Harryhausen: Father of Fantasy Film-making.

Having a day off and not in physical shape to go anywhere (the back again - a story for later, perhaps), I decided to do some investigating into certain people who made favourite films as far back as my early years.  I came across a few interesting articles, and this is one of the best. This man's concentration and magical touch mesmerized me then as his story does today.  From The Guardian:

Ownership of films is usually the preserve of directors and actors. You will hear of the new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, or the new Tom Cruise vehicle. But such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963)and Clash of the Titans (1981) are Ray Harryhausen films, regardless of who directed and acted in them. One Million Years BC, a film for which, unusually in his career, he was brought in as a hired hand, (1966) isn't even regarded as a Hammer or Raquel Welch movie. No other technician or artist working in film can make such a claim.
"Everyone has their own right way of doing things," explains Harryhausen, now aged 92. "I'd probably call myself a film-maker rather than just a special effects man. I'd often come up with the story, advise on the script, scout locations, design and sculpt the models. I'd have to be on the set to make sure the effects sequences were shot properly which was a problem for some directors – that never really got easier. And I'd do all the animation myself. It was just simpler to do all that myself than try to delgate."
As a result, all Harryhausen films have his personality, and his incredible craftsmanship, showing through them. I meet him in the Kensington house he and his wife Diana have shared since he moved his base of operations from Hollywood to Europe almost half a century ago. "I dread to think what it would cost now," he says. "We found out from some neighbours many years later that Michael Powell used to own this house. He had a pair of red shoes hanging in one of the windows."

 Harryhausen's home has no such external signs of its inhabitant's career. Inside there are few clues among the antique furniture. Until, that is, you take a closer look at the bronze sculptures on display. There is the Hindu goddess Kali, an allosaurus, some sword-wielding skeletons (a dead giveaway), Perseus and Medusa locked in deadly combat. "That one was used to show to studios when we were getting Clash of the Titans going," Harryhausen explains. It is common for artwork and even test footage to be used to generate interest in a film, but this is the first time I have heard of a piece of bronze being used to sell a project.

One of the most dramatic of his self-made ornaments is of a T-rex and King Kong. For Harryhausen it was Kong that started it all, back in 1933. "I had an aunt who took me to see a new movie she'd heard had gorillas and dinosaurs in, two things I was very much interested in." She took the 13-year-old Harryhausen to Grauman's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard to see King Kong on its opening week in LA, a night filled with the sort of showmanship typical of the venue's owner Sid Grauman. The foyer was decorated in jungle style, and music and dance acts performed before the curtain went up for the film. With that set up followed by a film unlike any seen before the evening delivered the kind of sensory overload that beats things like 3-D and IMAX into a cocked hat. Harryhausen left the cinema with no idea how this lost world had been created, but he knew that he had to find out.
"I wasn't even looking to get into movies. I was a diorama kid at school, always making these little prehistoric scenes. Well, here was a way to make my dioramas move. I knew it wasn't a man in a suit. There was a magazine article that even had a picture of a life-size Kong with electrical leads running out of it. Even at that age I knew that couldn't be true. It wasn't like today: information was almost impossible to find." He pieced together what few facts he could and started making his own crude attempts with a home-movie camera.

The rest, as they say, is History.
Read the whole piece HERE.

And so it goes.
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