDeleteI would have paid double or triple just to get a clothbound coffeetable book to stand alongside with "The invisible art".
PDF's tend to be forgotten, books don't.
Well, I too love a hard copy book. And I am pretty "old school", as well as getting old, in many ways. However, I did not find it cumbersome or awkward to read.
ReplyDeleteThe really nice thing about Jim's ebook is that I can zoom into any picture I want to and study it in better detail. The problem with many books in our genre is that there is so much visual information we want to pour over, and often the cost of "real" books is SO expensive that many images wind up way too small. (An example here would be Ray's latest book, where the armature designs for Joe and the Lions. Beautiful detail, but so small as to be almost worthless. And for such a historic piece.)
Another GREAT feature in my view is the ability to copy any still, and print out a nice 8x10" photo print for my collection and further study. Something almost impossible from many of the smaller stills in other books.
Best,
Rick
Hi Rick
DeleteYes, the imagery on the PDF is sensational, no question...with that zoom function pretty darned useful. I too have professional blow ups printed and bound for me of several hundred great matte images which have appeared on my site over the years. They make great coffee table "books" to feed my own pathological obsession. Books 'as we known them' may vanish completely in years to come, which makes me weep as I cannot get my head around the twitter/text message-sms/cel phone/facebook modus operandi in any shape or form. I'm a dinosaur according to my adult kids (and and old stop motion one at that...not a CG beast!)
I just love prowling through old 2nd hand bookshops.... there's that smell and sense of something literate which doesn't occur with a shiny CD in a plastic case. Point taken though Rick....both have much to offer.
All the best
Peter
Great job! The Thing matte painting you show here just sold at the propstore.com where you can see more photos of it here: http://www.propstore.com/product-Title-Shot-Matte-Painting-of-Planet.htm
ReplyDeletePeter,
ReplyDeleteI have the same fear about books becoming less prevalent...hopefully not becoming extinct. And I am a similar dinosaur in many of the same ways. Although I have pretty much run out of room for my books (without taking over another room in our home), getting some on cd's may become a necessity at some point, just for the space issues.
Best,
Rick
Wow thank you so much for all the work that you put into this blog - it is fantastic!
ReplyDeleteAs an animation student and aspiring illustrator, the work of these artists is so inspirational - and we take for granted their incredible skill and abilities, especially in an age that is turning digital - and in a generation that expects things instantaniously and doesn't necessarily appreciate the work that goes into the production of their entertainment. :)
Thanks for taking the time to catalogue these awesome unsung heroes of film!
~Hannah
Thank you for this fantastic interview Pete !
ReplyDeleteI'll just add my name to the heap of people taking their hats off to your terrific, exhaustive work. I agree getting this wonderful, bygone era of movie magic down for history is a worthy job, and no one better than *you* to do it, Pete!
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that Jim didn't mention (and you didn't ask) about his work on the classic '60s show The Outer Limits while Jim was at Project Unlimited. He's quoted several times in The Outer Limits Official Companion book (Schow, Frentzen, 1986). There's one very memorable episode with stop-motion aliens, The Zanti Misfits, although the book says they were animated by Al Hamm. Jim is indicated as the animator for a less remarkable episode, Counterweight. Would be interesting for us fans of that cult series to know what other work Jim did on the show.
Again, thanks for a great post, and I hope you're not gone too long!
Hi Pete,
ReplyDeletethe old stopmotion.com website has been closed down with all the old postings gone. Very sad. Hopefully they will bring it back because otherwise yours and Domingos site will be the only way to learn about the art of traditional matte painting.
I'm eagerly awaiting your tribute for Matthew Yuricich. So sad he had to go.
Kind regards,
Thomas
Hi Thomas
ReplyDeleteAlways good to hear from you my friend. Yes, i noticed that SMA had gone through a disasterous change recently, and is now some crazy sort of Facebook styled nonsense deal as opposed to the good old solid forum which kept many of us informed and entertained for years. Bad decision SMA. The regular, highly active readers all seemed to have "abandoned ship" months ago on the matte forum there, which is why I more or less quit.
Matthew's oral history should be out soon. I'm just awaiting on some material from Michelle Moen who has graciously offered to write her own foreword for Matt. There are plenty of utterly fascinating stories, anecdotes and facts courtesy of Matt which may be of little interest to the average casual reader, but will be "pure gold" to fellows like you, Domingo, Steven and a few hardcore matte historians who follow the blog.
All the best my friend
Peter
Pete,
ReplyDeleteWonderful interview with living legend Jim Danforth. Spent my whole day and yesterday reading this. Doug Trumbull charged for meetings? Guess that's one way to cause people to put up or shut up. Miss the old SMA site. Too bad they went with whatever it is now. Guess it was nice while it lasted. Enjoy your vacation. You definitely earned it.
Mike
I think you're doing interesting and important work here. I do have one request: above there's a photo of Jim, Forry Ackerman and Marcel Delgado taken in the front room of the original Ackermansion. Taken by me, Bill Warren. I would appreciate being credited
ReplyDeleteHi Bill
ReplyDeleteThanks for the note. Regrettably I'm unable to go back in and alter the article as most of my blogs are of such vast size that I've had VERY bad experiences with 'Blogger' in the past when doing edits after the fact, with much of the article on numerous occasions simply not re-saving and vanishing into cyberspace, so unfortunately, I'm not going to risk fiddling with this one and potentially lose so much hard work that's gone into it. I do apologise if that's a problem.
Peter
I really love the practical use of the toy cars for that freeway shot. The end result's top notch.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a remarkable, though so brief special effect that works so well. Normally artificial light would give the game away on a miniature shot like this (especially with light sources in the 1960's), but Ralph Rodine lit and photographed it perfectly. A great 'little' gag shot.
ReplyDeletePeter
NZPete is there any chance that you've heard anything about Vol II of JD's autobio Dinosaurs, Dragons and Drama? It's been three years since Vol I was out; there's a teaser for Vol II at the end but sadly it has not yet been published. Any info would be appreciated, perhaps you can inquire with the man himself as he seems largely "off the grid". Thx
ReplyDeleteJim actually showed me some of it and it look's great, though whether or not it will get published I don't really know. I can inquiry with Jim.
DeletePeter
Many thanks, if you find anything out please post it here. :)
ReplyDeleteRe: Jim's Memoirs.
DeleteYes, after some soul searching on the part of Jim and weighing up the financial practicalities, he has CONFIRMED to me that he is indeed publishing Volume II AND Volume III.
Jim is working out the final distribution deal as we speak.
Sorry about the slow response.... I was sure you had e-mailed me with this inquiry and I couldn't for the life of me find any such email in my computer... then it just dawned on me that you'd commented on my blog. Problem solved.
Pete
Hey NZPete -
ReplyDeleteJust circling back to this - any news on the Vol II and III releases? Not finding anything about them on the 'net...
Thanks!
Ed
Hi Ed
DeleteNothing new, just what Jim told me as reported in that previous comment. I'll make another inquiry. You sure are keen!
Peter
Yeah, it was just getting really interesting at the point where vol 1 leaves off. I'm a bit older and so grew up watching much of Jim's work, also did a very brief stint in fx myself, so it's something of a hobby as well as a nostalgic experience to read about the work of the greats. Thanks for the fresh inquiry, I'll check back again soon.
ReplyDeleteEd
Hi Ed
DeleteI had a quick response from Jim which will delight you no end:
"Volume Two is about to go the final proof reader, so it should be out very soon.
The ISBN number has been assigned; Price $30".
So there you have it Ed. Out soon!
Best
Peter
Great news, thanks for looking in to that!
ReplyDelete- Ed
Hi--just found this. Nice piece on Jim. Thanks for the credit on my spaceship from "The Thing." Would really appreciate it if you would add: copyright Sue Turner on the photo of Jim with "The Equinox" matte painting. I took that in 1965. Thanks, Sue
ReplyDeleteHi--nice piece on Jim. Just found it. Thx for credit on my Thing spaceship. Would really appreciate it if you would add: copyright 1965, 2006 S. Turner to that shot of Jim with the Equinox matte painting. Thx. ST
ReplyDeleteNice post. I was checking continuously this blog and I'm impressed!
ReplyDeleteExtremely helpful info specially the last part :) I care for such info a lot.
I was looking for this certain information for a
very long time. Thank you and best of luck.
Regarding the matte painting for Kung Fu, the one presented here does not belong to the pilot movie, in which no port is seen, but to the s3e3 episode "A Small Beheading."
ReplyDeleteIn this forum there is discussion about Mr. Danforth's work, and another painting is presented as belonging to the show. I don't remember it, it might be.
https://www.vortex42studios.com/sma/index.php?archive=forum&topic=4&subtopic=23&message=3671