But, when you think about it, what was he doing? It seems to me Harryhausen was using currently available technology and with imagination and genius, he was taking it to it's creative limits.

The CGI folks whom Cameron hired have done the same thing in the film Avatar. The story may be weak or repetitive, there may be other problems with the film, but I think that Avatar is as visually impressive now as Harryhausen's contributions were back then.

For about 25 years, I used to be a friend of one LINWOOD G. DUNN, who's film career goes all the way back to the silent days of cinema. He did the opitcal effects for the original KING KONG, CITIZEN KANE, dozens of other films, and was the optical effects guy at RKO for decades. In the late 50s, he formed his own EFX company, "Film Effects of Hollywood", and was one of four optical houses that worked on opticals for the original STAR TREK TV series, and also specialized in EFX for large film formats such as 70mm and IMAX.

He was a member of the Oscar Academy (AMPAS), at one time their president and treasurer, a long-standing member of the Academy Special Effects Committee, the ASC, and over the decades before he died in the late 90s, in his 90s, came to know virtually everyone in the professional film industry, from the silent era to modern Hollywood, including Harryhausen.

He invented the first practical optical printer, refined it many times, won several Oscars himself, and even invented the Hi-Def 3-D video projection systems that are now being used in some theaters.

Off and on, when I journied to Hollywood, I used to hang out and/or communicate with Dunn often during his later years. He once told me that the reason why Harryhausen's films were never nominated for the EFX Oscar was that Harryhausen was always an "inde" efx guy, and didn't work in the effects department of any particular studio (despite most of his films being released by Columbia), nor was he on any particular EFX team, always working independently of the main Hollywood EFX "good-ole-boy" system, and thus wasn't part of the mostly-closed "clique" that always made and gave each other the EFX Oscar nominations.

Harryhausen's films also profiled EFX as obviously fantastic settings that called attention to themselves as EFX, while the Oscar EFX committee looked for films that used effects to depict more conventional "realistic" scenes that were supposed to be subtle enough to not even be noticeable as effects, war movies, earthquakes, aerial dog fights, floods, volcanoes, exploding Hindenburg blimps, and other more "realistic" settings, etc. However, in many years so few "realistic" EFX-heavy films made by the guys inside this clique of EFX guys were available that they sometimes had to nominate some of their own fantasy films like "DESTINATION MOON", "WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE", WAR OF THE WORLDS", "THEM", "FORBIDDEN PLANET", "TIME MACHINE" etc., even if some of them were obviously on the same level of quality as Harryhausen's films.

The idea behind their "logic" (always with the "image" of the Academy membership's choices in films in mind, as in the past some pretty bad films had occasionally won Oscars, embarrassing the Academy and hurting the Academy's "credibility" a bit) was that they didn't just nominate films with the best effects, but the best film that had effects, and for far too many decades Sci-Fi-Fantasy films were generally considered B-Movies and therefore not very "good" films to begin with, and unfortunately, loner Harryhausen's relatively low-budget films were considered the efx committee to be low budget "B" films also.

I disagreed with this logic and often let Dunn know this as diplomatically as I could.

Via my persistent lobbying, mostly after Harryhausen's retirement from filmmaking, Dunn was made aware of Harryhausen's huge world-wide fan base, and how so many us (unaware of the EFX committee's logic) were incredulous that Harryhausen's films had never been nominated for the EFX Oscar, let alone won. I, and others, many of them now newer Academy members, and some of them eventually famous film directors from the "new wave" of directors that effectively took over the film industry starting in the late 60s, who had also been influenced by Harryhausen, started lobbying not only Dunn and old-guard efx associates, but the Academy in general, to give Harryhausen some kind of lifetime achievement Oscar, which eventually happened, long overdue.

Sometime it takes a long time to right a long-standing wrong, but at least we "young turks" of the film industry managed to do that (with Dunn's blessing, I might add) while Harryhausen was still alive to accept it.

Now if only we could do the same for some deserving second-generation EFX geniuses like Jim Danforth, the late-great David Allen, Phil Tippet, Mike Jittlov, and some others of equal talent in Hollywood and elsewhere who have astounded all of us with their magnificent pre-CGI artistry and craftsmanship.

Dan Fiebiger
Portland, Oregon