Before Industrial Light and Magic: the independent Hollywood special effects business, 1968–75

Abstract

This paper provides a rejoinder to Industrial Light and Magic's (ILM) rather triumphalist story of its ‘rebel’ origins. First of all, the paper describes the independent Hollywood optical, title, and effects houses in the late 1960s and early 1970s – an industrial history that does not exist in either academic or popular accounts. The independents provided the training ground for much of the future ILM team on Star Wars (Lucas, 1977) and other special effects-heavy blockbusters of the late 1970s and through the 1980s such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977) and Blade Runner (Scott, 1982). By paying proper attention to the industrial context of special effects in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, a surprising stylistic history emerges that reveals that today's special effect aesthetic (which is primarily the ILM aesthetic), typically called ‘photorealism’, is as much of a style as any other, with stylistic components that can be identified, analyzed, and most importantly, denaturalized. Further, I argue that the style of photorealism as practiced by ILM includes surprising components-based counterintuitively in ‘anti-realistic’ styles, such as commercial graphics, experimental animation, and stop-motion animation.