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Harryhausen is one of the happiest men around. Of a fortunate minority, he has seen most of his dreams come to fruition. An immensely likeable man with a great sense of humor, he has lived a life surrounded by fantasy and monsters and realized an ambition that took shape when he was thirteen years old.
Born in Los Angeles, June 29, 1920, Ray Harryhausen was educated at Audubon Junior High and Manual Arts High School. School held little interest for him, but at an early age he conceived an overwhelming passion for the film King Kong, a fascination which became the basis of his future life.
“I first saw King Kong by accident,” he has said, “My aunt was a nurse and had been taking care of Sid Grauman’s mother. She was given three tickets for the film and took my mother and myself. I haven’t been the same since.”
Harryhausen became fascinated with the film because he couldn’t determine how it was done. He knew it was not a man in an ape suit and soon learned that the film’s creator was Willis O’Brien. “I was in awe of O’Brien’s ability to produce on the screen the illusion of life.” Harryhausen remarked.
The film inspired Harryhausen to begin experimenting with his own models. The first was a Cave Bear fabricated from his mother’s fur coat. “Her coat was hanging in the closet and hadn’t been worn for some time, so I decided to use it. I did ask my mother’s permission afterwards and she did eventually agree that she didn’t want it anymore. I hope it is not too disillusioning that my mother didn’t whip me to an inch of my life for taking her coat.”
Borrowing a friend’s 16mm camera, Harryhausen made his first attempts at stop-motion photography. The camera was difficult to control, but he says, “the excitement of seeing the bear move was quite satisfying, which encouraged me to do more, He found that his interest in this form of cinema was so great that he began to look for ways to develop his hobby into a career. To this end, he went to night school at the University of Southern California and studied all aspects of trick photography, from matte shots to double exposure. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with this knowledge but found it all very interesting.
He took classes in drawing, sculpture, ceramics and life drawing, initially to help his stop-motion work, but also with the thought that it would be valuable should he be forced to find another career.
Harryhausen established a studio in a corner of the family’s back porch and his father, always encouraging Ray’s ambitions, later built him a studio at the back of the garage. By 1940, he owned his own single-frame camera and had begun work on his first feature-length film, Evolution, an intricate film based on the origin of the species. “I started this grand project hoping it would be released in schools and used as a documentary of some sort,” he recalls. “It finally became very ambitious, out of hand, really. But I suppose it’s very good to place something beyond your reach as a goal, because just striving for that you learn far more than if you place your goal too low.”
Unfortunately for Ray, Disney released Fantasia and he realized there was no point in continuing. He decided the time had come to get a job and showed his footage of Evolution to George Pal. Pal, who made shorts called Puppetoons, thought Harryhausen’s work brilliant and hired him.
Harryhausen worked with Pal until 1942, when he was drafted into the Army Signal Corps. He was lucky to be assigned to the film unit and spent the war making animated segments for orientation films. Discharged at war’s end, Harryhausen went back to his garage studio and decided to make a series of fairy tales, beginning with a ten-minute film called Mother Goose Stories. After some setbacks, the film was released by Bailey Films and, with the money he earned, Harryhausen was able to make four more fairy tales.
Ray Harryhausen’s hero remained Willis O’Brien, creator of King Kong. In 1939, he had summoned the courage to telephone O’Brien and arrange a meeting. O’Brien had been critical of his work, although in a constructive way, but obviously remembered Harryhausen’s talent. In 1946, O’Brien asked Harryhausen if he would like to assist in the production of Mighty Joe Young, the story of an enormous ape. Naturally delighted, Harryhausen moved into the RKO Studios and the film, finally released in 1949, won O’Brien an Oscar.
O’Brien’s next project. The Valley of the Mist, ran into pre-production problems and Ray Harryhausen returned to his fairy tales. Then a friend introduced him to a producer, Jack Dietz, who wanted to make a monster movie. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Harryhausen’s first feature-length film, was based on long-time friend Ray Bradbury’s story of a dinosaur rising from the sea in answer to a foghorn, thinking it to be a mating call.
After the film’s success, Ray developed the outline for two further productions, The Giant Ymir and The Elementals. Dietz bought the idea for The Elementals, a story of bat-like men invading Paris but was unable to raise the financing and the film was dropped.
Again Ray went back to his fairy tales but this time with less enthusiasm. “Working alone one does have a tendency to get depressed,” he has said. “You have problems and ask yourself, it is worth it.” With little money to finance his own efforts, Ray couldn’t work with George Pal, then making features, as Pal was based at a major studio and Ray had no union card. At this opportune moment, Charles H. Schneer appeared in his life.
A young producer who had worked for Universal and Columbia, Schneer wanted to make a picture about a giant octopus that pulls down the Golden Gate Bridge. This time there were no money problems and little time was wasted in mounting the production.
Called It Came From Beneath the Sea, the film was a success and also marked the foundation of a professional partnership between Schneer and Harryhausen that endured nearly 30 years.
Harryhausen and Schneer produced a trio of films during the height of the science fiction boom of the 1950s including the aforementioned It Came From Beneath the Sea (`1955), Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and 1957’s 20 Million Miles to Earth.
All of these low-budget, black-and-white films were enlivened by Harryhausen’s developing artistry and innovation within the field of stop-motion animation. From this point onward, Harryhausen’s work was consistently singled out for special critical acclaim.
At the end of the 1950s, Harryhausen and Schneer made a distinct break away from science fiction into the fertile world of fantasy, fairy tales, and myth, with their groundbreaking and highly acclaimed The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. This film was also Harryhausen’s first opportunity to experiment with color, and its success was such that it led to a trilogy of highly popular Sinbad movies, culminating in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger in 1977. The late 1950s/early 1960s also saw Harryhausen and Schneer moving their production base from Hollywood to London, where they could utilize the technical expertise of British studios and crews while also being able to film at various exotic European locations, particularly in Spain.
In 1963, Ray produced arguably his most famous film, Jason and the Argonauts, which is also regarded by Harryhausen himself as his most complete film, incorporating as it does much of his most seamless and yet outstanding stop-motion animation in many memorable sequences, not least of which is the famous fight between Jason and the supernatural skeletons of the dead.
During the 1960s, Harryhausen also contributed to notable films such as The First Men in the Moon in 1964, One Million Years BC in 1966 and The Valley of Gwangi in 1969. He finally brought the curtain down on his film career in 1981 with his and Schneer’s Greek mythological epic, Clash of the Titans. In 1992, at the sixty-fourth Academy Awards, Harryhausen was honored with an Oscar for his lifetime of extraordinary achievements.
In 2003, Harryhausen was honored with a star on the legendary Hollywood Walk of Fame; in 2004, his large-format book, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life was published; and 2005 saw the release of an elaborate two-disc DVD, Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection, containing all of Harryhausen’s early short films, tests, and experiments.
In July, 2005, the first of a series of limited-edition, signed and numbered prints of Harryhausen’s pre-production artwork premiered at Every Picture Tells A Story Gallery and Bookstore in Santa Monica, California. Additional prints from Harryhausen’s private collection will be made available on a continuing basis.
In March 2006, Ray Harryhausen’s latest book, The Art of Ray Harryhausen, containing most of his motion picture pre-production art, was released to great acclaim in the United States.
With the approval of the Merian C. Cooper estate, Harryhausen completed the supervision of the colorization of Cooper’s 1935 adventure classic, She, in the fall of 2006, the DVD of which was released by Legend Films of San Diego. A two-disc special edition of She was released by Kino International in the summer of 2007.
Also in 2007, the 50th anniversary of Harryhausen’s 1957 film, 20 Million Miles to Earth, was released Sony Pictures Home Entertainment in a colorized, two-disc special edition. In January 2008, both Harryhausen’s 1955 film It Came From Beneath the Sea and the 1956 Earth vs the Flying Saucers were released by Sony in colorized, two-disc special editions.
In February 2008, Ray Harryhausen was honored by The Art Directors Guild at its 12th Annual Awards ceremony for his “Outstanding Contribution to Cinematic Imagery.”
Harryhausen is currently preparing his third large-format book, in which he details the history of stop-motion animation worldwide.
April 2008