In 1933 the 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen went to see King Kong at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. That is the moment his life changed. In 1958 the eight-year-old John Landis went to see The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad at the Crest Theatre in Los Angeles. That is the moment my life changed. I asked my mom: “Who makes the movie?” She answered: “The director.” So from that moment on, a director was all I wanted to be.
When you ask someone for their favourite movie, they can usually tell you how old they were, the name of the theatre and who they were with when they first saw it. An argument can be made that, indeed, the movies are our collective memory, contemporary man’s new mythology. Harryhausen was overwhelmed by his experience of watching “the Eighth Wonder of the World”.
All films require “suspension of disbelief” to work. And every film creates its own unspoken rules to accomplish this. The filmmaker uses lighting, actors, montage and narrative to convey the “reality” of the story being told. And by “reality”, I do not mean the actuality of the situation and characters. I mean that the audience should care about what is taking place before them.
In 1975 I worked as one of the writers of the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. Guy Hamilton was the director I was trying to please. (Neither of us ended up working on the final film.) I mention this only because Hamilton told me a marvellous thing. Explaining why every Bond film starts with an outrageous prologue, he said this was the way the filmmakers said to the audience: “Right, please put your brains under your seats and here we go!”
What does all this have to do with Ray Harryhausen? He was inspired by the brilliant stop-motion work with which Willis O’Brien made King Kong a reality — not only an awesomely powerful physical presence, but also a sympathetic being with thoughts and emotions. After he saw King Kong, Harryhausen’s tolerant parents encouraged him in his pursuit of his craft. He cut up his mothers fur coat to cover his puppet of a woolly mammoth, and his father helped him with the steel armatures (or skeletons) of his creatures. (His father continued to create armatures for Harryhausen for many years.)
He served in Frank Capra’s army film unit in World War II. When it ended he moved into making shorts, then started generating special effects for features.
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, which became a tremendous box office success, was the first colour movie he worked on, and he was credited as an executive producer. That is an important moment in the history of the movies: Harryhausen, a below-the-line special-effects technician, had become his own genre. In fact, he is unique in the history of movies as a special-effects technician who is really the auteur of his films.
The stop-motion creatures and vehicles Harryhausen created were not only the stars of those movies, but also the main reason for them to exist at all. He would conceive the stories and create illustrations and storyboards to guide the picture’s art directors and crew. He created reality — audiences cared about what was being put before them.
Jason and the Argonauts remains my favourite of Harryhausen’s films, probably because it has the best script of all of his pictures. But all of his films hold a special place in both my heart and my mind. Maybe it is the tactile reality of movement generated by Ray’s hands and the extraordinary personalities his figures display that makes his work so special. I don’t know. But I do know that Harryhausen is a true giant of the cinema, and I am proud to call him both my mentor and my friend. Ray’s 90th birthday is rapidly approaching. And all of his fans, and we are legion, wish him well. — Guardian News & Media 2010