RAY HARRYHAUSEN THE MAN OF WONDERS

by Mike Watt

Ray Harryhausen was the first special effects superstar. It is his name you associate with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, rather than solid director Nathan Juran - if you remember Juran's name at all. Standing in the science fiction and fantasy section of any video store, you see titles and think "Ray Harryhausen's Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "Ray Harryhausen's It Came from Beneath the Sea".

The movies he worked on are made up of moments and monsters. You hear the title 20 Million Miles to Earth and you think of the giant Ymir, toppling columns in Rome; someone mentions The Beast from 20 Thousand Fathoms, and your mind plays the image of the colossal rhedosaurus, chomping down on the head of the hapless cop, hoisting the poor man into the air and gulping him down. You remember rooting for the dinosaur.

Ray Harryhausen is the man behind an army of skeletons, a flock of harpies. He launched the Argo, he put the first men on the moon. Ray is a towering cyclops, a multi-headed hydra, a gentle ape performing for a tiny audience. Ray was the man who animated our mythology.

You can almost feel sorry for the current flock of tykes in this Phantom Menace generation. Now that they've witnessed an army of step 'n fetchits battle a bigger army of skeletal bird robots, all of which were spit seamlessly out of a PC, what can they say when you tell them that one man animated seven swashbuckling skeletons, moving each one an almost negligeable amount, clicked off a single frame of film, then repeated the process, for days upon days, to bring the scene to life? They might say what this one young Suncoast customer said, when his father gave him the information, holding a sealed Jason and the Argonauts cassette: "Oh? Why didn't he use a computer?"

"They didn't have computers back then," replied his father.

The boy placed the cassette back on the shelf. "Then he should have waited."

Now that I have you wanting to strangle an unknown Pittsburgh child, may the rest of us all breathe a sigh of relief that Ray hadn't waited. Think of the implication if he had! There would never have been a Star Wars, never a Jurassic Park, and nothing that has come since. Our computer-spawned Gungan friends would never have existed without Ray's painstaking work in his day. Think about it. If stop-motion was easy, would they have invented the computers to do the work?

In 1982, less than a year after Clash of the Titans opened in theaters around the country, Ray Harryhausen retired from the monster business. He can be glimpsed in such films as Spies Like Us and the recent remake of Mighty Joe Young, but he decided that, in the current Spielberg/Lucas empire, that there was no room for a craftsman like him. Too many young people were movie-savvy. They could see through his animation. There was no magic left in his art. He left the stage to the new magicians, taking his rabbit-filled hat and his sorcerer's wand, he walked into the audience and allowed himself to be mystified for a change.

King Kong was the reason Ray got into the business in the first place. After viewing the film in 1933, as a young lad of thirteen, Ray was captivated by the images of the Mighty Kong, clinging to the Empire State Building, swatting down bi-planes. The man behind the gorilla, at the time, was special effects maestro, Willis O'Brien.

Harryhausen met O'Brien in 1940. By that time, the younger man had been experimenting with stop-motion animation for years, and his sample films won him the encouragement of his long-time idol. The second world war interrupted their collaboration for a time, but by 1948, Ray had joined the O'Brien team on a film called Mighty Joe Young, another giant ape film, and a dream come true for Ray.

From there Harryhausen worked on such films as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and the atomic '50s films, It Came from Beneath the Sea, 20 Million Miles to Earth and Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers.

"Our movies were usually born with an idea that I had or someone else had," said Harryhausen. "Most movies start with a script. These pictures never started that way. When Willis O'Brien started on King Kong, he was working on a film for RKO called Creation. They made a lot of tests for about six months and [producer] Merian Cooper came along and saw the tests Willis had done. He didn't like the script or the story because there was no central figure in it. He brought in the idea of the giant gorilla, and a lot of Creation was brought into King Kong. The scene with the log was part of Creation, they had an orcinetharium shaking the log and that finally became the gorilla. A lot of King Kong deveolped from Creation as well as The Lost World (1925).

"Willis O'Brien contributed a lot to these stories, just as I contributed to our films. With Mighty Joe Young and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, I'm always in on the story part because I'm the only one who knows what I can do. Sometimes I brought the original story in, like in the case of 7th Voyage, but in my early days I was too modest to claim credit."

The genesis of many of the most memorable sequences grew out of Harryhausen's artwork. Usually, Ray would draw six to eight charcoal drawings of the most exciting scenes he wanted to do, then he would shop these drawings around in Hollywood, to raise money for the project. "I made eight big drawings for 7th Voyage, to peddle around Hollywood and nobody was interested, because it's essentially a visual thing, rather than a dialogue thing. It wasn't until three or four years after I conceived 7th Voyage that Charles Schneer finally came along interested. I redesigned it later. I wanted it to be as lavish as The Thief of Bagdad (1940) that [producer Alexander] Korda made, but we couldn't get the money. We had to rethink it, and I think, ultimately, the picture cost about $650 thousand dollars."

The drawings also served the production itself, as a visual reference for the actors, publicity artwork, etc. From the charcoal drawings came three hundred to four hundred pen and ink sketches used to flesh out the sequences, so as to eliminate any confusion on the live-action set. But the drawings were always the representation of the ideas.

"Once the ideas were there, we talked it over with the writer and we all contributed ideas ­ often Charles Schneer and myself ­ in what we call "sweatbox sessions", in which we tear the script apart and try to make it better. Most of the times, we think we succeeded."

The pains taken from this amount of pre-production ultimately paid off in the end. "Most of our films I'd say we only had four to five percent retakes. Almost everything was done on the first take. I did a lot of the editing of the sequences myself, and of course we'd trim here and there, cutting up the scenes, to increase the pace or whatever. The "Medusa" sequence [from Clash of the Titans] I edited the whole thing myself. But usually we had very little animation on the cutting room floor, everything was perfectly timed out because it was such an expensive and time-consuming process, we didn't want a lot of wasted film.

Sometimes, the ideas didn't fit the particular picture, however, and sometimes they were things Ray wanted to do in the future.

"I always wanted to do a medusa - and obviously I did animate her, but years later - but a different sort of Medusa. I ransacked the paintings of Titian, and various other people who made paintings of Medusa, and most people painted a normal looking woman with snakes in her hair. I purposefully wanted to make her as grotesque as possible so that you could believe she could turn people into stone. So we gave her a snake's body ­ because I didn't want to animate gauzy gowns flowing in the breeze, you know. So we gave her a snake's body, and I gave her a rattlesnake's tail so that she could be a menace in the sound effects department. You could hear her rattling as she moved, which became quite menacing in the sequence. I also borrowed her bow and arrow from the huntress Diana, so that she could be dangerous from a distance. These type of things have to be considered when you're developing a character."

Ray's most memorable work stayed in the realm of mythology. The greek myths of Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, the lavish Arabian settings of the Sinbad movies.

"I always liked to go into the past [when I chose films]. The future always looks so cold and dismal. Everybody is always blowing each other up and out of space ships, trying to conquer the world. [From the movies] I never have any high hopes for the future, so I want to go into the past. It's more romantic, you know, like the romanticism of the Arabian Nights and of the Greek Mythology."

One of the strengths of Harryhausen's work was that he was able to give audiences fantastic creatures they'd never seen before, because he was creating them on his desk. Many science fiction films at the time - particularly in the 1950s - were using live lizards costumed to look like dinosaurs, an effect Harryhausen didn't like. However, due to budgetary constraints, he was forced to employ this technique on the Raquel Welch vehicle, One Million Years B.C. (1966) So out of character was this use of live animals in a Harryhausen film, that many people wondered if this was a tribute to the 1940 Hal Roach version of the film, entitled One Million B.C..

"No, it wasn't really a tribute, though it was based on the same script. I always swore I'd never use live lizards with fins glued on the back, but because of time and money [we had to]. It was my fault, because I had the choice between animating the dinosaurs, which would have taken three weeks, or shooting live iguanas during one afternoon, so I opted out for the lesser. I regret that, because everybody accuses me of going back on my word.

"I had this theory that if you saw a live lizard at the first sight of the dinosaur you might believe the rest more thoroughly, but it turned out just the opposite. We had three iguanas that looked very similar, and they kept falling asleep in the hot lights. You could hardly get any movement out of them ­ they consented to blink occasionally, but they wouldn't move. The man [supplying the iguanas] had to manipulate them across the set like a hand puppet. Which is why I dislike using live things. But sometimes you have to eat your words."

Ray dubbed his stop-motion technique Dynamation, which was his fancy way of expressing the dynamics of the animated creatures, though it doesn't differ from the classic techniques of stop-motion animation. The name was a way of setting his animation apart from others. In the age of computers, stop-motion is rarely used today, except by die-hard technicians like Will Vinton (The P.J.s) and Nick Park (Wallace and Grommit, Chicken Run). Park has often stated that, on a good day, he averages about four seconds (96 frames) of animation. Harryhausen compares:

"Well, it depends on how complicated the particular piece of animation is. Sometimes you can get twenty-five to forty feet [roughly 25 seconds] if it's a simple animation job. For the skeleton sequence [on Jason and the Argonauts], where I had seven skeletons fighting three men, I only averaged about thirteen frames a day. The accountants were quite upset about that. But it always takes a long time when you're dealing with split timing. I always avoid pans and camera movements as much as I can, because they take so long to calculate. The computer can do it [in today's movies], and you can go over and over the same sequence and refine it, where you couldn't do that with the [Dynamation] animation process." (Take that, you rotten little kid!)

For anyone familiar with films, it is obvious that the live action was shot first, the animated monsters inserted later. "[The big scenes were] accomplished by using a miniature for the set, and the people were inserted into the scene by a process called the "traveling matte". That's how we accomplished the flood scene in Clash of the Titans. You saw all these people running and big tons of water coming down on them. Well you'd kill somebody if you really did that, and there are penalties to pay for killing people. (Laughs) We didn't want to injure anyone, so we matted the people in afterwards into the miniature set. Many times, if you do it correctly, it looks very convincing."

This was state-of-the-art special effects in the pre-Star Wars days, which is why Harryhausen's films appear dated to the eye today. But for the fans that grew up with his magical creatures, each film is like an old friend, a comfort, often inciting giggles of glee, especially in moments involving chomped policemen, giant bronze statues, and undead skeletons. Ray's influence can be seen in many of today's directors, writers, and special effects artists. Look at the cult favorite, Army of Darkness, the last hour of which is Sam Raimi's homage to Jason, featuring hundreds of animated skeletons laying siege to a castle. Lucasfilm staple Phil Tippett, who animated Tauntauns and the towering snow walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, has often referred to Harryhausen as his idol. Tippett's patented Go-Vision (a technique used to add motion blur to an animated model) would never have existed without Dynavision.

With his legacy behind him, Ray was forced to face facts after the release of Clash of the Titans in 1981. While the film did well at the box office, it would never compete with the constantly evolving special effects of Superman and the juggernaut Star Wars series. Younger audiences found Dynavision "quaint" and could easily see through it. He wasn't astounding anyone any more. Gone were the days when Willis O'Brien (and co-conspirator Sr. Arthur Conan Doyle) could fool a roomful of old men that the dinosaurs of The Lost World were real creatures, photographed by National Geographic photographers. Audiences needed new wonders, wonders that Harryhausen could no longer provide.

Ray hasn't drawn or worked on special effects for almost twenty years, but his pictures live on, in spite of snot-nosed Pittsburgh toddlers. He has an impressive body of work that had captured the imaginations of film lovers for half a century. Yet, he doesn't have a favorite.

"Oh, I can't have a favorite, the others would get jealous. I guess Jason was the most complete, though there are a few things I'd like to do over. I always look at my films and cringe and think if only I'd taken five or ten minutes more to do that scene it would have been so much better. Hindsight is never as good as foresight.

"I was proud that we were able to make Beast from 20,000 Fathoms for only two hundred thousand dollars, including the special effects, and the picture made millions for Warner Brothers ­ not for me or [producer] Eugene Lourie. The producers had sold it outright to Warner for a flat fee because they were afraid that all they had was a flat black and white monster film on their hands at the time The Robe was coming out in Cinemascope, and you had 3-D Cinerama, so they got panicky and sold it outright instead of taking a percentage. I guess they regretted that afterwards, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

"I'm proud of [Beast]. There are some scenes I'd love to do over, but you can't do that. Somebody will remake it, of course. I just hope they don't make a musical out of it."

Originally published in GC Magazine - Edited by Jon Keeyes.