Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Movie)

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    Teri Garr Found the Soul in Memorable Ditsy Blondes

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    In “Tootsie,” “After Hours” and other films, she played truly unhinged characters while also layering in sadness or drama.In “Tootsie,” Teri Garr perfected the polite way to say you had a bad time at a party. Bidding a friend good night, her character, a struggling actress named Sandy, tells him, “It was a wonderful party, my date left with someone else, I had a lot of fun, do you have any seconal?”She sounds sunny as she’s saying all this and barely takes a breath. It’s a master class in comedic despair.Garr, who died on Tuesday at 79 from complications of multiple sclerosis, turned the neurotic basket case into an art form. On paper a Teri Garr role could be written off as a daffy blonde, but in her hands she gave these women depth and made them entrancingly funny.Garr came from a show business family — her father was a vaudevillian, and she arguably inherited that can-do spirit of performing. Though she had appeared in a number of television shows and films throughout the 1960s, including as a dancer in multiple Elvis flicks, she was introduced to most audiences in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974, not currently streaming), playing Inga, the laboratory assistant to Gene Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein. (Don’t mispronounce it.)Brooks first presents her lying in the back of a hay wagon. She’s beautiful and busty, but immediately lands her first punchline.“Hello,” she says seductively, in her ostensibly Transylvanian accent. “Would you like to have a roll in the hay?” Wilder pauses, taken aback by her apparent forward proposition. She interjects, brightly. “It’s fun!” She starts flinging her body around, singing, “Roll, roll, roll in the hay.” She doesn’t mean the sexual innuendo — or maybe she does.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Williams on ‘Indiana Jones’ and His Favorite Scores

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      In a long career making music for the movies, the composer has made an indelible contribution to cinema. Williams shares his thoughts on some landmark works.When the New York Philharmonic honored the work of the film composer John Williams this past spring, the director Steven Spielberg introduced a clip of the opening scenes of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — without the music. The effect, he noted apologetically, was like something out of the French new wave.The clip was played again, this time with the orchestra joining in. Like magic, the adventuresome spirit of the movie was restored.On June 30, the rugged archaeologist at the heart of that film (played by Harrison Ford) will return for the fifth entry in the franchise, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.” He’ll be accompanied, as ever, by Williams’s indispensable music.The composer, who turned 91 this year, had said it would be his final film score. Speaking during a video call more recently, he walked back his retirement plans. “If they do an ‘Indiana Jones 6,’ I’m on board.”Ahead of the new film’s opening, Williams shared his thoughts — with contributions from others closely connected to this work — on milestone moments in an extraordinary career.1966‘How to Steal a Million’Williams made some of his earliest contributions to movie music playing piano for the scores of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “West Side Story,” among others. (That’s also him playing the chugging piano riff on the “Peter Gunn” theme for television.)Under the name Johnny Williams, he gradually transitioned, as he put it, “from the piano bench to the writing desk,” composing several light, jazzy scores for comedies. “How to Steal a Million,” an art-heist caper starring Audrey Hepburn, was an early high point. “It was the first film I ever did for a major, super-talent director, in William Wyler,” Williams said.With moments of comedy and tongue-in-cheek suspense, that score was an early clue of “just how versatile John Williams could be,” said Mike Matessino, a producer of numerous Williams soundtracks.Many years later — long after his name had become synonymous with the sound of the cinematic blockbuster — Williams would channel his earlier, funnier work into the jazz-inflected score of “Catch Me if You Can.” That mode “had been residing there in the intervening decades, waiting to come howling to the surface,” Williams said. “It was the easiest thing in the world for me to do, and I was giggling while I was doing it.”1972‘Images’1973‘The Long Goodbye’Working with the director Robert Altman produced a couple of the strangest entries in Williams’s filmography. The soundtrack to “The Long Goodbye,” Altman’s woozy neo-noir starring Elliott Gould as a laconic Philip Marlowe, consists of several cheeky variations on the title tune, including a bluesy nightclub number, a mariachi and a tango.For the psychological horror “Images,” Altman gave Williams the kind of freedom he famously gave his actors. “‘Do whatever you want. Do something you haven’t done before,’” Williams remembers Altman saying.The result was an eerie, fractured score that reflects the deteriorating mental state of the protagonist. The music was a collaboration with the Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta, who performed on sculptures by the artists François and Bernard Baschet. Williams said that had he devoted his career to composing for the concert hall rather than the cineplex, his work would have sounded most like his “Images” score.When Spielberg was looking for menacing music to accompany scenes of dread in “Jaws,” he tried sounds from “Images.” But Williams believed the movie needed something more primal, less psychological, and eventually built a theme around two brutish bass notes.1977‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’How to sum up the Williams-Spielberg collaboration? Beginning with “The Sugarland Express” and concluding (for now, at least) with “The Fabelmans,” the partnership has spanned 29 films.Spielberg has described Williams’s score for “Schindler’s List” as “one of the most stunningly evocative gifts that John has ever given us.” It says something about the range of their collaboration that “Jurassic Park” came out the same year, featuring another towering Williams score — infused with an almost religious awe for the prehistoric creatures of the film.In an interview, Emilio Audissino, the author of “The Film Music of John Williams,” made the case that “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was the movie on which “the two fully realized the mutual advantage and compatibility of their partnership.” One moment in that film captures some of Spielberg and Williams’s alchemy: the musical dialogue between the humans and the otherworldly visitors, itself an artistic collaboration of sorts.Williams remembers spending hours with Spielberg, listening to countless musical phrases. “We were waiting for that eureka moment.”Many years later, Williams figured out why the phrase they ultimately chose (re, mi, do, do, so) feels so perfect. The “re, mi, do” feels musically resolved, he explained, after which “do, so” — the alien response — feels like an appropriately startling interjection. “I realized that 20 years after the fact.”1978‘Superman’Remember when superheroes had memorable themes?The score for “Superman” demonstrated one of Williams’s own musical superpowers: making the unbelievable feel thoroughly believable. His indomitable sounds are essential to audiences’ accepting — and being stirred by — the sight of a man in flight.The director Richard Donner had a theory that the three-note motif in the main theme — the one that makes you want to punch the air in triumph — is a musical evocation of “SU-per-MAN!”Is there anything to that?“There’s everything to that,” Williams told me.1999‘Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace’Williams remembers feeling “a little bit insecure” on the first day of recording “Star Wars” in 1977. But Lionel Newman, the studio musical supervisor, “who was sitting there next to me, said, ‘This is really going to work very well — you’ll see.’”The music for the central “Star Wars” saga was consistently extraordinary even when the films themselves failed to strike a chord. This is true of “The Phantom Menace,” which, despite its 51 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, features some of the composer’s most exciting work. Today, the Carl Orff-inspired symphonic banger “Duel of the Fates” is the most streamed piece of “Star Wars” music on Spotify.“It was pretty indescribable,” Maxine Kwok, a London Symphony Orchestra first violinist, said of the recording session. “I remember getting chills the first time the ostinato started.” Kwok joined the institution partly because she associated it with the music of “Star Wars” — the soundtrack to her childhood. “I grew up with those heroic trumpets and soaring strings. It had a profound effect on me.”Scoring “The Rise of Skywalker” in 2019, after more than 40 years with “Star Wars,” Williams said he didn’t want it to be over. “My feeling was, ‘This is fun. Let’s go back and do nine more.’”2023‘Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny’The “Indiana Jones” movies feature a number of Williams’s most recognizable character themes. They also feature swaths of swashbuckling music precisely calibrated to the action onscreen.“I don’t see John as simply a genius of themes and tunes, which he is of course,” the director James Mangold said. “Rather, it’s John’s moment-to-moment scene work that astounds me. Film scoring is really a kind of duet between the director and the composer. It’s John’s sensitivity to this partnership that most defines his work for me.”On the appeal of scoring a fifth “Indiana Jones” movie, Williams said, “I just thought, if Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it.” The movie features a new theme for the character of Helena, played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. “I had a wonderful time writing a theme for her,” Williams said.“When John first played that theme for me, with the orchestra, I was wowed, of course,” Mangold said, “completely knocked over by the music. But I was also a bit nervous that it was just too much — too damned lush. Too romantic. John just smiled, gently, and let me babble, because I think he knew it was going to work beautifully.” More

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      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

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      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More

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      Colin Cantwell, ‘Star Wars’ Spacecraft Designer, Dies at 90

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      He created the look of the X-wing and the Death Star; he also worked on “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “WarGames.”Colin Cantwell, an animator, conceptual artist and computer expert who played significant production roles in seminal science fiction films like “2001: A Space Odyssey, “Star Wars” and “WarGames,” died on May 21 at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo. He was 90.His partner, Sierra Dall, said the cause was dementia.Mr. Cantwell’s work on several influential movies reached its peak with “Star Wars,” George Lucas’s hugely successful space opera. To impress Mr. Lucas, Mr. Cantwell built two elaborate steampunk-like spacecraft models from parts he had culled from dozens of hobbyist’s kits. He got the job before Mr. Lucas had found a studio.Mr. Cantwell produced the original designs for spacecraft familiar to fans of “Star Wars” (later retitled “Star Wars, Episode IV — A New Hope”): the X-wing, the Rebel Alliance’s starfighter; the TIE fighter, part of the Galactic Empire’s imperial fleet; the wedge-shaped Imperial Star Destroyer; the cockpit for the Millennium Falcon; and the Death Star, the Empire’s enormous battle station, with a weapon capable of destroying a planet.“Colin’s imagination and creativity were apparent from the get-go,” Mr. Lucas said in a tribute on a Lucasfilm “Star Wars” website, adding, “His artistry helped me build out the visual foundation for so many ships that are instantly recognizable today.”Describing the design of the X-wing, Mr. Cantwell said in an interview on Reddit in 2016: “It had to be ultracool and different from all the other associations with aircraft, etc. In other words, it had to be alien and fit in with the rest of the story.” He got the original concept, he said, from “a dart being thrown at a target in a British pub.”His original design of the Death Star did not include the meridian trench. But as he created the model, he realized that it would be easier to include it. And it turned out to be critical to the design: In the film, the trench contains a thermal exhaust port that proves to be the source of the Death Star’s destruction.Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist, said that Mr. Cantwell was most likely the first person Mr. Lucas hired to design the spaceships.“George had some rough shapes in mind for the ships that would make you know these are the good guys and these are the bad guys, but the details were left to Colin to work out,” he said in a phone interview. “All his designs evolved; it was all a group effort, but Colin was the godfather of the models.”In an interview with the Original Prop Blog in 2014, Mr. Cantwell described his interplay with Mr. Lucas.“He would say, ‘Oh, I want an Imperial battle cruiser,’ and I’d say, ‘What scenes do you want to shoot with it and how big is it?’” Mr. Cantwell said. “He said, ‘Really big,’ and I’d say, ‘Is it bigger than Burbank?’”An X-wing starfighter, one of the spacecraft Mr. Cantwell designed for “Star Wars,” on display at the California Science Center in Los Angeles.Stephen Osman/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesColin James Cantwell was born on April 3, 1932, in San Francisco. His father, James, was a graphic artist, and his mother, Fanny (Hanula) Cantwell, was a riveter during World War II.As a child, Colin was fascinated by outer space but could not go anywhere for two years: After he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, his treatment involved being forced to sit immobilized in a dark room with a heavy vest across his chest to prevent coughing fits.“Suffice to say, nothing could slow me down after that!” he wrote on Reddit.He studied animation at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received a bachelor’s degree in applied arts in 1957. A love of architecture led him to create building designs that he personally showed to Frank Lloyd Wright, who was impressed enough that Mr. Cantwell was invited to study at Wright’s school of architecture in Arizona. Mr. Cantwell was accepted, but when Wright died in 1959, he decided not to proceed.“Colin had no interest in working with any other architect,” Ms. Dall said in a phone interview, “so that ended his architectural career.”In the 1960s, Mr. Cantwell was a contract worker for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, developing programs to educate the public about early space missions, and for Graphic Films in Los Angeles, which made live-action and animated films for NASA, the U.S. Air Force and industry clients. Douglas Trumbull, who died this year, had worked at Graphic Films before being hired by the director Stanley Kubrick for “2001.”Mr. Trumbull became a special photographic effects supervisor on “2001,” and Mr. Cantwell joined the crew from Graphic Films in 1967, during the last six months of its production. He organized 24-hour shifts of animation to complete the film’s animation, according to “Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece” (2018), by Michael Benson. Mr. Cantwell also produced some of the movie’s space sequences, suggested different camera angles to depict the arrival of a shuttle on the film’s space station, and worked with Mr. Trumbull to depict Jupiter’s moons.And, Mr. Benson wrote, Mr. Cantwell’s conversations with Kubrick about Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking led Mr. Cantwell to produce a tightly symmetrical animated shot that appeared in the “Dawn of Man” sequence early in the film: a low-angle view of the mysterious black monolith on Earth, with clouds beyond it, the sun rising and a crescent moon above.For “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Cantwell contributed technical dialogue and created early computer-generated imagery of unidentified flying objects strafing the landing site at Devils Tower in Wyoming, for a sequence late in the film. His U.F.O. imagery did not make it into the film — Steven Spielberg, the director, relied instead on old-fashioned special effects technology created by Mr. Trumbull — but the subject of U.F.O.s intrigued Mr. Cantwell, who claimed to have once been part of a group that witnessed a mysterious object in the night sky.In a provenance letter for an auction of his artifacts and memorabilia in 2014, he described the experience: “A silent intense light rose in the east, climbing to our zenith where, instantly doubling in brightness, it launched straight upward.”Mr. Cantwell worked on two other movie projects after “Close Encounters” and “Star Wars”: “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” (1979) and “WarGames” (1983). For “Buck Rogers,” he created a system that let animators simulate spacecraft movements as they designed space battles.“Colin’s imagination and creativity were apparent from the get-go,” George Lucas said of Mr. Cantwell.Sierra DallHe also worked as a computer consultant for Hewlett-Packard, where he helped develop the first color display systems for desktop computers. He and a team working on “WarGames” used the company’s computers to create the graphics — projected on giant screens at the North American Aerospace Defense Command facility — that appeared to show a massive nuclear attack by the Soviet Union against the United States.Mr. Cantwell also wrote two science fiction books, “CoreFires” (2016) and “CoreFires2” (2018), about what happens to humanity after it has colonized the galaxy.Ms. Dall is his only immediate survivor.A year after the release of “2001,” Mr. Cantwell played a role in the reality of space exploration. As a liaison between NASA and CBS News, he sat a few feet from the anchorman Walter Cronkite, feeding him information, during the moon landing of Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.“Halfway through the final descent, I alerted Walter to my detection of an orbit change that would consume more fuel, but allow coasting a little further than the planned target,” Mr. Cantwell told Reddit. “When the other TV stations had the ship landed according to their NASA manual, I determined that the Apollo had not yet landed. This was later confirmed that I had the accurate version of landing.” More

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      Douglas Trumbull, Visual Effects Wizard, Dies at 79

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      His technical savvy was on display in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner.”Douglas Trumbull, an audacious visual effects wizard who created memorable moments in a series of blockbuster science-fiction films, including the hallucinogenic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which an astronaut in a pod hurtles through space, died on Monday at a hospital in Albany, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Julia Trumbull, said the cause was complications of mesothelioma.With colleagues, Mr. Trumbull was nominated for visual effects Oscars for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” but perhaps his most stunning work came in “2001” — his first big break in motion pictures.He was in his early 20s when Mr. Kubrick hired him as a $400-a-week artist, and his first job was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft at the center of “2001.”Then, using a process called slit-scan photography, he conceived the trippy five-minute scene in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) soars at hyperspeed in his pod through a phantasmagorical cosmic passageway in the universe.Mr. Trumbull used a motorized camera that tracked to a slit in a rotatable rectangle of sheet metal, behind which he manipulated illuminated art — wedding his ambitious youthful vision to Mr. Kubrick’s.Keir Dulleau in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Mr. Trumbull’s first job after being hired by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of the seemingly omniscient HAL 9000 computer.Warner Bros. via Museum of the Moving Image, New York“It wasn’t about the normal cinematic dynamics of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots and reversals and conflicts and plot,” Mr. Trumbull told The New York Times in 2012. Mr. Kubrick, he said, “was trying to go into another world of first-person experience.”Over the next half-century, Mr. Trumbull became known as one of the film industry’s most innovative visual effects masters. He used old-school tools like mattes and miniatures to enhance science fiction films before digital effects animation became the industry standard.“He had this ability that I don’t think most people have — to see a final image in his mind and somehow figure out what was needed to get that image on film,” said Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist. “Sometimes those images were crazy, like a diaphanous cloud traveling through space heading toward the Enterprise,” the spacecraft in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979).For Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium filled with a mixture of fresh and salt water to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of the extraterrestrial mother ship.For Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), Mr. Trumbull used, among many other things, models and images projected onto blimps and buildings to fashion the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles.When Philip K. Dick — whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into “Blade Runner” — saw a segment of Mr. Trumbull’s visual effects on a local newscast, he recognized them approvingly as “my own interior world,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1982.An image from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), for which Mr. Trumbull fashioned the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesFor “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Mr. Trumbull oversaw the docking of the shuttle with the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk, a wild excursion (partly through a “plasma energy conduit”) that has obvious visual links to “2001.”“I thought it would be fun to just get kind of abstract and make it a fantasy dream sequence in a way, not literal,” he told TrekMovie.com in 2019.In 2012, Mr. Trumbull received the George Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry and the Georges Méliès Award from the Visual Effects Society.Douglas Hunt Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His mother, Marcia (Hunt) Trumbull, was an artist; his father, Don, worked in visual and special effects, most notably on “The Wizard of Oz,” but had gone to work as an engineer in the aircraft industry by the time Douglas was born.His father “never mentioned much about ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Douglas Trumbull told VFXV, a magazine devoted to visual effects, in 2018.Growing up, Douglas was a fan of science fiction movies, became fascinated with photography and could build crystal radio sets. After high school he worked for an electrical contracting firm while studying technical illustration at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif.For “Close Encounters,” Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of a U.F.O. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesHe took a job with Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where his paintings of space modules and lunar surfaces appeared in documentaries for NASA and the Air Force. He was hired for “2001” after Mr. Kubrick noticed his work on a 15-minute film, “To the Moon and Beyond,” which was produced in Cinerama 360 and exhibited during the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.After working on “2001,” Mr. Trumbull created space scenes in “Candy” (1968), a comedy based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; provided visual effects for “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), about a team of scientists trying to contain a deadly alien microorganism; and directed his first film, “Silent Running” (1972), in which botanical life has ended on Earth and plants are kept in a greenhouse on a space station by an ecologist played by Bruce Dern.Although Vincent Canby of The Times called “Silent Running” “simple-minded,” he praised its “beautifully eerie and majestic special effects — particularly its spaceship that looks like horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers.”Mr. Trumbull resuscitated his father’s film career by hiring him for “Silent Running,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Trek.” The senior Trumbull also worked on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but his son was too busy for that one.Douglas Trumbull’s affinity for vivid visual effects led him to conceive ways to produce films with a format that more closely approached reality. He created Showscan, a cinematic process in which 70-millimeter film is projected at 60 frames per second (35-millimeter projection is usually at 24 frames per second).He shot part of “Brainstorm” (1983), his second directorial effort, with a Showscan camera. That film — about scientists who devise a system that can record and play a person’s thoughts — is better known for the death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood, during production. Mr. Trumbull fought to complete the film, but it could not be exhibited in Showscan because theaters would not invest in the necessary equipment until all studio films were shot in that format.But developing the Showscan camera earned Mr. Trumbull, Robert Auguste, Geoffrey Williamson and Edmund DiGiulio the Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992.Mr. Trumbull in action in 2011, the year he returned to traditional filmmaking after many years of designing theme-park attractions and other projects and working for Imax.Joseph HeckThe experience led him to detour from Hollywood filmmaking and move to the Berkshires, where he worked on projects for the rest of his life. He developed simulator-based attractions like “Back to the Future: The Ride” for Universal Studios Florida, which opened in 1991, and, using Showscan, created “Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid,” a virtual reality experience featuring three films, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, in 1993.In 1994, he signed a deal to bring his simulator-ride technology to Imax. He also served for a time as the company’s vice chairman.In addition to his wife, Mr. Trumbull is survived by his daughters, Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; his stepdaughter, Emily Irwin; his stepsons, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; his sister, Betsy Hardie; his stepsister, Katharine Trumbull Blank; and his half sisters, Kyle Trumbull-Clark and Mimi Erland. His marriage to Cherry Foster ended in divorce; his marriage to Ann Vidor ended with her death.Mr. Trumbull returned to traditional moviemaking when the director Terrence Malick, a friend, asked him to help on his film “The Tree of Life” (2011). Working as a consultant, Mr. Trumbull helped conjure the kaleidoscopic sequence that depicts the Big Bang and the creation of life on Earth, using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, carbon dioxide, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics and high speed photography, he told cinematography.com in 2011.“It was a freewheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business,” he said. “We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.” More