I’M SORRY FOR YOUR TRUMBULL
Groundbreaking SFX wiz Douglas Trumbull has died at 79. The son of Donald Trumbull (who did the effects in The Wizard of Oz), the younger Trumbull’s early work caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick recruited Trumbull for 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Trumbull was responsible for some of its most iconic scenes. The scene where Dave Bowman passes through the Star Gate and experiences an explosion of colour immediately comes to anyone’s mind when they think of the film. That was Trumbull’s doing – he developed new types of cameras and lighting systems and experimented for over 6 months to achieve the mesmerising sequence. He accomplished this by his mid-20s!
Trumbull would be a name to note in sci-fi and SFX circles off 2001 alone, but he didn’t stop there. He worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner, films where he continued to develop new camera technologies and techniques regarding clouds and smoke. His directorial ventures included Silent Running, where Bruce Dern tends to a barren Earth’s last forest within a spaceship greenhouse, and Brainstorm, which struggled due to both studio disinterest in the project and Natalie Wood’s death late in production. Those frustrations led him to quit directing afterwards, but he remained devoted to special effects and continued to look for ways to innovate (he was a heavy advocate of IMAX during the 90s). He was a unique hit for sci-fi team All these moments will be lost.
Douglas Trumbull
8 April 1942 – 7 February 2022, aged 79
💀💀💀💀💀💀💀 + 👻 = 11 POINTS