Special visual effects dominate so many films nowadays that they've become an industry within the movie industry.  As with any facet of filmmaking, there are good effects and bad;

Linwood Dunn in 1930 on location for the RKO super-production (and future Oscar winner) Cimarron

likewise, there are visionaries and hacks turning out this work.

One man who commands great respect in the field is a fellow who's always looking ahead. 

His name is Linwood Dunn, and he's nearly 92 years old.

I give his age as a kind of afterthought, because Lin always strikes me as ageless.  That is, until he mentions something about running a silent-film projector in New York in 1923, working on King Kong in 1933, or Citizen Kane in 1941.  He helped those chorus girls go Flying Down to Rio, and, with a matte painting, added scope to the historic land rush in Cimarron.  What's more, he made it impossible to detect that Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn never spent a moment on the set at the same time as the leopard in Bringing Up Baby. 

Lin spent nearly thirty years working at RKO Radio Pictures, beginning in 1928; he even had a hand in filming the famous RKO logo with its radio tower on top of a revolving globe.  "When I went to RKO in 1928, I learned by doing.  We didn't have schools or trainee

Lin Dunn actually helped photograph this famous studio logo in the early 1930s. The globe and tower were real.

programs then, and I came fresh out of production, having been a so-called first cameraman in the silent days. Now I was joining a new photographic effects department being formed at RKO.  Everything was start-up at that new major studio; I was the third one employed in the department, with a cameraman and an artist.

"We averaged forty pictures most years at RKO, and I had work on probably every one of them--some a lot, and some a little, such as lap dissolves and fades.  I did all the optical printing composite work on King Kong, like Kong climbing the Empire State Building.  With seven major studios in those days, RKO was the smallest; well, that was a big advantage to me, because in the larger studios like MGM, Fox, and Universal, the special effects field was broken up into separate departments.  The background projection department, the optical printing department, the matte paintings, the miniatures were all done in separate departments.  RKO being the smallest studio, we did all this work in the one department, so I had hands-on experience on everything.  It was a real education which guys in the large studios didn't get.

"We also worked more like a family.  Writers would call me up sometimes and say, `Let's go to lunch; I'm writing a story here and I want to know whether we can do certain effects.'  I always used to urge them, `Never mind how it's gonna get done; you put in the

Here's a later version of the same logo, but Linwood let me in on a secret: RKO was too cheap to refilm the trademark in color, so he manufactured a makeshift color version using stencils.

story what you want, and we'll find a way to do it.'"

Lin was also a troubleshooter.  When it suddenly appeared that the "tame" leopard assigned to Bringing Up Baby wouldn't be safe for actors to work with, he was summoned to the set to help figure out ways to shoot the master scenes separately and then all subsequent scenes to patch the animal and the actors together, using split-screen composites.

When Orson Welles wasn't happy with the effect of the opening death scene in Citizen Kane, it was Lin who volunteered that using the optical printer, he could zoom in very tight inside the snow-globe--and superimpose more snow to camouflage the imperfections that this magnification would cause.  The more Welles saw of what could be done in post-production, the more it fired his imagination.  As a good company man, watching costs, Dunn used to say, "No, we can't do that," and Welles would say, "You mean you can't?  It's impossible?" and Dunn would reply, "No, nothing's impossible; it's just a matter of time and money."  Then Welles would get the extra time and money authorized by the front office.

Later, as the founder and president of Film Effects of Hollywood, he became a specialist in fix-up jobs, saving producers, directors, and studios thousands of dollars by finding ways to repair shots that had somehow gone wrong when they were photographed.  He charged only his cost for those assignments, refusing to profit from a filmmaker's misfortune. 

There were no computers or motion-control cameras in Linwood's heyday; the

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incredibly long, complicated (but impressive) title sequence designed by Saul Bass for West Side Story had to be shot in real time, with a staggering number of carefully-timed camera moves across credits inscribed on walls and street objects.  He did shots with special traveling mattes and his optical effects printer that today's technicians might find impossible to create without digital technology.  Yet his work was both dazzling and convincing.  True to his nature as a man who lives in the present (and the future), Linwood Dunn isn't resistant to modern-day technology; on the contrary, he applauds it.  He's involved in a new business venture called Real Image Technology which proposes equipping certain theaters with state-of- the-art electronic projection, which has many benefits over traditional 35mm film presentations.

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Fortunately, he's also available to younger people for advice and counsel.  I don't know how many of them seek out his wisdom and guidance, but he does have a number of disciples in the effects world, and is especially proud of his grandson, Chris George, a skilled cinematographer, and his granddaughter, Denise Ream, who rose to the position of a producer of visual effects at Industrial Light and Magic.  (Lin is quick to point out that both of them made their mark without using their family name or reputation.) 

Of the current state of effects, he says, "I'm thrilled with what I see; I'm really thrilled with all the new technology.   It's a revolution, that's all I can say, and the future of visual effects looks truly exciting."  But he's also been around long enough to recognize that every now and then, "they use a new technology to accomplish certain effects when it could be cheaper to just do it the old-fashioned way."

That's what comes from experience. 

[Linwood Dunn died in 1998, learning and experimenting right to the end.]