R.I.P. Douglas Trumbull, visual effects pioneer behind 2001 and Blade Runner
The revolutionary visual effects artist and filmmaker was 79
Aux News Douglas Trumbull
Douglas Trumbull, the visual effect pioneer behind some of the most groundbreaking work in motion picture history, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, has died from complications with mesothelioma. His daughter, Amy, confirmed his death on Facebook earlier today, writing that he had a brain tumor and a stroke during a two-year struggle with cancer. He was 79.
Born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942, Trumbull was part of a motion picture legacy. His father, Donald Trumbull, worked on special effects for The Wizard Of Oz and, later, Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, a standard the younger Trumbull would meet and exceed during his career.
Trumbull first saw the “future of cinema,” as he called it, working with Stanley Kubrick on 2001. Kubrick plucked him out of obscurity several years prior after the director saw Trumbull’s visual effects exhibition, a 65mm film called To The Moon And Beyond, at the 1964/1965 World’s Fair. 2001 was a breakthrough not just for cinema but also for the young Trumbull. The film won Kubrick his only Oscar, a special award for visual effects, and set Trumbull, then 26, on a course to change cinema several more times.
Following 2001, Trumbull took a job doing the effects for Robert Wise’s Michael Crichton adaptation, The Andromeda Strain. The film was one of the biggest box office successes of the year and earned two Academy Award nominations. It also allowed Trumbull to finance ambitious 1972 sci-fi environmentalism film Silent Running, which he directed on a shoestring budget.
While Silent Running flopped, it did cement his reputation as an effects master who could turn in top-notch work on a tight budget. After turning down an offer to provide effects for a little movie called Star Wars, Trumbull did the next best thing: creating effects for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, both of which earned him Oscar nominations.
In 1983, Trumbull would receive a third nomination for his work on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. While the film flopped with audiences and critics at the time, science fiction legend Philip K. Dick praised Trumbull’s work. “I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull’s special effects for Blade Runner,” Dick said. “I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly.” Over the next 40 years, the rest of the world would catch up to what Dick saw.
In the early 1990s, Trumbull was at the forefront of audience immersion. Directing Back To The Future: The Ride at Universal Studios, he pushed cinematic immersion forward, testing new techniques that he believed would change the industry. “Exploring the language of storytelling as it relates to immersion is the key to the kingdom,” Trumbull said in regards to the future of cinema. However, disappointingly to Trumbull, the industry ignored the advancements he made on the ride.
Nevertheless, in 1993, he won his first Oscar, an honorary award honoring his development of the CP-65 Showscan Camera System for 65mm motion picture photography.
It wasn’t until 2011 that he returned to Hollywood, with Terence Mallick’s The Tree Of Life, which saw him, once again, developing ingenious practical effects that were unlike anything else at multiplexes. That year, he was awarded an Academy Award, the Gordon E. Sawyer Award. The honorary award recognizes “an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.” If there was ever someone worthy of that, it was Trumbull.
“I like the social experience of movies, where a lot of people can see something simultaneously and all laugh together, all cry together, all talk to each other and be in the room together,” Trumbull said in a 2018 conversation with Future Of Storytelling. “There’s some kind of energy in a room full of people. It’s now time to make the next step.”
“I personally believe that a lot of the excitement and enthusiasm about virtual reality is related to a personal, individual desire for an immersive experience. Something that goes beyond television and beyond movies. That’s why I call it ‘experience making’ as different from storytelling.”
Trumbull’s daughter eulogized him today, writing, “My sister Andromeda and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that we love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond.”
28 Comments
If you’re ever in Queens, several of Trumbull’s props including the miniature prop of the Tyrell Corporation pyramid can be seen at the Museum of the Moving Image. (But “miniature” is a weird word to use for something that’s 4 feet tall and six feet wide.)
Have you seen an actual 1/1 pyramid? In that context, I think miniature is apt.
Heh, fair. 🙂
Blade Runner continues to be a fantastic film, not just for the story and the soundtrack, but it’s also a film that I know I can’t just put on and use as background fodder. The visuals are what pull everything together, and Trumbull was a genius. I have probably watched the Final Cut of it at least three times in the last year, because it just pulls you into that world. RIP good sir.
It’s shocking how much influence Trumbull had on special effects (and modern filmmaking) even though he only had less than a dozen special effects credits to his name. Essentially, his work on 2001 spurred the whole era of model based special effects of the 70’s and 80’s and I think, even beyond his model work, his use of light in movies like Close Encounters and Blade Runner remains stunning. On a personal note, in the late 70’s, after the success of Star Wars, the studios rereleased all of their Science Fiction films from the previous decade for the kids which meant that the kids sat through 2001 and other similar, far too adult and far too dour, films. Needless to say that 7-year-old me sat through Silent Running and 7-year-old me was not ready to watch Bruce Dern murder a bunch of people and drown in loneliness with the fate of Earth’s ecology in constant peril. To this day, I’m not sure if that movie fucked me up or made me a better person. Anyways, RIP Mr. Trumbull from a kid you awed and scarred.
It’s kind of funny because even as a kid, I could tell that Close Encounters, and 2001 had better-looking effects than Star Wars. I liked Star Wars a lot more, but it had matte-boxes and other compositing artifacts. With 2001, though, everything looked “real.”
2001’s effects are simply incredible. I think the stand up even to this day.
In Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky had a meeting with him and he immediately took a phone call and ignored J. It sounded like he was a very disorganized person.
Yes. He created stunning, groundbreaking special effects for 2001, Close Encounters, and Blade Runner, but he took a phone call when Jodorowsky was sitting there, so he was very disorganized.
Sounds like he had the measure of Jodorowsky.
Or he immediately recognized that Jodorowsky’s Dune is unfilmable sham not worthy of his time.
Bruce Dern said he worked with two geniuses in his career: Hitchocock and Trumbull. Trumbull revolutionized visual effects with the slit scan technique alone. R.I.P. to this humble master.
From Wikipedia:“Trumbull was often incorrectly credited in print as being the sole special-effects creator for 2001. Whenever this happened, he usually received a call shortly thereafter from an irritated Kubrick. Though this created a strained relationship for many years, Trumbull said after Kubrick’s death that Kubrick “was a genius”, someone whom Trumbull missed terribly.”First off, it’s not like that’s his fault or that he had any control over people doing that and secondly, why didn’t Douglas Trumbull also get nominated for an Academy Award along with Kubrick for the Special Effects Academy Award that year? (I suspect we all know why, though.)
Yeah, I hope Kubrick didn’t get butt-hurt when he was the only one out of that crew who wound up with an effects Oscar.
Several years back he was at the TIFF Lightbox here in Toronto and gave a talk about his work and career. Great evening. When he was talking about designing the Enterprise for The Motion Picture he wanted a modal that would light itself up like an aircraft carrier at sea, instead of having to be externally lit all the time, because it’s out in space, there’s not always a star around!
Douglas Trumbull was the most influential special effects movie artist that ever lived. He created the first modern special effects on film with, 2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968. It was the first time we saw special effects in a film and thought, that looks real! It influence George Lucas and made him realize he could bring Star Wars to the big screen.He would go on to do the special effects in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek The Motion Picture. Blade Runner, one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever made. It’s why we have flying cars in movies and cyberpunk culture. Douglas Trumbull’s thing was lights. He loved to use lights in his special effects, which gave off a lens flare effect and real sold his special effects on looking real. We’re all grateful we had him in this world. He will be missed.
These are just a few of the films he worked on. There’s so much more.
It’s funny because “lens flare” has gotten to be an overused visual trope, but his use of them in the 70s and 80s was really majestic.
Yeah, the irony, but Abrams over does it lol
Abrams is the Creed to Trumbull’s Pearl Jam.
“It was the first time we saw special effects in a film and thought, that looks real!”
I think maybe you should insert the word ‘futuristic’ or something in there, because realistic special effects were nothing new – there’s some sort of SFX in every frame of ‘Citizen Kane’, for instance, but hardly anyone notices.
Citizen Kane, but it doesn’t look like real life.
I heard that between Silent Running and Brainstorm he spent time trying to get a film of The Nightland by Hodgeson off the ground. I was always disappointed that he didn’t manage that. It would have been a fascinating film.
Still, at least he influenced Joel Hodgson to get stranded in space with robot friends as well… never mind the jumpsuit chic!
One of my brothers had the “Making of 2001″ paperback. As a little kid I thumbed through that a million times.
I was in grade school in the 70’s and saw Silent Running on TV. It was one of the films I saw as a youngster that taught me that not all films have happy endings. That sometimes the absolute shittiest outcome is a completely legitimate way to finish a movie. (Joan Baez, less so.)
As for Trumbull’s fx oeuvre, the big 4 of 2001, CEot3K, Star Trek TMP, and Blade Runner are all major movie-going moments in my life. His artistry and influence is incalculable. He will be missed.
(Yes, my avatar is a drone from Silent Running.~pushes up nerd glasses~)
RIP. I honestly never knew he was so young on 2001. What a career.
If you want proof that we’re getting dumber as a species watch the original Andromeda Strain. A movie with zero stars, little action, and script that prominently features the word “ketoacidosis”. It not only got made, it was a solid hit. Anyway, RIP Doug. 2001 blew my mind the first time I saw it, and I wasn’t even high.
This is the Mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, miniature made by Greg Jein and displayed at the Smithsonian. It’s all gray. In the movie, it’s colorful and full of lights, all thanks to the genius of Doug Trumbull.
I like how the AVC, new-new blood is gonna just grey me. Continuously. The commentariat is going to thrive one way or another. We may not like it, but deal, dude. I’ve been reading the Onion, hell, the AVC since it was in print and way before it got online and was a force before G/O got involved and all the good folk went scattering. Kinja sucks, and you folks at G/O know it, but don’t care. I’m hardly surprised that comments are still blocked on Deadspin. Head of Deadspit(n): “Let’s find a way to piss off everyone!!”Board: “No comment!!!”