| Reviewed by Mark London Williams
Book by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton
303 pages; Billboard Books; $50 Before there were digits and pixels, there was latex. Some of it went on faces, à la Lon Cheney and Rick Baker, but some of the most famous latex was married to ball sockets and wire frames to create one- and two-foot-high dinosaurs, giant apes, and mythical creatures brought to painstaking animated life by special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. The man responsible for the Cyclops in 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the saucers in Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, a myriad of dinosaurs in One Million Years, B.C., - and numerous other films - and the astonishing skeleton army in Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen's "Dynamation" technique - which boils down to painstaking frame-by-frame tabletop animation - inspired a couple of generations of (mostly male) film geeks and sci-fi fans. This reviewer can make that assertion given that he was among their number. And in those pre-Internet days, one of the best sources of info on Harryhausen's legendary canon of film work was the always hard-to-get Film Fantasy Scrapbook, a 70s-era tome with the kinds of production shots and behind-the-scenes anecdotage now taken for granted at websites everywhere. Now, in partnership with British film writer Tony Dalton, Harryhausen has provided an opus that is even more magnum than his original book, with more pages, more production information, and far more glossy color stills than its long-out-of-print predecessor. In Film Fantasy Scrapbook, Harryhausen talks about favorite projects that had been derailed but that he still hopes to make, one day. The most poignant section here is a chapter called "Lost Projects, Lost Worlds," where we see production sketches for shoulda-been-made movies like the founding-of-Rome epic Force of the Trojans, a version of Karel Capek's robots-ascendant R.U.R., and an over-the-top Swingin' London-infused Hammer production called When the Earth Cracked Open. But Ray saw the digits on the wall, and retired to elder effects statesman status just as computers were replacing models and motion. Much of the computer generated images (CGI) being used today, though, is deployed by former fan boys who simply grew up to be film directors. Where do you think Richard Rodriguez got the idea for his skeleton army in the Spy Kids movies? The book is a terrific compendium - so densely packed that it can be savored over numerous trips back through its pages. And while a filmography and glossary in the back are quite helpful - you'll know what a "gamete test" is, after all - this American edition of the published-in-England original astonishingly has no index. That makes it hard to look things up after catching It Came From Beneath the Sea on late night AMC. But flipping through the pages at random will always be fun. |
