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That stained-glass knight wasn't just a little moment: It earned pages of coverage in American Cinematographer. This knight was also a giant frog in the small pond of mid-'80s computer graphics. Digital visionaries and animators alike saw him as a clue to the next direction -- one that could change the relationship between special effects and the rest of movies.
In the golden age of Hollywood, effects sequences were often the lonely high points of epics, spectacles, and fantasy or adventure films. They were isolated in their position in the movies, and isolated in the way they were made. Typically, Tippett explains, "a production designer would call for a matte painting, a director would call for a dam bursting." That began to change in the '50s, when puppet masters George Pal (Destination Moon, The Time Machine) and Harryhausen developed enough clout to seize control of entire productions. In the '60s and '70s, a series of collaborative leaps -- made by Douglas Trumbull and Stanley Kubrick in 2001; by Trumbull and Spielberg in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; and by ILMers like Muren and Tippett and Lucas in the Star Wars trilogy and beyond -- brought effects teams and directors close together. And after Young Sherlock Holmes, filmmakers began to realize that the computer enabled them to weave the most whimsical or dangerous effects even more intimately into the fabric of a movie.
That hasn't happened yet -- in 1997, effects are largely still a carnival attraction. Levinson compares the digital boom to the emergence of color television: "When the sets for the TV shows all had to be very colorful, game-show sets had panels with nine different colors. Everything went haywire and became garish. Each new invention basically gets abused in some fashion until good sense takes over."
Of course, Levinson doesn't hesitate to exploit the new technology when it's apt, as in the virtual-reality subplot of his Disclosure. Talking about his forthcoming underwater sci-fi flick, Sphere, he rhapsodizes about "a digital thing with jellyfish that's still evolving." He says, "We're trying to picture a school of these gorgeous, transparent, colorful jellyfish in a way that's just fantastically beautiful at the beginning, then eerie, then deadly; to have this tranquil, idyllic moment when a flashlight shines through them and they're illuminated, and then to have it go haywire. It's something you could never do with puppets."
But Levinson most looks forward to digital work that will support storytelling without calling attention to itself. As he points out, even his beloved sleeper Diner, whose charm derived from its evocation of '50s Baltimore, would be hard to produce in today's inflated film economy. Detailed digital sets could make more movies like it affordable.
Levinson's one-time collaborators at Pixar were the first to find a way to integrate digital effects organically into a feature -- by making an entire film in the computer. Their pop phenomenon Toy Story took place in a digitally stylized Everysuburb that the mass audience instantly read as "home." The brilliance of the film was to accept the suburbanization of movies and to play with it instead of simply pander to it. The human characters in Toy Story are consumers -- and the main characters, toys, are actually retail products, many of whom, like Slinky Dog or Mr. Potato Head, have commercial pedigrees. With Toy Story, Pixar's moonstruck wiseacres proved they bring self-mocking fun to their most intricate bagatelles and whim-whams. This movie marked the first occasion that a burger-joint product tie-in was more giggly than offensive. A direct-to-video sequel, Toy Story 2, is scheduled for 1998, along with Pixar's next full-scale feature: A Bug's Life.
Steve Jobs bought Pixar from Lucas in 1986 and the company jumped across the bay to Point Richmond. But it always had a separate identity from the rest of the Lucas empire. Lucas hoped to use computer graphics as one tool in his live-action movie workshop. John Lasseter and company aimed to create shorts and then features solely from computer imagery. To Orson Welles, the movie studio was the greatest train set in the world; to Lasseter, the computer is.
A yawning gap separates the ILM and Pixar aesthetics. That's not to belittle the comic skills of ILMers, who have done uproarious slapstick effects. In the dueling-bitch comedy Death Becomes Her, it was a hoot to see Goldie Hawn flatten Meryl Streep's head into her neck with a shovel until she looked like a chess queen. In The Mask, the computer animation that allowed Jim Carrey to bounce and gyrate appeared to spring from his own pliable core. And the memorable effects in Men in Black were its freakiest and tiniest -- the wormlike creatures swigging coffee, the benign alien lodged in a humanoid brainpan.
But ILM's digital effects team is best known for bringing photo-realism into fantasy, and that can become monotonous. The dinosaurs in The Lost World are imposing but not haunting; they lack the mysterious gravity of Harryhausen's handmade Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. Speaking with a gifted animation supervisor at ILM, I kept asking whether the push to have computer-generated imagery duplicate physical reality was self-defeating. What would be the point? It's not the accuracy but the poetry you remember from Willis O'Brien's King Kong. He looked at me kindly and patiently, and replied that it would take years for a computer even to approximate the complexity required to render the tissue, bones, and muscles of, say, a wrist.
