So that's How They Do It!

hollywood's magicians, the special-effects men, show you the way they make the hindenburg explode, the goodyear blimp crash and an actor's brains splatter, now aren't you glad you asked?

• Bruce Dern charms an airport guard into believing that an antipersonnel bomb is a newfangled kind of camera. While the guard poses in front of it, Dern goes outside and detonates the bomb. In a flash, we watch as the man's face is ripped apart by thousands of tiny steel darts (Black Sunday).

• Forced mano-à-diode against crazy Hal 9000, Keir Dullea blows the explosive bolts on the hatch of the "space pod" and is blasted into the space capsule, bouncing back and forth like a ping-pong ball (2001: A Space Odyssey).

• With R2-D2 as his astrodroid, Luke Skywalker arcs his X-wing fighter into the alloy trench of the Death Star as Darth Vader in his T.I.E. fighter swoops in from behind for the kill, lasers blazing. Bolts of energy ricochet up and down the walls, one frazzling R2-D2, as Luke watches his target zooming up on the computerized view finder (Star Wars).

Ah, cinema! We sit there helpless captives as, tempest tossed, our disbelief is set adrift on the sea of Hollywood special effects. And they're stunning things, the primary mysteries of film, the basic gimcrackery on which the entire industry is founded and which, no matter how good or how bad the rest of the movie may be, bring (continued on page 275) How they do it (continued from page 159) us to the edge of our seats, to the fine line (and getting finer all the time) between what is real and what is not.

Like Luke Skywalker's Land Speeder in Star Wars. He scoots it over the arid plains of Tatooine about two feet off the ground, on air cushions, one presumes. In fact, in most scenes, it's a regular car with the wheels covered by mirrors that reflect the sand beneath them. In the long shots, the shadow of the car is painted on the mirror. In the close-ups, and for starts and stops, the Speeder is being held on the end of a long crane, like a horizontal Ferris wheel, which is why it bobs so realistically on its "cushion" when Luke jumps out. Other effects, of course, are more complex. The "dogfight" between Darth Vader in his T.I.E. fighter and Luke in his X-wing fighter as they hurtle through the alloy trench of the Death Star is a seamless mosaic of over 28 separate printing elements blended together through all the optical wizardry of modern film technology. Indeed, some 365 scenes are of this level of complexity--some 10.5 elements, on the average, per individual shot.

The term itself, special effects, was allegedly coined by Louis Witte at the old Fox Film Company in the early Twenties. He did it in order to create a division of labor and to differentiate mechanical effects, which are set up and shot live action, from optical effects, which are added after the live-action photography has been completed. By and large, however, it is mechanical effects to which people refer when they say special effects, taking in under that phrase all the beery craziness we associate with pulp video: cars exploding at the first bump in the road, fantastic colossi stomping through cities and more--arrows thwacking into charging cavalry, knives thudding into doors, bullets chunking through walls, windshields, flesh--indeed, all the great and wonderful things of this world that are blown up, crunched up, exploded in balls of flame, splashed with acid and otherwise blown away with all the demonic genius and nihilistic enthusiasm Hollywood possesses. And almost all of these marvelous obliterations are the province of one very select group of people: the powder men, the 150 or so members of Local 44 of the Affiliated Property Craftsmen of I.A.T.S.E. who own state- or Federal-issued powder cards and who are responsible for everything in a movie that goes bang.

Like blood hits.

"Blood hits," Terry Frazee explains, "are bullet holes that erupt in blood when the victim is shot. We have spurters, spatterers and seepers. Whatever the director wants." The hit itself consists of a small rectangular brass plate on which is taped an electrically fired powder charge (called a bullet hit). Over this is taped a condom or other thin latex or plastic bag ("I prefer Trojan-Enz," drawls Terry) filled with studio blood--from 3M Company (Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing) or a specially mixed preparation. As many as are wanted are planted on the victim on or under his clothes, the wires fed out through a pants leg or whatever and attached to a "clunker box," which is used by the effects man to fire the charges in whatever order seems most impressive, much the same way a car distributor ignites the sparkplugs in your automobile's engine.

Clunkers are most frequently used to "strafe" machine-gun fire through crowds, buildings, pails of water, crockery--anything that might look good when hit. Dipped in various incendiary materials, detonating caps (called squibs) can simulate electrical shorts, small explosions, shrapnel, almost anything that pops. In that memorable scene where Oddjob is electrocuted when he tries to retrieve his metal derby-Frisbee lodged in the bars of the Bond-electrified fence in Gold-finger, most of the bursts and flashes of electrical flame were squibs and flash powder set off through a clunker.

Because a clunker can fire only a few charges at any one time, the squibs are sometimes wired separately. In the attempt on Godfather Al Pacino's life in Godfather II where his bedroom in the Lake Tahoe mansion is riddled by hundreds of bullets fired from submachine guns, each hit was individually wired. "In order to make it a continuous scene with no cuts," A. D. Flowers explains, "I used a nail box and wired each squib separately." The nail box is, literally, a long board studded with two rows of partially hammered nails running down its length. Each squib was wired to a nail and--by passing an electrical current down the row of nails--Flowers could fire the hundreds of bullet hits without resorting to any cuts as, for example, had to be done in the famous "dance of death" sequence in Bonnie and Clyde where (in order to simulate their deaths beneath a merciless hail of lead by a small army of G men) a few hits would be exploded, then a cut, a few more exploded and cut away again.

Bullet hits are also simulated with large CO2 guns that look like hand drills with barrels. These fire hazelnut-sized plastic pellets containing fuller's earth (a chalky powder that makes a very satisfactory puff whenever it hits something) and combinations of various other substances that can spark ricochets, explode on contact and even simulate bullets going through glass. In the famous windshield shot, for example, when the driver never seems to get hit, even though the windshield is riddled, the plastic pellet is filled with petroleum jelly and a thin layer of black shoe polish. When the pellet hits the glass, it makes a very realistic smear, just like shattered safety glass, and the shoe polish leaves a perfect, bullet-hole-sized black ring.

Similar trickery gets those great nighttime bursts of flame from the barrels of machine guns and automatic rifles. As Stew Moody, who claims to have killed "at least 10,000 Indians, cowboys, enemy soldiers and outlaws," demonstrated, a tiny oxyacetylene torch is planted in the mouth of the weapon, hoses fed down a pants leg to a portable tank of gas and a trigger mechanism installed to ignite the flame in realistic bursts.

Arrows can also be shot out of the CO2 guns. "On Little Big Man," Logan Frazee, Terry's father, explains, "we just cut the arrow to size, sharpened it in a pencil sharpener and simply shot the stunt men--who were wearing bulletproof vests. The wood point mushroomed on the vest and stuck very effectively." Generally, however, arrows are "shot" in the age-old way of cutting them to size, attaching them to the victim's clothing on little spring traps (like mousetraps) that pop the arrow up when the shot person gets the cue.

Knives, for example, are "struck" two ways--either by attaching them to piano wire and darting them down it or by having them actually spring out of a small hole in the wall next to the victim's head. In the latter case, a long rectangular box holds the knife with its point clamped in a hardwood block. The block, with the knife sticking out of it, is drawn back like a slingshot on a long elastic. At the director's cue, the effects man releases the elastic and the knife thwacks out through a small hole in the wall over which a flap of cloth has been placed and matched to the color of the wall.

Other effects are not always so simple and the current demand for ultrarealism can create big problems for the powder men. For example, the gruesome scene in Black Sunday where Dern blows up the airport guard with an antipersonnel bomb. "It took me three days to rig a model of the man's head," Terry Frazee explains, "implant 50 bullet hits with supersmall blood sacs and cover them with stearic acid. So much time elapsed between the rigging and the ignition that when it was set off for the camera, nothing happened--just a lot of white dust as the plaster chipped out--all the blood had dried. Well, I did it over. This time, the firing device shorted out just before filming! So I did it again. It took us three weeks and I don't know how many thousands of dollars to get that effect," he concludes. Madness.

Another contingent that works closely with powder men is the stunt men. Stunts, besides being a minor art form, are also dangerous. To keep himself polished, for example, Everett Creach (who coordinated all of Robert Shaw's stunts in Black Sunday) built a 60-foot tower next to his home where, of an afternoon, he and his buddies will quaff a few beers and practice their falls. Stacked cardboard cartons have long been a favorite landing "pad," but--according to Creach--the new air bags are the best. "You hit bottom," he drawls, "but very softly. It's almost a perfect displacement of weight."

But the most heroic incident of self-disregard belongs to veteran stunt man Hal Needham. As one might expect, among the more requested stunts are car crashes, particularly flips--which, of course, must happen on cue. It's not an easy stunt and Needham figured he had a new way to do it--by "cannon." He took a large piece of steel pipe on one end of which he welded a backplate and in the other placed a four-foot section of telephone pole. The whole thing was welded into a hole cut in the floor boards right behind the driver's seat, with the pole facing the ground. "The idea," Needham explains, "was to put some powder in there and fire it on cue, driving the pole into the ground and 'flipping' the car."

To test the device, he and some buddies drove out to the desert with the cannon and four eight-ounce charges of powder. The first test, with a single eight-ounce charge, barely rocked the car. So, for his next run, Needham put the three other charges in, got the car rolling at about 55 mph and fired the cannon. "It must have knocked me out for a second," Needham relates, "because when I came to, it was real quiet and I thought, Shit, it didn't work. Then I realized, Sheee-it! I'm 30 feet in the air and this sumbitch is gonna be some sort of crash when it hits!"

Indeed, it broke his back, three ribs and took out his front teeth. "I didn't know fuck about powder," Needham admitted. "I didn't know that the amount increases the effect geometrically!"

"All I can say," Logan Frazee dryly commented, "is that's one hell of a way to learn."

Still, men die. Stunt men "buy it" a lot more frequently than others, but in the Sixties, three powder men were killed in an arsenal at MGM, "even though we had less than six pounds of explosives in there," explains Glen Robinson, MGM's prestigious head of effects. Robinson--who received two Oscars last year (for Logan's Run and King Kong)--estimates that nine men have lost their lives in recent years and that the restrictions and requirements for powder cards have become too light. A problem, he implies, that can be placed at the doorstep of television. "Every show these days seems to have a car blown up or something," he complains. "It used to be cowboys and Indians. Now it's all this detective stuff. It's gotten out of hand. But I guess that's what the producers think they can make money at. And, after all, that's the name of the game."

The notoriously sanguine attitude of the producers and the studios toward human life is reflected in the compounding rooms themselves, the special rooms in which the powder men concoct their explosives. Telephones are heavily insulated, sprinklers are in evidence and, overhead, the impressive spring-held steel-hatched door in the ceiling that "breaks away" like a giant potlid in the event of an explosion. "The breakaway hatches," Paul Wurtzel, head of effects at Fox, explains, "prevent the walls from blowing out sideways and killing other people." Those inside the room, of course, are written off, even though Logan Frazee, Jr. (Logan's other son), can joke: "It's not the explosion that kills you, it's hitting your head on the hatch!"

The giant among powder men, however, is the smallish, soft-spoken Flowers. His gentle nature belies the screen violence for which he is famous, most notably, with his associate, Joe Lombardi, for Godfather I and II.

"Coppola is unlike any other director I have ever worked with," Flowers explains. "When we were doing Godfather I, he came up to me and said, 'A. D., I want to kill a man in a manner never before done in motion pictures.' But, in the same breath, he says, 'You have all the time you want--up to two months--and all the money you want to spend to do it.' Now, in this industry, nobody says that. But that's the kind of man he is. If Coppola wants something, he gets it."

The effect was the assassination of Moe Green during the 'big sweep' after Brando's death. Green, you may recall, is lying on his stomach getting a massage when the gunman opens the door. He looks up, puts on his glasses and is about to angrily demand what's going on when he is shot--through the glasses--in the eye. "What I did," Flowers explains, "was rig a specially made pair of glasses with a compressed-air device, candy glass and the blood lining the frame. I won't tell you exactly how I did it," he continues, with characteristic caution, "because somebody out there might try it--and it's just about the most dangerous effect somebody could try, working close to somebody's eye like that."

And now Coppola's perfectionism has brought us Vietnam revisited, a movie Flowers is especially proud of. "Apocalypse is the biggest movie I have ever worked on," he explains. "For example, Joe [Lombardi] and I blow up a bridge that's over 600 feet long. I used six to eight miles of wire just rigging the explosives. It took us a week to set it up, and then the whole thing went off in about five seconds."

To see his work go up in smoke is, of course, a professional ambition. "There is one scene," he relates, "where we simulate the napalming of Kurtz's compound and the destruction of the central building. I got 600 feet of four-inch plastic pipe and filled it with gasoline, then we placed Primacord underneath it for the entire length. Primacord travels 22,000 feet per second, which makes it a high explosive. In fact, there's an old joke about a powder man at MGM who used to advise us young guys, 'Boys, you better be damn sure you know what you're doing when you light this stuff, because you'll have one hell of a time stomping it out.' So," he continues, "the plane comes in low and drops the canister of 'napalm' and we set off the Primacord. It starts with a great swoosh at one end, igniting the gasoline as it roars along. It travels the 600 feet instantly. Our military advisor there said it was indistinguishable from the real thing." Madness.

More blood, more blood! Give me the bottle!

--Director William Wyler on "Ben Hur"

Although Sam Peckinpah's Killer Elite was a box-office bomb, the scene where Robert Duvall blows out Helmut Dantine's brains, then shoots off James Caan's kneecap was something of a personal triumph for make-up artist Jack Petty. "I used gaffer's [electrician's] tape on Dantine. First, I matched his hair and made a hairpiece, which I glued to the top of the tape. Under the tape I placed large sacs of blood and carefully combed the hair back over them. Using monofilament fishing line, which I attached to the tape and ran out through Dantine's shirt, I waited for the cue and then yanked. The lines ripped the tape away from both sides of his head, tore open the blood sacs and pulled the blood against the wall, just as if a bullet had really gone right through his head. It was, I thought, a pretty good effect."

Like most make-up men, Petty is proud of his blood--a charmingly photogenic substance that he concocts out of 3M blood paint, Hershey's chocolate syrup and Karo syrup. "Real blood," he explains, "is too dark. Besides, it draws flies. By changing the coloration slightly, I can match my own blood against the film stock for perfect color tones." His favorite effect, however, was also a scene from Killer Elite--in which he shows a man's face opening up with cuts right after he goes head first through a plate-glass window. "Sam wanted that delayed effect," Petty recalls, "so I built seven different cuts on the stunt man's face. First, I placed tiny blood sacs on his skin to which I then tied very fine monofilament fishing leaders. Then I covered them over with 'plastic skin,' which I matched to his skin color with make-up. I ran the lines through his hair and down his shirt. When he went through the candy-glass window, I yanked and they all opened up right on cue. Sam paid me the best compliment I have ever received for that effect. 'Someday, Jack.' he said, 'I'm going to stump you.' "

Directors, however, have not always been so pleased with Petty's work--a risk all effects people must face. For example, Petty had his share of problems while working on an early John Frankenheimer movie, Seconds, in which John Randolph is reborn as Rock Hudson.

"Originally," Petty claims, "the script called for Hudson to have his head blown off with a shotgun. I filled a model of Hudson's head with five pounds of pigs' brains and blood from a meat market in Vernon. Nobody knew what was inside the model and when they shot it--with a real shotgun and double-O shot--blood and brains and hair were blown all over the place. It took over an hour to clean the room."

Next to blowing up dummies, grossing out directors would seem to be a favorite pastime of production crews. On Breakout, for example, one scene showed a man cut up by an airplane propeller. A dummy filled with offal was used for the propeller hit. When the editor, Bud Isaacs, showed the cut film to a crowd that included two directors, the scene looked so real he said, "Too bad, the stunt man got it." One director gasped, "Who was it? Maybe I knew him." Isaacs replied, "Don't worry, he got paid." When the director saw Isaacs smiling, he finally caught on.

There is also the account, probably apocryphal, of how a famous macho director blew his breakfast. It was during filming in Mexico. The script called for a macabre scene in which a drawer is opened and we see that it is full of ears, human ears. An enterprising make-up man went to a local morgue, presumably bribed the undertaker and sliced off an ear or two from corpses there. He touched them up slightly with some blood and put them in the drawer along with the plastic ones. When the director went out that morning and asked to be shown the effect, the effects man opened the drawer and revealed the clotted-up, real ears, an effect that revolted the director in the extreme.

Murder by make-up, however, is not always bloody. There are a truly great many ways to get wasted, as we know. There is death by various ecological turnabouts, the most popular of which would seem to be death by killer bees. "In The Savage Bees," relates make-up artist Maurice D. Stein, "I show a man who is attacked by bees. He leaps into a pond to escape, but the bees swarm around; every time he comes up for air, they attack. I had to show him dying slowly--each time he comes up getting more and more swollen and stung." For the close-ups, Stein carved stingers out of rose thorns and glued live bees to the faces of his actors. "I suffered so many stings myself," he claims, "that my doctor insists that I carry a bee-sting antidote with me at all times, since I've reached my toxin threshold."

Death by killer Bs like The Savage Bees may prove a cinematic epitaph for all of us, but then again, you never know; you may end up owing your life to a bad movie ... with good effects. Stein and his associates, for example, fabricate glue-on tragedies for training disaster medics and paramedics. They even create complicated simulated wounds for training in medical schools. But the most poignant connection to medicine, perhaps, is the work of the greatest make-up artist of them all, John Chambers, who began his career making dental plates and plastic prosthetic devices (noses, ears, etc.) for war victims and still works as a consultant surgical prosthetic designer for difficult cases.

Known as "the king of appliances," Chambers creates make-up effects that are worn by the actors--Mr. Spock's ears, for example, and the masks in Planet of the Apes and The Island of Dr. Moreau.

"Appliances" aren't limited to masks. There's the marvelous hump that Vanessa Redgrave wears throughout The Devils, and there is the perfectly fleshlike Plasticine breastplate that Richard Harris wears in the Sun Vow sequence of Irvin Kershner's The Return of a Man Called Horse. In that scene, a chief pinches Harris' breast with his thumb and forefinger and inserts a bone blade through the "flesh." Later, as a lightning storm signals the answer by the Great Spirit, Harris leans his full weight backward, stretching his pectorals to their fullest point. When the bone blade finally breaks through, the flesh tears and makes perfectly realistic popping sounds.

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On February 11, 1977, Roger Mudd played a sequence from Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory on the CBS Evening News. It was a dust storm rolling over a prairie town, which he used to illustrate a discussion of weather trends during the California drought. It wasn't a real dust storm, of course, but a prime example of the mattework of Al Whitlock and his crew at Universal Studios.

To understand mattework, let's suppose a script calls for an aerial shot of a rural Midwest town in the Twenties. Rather than build an entire town on a studio back lot, an expensive undertaking, the film makers decide to use a real town and doctor it up a bit. First, a suitable town is found, let's call it Middleville. A camera is locked into place at a vantage point high above Middleville and some real town footage is taken. The special-effects man then looks over the footage and sees that there are a lot of elements that don't belong in a Twenties rural Midwest town, such as TV aerials, modern gas-station signs, billboards and so on. That's where the mattes come in. Mattes are simply cardboard cutouts placed in front of the lens while the camera is shooting to mask out unwanted elements. A corresponding matte painting (perfectly blended to fill the masked-out areas) is then made, usually on a pane of glass, photographed and inserted into the original footage of Middleville on a special optical printer called a rotoscope. The rotoscope has the special ability of projecting and photographing through the same lens so the image from one frame of film is projected directly onto the second piece of film (in other words, the matte painting is projected and photographed over the real footage of Middleville, creating the effect of a Twenties version of the same town).

There are variations of this technique. In Bound for Glory, for example, to create the effect of the dust storm approaching the Thirties prairie town, the Sacramento delta town of Isleton was first photographed from high atop a water tower. Later, back in the studio, this image was projected and traced onto a large pane of glass. Al Whitlock then painted directly on the glass (over the tracing), adding some buildings, changing the landscape and covering all evidence of the intervening four decades. The finished painting, perfectly matching the color and tone of the original photography, became its own matte, the camera acting as an optical printer, with the glass lit from behind and Whitlock's painting masking out unwanted parts. The film was then rewound and, on a second camera pass, the painting was relit--this time from the front--and a finished piece of film was created: a prairie town in the Thirties.

So much for the background. To achieve the actual dust-storm effect, Whitlock photographed three revolving disks (roughly the size of buffer attachments you might add to your electric drill to wax your car) on which he had glued cotton and that he had spray-painted dusty brown and gray. In a separate series of three shootings, he photographed the buffers--one revolving clockwise, the other counterclockwise, etc.--which he then superimposed as a collage directly over the stationary matte painting of the "prairie town." By overexposing the top half and angling the buffers away from the camera to get a sense of depth, Whitlock was able--though it hardly sounds possible--to create the perfect effect: a dust storm ravaging a helpless prairie town.

Whitlock's superlative mattework is all but invisible (which makes public recognition a problem. How can people appreciate his work if they can't see it?). In The Hindenburg, for example, a shot of New York City in the Thirties seen from the air was needed. Obviously, it is impossible to build such a set, but Whitlock's matte painting is so good (including the wake of tugboats and other moving objects added by an animation-type process) that most people thought it was some ancient stock footage. The same with the denouement of the great airship where it explodes and burns. Many critics wrote that they presumed it was newsreel footage; it wasn't. It was a composite of matte paintings based on a famous newspaper photograph of the moment of explosion. The men who fall from the airship--their bodies aflame--are actually stunt men falling off a platform in a Universal sound stage. Everything around them was matted out, the sequence rotoscoped, combining the burning men with shots of the blimp and shots of men running on the ground, and the effect achieved: men falling from the Hindenburg seemingly from a great height, as the great blimp explodes, collapses and burns.

To examine one of Whitlock's matte paintings close up is to examine a remarkable kind of impressionistic artwork. He does not paint detail, at least not detail as we might expect. Rather, he paints what the camera sees--light bouncing off objects and not the thing itself. Color itself is a function of light and Whitlock's paintings consist of blobs of color, tonal masses and shadows. To be sure, everything is recognizable (and the perspective is perfect) for what it is, but to the human eye, these paintings are obviously exactly that--paintings. Onscreen, however, they look real, such as the Tibetan mountaintop monastery in The Man Who Would Be King or the Capitol building in Airport '77. A classic example of a miniature filmed against a blue screen and superimposed over a matte painting is the shot of the 747 buzzing the Capitol dome. (The blue screen is simply an illuminated blue backdrop against which the desired object is photographed. In the lab, during processing, the blue register is dropped and the result is the object seen against a perfectly clear background.)

The crashing of the Goodyear blimp into the stands of the Super Bowl in Black Sunday is another example of the double-exposure abilities of the matte. In that scene, the newscasters look out of the press box and see the nose of the blimp coming right at them. In fact, the actors are "reacting" to an illuminated blue screen in the place where the press-box window would be. The nose of the blimp, shot separately, was later superimposed by the optical printer into the window of clear film that the blue screen created. In the striking sequence in which we actually see the blimp fall into the stands, we are being treated to an excellent display of process photography combining front projection and miniatures. A five-foot replica of the blimp was built by the Paramount prop shop and suspended upside down by piano wires in front of a screen on which was front-projected a live-action sequence from the Super Bowl also upside down. The process coordinator, Bill Hansard, did that because he was afraid the piano wires would show against the sky if it was filmed right side up. In this case, the blimp was pulled upward across the upside-down stands and when the footage was later turned right side up, we had the shot: the blimp coming down into the stands, the wires successfully hidden by the crowd "below."

Upside-down film, reversed film, rear and front projections are common ploys of the trick photographers. In the scene in which Keir Dullea is blasted back into the space capsule in 2001, for example, the camera was actually placed on the ground pointing upward. Dullea was then lowered on piano wires toward the camera, which was running at slow speed. The film was then reversed and played at normal speed for the effect: being blasted into the space capsule and bounced around, his own body hiding the wires from view.

Cecil B. De Mille's parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments was another use of reversed film--along with numerous matte shots. Created by the late John P. Fulton, as John Brosnan relates in his fine book Movie Magic, the effect, which took six months to create, involved building a giant water tank that released 360,000 gallons of water. The footage was reversed to give the effect of the sea being parted and was later run forward to engulf the Pharaoh's army. Everything else--the clouds, the Pharaoh's army and Moses looking on--was matted in.

Front and rear projection are closely related techniques using juxtaposed images and events that have not come within 6000 miles of each other. Rear projection is simply a strip of film projected onto a screen from behind while the live action is filmed in front of it. The most famous of such scenes is the sequence in Casablanca in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman drive through Paris in his convertible. As they are talking, the background scene casually cuts from one locale to another with no break in the action.

Front projection was first used to admirable effect in 2001--the bench-mark special-effects film. In the opening sequence, for example, when the Olduvai man fights off the leopard, all of the background scenery was shot in Africa, the set, the people and the animals were shot together on a sound stage. The scenery was projected right over the actors and animals onto a special screen that reflected light directly back at the camera. The projector was aligned on the same optical axis as the camera, so that the actors exactly filled their shadows. The only time, in fact, the front projection is noticeable is when the eyes of the leopard are glowing--the light is reflecting into the camera and because of the retroreflective properties of animals' eyes, they seem to glow (just as they do when picked up in the headlights of your car).

There are other optical effects, of course, and combinations of all of the previous into areas of technology that are the specialties of only a few highly trained individuals. Besides animation, with which we're all familiar, there's live animation, which uses stop-motion photography, frame-by-frame poses of pliable (usually rubber) miniatures, a technique first used with great success by Willis O'Brien and brought to the screen full-throttle in the first King Kong. In that archetypal wet-dream sequence in which Kong peels the clothes from Fay Wray and then sniffs his fingers (a scene the censors removed but which is included in European prints), a combination of effects was used as the director, the late Merian C. Cooper, explained:

A movie was first taken of [Fay Wray] alone while invisible wires pulled off her clothes. Then the miniature Kong [18 inches high] was placed on a set built on a waist-high platform, about twice the size of a dining-room table, on which miniature trees, ferns and plaster of Paris rocks had been arranged. Back of this, the movie of Fay Wray was projected and Kong's movements made to correspond with it.

Dino de Laurentiis' King Kong, which, like the Godzilla epics from Japan, features a couple of guys in rubber suits for some of the shots, runs a poor second to the original. Even the work of Ray Harryhausen, the developer of Dynamation, which carries on the traditions of O'Brien, in the Sinbad series (and is best in Jason and the Argonauts), is surrounded by such poor acting and worse scripting that it's almost impossible to fully appreciate what he does. The little chess monsters in Star Wars, on the contrary, with which Chewbacca and C3PO play, are adroitly animated by Jon Berg and Philip Tippet and to delightful effect.

In fact, it's quite possible that in Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, mattework and all the other complex optical wonderments may have reached their apotheosis. And a great mutual challenge. In the offing, at any rate, is an Academy Awards showdown unlike anything since Forbidden Planet went up against De Mille's parting of the Red Sea. Put another way, it's a real-life star war, a do-or-die conflict between George Lucas' Death Star and Steven Spielberg's Mother Ship, the centerpiece special effect of Close Encounters.

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The Mother Ship hangs suspended in the luminous night, a chilling, massive vision of extraterrestrial presence. Through the camera's view finder, it looks about the size of downtown Manhattan, its vaguely mushroomlike shape precisely detailed and radiant with thousands of tiny lights. The hundreds of observation decks, docking bays and launching pads radiate from its sides and project downward from its center like the spiny antennae of some great metal sea urchin or jellyfish drifting slowly through the sky.

It's a miniature, of course, like the Death Star of Star Wars; but whereas the Death Star was a hardened-foam-base, 1600-square-foot, tabletop layout, the Mother Ship is in actual size barely a yard in diameter--a smallness that belies the wealth of detail that adorns it. Spielberg himself took stints on the micro-drills that made the tens of thousands of tiny holes ten to 25 thousandths of an inch wide that were individually capped with minuscule plastic bubbles and illuminated from within by over 1000 neon tubes, all painstakingly bent to fit the various deck shapes and internal contours in order to create an evenly balanced luminosity for the pin-point lights.

The gestation of the Mother Ship began in February 1976, when George Jensen and Spielberg sat down and sketched out some of the special-effects sequences. Douglas Trumbull, who put together the effects for 2001, and was hired in April, used those sketches to concoct actual story boards (drawings of the action sequences involving flying saucers, "encounters" and the Mother Ship). Several renditions of the Mother Ship were made, including a painting by Ralph McQuarrie (who also drew the remarkable effects duplicated with surprising exactness in Star Wars). With the effects carefully charted for later construction, filming and insertion back in the Marina Del Rey studio, the live action was begun in a giant hangar in Mobile, Alabama. It was there, in a sound stage bigger than anything Hollywood could offer (Lucas had already commandeered the big ones in England), full-sized roads were built, meadows created and the giant lights rigged for the required effects.

In the concluding scenes, when the Mother Ship descends and the extraterrestrials actually emerge, they are backlit with extremely bright light to give the effect of light emanating from the Mother Ship. A special model of the underbelly of the Mother Ship was constructed and matted through long exposures to the light effects and live action. Since light has fuzzy edges and shines on everything around it, creating reflections and shadows, it is virtually impossible to matte with cutouts or blue screens. And the secrets behind much of their work are being closely guarded by Trumbull and Spielberg.

And light is what differentiates the Mother Ship from the Death Star and, with it, some other differences of extreme technical contrast. "Each frame of film is exposed for 40 seconds," Trumbull explains, "and 80 seconds for the close-ups. The effect is to make the Mother Ship a light source. In Star Wars, all of the miniatures, the spaceships, fighters and all that, are illuminated from some offscreen light source--one presumes it's the sun or something equivalent. Also, it's a fantasy; you immediately sit back and say, 'This is great; I'll believe anything!' We don't have that blessing on Close Encounters. In fact, our goal has been absolute reality. It's been a real curse!"

When you think of a single sequence of Star Wars taking as many as 28 separate elements to create one single shot, the magnitude of additional difficulty with such elements all part of or being influenced by a light source cum miniature like the Mother Ship is obviously even greater. Consider this "simple" set of instructions for the dogfight between Darth Vader and Luke that John Dykstra, special-photographic-effects supervisor for Star Wars, described recently in American Cinematographer:

The description which optical has for this shot is as follows:

The T.I.E. ship crosses over both sets of lasers, the X-wing, the Planet and the Stars.

The reflection element crosses over the T.I.E. ship.

The "over the X-wing lasers" cross over the X-wing, the Planet and the Stars.

The X-wing crosses over the "under the X-wing lasers," the Planet and the Stars.

The reflection element crosses over the X-wing.

The "under the X-wing lasers" cross over the Planet and the Stars.

The Planet crosses over the Stars.

This description determines the order in which the printing elements must be used.

No sweat, boss.

The clearest telltale of special-effects work in films has always been the fact that the camera is locked down during filming to hold the frame rigid for perfect matte match-ups later by the optical-effects people. (If the camera were not stationary, you would see seams or spaces in places where the matte painting was inserted against the original footage.) So, in the past, it was sometimes easy to spot special-effects work because the camera was still while only the objects--blimps, zeppelins, spacecrafts, etc.--moved. To increase the realism of the effects in Close Encounters, a special computerized camera was built (similar to the famous Dykstraflex used in Star Wars) that digitally recorded every move the camera made. The new camera's digital recorder works on the same basic principle as the digital recorder of a tape recorder--those little numbers that flitter by as the tape records. Later, if you want to go back to a specific part of the tape--or, in this case, a specific frame of film--you simply refer to the number on the digital recorder. The difference is that with the computerized camera, when you refer back to the number, you get a computerized readout of how much light is exposed, location of objects, relative perspective, parallax and so forth in each frame of film. "That way," says Trumbull, "we could have the camera move during the special-effects shots; we could match every move back in the lab just as if the camera were stationary."

"Even the experts won't see 60 percent of the effects in Close Encounters," Spielberg comments while lounging between dailies at Future General, "and, in a way, I'm both saddened and delighted by it. On one hand, I believe that special effects, to be perfect, should be invisible; but, on the other, it's disappointing that they won't be recognized."

Which points up something about Hollywood that most of us tend to forget--if, in fact, we ever knew it in the first place--and that is that movies are a very young art form, especially special effects; most of the top craftsmen have essentially invented their art. But, of course, they did so for a reason: Some crazy young genius director wanted it.

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The future of American cinema is linked inextricably to the technology that supports it and to the storytelling abilities of the men and women who have the stamina and the chutzpah to play with it.

The enemy, as most film makers attest, is television. Not that television is bad per se but that movies are simply not better enough to drag people out of the cozy insulation and high-information load television offers. Star Wars reverses that process, and so, it's hoped, will Close Encounters. At stake is the quality of entertainment itself--that untarnished sense of delight with which the child in us, at any age, can behold even the most tawdry of magic shows and come away feeling rewarded.

Unfortunately, as we grow older, our thresholds for wonder and delight continually expand. We want better and we want more. The pressure is tremendous, and nowhere is it more visible than in special effects. They have entered the realm of high technology and passed through. They're an art form now, complex, sophisticated but still one that speaks to us most purely as children.

"THX was my 20-year-old consciousness," Lucas explains. "I used my head as a film maker. Graffiti was me at 16, using my heart. This movie was using my hands, at 12." It's a stunning progression and one that--when you consider that Star Wars will most probably be, at $200,000,000 plus, the biggest moneymaker in the history of film--may have tapped cinema's primary secret, her mother lode: a well-told fairy tale that rewards and celebrates us with special effects.

"Almost all of these marvelous obliterations are the province of one very select group of people."