Ray, Fay Wray and destiny


By JAMES ADAMS

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

www.theglobeandmail.com


Okay, so maybe it doesn't rank with King Henry's chat with Pope
Gregory at Canossa in 1077 or the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton
hookup in Rome in 1962. Still, Ray Harryhausen's meeting with Fay
Wray at New York's Empire State Building a couple of weeks ago had
to have been pretty cool.

Admittedly, the sparks probably didn't fly. The Alberta-born Wray,
after all, is a frail 97 this year, while Harryhausen, who moved to
London from Los Angeles 40 years ago, is a touch more spry at 84.
Nonetheless, they knew they were making a bit of B-movie history by
having a date of sorts on May 15 at the Empire State Building
because they invited the press along. There she was, the Queen of
Scream, back at the skyscraper that made her famous in 1933, when
she played the reluctant girlfriend of the besotted, doomed giant
ape King Kong. There he was, the dapper, courtly chap who saw Wray
in King Kong at Grauman's Chinese Theatre when he was an
impressionable 13-year-old and decided then and there to dedicate
his life to making special effects for the movies.

Or, as he put it during a stopover in Toronto a few days after his
Wray reunion, "It struck a chord in me that I could not get out of
my mind."

Harryhausen got Wray, who lives in New York, to visit him for two
reasons: First, he "hadn't seen her for a good many years;" Second,
he's just published a five-year labour of love, a huge, colour-
packed hardcover of his life and art retailing for $50 in the U.S.
and a hefty $75 in Canada. Units, in other words, must be moved,
just as Kong moved up the 102 storeys of the Empire State Building
with a hysterical Fay Wray in his sweaty paw.

Even if you don't know of Harryhausen, you know his work -- or at
least the impact of his work. Most of today's film buffs have
probably never seen the 15 or so movies for which Harryhausen did
the special effects -- films like 1952's The Beast from 20,000
Fathoms, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Mysterious Island, Jason and the
Argonauts, The Valley of Gwangi. But some of those who did, people
with names like Spielberg, Cameron and Lucas, never forgot them, and
later went on to perfect Harryhausen's revolutionary stop-motion
animation and split-screen techniques in Star Wars, Close Encounters
of the Third Kind and The Terminator.

If, in today's computer-generated imagery (CGI) era, some of
Harryhausen's effects now seem more charming than jaw-dropping,
well, let's not forget that he never had a 10th or even a 30th of
his more famous protégés' budgets during his heyday. The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms cost all of $200,000, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
around $600,000. In fact, virtually all the conceits you see in a
Harryhausen film were done by the man himself ("Now you see films
where they're crediting 80 persons with special effects"). And while
it may have taken weeks or months to prepare the effects for one
scene in a Harryhausen picture, when it came time to shoot that
scene, "90 per cent of the time it was done in the first take
because the money was so tight."

Harryhausen got out of the movie business in 1981, after his biggest-
budget movie ever, a $16-million romp through Greek mythology called
Clash of the Titans, featuring Harry Hamlin, Laurence Olivier and
Maggie Smith ("The actors got most of the budget"), suffered a
drubbing at the box-office and from critics. "I just couldn't
sustain my enthusiasm any more," he said.

"I got tired of being in a dark room all the time, working for
months with three-dimensional models and the like, while my
colleagues were out making two or three more pictures."
Besides, "the type of movies they wanted to feed the public just
wasn't my cup of tea."

Harryhausen has since spent a lot of his time attending fantasy-film
conventions and personal retrospectives, signing autographs, giving
lectures, organizing his archives, explaining how it took four
months to orchestrate the legendary fight of the skeleton soldiers
in Jason and the Argonautsor how he plowed the space ship in Earth
vs. the Flying Saucers into the U.S. Capitol building.

All this has meant that Harryhausen has been able to develop a cult
following of sorts. Which, in turn, has been something of a balm and
a blessing, since Hollywood tended to ignore or underplay his
contributions to film. This situation started to change somewhat in
1992 when he was awarded the Gordon E. Sawyer special Oscar for
technical achievement. Eleven years later, he got a star on
Hollywood Boulevard -- "right next to Jane Russell, in front of the
Masonic Temple."

As usually happens with cult figures with a defined body of work,
Harryhausen has become a practised interviewee who seems to have
heard every question he's asked, yet answers each graciously, if a
touch formulaically. Unsurprisingly, he has a jaundiced view of
contemporary filmmaking's fondness for CGI. "It's a wonderful tool,
certainly," he averred, "but I don't think everything else should be
discarded just because you have that. I mean, Kermit brought back
the potency of the hand-puppet. Nick Park showed the vibrancy of
stop-motion animation with Chicken Run."

"When I grew up" -- an only child, Harryhausen had a machinist dad
and housewife mom who encouraged his drawing talents and let him
build miniature models of dinosaurs and the like in their garage --
"entertainment was an important thing on Saturday night, to see the
latest film, whatever it was. Today you're inundated with
entertainment . . . and films aren't as important as they used to
be. You see spectacular CGI imagery in a 30-second commercial these
days. Our sense of what is unique any more has completely changed."

Regrets? Sure. He would have liked to have done a film adaptation of
H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. At one time, he even toyed with
doing a stop-motion animation version of Dante's Inferno!The latter,
he acknowledged, would have run up "astronomical" costs and taken
years to complete. "I also wondered, 'Can people get through 1˝
hours of tormented souls?' I thought it might be too much. Now
people seem to be able sit through two or three hours of the stuff."

Over all, Harryhausen seems content to rest on his laurels. As he
writes in the conclusion of his book An Animated Life, "It's
gratifying to know that my work bridged the years between the
pioneering work of Willis O'Brien [the creator of King Kong, whom
Harryhausen later worked with on 1949's Mighty Joe Young] and the
new science of computer special effects." At the same time, he
admits "lost lands" and "other creatures" still inhabit his mind,
but they'll never find their way onto celluloid.

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