Lenny Lipton, “Puff the Magic Dragon” lyricist, dies at 82
despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)
Lenny Lipton, who as a The songwas such an imcollege freshman wrote the mediate and lasting hit — lyrics to the classic folk tune Lipton called it his “Macar“Puff the Magic Dragon,” thur ‘ genius’ grant” — that and used the song’s bounit allowed him to leave his tiful royalties to fund years job and move to California. of pioneering research in In the Bay Area, he fell in 3-D filmmaking, died Oct. with a circle of independent 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82. filmmakers and made sev
His wife, Julia Lipton, eral short films of his own. said the cause was brain He received even more cancer. royalty income from his
Few people leavemuch of book “Independent Filma mark on popular culture; making” (1972), which beLipton was among the few came a niche but durable who got to leave two, and in success, giving himenough such wildly divergent corof a financial cushion to ners as folk music and cinexplore yet another abidema technology. ing interest: stereoscopy,
He was a 19-year- old stuthe technical name for 3-D dent at Cornell when he sat technology. down at the typewriter of Lipton had fallen for it as his friend and fellow physa boy in early 1950s Brookics major Peter Yarrow. He lyn when the first wave of had just read a 1936 poem 3-D films arrived in theby Ogden Nash titled “The aters. He saw them all: Tale of Custard the Dragon” “House of Wax,” “Bwana and felt inspired to write Devil,” “The Maze.” And alhis own. though the craze passed —
Some time later, Yarrow the technology was crude, found the poem, still in his the projectors were hard to typewriter, and felt a simisynchronize, the cheap eyelar inspiration. He put the glasses that had to be worn poem to music, and in 1963 to see images in 3-D were he and his folk trio, Peter, clunky— his belief that 3-D Paul and Mary, released it was the future of film did as “Puff themagic Dragon.”not.
It begins: “Puff the Amagic nd in California he bedragon lived by the sea / gan tinkering with ideas to And frolicked in the aumake that belief a reality. tumn mist in a land called “‘ Puff’ gave me a lot of Honah Lee.” freedom,” he said in a 2021
Yarrow tracked down interview with Moving ImLipton, who was working ages, a Youtube channel. “I as a journalist in Manhatdidn’t have to get a job. I tan, and gave him credit spent years in my little lab as a co-writer. (As Lipton in Point Richmond developtold reporters repeatedly, ing my stereoscopic inventions.”
Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among thema screen that switches rapidly between left- and right- eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.
He developed that technology, which he called Crystaleyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.
Crystaleyes and other advances devised by Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3D techniques that evolved from his innovations.
Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-Danimation at Arizona State University, said.
In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution ofmotion Picture Technology fromthemagic Lantern to the Digital Era.”