The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation

The Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation is a charitable Trust set up by Ray on the 10th April 1986. It is the primary aim of the Foundation to protect Ray’s name and body of work as well as archiving, preserving and restoring Ray’s extensive collection.

In addition the Foundation is firmly committed to show and exhibit, for educational and enjoyment purposes, all of Ray’s unique collection and films.

The Trustees include Ray and Ray and Diana’s daughter Vanessa Harryhausen who is determined to protect and conserve her father’s name and reputation in the film industry.

It is estimated that there are over twenty thousand items in the collection, including original armatured models, hard rubber stand-in models, armatures, original moulds, original artwork, original miniatures, stills, negatives, original equipment, various test and dailies footage, books and many influences, such as paintings and lithographs by Gustav Dore and Willis O’Brien. During Ray’s life, it is remarkable and fortunate that he has rarely thrown anything away, which is why the collection is near complete and contains so much original materials.

With such a vast wealth of archive materials it is a difficult, complex and ongoing task to catalogue and preserve as much of it as possible.

The Foundation recently recovered a huge cache of items from a garage at Ray’s house in Los Angeles. Ray always insisted that if there was anything in the garage then it would be rubbish because it would be unimportant, but what seems unimportant to Ray, is film history to the rest of us.  Discovered there were items from his earliest experiments including a triceratops used in Evolution of the World, which still retained its complete latex skin in exceptionally good condition.  Also recovered were armatures of the tyrannosaurus rex and the brontosaurus also seen in Evolution, both of which still retained their resin heads and feet.  Also found were armatures for the large tentacles featured in It Came From Beneath the Sea still retaining a small amount of cotton and latex covering.

The Foundation is now also cataloguing and preserving these ‘new’ items.

It is hoped that during 2010 the Foundation will be able to make huge strides in finding funding for the ongoing preservation, the first  of which will be the publication of a new book to be called Ray Harryhausen – A Life in Pictures that will be available on Saturday 26th June at Ray’s 90th birthday celebrations at the National Film Theatre in London.  The book will then be made available to the general public in selected bookshops.  See Collectables.