For a few years, I wrote a piece or two to promote the Portland Creative Conference. Many divas, great fun. From September 9, 1992. – JDW
If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane. – Ray Harryhausen
In the childhood I remember, we went to the movies every Saturday it rained. I wish the old gang was here now so I could tell them about this exclusive interview with Ray Harryhausen, creator of “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.”
Except for “The Blob” and any Western with Indians and no singing, “Sinbad” was our favorite film. Thirty-five cents for a ticket and more excitement than we could stand.
“The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” “Twenty Million Miles To Earth,” “The Three Worlds of Gulliver,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” “It Came From Beneath the Sea” and “Earth Versus the Flying Saucers” were movies we watched one weekend after another.
Ray Harryhausen took us on journeys to worlds barely imagined by most kids growing up back then.
It was a simpler time.
Harryhausen’s battling dinosaurs, sword-fighting skeletons, snorting centaurs and one-eyed Cyclops were not the fare of our daily lives.
Just our nightmares.
As “mature” teens, we were old enough to appreciate the grunting cavemen and the fur bikinis of “One Million Years B.C.”
Remember Raquel Welch? Another Harryhausen design. (No relation, by the way.) (Too bad.)
Ray Harryhausen was a kid once. He was thirteen-years-old when he first saw “King Kong,” the original urban gorilla.
“I didn’t know what animation was, but I was stimulated to find out how it was done. I discovered the glories of stop-motion.”
What are those glories? “The process of producing artificial life,” Harryhausen explains. Like some mad scientist. “You might say, it’s a Frankenstein complex. You put on the screen living images that don’t really exist.”
His first film featured another big ape, “Mighty Joe Young.”
“The critics said the movie was animated, so, of course, everybody thought it was a cartoon.” It was dynamation, the term used by Harryhausen to describe 3-D animation combined with live action.
What that means is, Ray Harryhausen basically invented special effects. This past March, his unique contributions were recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. With a special Oscar awarded on prime time.
Official living legend status.
Ray Harryhausen is a storyteller.
“Film was a means to an end, the means of putting on the screen these never-never land stories you could only find in books,” offers Harryhausen. “When I was young, we’d see these old films called “The Arabian Nights.” But they simply ended up being cops and robbers in baggy pants.
“They would talk about these fantastic creatures like the Cyclops and the Two-Headed Rock, but you’d never see them on the screen. I always wanted to put them on the screen, so you had a sense of wonder and fantasy that was seldom seen in those days.”
Ray Harryhausen is a magician. His movies still have a how-did-they-do-that? quality.
“I always felt the film medium was made for fantasy and stories of elevation,” says Harryhausen, who traces his artistic influences to the Victorian age.
“Today, you’re surrounded by nothing but negative messages and psuedo-realistic drama that are always on the dark side. It’s rather amazing there are no gentlemen on the screen today. There is only whit you might call a portrayal of slobs.”
Ray Harryhausen is an artist.
“We had to compromise enormously. Creativity on a low budget means an enormous number of compromises. But the lack of money also stimulates.
“I think the same principle applied in early films when censorship taught the director to infer, to use his imagination, rather than blatantly put on the screen people’s insides being ripped open and blood all over.”
Harryhausen is disenchanted by the plasma, gore, sex and violence of modern film. “Oh, yes, I think it’s disgusting, frankly. Such a pity because it’s leading young people into callousness. When you see all that on the screen constantly with nothing else to balance it, you grow up with a jaded attitude.”
“You are seeing the results today, the Los Angeles native says from his London home. “Anyone who closes his mind to what is happening in America, and in Britain, needs seeing to. It’s obvious these things affect people.”
Harryhausen affected people. Positively. Without Ray Harryhausen, there is no Claymation. Without Claymation, there’s no Singing Motown Raisins.
“Long after we are all gone,” said futurist Ray Bradbury who himself left recently, Harryhausen’s shadow-shows will live through one thousand years (1,000) years. He reminds us of the creative powers of single individuals in the world. Not groups, but lonely, creative spirits working long after midnight change the cinematic and aesthetic machineries of civilization.”
But – more than that – Ray Harryhausen’s work was the inspiration behind “Godzilla,” for goodness sake.
FIRE-BREATHING DINOSAURS INVADE DOWNTOWN. SCHOOLS CLOSE.
Just the best idea ever, all the kids agreed.
