Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics

By Julie A. Turnock

Julie A. Turnock tracks the use and evolution of special effects in 1970s filmmaking, a development as revolutionary to film as the form's transition to sound in the 1920s. Beginning with the classical studio era's early approaches to special effects, she follows the industry's slow build toward the significant advances of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which set the stage for the groundbreaking achievements of 1977.

Turnock analyzes the far-reaching impact of the convincing, absorbing, and seemingly unlimited fantasy environments of that year's iconic films, dedicating a major section of her book to the unparalleled innovations of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She then traces these films' technological, cultural, and aesthetic influence into the 1980s in the deployment of optical special effects as well as the "not-too-realistic" and hyper-realistic techniques of traditional stop motion and Showscan. She concludes with a critique of special effects practices in the 2000s and their implications for the future of filmmaking and the production and experience of other visual media.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231535274

Book preview

Plastic Reality

FILM AND CULTURE

John Belton, Editor

FILM AND CULTURE

A series of Columbia University Press

Edited by John Belton

For the list of titles in this series, see Series List.

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

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Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press

COVER PHOTO: The Kobal Collection at Art Resource

COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53527-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turnock, Julie A.

Plastic reality : special effects, technology, and the emergence of 1970s blockbuster aesthetics / Julie A. Turnock.

pages cm. — (Film and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16352-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16353-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-231-53527-4 (ebook)

1. Blockbusters (Motion pictures). 2. Cinematography—Special effects. I. Title.

PN1995.9.B598T87 2014

791.43'75—dc23

2014026529

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents,

Ann and Jack Turnock

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I

Before 1977

1    Optical Animation: Special Effects Compositing Up to 1977

2    Before Industrial Light and Magic: The Independent Hollywood Special Effects Business, 1968–1975

PART II

Circa 1977: Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

3    The Expanded Blockbuster: The Auteurist Aesthetics of 1970s Special Effects–Driven Filmmaking

4    The Buck Stops at Opticals: Special Effects Technology on Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

5    A More Plastic Reality: The Design and Conception of Star Wars and West Coast Experimental Filmmaking

6    More Philosopical Grey Matter: The Production and Aesthetic of Close Encounters of the Third Kind

PART III

The 1980s and Beyond

7    Optical Special Effects into the 1980s: A Well-Oiled Machine

8    Not-too-Realistic and Intensified Realistic Approaches in the 1980s: Traditional Stop Motion and Showscan

Conclusion: World-Building and the Legacy of 1970s Special Effects in Contemporary Cinema

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Over the last decade, this book has benefited immeasurably from the input and advice from many others. At the University of Chicago, I must first of all thank Tom Gunning and Jim Lastra, who encouraged, critiqued, and pushed me through the multiple stages of this project. This project is also dedicated to the memory of Miriam Hansen, who read and commented on selections, and for her extremely insightful suggestions. Tom, Jim, and Miriam not only helped the book take form but also provided inspirational models in their own work. Many classmates and colleagues have proved to be invaluable in reading chapters and offering comments as this work progressed: Doron Galili, Andrew Johnston, Sarah Keller, Dan Morgan, Christina Peterson, and Theresa Scandiffio. I particularly want to thank Andrew and Christina for their technical assistance.

Many other friends and colleagues have provided comments, research tips, and encouragement, and I especially want to thank Emily Carman, Ken Eisenstein, Allyson Field, Adam Hart, Matt Hauske, Laura Horak, Nathan Holmes, Katharina Loew, Scott Richmond, Ariel Rogers, Allison Whitney, and Josh Yumibe. Additionally, I want to thank the participants in the Mass Culture workshop, and the 2007–2008 Affiliated Fellows group at the University of Chicago, notably Neil Verma and Neil Chudgar, for reading and discussing my project.

Many other academics have also been generous with their time and suggestions, and I would like to express my gratitude to John Belton, Scott Bukatman, Don Crafton, Thomas Elsaesser, Scott Higgins, David James, Alison McMahan, James Naremore, Murray Pomerance, Eleftheria Thanouli, Kristen Whissel, Jennifer Wild, and Mark Williams. I am especially grateful to J. B. Capino, Sarah Projansky, Angharad Valdivia, C. L. Cole, and the Unit for Criticism at the University of Illinois, Urbana, for their support of this project. Also at Illinois, former and current graduate students, Alicia Kozma proved an invaluable research assistant, and thanks to Audrey Evrard for checking my French translations. Richard Rickitt has graciously allowed me to reproduce several very useful diagrams from his book. I have also been fortunate to work with Jennifer Crewe, Kathryn Schell, and Roy Thomas at Columbia University Press, who have patiently helped me through the manuscript’s various stages, and Cynthia Savage, who did the index.

This book could not have been finished without the generous support of a number of sources. Most importantly, a Whiting Foundation Fellowship granted me time to write and to conduct research travel to Los Angeles. Additionally, I received short-term travel grants from the University of Chicago Humanities Division, Cinema and Media Studies travel funds, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies. Over the revising period, I am grateful for a Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship carried out at the University of California, Davis, Institute for the Humanities, and thank Jennifer Langdon and Carolyn de la Peña for hosting me there.

For help with matters both research-related and logistical in Los Angeles, many people and research institutions provided support, including Mark Toscano, May Haduong, and Brian Meacham at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Pickford Center, Ned Comstock at the USC Cinema Library, Coco Halverston at CalArts, and Mark Quigley at the UCLA Film and Television archive. Also, Barbara Hall and Jenny Romero at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, and Stephanie Sapienza at the Iota Center. In the U.K., those at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts and Special Collections in London were especially kind and helpful: Sara Mahurter, Jessica Womack, Richard Daniels, and Wendy Russell.

I was fortunate to be able to meet a good number of people involved with special effects in the 1970s and 1980s, and I am especially grateful to Gerry Harding, Sarah Kareem, David Larson, Steve Merel, Patty Rhodes, John Swallow, and Mark Toscano for putting me in touch with many of my interview subjects. Finally, on the research front, I want to express my enormous debt to those who served as interview subjects in Los Angeles and London: Betzy Bromberg, Joy Cuff, John Dykstra, Syd Dutton, Bill Gilman, Brian Johnson, Tim Johnson, Peter Kuran, Sandra Lee, Bryan Loftus, Pat O’Neill (particularly for suggesting the title), John Swallow, Bill Taylor, Richard Winn Taylor, and John Whitney Jr.

On a more personal note, thanks to my sisters Jennifer Harding and Amy McMahon, who always supported me and made me laugh when I needed to throughout this long process, and to their families (Pat McMahon, Chris Harding, John, Zoe, Nora, and Nick). A word of thanks to Jonathan Knipp, because there is no one I would rather see Transformers 3 with, and all the Transformers yet to come. Most of all, I want to express my love and appreciation to my parents, Ann and Jack Turnock who have patiently and steadfastly encouraged me through my academic career.

I hope I never hear the term special effects again.

—STEVEN SPIELBERG (1977)¹

I have never been a science fiction buff.

—DOUGLAS TRUMBULL, SPECIAL EFFECTS SUPERVISOR ON CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND AND BLADE RUNNER, AS WELL AS DIRECTOR OF SILENT RUNNING AND BRAINSTORM²

I was never into effects work [in other films].

—BETZY BROMBERG, EXPERIMENTAL FILMMAKER AND SPECIAL EFFECTS ARTIST ON WOLFEN AND THE TERMINATOR³

Introduction

The quotations above represent a sampling of statements by many of the most prominent participants in the special effects boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Why such a resistance to science fiction and special effects, even by those most closely associated with it? One might expect the notion of highly manipulated imagery masquerading as seamless realism was anathema to many 1960s and 1970s filmmakers steeped in filmmaking polemics favoring a stripped-down authenticity. Certainly many proponents of the so-called New Hollywood of the 1960s and 1970s share these misgivings, for whom films such as Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) spelled an end to what they articulate positively as the United States’ Auteur Renaissance.⁴

Another aim in citing these quotes is to point out the number of artists in the 1970s and 1980s from many different and unexpected backgrounds—in mainstream film, experimental filmmaking, traditional animation, and underground film—who were perhaps never science fiction buffs or into effects, but who nevertheless found in special effects work an exciting and fertile place for their imaginations and creative energies, and indeed helped reconsider given categories of cinematography such as diegesis, mise-en-scène, and camera movement. Many contemporary critics’ and academics’ own resistance to the development of special effects–intensive cinema means we have largely lost the divergent and unexpected contexts out of which those films arose in the 1970s. Likewise, this study hopes to suggest there are a great deal of unexpected benefits to be gained from an attention to special effects as a topic that includes but goes beyond an interest in science fiction, fantasy, or even technology. Placing at the forefront the historical confluence of art, aesthetics, technology, and fantasy, Plastic Reality makes a case for the historical significance of special effects in cinema and media studies.

More specifically, this book argues that 1970s special effects aesthetics developed for these science fiction blockbusters do not represent an opposition to this 1970s anti-Hollywood naturalistic style, but expressly an extension of it. Moreover, this book will argue that rather than moving away from New Hollywood auteurist filmmaking, the mid- to late 1970s science fiction and fantasy blockbusters exemplify an elaboration of that ethos by allowing the filmmakers to more fully express their own personal vision through the effects work. New Hollywood auteurs believed the effort that went into developing these complex techniques was a parallel strategy that helped shape the diegesis of the 1970s auteur’s worldview and demonstrated the power of the cinema not only to mold and bend reality but indeed to display alternative potential realities.

While many regard auteurism a critical category of value, here I consider the auteur historically, as a filmmaker of the subsequent generation influenced by François Truffault and Andrew Sarris and exposed to the notion in film school and by their peers. Consequently, many filmmakers of the 1970s considered themselves auteurs and acted accordingly. In the 1970s, newly minted U.S. filmmakers had absorbed and taken to heart the auteurist ethos that they could and should make films that reflect their own personal vision within the Hollywood system. Echoing the activist culture of the day, they also believed they should make films for the people and that they should work to gain more economic and therefore artistic control over their films. A professed characteristic of auteurist filmmaking is displaying a recognizable style. The special effects technology and aesthetic developed for such late 1970s special effects–heavy films such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind helped these two ideals to come together: to gain greater control over the image in order to better express the filmmaker’s vision, and also to present a highly personalized manifestation of that style.

Therefore, filmmakers needed special effects technology to accomplish more than it had in the past. Aided in part by the example of contemporary experimental filmmaking as well as refreshing older techniques, popular filmmakers learned new strategies for how to stage spatial relations and kineticism on the screen. The ability to manipulate the filmstrip frame by frame allowed the filmmaker more control over the image, to compose a more elaborately layered and polished composite mise-en-scène, mobilized and energized by the properties of graphic dynamics. Filmmakers believed that an imaginary environment that appeared to be captured directly by a single live-action camera would add not only to the impact of the narrative but also to the effectiveness of the overall experience and the penetration of the filmmakers’ worldview. Special effects aesthetics in the 1970s did not only mean more real images. The new style of blockbuster filmmaking that emerged at the end of that decade emphasized a sense of immersion and bodily engagement. Many filmmakers believed this corresponded to the need to take filmmaking into a realm more properly driven by sound and vision, and away from talky scripts and literary themes. In other words, filmmakers saw these visually energized, obviously fantastic environments as an alternative to participating in the politically suspect illusionism of old Hollywood.

At the same time, the director/producer-driven approach incorporated by George Lucas at Lucasfilm Ltd. was succeeding well beyond the original plans. Lucas’s effects wing Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as the industry leader was working to streamline and homogenize its style and working method in order to increase efficiency and consistency. As ILM-produced effects appeared in most of the highest-grossing films of the last several decades, their house style eventually pushed all others to the periphery. Not surprisingly, the story of special effects since the 1970s is largely the story of ILM and its economic domination, and its enormous success in setting the style for realism in the cinema—so much so that we tend to accept the contemporary realism of the special effects business, especially ILM’s, as natural. What is important to recognize is that the powerfully photorealistic style of contemporary effects is in no way objectively more natural or realistic than any previous style. Instead, it is a historically specific style comprised of component parts.

This new style of the popular feature film as multimedia event also arose in a historical context of optimism for what the fast-changing fields of technology and media might be able to provide society. Cinema was a popular forum for artists to be able to visualize both the hopes and anxieties associated with rapid social change, and also facilitated cultural discussion around these issues. Many filmmakers believed bringing people together in a movie theater and visualizing alternate or future worlds for them was perhaps the most powerful way movies could effect larger change. Unhappily, this utopian view of cinema did not last long, even with those who helped popularize it. Cinema as a communal event that would assuage viewers’ alienation and atomization in the modern world was quickly reabsorbed into the system it was initially built to resist.

Special Effects Studies

Until very recently, cinema and media studies have woefully neglected the topic of special effects in the cinema as a topic in itself. However, academics are beginning to produce a plurality of viewpoints on effects, one that recognizes that manipulation and compositing of the mise-en-scène is hardly unusual in the history of cinema. Also, attention to special effects points up what many have long believed, that the index, or the imprint of light through a lens onto a light-sensitive storage medium, has never been a very useful description for differentiating digital from optical, or moreover, on hinging an ontology of the cinema.⁵ An emerging view is that effects films drive Hollywood production (even in films where that is less obvious), and cannot be ignored or marginalized. As the technology and look of these films set the style for so many other kinds of images (including television, advertising, and even political ads), cinema studies and moving-image studies more broadly need to understand the technology and aesthetic of these films. Moreover, we need to understand who is actually producing the effects footage, and how. What aesthetic standards do these people and companies utilize to build realism from scratch? Where does our aesthetic of realism in special effects even come from?

It has become clear through recent critical analyses deploying Tom Gunning’s well-known cinema of attractions argument that different kinds of filmmaking choices provide diverse appeals and pleasures, and furthermore, that much of the excitement and pleasure of filmmaking is carried through its style.⁶ Much valuable theoretical work referring to special effects (Scott Bukatman, Vivian Sobchack, Thomas Elsaesser, Gunning, and more broadly speaking, Annette Michelson and Richard Dyer) has been especially suggestive in helping academe rethink cinema in terms of movement, animation, cinematic space,⁷ affect and spectacle, and to understand the spectator as an active and engaged viewer and even a participant in the cinematic experience.⁸ While I take these approaches as inspiration, I consider special effects work as more than just an important component of cinema’s attraction. Rather, I argue that special effects particularly have been instrumental in the historical emergence in the 1970s of more intensively manipulated styles of filmmaking that have led to the ability to create infinitely expandable diegetic environments.⁹

Therefore, although there has been important work around special effects, especially by Scott Bukatman, Vivian Sobchack, Kristen Whissel, Michele Pierson, and Dan North, that fascinatingly deploy effects as a topos to examine another topic, such as wonder, historicity, magic, fantasy, and sensation in the cinema, this book will put special effects, its history, technology and aesthetics, at the forefront. Moreover, unlike mid- to late 1990s work addressing the digital anxiety given rise by films such as Jurassic Park (1993) and Terminator 2 (1991), which led those such as Warren Buckland, Lev Manovich, Sean Cubitt, Yvonne Spielmann, and others to conjecture about the new hyper-realness of digitally generated effects’ impact on the viewer, this study is more concerned with the technical, aesthetic, and historical continuities across special effects practices, and the producer-side assumptions and contexts that shape notions of realism in effects.

Stephen Prince’s recent book (2012) on effects takes the topic most directly, making a broad-based argument for visual effects, or digital effects that manipulate the mise-en-scène as part of cinema’s long tradition. While I agree with Prince that effects technology needs to move into the mainstream of our understanding of cinematic technologies, and should not be understood as more or less remarkable or frightening than, say, editing or sound design, I disagree with the many disparate technologies he collects into the catchall term visual effects; including feature-length animation, digital capture camera technology, digital intermediate, computer-based production design, motion capture, and 3D. While visual effects (as he formulates it) makes a convenient rhetorical heuristic, it flattens the many technologies, practices, and design traditions into a false unity of the digital. Certainly, the digital technologies of many sorts that Prince describes all routinely appear side by side in the same film. However, their software, platforms, pipelines, and workflows are not easily compatible or collapsible. Nor are their personnel interchangeable. Certainly, the topic of special effects is particularly daunting because of the many different technologies, terminologies, and, especially, its confusing and somewhat unique position in the industrial production hierarchy. This book not only describes the technologies and personnel, but places them in a historical context and at the forefront of historical transformations.

Special Effects and Cinema History

More strongly, I cast the shift in the 1970s and through the 1980s toward a cinema more and more reliant on special effects technology as comparable to cinema’s shift to sound in the late 1920s, albeit a transition that took considerably longer. Historical accounts of the transition to sound by Donald Crafton, James Lastra, Robert Spadoni, and Rick Altman have convincingly argued that technology and its accompanying aesthetics have been the major driving force for change in the cinema on every level of production, marketing, and distribution. These changes in technology occurred hand in hand with all areas of aesthetics, including screenwriting, narrative patterning, acting styles, arrangement of the mise-en-scène, camera movement, etc. And while older forms remained active, they nevertheless became transformed in the new context.¹⁰ Similarly, the shift to a special effects–intensive cinema beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the digital era has been more difficult to name because its consequences appeared more gradually.

What all studies of digital effects agree upon is that analog or pre-digital effects are important for understanding digital effects. However, this is usually asserted simply as an acknowledgment of past practices as precedent for more recent digital technologies.¹¹ Exactly how these disparate methologies have shaped contemporary practice is rarely discussed. This is largely due to the unacknowledged complexity of special effects history, and the lack of primary source research on the topic before the 1990s. Which is why it is useful to propose a distinctive importance for special effects, as well as a revised timeline that does not rely upon an analog/digital split for a historical dividing line.

Moving the transitional timeline from the early 1990s back to the mid-1970s accomplishes a number of tasks. First of all, it helps us make sense of a period of cinema history that has been in dispute over its characterization and importance. Historians have long argued that the late 1960s and early 1970s in U.S. filmmaking represents a break from the previous studio-based Classical Hollywood cinema. This period has been approached from a number of different organizing factors—for example, Richard Maltby’s description of the economic aesthetic of the post-studio era, arguing that the economic imperatives of the blockbuster drive these films’ aesthetic.¹² Also, the Classical to Post-Classical debates waged most prominently between David Bordwell and Thomas Elsaesser are organized primarily around narrative.¹³

Certainly, any study that seeks to periodize cinema history must engage with Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson’s canonical The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Rather than attempting to overturn this vital work, my study addresses that project’s main deficit: its functionalist treatment of aesthetics. In other words, in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, the discussion of aesthetics tends to be treated as a by-product of stronger forces (such as technical change or economics), and further reduced to a drive toward greater narrative clarity and comprehensibility. In terms of aesthetics, Bordwell and Thompson have since granted shifts in narrative, cinematography, continuity editing styles, and arrangement of the mise-en-scène by coining the term intensified continuity. While I believe that this is an important concept, it overemphasizes continuity (stressing shorter shot lengths), while underemphasizing the intensified compositing of the mise-en-scène.¹⁴ I claim that this focus neglects or downplays a great deal of cinematic material and energy, not all of which is directly in support of the narrative, but nevertheless has commensurate importance to driving change and innovation in filmmaking practice. For many, greater emphasis on special effects is a small part of this historical shift. However, I want to demonstrate that special effects technology and aesthetics have been an important (although not exclusive) driver of these changes, rather than its symptom. Furthermore, I argue that the 1970s bring exactly the historical change in emphasis that proves this point, as auteurist filmmakers place style at the forefront of their concerns. In other words, a history of special effects practice in this era provides a concrete argument and thorough evidence describing precisely by what means classical filmmaking has changed, and why a revised periodization, with a technological and aesthetic focus, is required.

Terminology surrounding effects technology can also be historically inconsistent and confusing, not least of all around the term special effects itself. The term likely began in the 1920s less as a distinction from regular live-action filming than a designation recognizing the need for specialized labor for particular effects. Eventually in the 1950s and 1960s the term denoted more spectacular or fantastic material generated by the studio’s special effects department.¹⁵ However, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, movie credits for special effects have meant physical and mechanical effects, such as stunts, gunshot squibs, makeup prosthetics, or pyrotechnics. Largely for this reason, Stephen Prince has proposed dropping the term special effects in favor of visual effects as a more inclusive term that can absorb digital capture and cinematography, character animation, digital intermediate, 3D, and environment-building. In this way, he believes that the digital prevalence of effects means that there is nothing special anymore about special effects, and therefore the term is a relic of an earlier, more effects-wary era. While I see his point, altogether dropping the term special effects in favor of an expanded definition of visual effects both misrepresents the current state of the effects industry, and has unintended polemic consequences. While the term visual effects is fine (it is in the name of the Academy Award category as well as the effects industry’s quasi-guild, the Visual Effects Society), we should be precise about what techniques we include in its definition. It is a distortion to include all of Prince’s technologies because although all would agree that these expanded digital production areas overlap and inform one another, their technology is not interchangeable. Moreover, these jobs are typically performed by different companies or divisions with specialized personnel and labor.¹⁶ The effects artists who complete effects of virtual cinematography in fact have a separate job (and usually work at a different company) from those who work behind the camera on the set and place the lights in production, etc., in principal photography. And in postproduction, they are also different from those who post-convert a film to 3D, or complete color correction in the digital intermediate. For example, Lucasfilm’s 3D conversion of The Phantom Menace (2012) was not completed by ILM, but by an outside firm who specializes in post-conversion.¹⁷ Different independent companies have proprietary digital technologies that do not usually mesh with other similar technologies. The digital that is used to capture live action is not the same digital that records motion capture.

Therefore, although it is rhetorically convenient to merge all these digital technologies together, it is important to acknowledge effects as a distinct production category. Even if we do not take the industry sectors as our guide for designating terms, there is an important polemic reason for maintaining the special in special effects. Again, considering the term historically as a labor category, dropping special diminishes the labor and considerable specialization of effects work, and reinforces the media conglomerates’ very real devaluing of the largely independent (that is, not owned by conglomerate) special effects industry. Although highly dependent on the effects industry for hundreds or even thousands of effects shots per blockbuster, the production companies continually strategize to keep the effects houses financially weak and underpaid, effectively erasing their very visible contributions.¹⁸ For that reason, I will continue to refer to special visual effects.

Finally, though digital manipulation permeates many levels of filmmaking, both visible and imperceptible, the marketing importance of a film’s elaborate effects as a lure is no less strong in the 2010s as it was in 1977. The enthusiastic audiences for the Transformers series can attest to the desire to see a film in the theater primarily for the special effects display. In any case, this book traces not only the terminology but also the historical transformations the effects industry has experienced, and the changing fortunes of the effects artist.

Special Effects and Realism

Because special effects material is generally designed to match or complement live-action footage (differentiating it from, say, traditional animation), a history of special effects aesthetics must also confront the thorny topic of realism. I argue that rather than improving previous styles of realism, the 1970s shift to special effects–intensive cinema brought with it instead a novel style of cinematic realism, as well as new audience expectations for what realism in such films should look like. Along with a carefully contextualized history of special effects technology, this book presents the interrelation between the new or revived effects technologies and the aesthetics they were designed to achieve, as well as the resultant aesthetics that arose over time. I argue that filmmakers’ notions of special effects aesthetics follow highly stylized forms of realism related to dominant filmmaking aesthetics, replicating an accepted aesthetic photorealistically. This is in contrast to the commonsense ideas that special effects aim to either emulate a notion of perceptual realism (what the eye sees in real life) or is congruent with a transhistorical notion of humans’ mimetic kunstwollen.¹⁹ In the age of digital reproduction, including photo may seem counterintuitive. Many understand the term photorealism reductively, as corresponding to camera reality, aiming to create perceptually convincing … representations.²⁰ However, the term refers to a series of approaches much more complex than a simple-sounding transfer of perception via lenses and light onto a photochemical medium.

It is instructive to consider the term photorealism much as it was initially popularized in art history, which describes paintings (and prints) executed to mimic a photographic aesthetic. In art history, the term typically describes mid-twentieth-century painters and graphic artists such as Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Ralph Goings, and others who created paintings and prints that initiated an ontological play on the perceptual cues of photography, featuring purposefully banal and quotidian subject matter, such as a diner still life with a napkin holder and ketchup bottle, or a row of chrome telephone booths, along with irregularly cropped, haphazard-looking framing. While art historical photorealism depends upon the recognition of an intellectual play on medium specificity, cinematic photorealism usually depends upon the erasure of the technique by a seamless matching of the special effects material and the live-action footage to depict a coherent diegesis. What is important is that neither aesthetic, however, replicates what the eye really sees. Cinematic photorealism instead builds, often from scratch, a stylized conception of how the camera lens, film stock, light patterns, movement, and so on translates images into cinema. Artists do not necessarily take the literal camera reality (that is, what an actual camera is able to capture), but instead offer a stylized representation of the photographic aesthetic, much like art historical photorealism. Filmmakers of the 1970s and their effects teams endeavored to match the look of the dominant style of live-action cinematography in the 1970s, not the actual physical plane of existence, and often took considerable liberties with so-called camera reality.²¹

Considering the term photorealism as a referential style is especially apt for the historical period beginning in about 1968 with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At that time, instead of a composited photochemical mise-en-scène (which had been common before 1968), filmmakers combined more kinds of artificial material, such as optical printing, animation, and rotoscoping, to match a particularly stylized notion of late 1960s and early 1970s cinematography. By this era, photography was recognized by effects artists not as a default aesthetic, but instead became a reference style to both imitate and schematize. Likewise, while the digital capture aesthetic is still in its formative stages, photography is still the primary aesthetic reference for feature mainstream filmmaking.

Historicizing special effects realism addresses another important problem with a notion of perceptual realism. That is, even if we assume it is a style with aesthetic contours mimicking perception, it nevertheless assumes an impossibly transhistorical ideal. As many, including Kristin Thompson, have long argued, cinematic realism has never displayed transhistorically consistent traits, but instead emphasizes different aspects at different times.²² This claim is easy enough to accept when discussing The Bicycle Thieves (1948) and considering elements such as choice of actors, location shooting, and framing. However, it is harder to accept when discussing special effects, which are generally meant to appear congruent with a coherent live-action diegesis. Much like we can today see through the realisms of The Bicycle Thieves and name their component parts, previous effects styles are likewise more noticeable in hindsight. With this in mind, if we adhere to perceptual realism as a transhistorical aesthetic, we must understand all past special effects realisms as inadequate, dated, and fake. Instead, like previous realist styles associated with live-action filmmaking, such as French poetic realism, cinéma vérité, or Dogme 95, we can acknowledge their style as historical. And that should help us also recognize the historical contingency of realism styles even in films like Iron Man (2008) or The Avengers (2012), which seem more real than earlier periods.²³

Instead, special effects realism attempts to fit, match, or enhance the dominant or desired cinematography styles, film stock limitations or specifications, color palettes, lens capabilities, or other technical specifications of their era. Through a careful consideration of historical cinematic aesthetics, this book seeks to understand neither realism nor photorealism as an endpoint or goal, but a historical discourse and series of practices.

Therefore, this book will detail how filmmakers and technicians of the 1970s confronted the problem of photorealism, which led to a transformation of notions of realism in the industry, and across media representation more broadly. To provisionally demonstrate historical photorealism, a few examples are in order. Traditionally, the commonly held special effects industrial ideal for photorealism is often stated as: If x existed in our world (an alien spacecraft, a Gollum, a fairy-tale castle) and was photographed, how would it look, and how would it move? This formula seems obvious. However, as Rudolf Arnheim has noted but we tend to forget, the key is, if it existed and if it were photographed.²⁴ We have become so inured to cinematic conventions that we typically do not notice the transformation that ordinary objects undergo when placed on a set in front of a camera lens, professionally lit, recorded on film or a hard drive, developed or processed, copied onto a release print or data file, and finally projected at our local theater. In other words, the simple glass of juice in a movie that seems to look exactly like the glass of juice in front of us at breakfast has gone through a number of artificial processes, and appears at a particular point in history with certain industrial and aesthetic conventions in order for us as moviegoers to accept that it looks exactly like we expect that glass of juice to look.

Likewise, histories of special effects tend to revolve around the assumption that they are always improving in the direction of greater realism. To demonstrate the various aesthetic contours of photorealism as new and different image capture (photographic or digital) techniques and technologies become standard or expected in filmmaking practice, we can imagine (considering for now only color films) the differences among that glass of juice in, say, Gone With the Wind (1939), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Nashville (1975), or in Miami Vice (2006).²⁵

The specific contours of 1970s photorealism will be described in depth later on. In realism’s historically privileged relation to cinema’s ontology, the unanswered question is, what historical factors and strategies lead us to accept or reject that glass of juice as realistic? If we understand cinema’s ontology in terms of a history and an aesthetic, answers to these problems start to take shape.

Special Effects Practitioner Discourse

This notion of a historicized photographic realism also seems to fly in the face of much practitioner discourse one reads in technical, professional, and fan publications, who are always touting a new technique as more real than what came before, and also, who unabashedly assert their goal as greater realism. Certainly, along with archival material, this book draws heavily on practitioner discourse, including interviews conducted by the author, for much of its evidence. However, special effects artists’ discourse is often misleading when taken at face value. As James Lastra discusses in his book on the discourse around emerging sound technology and aesthetics in the 1920s and 1930s, technicians, although often thoughtful and reflective, are not always the most reliable at acknowledging the historical context of their statements.²⁶ In other words, one must analyze practitioner discourse in order to present a historically situated composite theory of their statements.

Historical contextualization is especially important when considering statements about special effects. If the stated goal of Linwood Dunn in 1941 at RKO was often to look more real (as was Richard Edlund’s in 1980, as is any ILM artist’s today), we must understand the meaning of real within the particular aesthetic requirements and technical limitations of the time. When special effects artists claim they did something because they wanted it to look more real, one must ask, what is the model of realism they are emulating? Or more real in relation to what previous model? What aspects or cues are emphasized to create that effect? Again, assuming there is no ultimate representation of the real, analysis of the historical discourse helps us to form a historically based practioner theory of realism.

Because this book will concentrate on the special effects context of the 1970s as an important turning point in filmmaking more broadly, I will emphasize some techniques, especially compositing and other optical techniques, more heavily than others. Unhappily, effects makeup and other physical effects will not be thoroughly covered, but mostly because I do not believe they played as important a role circa 1977–1982 as they did later on in the 1980s. I hope to remedy that gap in future work focusing on other historical eras. Also, although sound effects were extremely important to effects of the 1970s, the topic’s complexity and aesthetic and historical specificities are well beyond the scope of this project, as well as my sonic sensitivities.

Plastic Reality

I consider photographic visual effects one of the least appreciated art forms in the world. It takes tremendous understanding of design and illustration of color, lighting photography, action, movement and drama.

—DOUGLAS TRUMBULL²⁷

The topic of this book pivots around the year 1977, the year Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were released. While it is a popular myth that individual films spur widespread industrial change, it is not an exaggeration to say that these two enormously successful special effects blockbusters were instrumental in putting into motion changes whose consequences we are still sorting through. While these films did not invent the blockbuster film, they did help shift a number of technological and aesthetic emphases in big-budget filmmaking.²⁸ Specifically, in terms of special effects, what did change in the 1970s? The increased importance of special effects in the late 1970s affected nearly all areas of production, marketing, and distribution in other ways: filmmaking moved to a more intensively layered and sustained composite mise-en-scène, in which layers of live-action photography, stop-motion animation, traditional 2D animation, as well as both frame-rate manipulated and still artwork could coexist in the same frame to build the illusion of an integral mise-en-scène captured by one camera in live action.

Certainly what was so exhilarating to many about these films was not simply the experience of a new kind of realism. Perhaps even more important was the intensified density of effects in films of the era, which many at the time understood as a thrillingly new and vividly somatic technologized experience. This book aims to recover the excitement that not just ticket-buyers but also many academics, critics, and journalists felt upon experiencing the special effects–heavy films of the 1970s, in particular Star Wars and Close Encounters, and further grant historical dimension and context to that experience. It may be surprising for many to realize that in the 1970s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg were considered among the most interesting, ambitious, and exciting filmmakers of the era, alongside more canonized American filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Martin Scorsese. What critics praised most often about Lucas and Spielberg as filmmakers was their grasp of specifically cinematic visual dynamics that lent their films both greater visceral and sensual engagement and an extra layer of expressive and intellectual potential. While many critics have