Douglas Hunt Trumbull (; April 8, 1942 – February 7, 2022) was an American film director and visual effects supervisor, who pioneered innovative methods in special effects. He created scenes for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and The Tree of Life, and directed the movies Silent Running and Brainstorm.
Early life Trumbull was born in Los Angeles. His father was an aerospace engineer who had briefly worked in Hollywood creating visual effects for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz; his mother, who died when Trumbull was 7, was an artist. Growing up in Inglewood, California as a child, he liked to construct mechanical and electrical devices such as crystal-set radios, and enjoyed watching alien invasion movies. He initially wanted to be an architect, leading him to take classes in illustration. He studied technical drawing at El Camino Junior College and joined the Screen Cartoonists Guild upon graduating. Hollywood initially rejected his portfolio of spaceships and planetary drawings. However, his abilities in creating photorealistic art led to a job at Graphic Films, which produced short films for NASA and the Air Force.
Career 1960s Douglas Trumbull's early work was at Graphic Films in Los Angeles. The small animation and graphic arts studio produced a film called To the Moon and Beyond about spaceflight for the 1964 New York World's Fair. Trumbull, the son of a mechanical engineer and an artist, worked at Graphic Films as an illustrator and airbrush artist. He painted a rotating spiral galaxy, and using a fish eye lens, projected the film onto a custom-built dome. The effect was ground-breaking for its time and the film caught the attention of director Stanley Kubrick, who was beginning work on the project that would become 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick hired director Con Pederson from Graphic Films and the company was to work on visual effects for the film. When Kubrick decided to move all production to England, he cancelled the contract with Graphic Films. Trumbull wanted to keep working on the film as he had already done considerable pre-production work, so he cold-called Kubrick after obtaining the director's home phone number from Pederson. Kubrick hired Trumbull and flew him to London for the production of 2001. Trumbull's first task was to create the dozens of animations seen in the data display screens in the Aries moon shuttle and the Discovery. They looked like computer graphics, but they were created by photographing and animating reproductions of charts and graphs from technical publications. Trumbull initially created the shots using a number of Rube Goldberg-like contraptions he built with gears and motors ordered from a scientific equipment supply house. Kubrick gave the young effects technician creative freedom and encouragement: "He would say ... 'What do you need to do it?' and I would have complete carte blanche, which was wild as a young guy", Trumbull recalled. "I was 23–24 when I started the movie, and was 25 by the time I was doing the Star Gate. 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 to town in his Bentley, with a driver, into London. It was great!"
Trumbull's responsibilities and talents grew as the production continued, and he became one of four special effects supervisors on the film (the others were fellow Graphic Films alumnus Con Pederson, along with Tom Howard and Wally Veevers.) Trumbull's most memorable contribution was the development of the slit-scan photography process, used in the "Stargate" sequence. "...I just happened to be in the right place at the right time ... We were struggling with the Star Gate. Nobody knew what a Star Gate was; but, I came up with some ideas that I didn't even know at the time were based on some things I was learning as a young guy about street photography and weird photographic techniques...". He created the Stargate by building a 6ft-tall sheet of rotatable metal and cut a narrow slit in it. The sheet was placed in front of a 12ft-long backlit glass panel, through which lighting patterns were shone. With a long camera exposure, the kaleidoscope of lights appeared to be darting towards the camera from a single point.
Trumbull and Kubrick wanted the audience to feel like they were on the adventure themselves. This approach eventually led to the Imax system of high resolution projection, which Trumbull helped to develop. Working on 2001 hooked Trumbull on the concept of producing immersive film experiences on huge screens, at a time when the industry was moving towards the multiplexing of theatres with smaller screens.
Although Trumbull's association with Kubrick was a huge boost for his career, he swore afterwards that he would "never work for someone else again", in part because Kubrick "was a hell of a taskmaster... his level of quality-control bordered on perfectionism."
The film earned an Oscar for best special effects, but the award went solely to Kubrick, with Trumbull receiving none of the accolade for his work. This led to threats of legal action and the two men did not speak for a decade. Trumbull said after Kubrick's death that Kubrick "was a genius", someone whom Trumbull missed terribly.
In 1969 Trumbull was filming the annual Flying Saucer Convention in Giant Rock, California. This evolved into a full-length project initially called Giant Rock, Rutabaga Deluxe, and then Saturation 70: An Ecological Horror Fantasy. The star of the film was a five-year-old Julian Jones, who was the son of Brian Jones, of Rolling Stones fame. The story involved Jones losing his mother in a giant garbage dump and wandering a desolate planet looking for her, while being menaced by gas-masked garbage men and helped by a fairy godmother in a sequined cowgirl creation by Nudie. Some footage includes a battle with a Green Beret and a Viet Cong in a supermarket. Trumbull's partner on the film was Anthony Foutz. A company called Dimension V took over backing of the film.Show Magazine July 1970
1970–1974
Having returned to Hollywood, Trumbull set up his own company and subsequently bid on the job to produce special effects for the science-fiction film The Andromeda Strain. ("I was a young guy and very naive", he later recalled, "And I seriously underbid the job – I had no idea what these things were supposed to cost. I nearly went bankrupt as a result!") Trumbull and associate James Shourt produced dozens of shots, including the "electron microscope" pictures of the Andromeda organism and various on-screen readouts. Though many of these looked like computer graphics, they were created using techniques Trumbull had used for 2001. Author Michael Crichton and director Robert Wise were much impressed by Trumbull's work.
Trumbull's participation and success on Andromeda set him up to direct the 1971 film Silent Running, with a script based on his original treatment: Earth's last great forests are preserved and sent into space inside huge geodesic domes, in the hope that one day they can be returned to an Earth that can once again sustain them. When orders are issued by faceless bureaucrats to abandon and destroy the domes, the ship's botanist (Bruce Dern) rebels and takes over the ship, aided by three non-anthropomorphic "drone" robots. He steers the ship away from the fleet and hides among the rings of Saturn, out of communication, attempting to keep the forests in good health, assisted by the drones who follow him around like pets.
Silent Running was produced by Universal on a shoestring budget of one million dollars, one-tenth the budget of 2001. The film used a number of special effects techniques that Trumbull had helped develop. The spacecraft interiors were shot aboard the mothballed aircraft carrier, USS Valley Forge (CV-45), which lent its name to the movie spacecraft. Trumbull was not originally slated to direct, but as the start of production loomed he became the obvious choice. (Other newcomers included the script writing team of Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino, who would later collaborate on The Deer Hunter, along with writer Steven Bochco of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law fame.)
When Silent Running was released, insiders were astonished that the finished film had been produced for so little money. Lead actor Bruce Dern compared Trumbull's creative vision to that of Alfred Hitchcock, with whom Dern had also worked. Trumbull was seen as one of Hollywood's up and coming young directors.
Although a critical success, Silent Running was a flop at the box office. Trumbull recalled that "It was just a great experience for me as a film maker, but I didn't know that I was part of an experiment by Universal Studios... to see if it was possible to have a movie survive on word of mouth alone without an advertising campaign." It was not, but Silent Runnings environmental message struck a chord, and the movie has since become a cult classic.
After Silent Running, Trumbull developed a number of movie projects, but a series of misfortunes and bad luck kept them from getting beyond the initial development stage. One project nearly did get into production, and was already being cast when it was abruptly scuttled – the investor had decided to abandon the movie business and build a Las Vegas casino instead. Trumbull described this period of his career as "development hell". Unable to live on development fees alone and needing money, Trumbull returned to creating special effects, including some uncredited work using blue screen techniques on the 1974 film The Towering Inferno, a huge commercial hit.
1975–1980
In 1975, Trumbull turned down an offer to provide the effects for George Lucas' Star Wars due to his commitment to contribute effects to Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977. In 1976, he was approached by producer Jerome Zeitman, who had bought the rights to Roger Zelazny's Damnation Alley, but also turned down the work due to prior commitments. In late 1978, Trumbull's Future General Corporation, a research/special effects house that was funded by Gulf + Western and Paramount Pictures, was offered the job to produce the special effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trumbull, already deeply involved in Close Encounters, refused, wanting instead to focus his efforts on his patented Showscan process, a high-speed, large-format movie process that provided unprecedented visual clarity. Paramount awarded the contract to effects house Robert Abel and Associates, and in a move seen by some as payback for Trumbull's refusal to take on the project, all but shuttered Future General.
Robert Abel had produced many high-end, visually advanced commercials for clients such as 7-Up, but it soon became apparent that their choice of technology, which featured software-controlled camera rigs and graphics imaging systems very advanced for the day, simply couldn't scale up to the volume of material required. In August 1978, with rumors of an impending meltdown at Abel swirling, Trumbull approached Paramount offering to step in and do the effects with partner Richard Yuricich. Paramount declined, hoping that Abel could still work a miracle.