Ray Harryhausen Gets Lifetime Achievement Award by Scott Essman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Scott Essman has been a regular cinema writer for Nuvein since the late 1990s. His features appear under the CINNEWS section.

Scott started writing about and for entertainment while still at the University of Southern California in the mid-1980s. By 1989, he had created Visionary Cinema in New York to create multi-media projects. Moving back to Los Angeles later that year, Scott developed a team of writers, directors, and craftspeople to work on his projects. In 1996, he created a documentary about legendary makeup artist Dick Smith. That year also saw an explosion of published articles about directors and industry craftspeople in magazines and newspapers that totals over 200 as of the Fall of 2003. In 1997, he organized and produced the 30th anniversary of the production of 'Planet Of The Apes', hosted by Roddy McDowall. It was filmed and released as a documentary in 1998. The next year, Essman and Visionary teamed to create the 60th anniversary of The Wizard Of Oz live on stage, later performed for Warner Bros. at Mann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. This performance included re-creations of the famous characters from the film. The most recent production endeavor by Essman and Visionary was Jack Pierce: The Man Behind the Monsters (2002) (V), a live biography of the man who created all of Universal Studios' classic horror characters. This most recent event has been released as a DVD and is exclusively available at www.jackpierce.com.

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Scott Essman and Ray Harryhausen

On the hallowed grounds of Universal Studios, birthplace to such genre epics as Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame, Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein and The Mummy, and Béla Lugosi’s Dracula, among many others, stop-motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen was awarded for lifetime achievement by a new honorary society of motion picture character designers called Cinerouge.

Harryhausen, who hails from Los Angeles but now lives in England, is on a book tour for his most recent of two new books, The Art of Ray Harryhausen. He made it to the storied Hitchcock Theater at Universal – just steps away from Stage 28 where Chaney shot Phantom – for a special screening of Paul Davids’ reverential genre documentary, The Sci Fi Boys, which features Harryhausen plus stalwart directors John Landis and Peter Jackson, effects gurus Rick Baker, Steve Johnson and Dennis Muren, and gaggles of noted fans and historians, chief among them Famous Monsters of Filmland‘s own arrested adolescent and resident editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, also in attendance for the April 30 gala.

After the screening, Paul Davids presented Harryhausen with his award, ironically a bust with a Chaney’s Phantom likeness, created by sculptor Brent Armstrong. Davids commented, “how does one introduce the greatest craftsman in cinema to ever have lived?” Gracious as always, Harryhausen, now 86, humbly countered that he’s glad that his films “have had such a positive influence. Most fans know Harryhausen’s work from Jason and the Argonauts and the 1950s-1970s run of “Sinbad” films, but few know that he also piloted the animation in RKO’s Mighty Joe Young and worked into the early 1980s before retiring to Europe.

The Sci-Fi Boys, a DVD release now exclusive through Best Buy, will also screen this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. Paul Davids is an LA-based filmmaker who also wrote and co-produced the 1994 UFO telefilm Roswell. The 80-minute film has been widely praised as an intricate and overdue account of the men who pioneered genre filmmaking and revolutionized the makeup, puppet, and visual effects that transformed those films. More information is available at http://www.pauldavids.com/sci_ficomp.html.