In memoriam: Douglas Trumbull (Telegraph 16/02/22)

Douglas Trumbull, who has died aged 79, was an effects virtuoso whose work in a run of films from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Blade Runner (1982) vastly expanded the cinema’s capacity to visualise worlds beyond our own.

Movie magic was a Trumbull family business. His father Donald had been a technician in Hollywood’s Golden Age, rigging the flying monkeys on The Wizard of Oz (1939); in his later years, Trumbull Sr. won two technical Oscars for his innovations in the fields of matte photography and motion-control camera systems.

His son landed his big break assisting on To the Moon and Beyond (1964), a 15-minute short produced by Graphic Films for the World’s Fair that zoomed out from a sub-atomic view to observe the Earth from space. Among its admirers was Stanley Kubrick, who flew Trumbull to London, initially to provide animations for 2001’s computer monitors.

Quick to earn his famously circumspect employer’s trust, Trumbull assumed additional responsibilities as production wore on: “He would say, ‘What do you need?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, I need to go into town and buy some weird bearings and some stuff’ and he would send me off in his Bentley, with a driver, into London. It was great!”

For the climactic sequence in which the astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) passes through the Stargate, Trumbull invented Slitscan, a photographic process that sped the camera past illuminated backdrops with the shutter open so as to generate heightened flaring. The stroboscopic results were intercut with aerial views of Monument Valley and discarded footage from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to produce one of the most strikingly original sequences in 20th century cinema.

It was a new frontier, in every sense: as Trumbull put it, “We wanted the audience to feel like they were actually going into space.” Yet creative freedoms were tempered by Kubrickian control; the two men fell out after the director assumed sole onscreen credit for the film’s Oscar-winning effects, with Trumbull vowing to work independently in future.

His freelance career began inauspiciously. Trumbull underbid for the effects work on Universal’s The Andromeda Strain (1971), leaving him with only $250,000 to generate the microscope-like close-ups of the titular virus. A distribution quirk saw that film jettisoned on an underpromoted double-bill with Trumbull’s directorial debut Silent Running (1972), an unusually emotive, eco-themed sci-fi about a lone scientist (Bruce Dern) tending plantlife on a spaceship orbiting a dying Earth.

Completed for a tenth of 2001’s budget, Silent Running allowed Trumbull to finesse a sequence involving Saturn’s rings originally visualised for 2001, but elsewhere the modest resources compelled him to improvise. College students – including future effects whizz John Dykstra – were hired to suppress costs, many set to assembling the 650 tank modelling kits used in the film’s miniature shots.

Though a commercial flop, Silent Running proved hugely influential on those who saw it. George Lucas approached Trumbull to work on Star Wars (1977); Trumbull turned the offer down, while approving Lucas’s plan to model the droid R2-D2 on Silent Running’s expressive drones Huey, Dewey and Louie. (Both Trumbull Sr. and Dykstra would work on Star Wars in various capacities.)

By that point, Trumbull was busy elsewhere, having been appointed VFX supervisor on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). This was an especially demanding production, entailing 200 effects shots that needed to inspire awe while meshing with Steven Spielberg’s completed live-action footage. Yet Trumbull found practical solutions to the film’s challenges: the ominous cloudscapes signalling the aliens’ arrival were formed by filling fish tanks with saltwater and paint. It earned him a first Oscar nomination, losing – in a field of two – to Star Wars.

Visual effects ingenuity sometimes resembles elevated child’s play, yet Trumbull’s experience on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) was hard labour. Belatedly hired after another effects house failed to bring the U.S.S. Enterprise to cinematic life, Trumbull worked overtime so the film could hit its planned Christmas release date; it landed him a second Oscar nod, plus ten days in hospital with an ulcerated stomach.

Upon recovery, Trumbull was lured back to hired-hand work on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Drawn by the prospect of detailing a careworn Earth rather than something stratospheric, he contributed several elements to the stunning opening panorama, including the images projected onto skyscrapers and the refinery flames, recycled from explosions Trumbull had filmed for Zabriskie Point (1970).

That worldbuilding was again Oscar nominated, again unsuccessful, but by then he was directing once more. Trumbull initially conceived the psychological thriller Brainstorm (1983) as a showcase for a new, high-definition photography process known as Showscan. When studio MGM balked at the cost, Trumbull ploughed on, only for the project to be comprehensively derailed when star Natalie Wood drowned in mysterious circumstances mid-shoot.

Studio bosses wanted to halt production and claim the insurance, but Trumbull persevered, recruiting Wood’s sister Lana as a stand-in for the remaining shots. That there was anything releasable was some achievement, but reviews were middling and box-office tepid, sending Trumbull into retreat: “I just had to stop. I had been a writer-director all my life, and I decided it wasn’t for me because I was put through a really challenging personal experience… I decided to leave the movie business.”

Douglas Huntley Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942 to Donald Trumbull and Marcia Hunt, a commercial artist. A tinkerer from an early age, young Douglas built crystal-set radios and soaked up science-fiction movies; he studied illustration at El Camino College with the aim of becoming an architect, joining Graphic Films upon graduation, where he also worked on promotional films for the Air Force and NASA.

In later life, Trumbull moved to Massachusetts and into the less pressurised field of motion simulators and theme park attractions, most prominently directing a short film for the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios Florida, launched in 1991. He won a technical Oscar in 1993, for his work in the development of a new 65mm camera, and was appointed vice-chair of IMAX in the mid-1990s, as the corporation expanded worldwide.

In 2011, he pulled the old magic tricks out of retirement, photographing chemical reactions in petri dishes and injecting paint into water tanks for the eyepopping Creation of the Universe sequence in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: “It was a working environment that’s almost impossible to come by these days… Terry wanted to create the opportunity for the unexpected to occur before the camera.”

He continued tinkering, going viral in 2010 with a video that proposed a solution to the BP oil spill, and offering his Magi Pod, an immersive boutique cinema, as a cure for the modern multiplex’s projection ills. He won the Tesla Award in 2011, and an honorary Oscar in 2012. Thereafter he was an avuncular presence on the convention circuit, embracing fans beguiled by a groundbreaking legacy: “They reinforce some enthusiasm about my work. It’s very hard to keep me going, because the setbacks were really tragic and difficult.”

He is survived by his third wife Julia Trumbull (née Hobart), and by Amy and Andromeda, two daughters by his first wife Cherry Foster; his second wife, Ann Vidor, died in 2001.

Douglas Trumbull, born April 8 1942, died February 7 2022.