THE OWL SERVICE
Oscar-winning effects legend Colin Chilvers built the full-size Bubo for Clash Of The Titans. SFX speaks to the true-life Hephaestus…
hero to come back. People have been worshipping the anti-hero for far too long.
I feel some folks feel that they have to be cynics so they can be ‘with it’ in the 20th century.”
“A return to Greek mythology meant they wanted to do it with a bang,” John Walsh tells SFX. Harryhausen and long-time production partner Charles H Schneer originally took Clash to Columbia Pictures, who had distributed most of their movies. The studio baulked at the scale of their ambition, even though the success of Star Wars had created an arms race when it came to effects-driven fantasy films.
They then offered it to Orion Pictures, who wanted a pre-iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger as Perseus. “They contemplated it briefly – this was before Conan The Barbarian – and they decided no, it’s not a muscle-man picture,” says Walsh. “We’d prefer to have someone else, maybe an unknown in the lead, like Christopher Reeve in Superman.”
Arn-hult’s involvement was a deal-breaker for Orion. Schneer found a more enthusiastic reception at MGM, who approved both the $15 million budget and the gamble of an unknown lead: “They loved the material, they loved the picture, and they were wonderful to us. As I put the film together and the castings came up, they approved the additional castings and added that expense to the budget.”
UP ABOVE THE GODS
From sword-wielding skeleton warriors to prehistoric beasts, Harryhausen’s unearthly creations had always been the stars of his movies – certainly the crowd-pleasers and scene-stealers. For Clash Of The Titans Schneer wanted heavyweight names to play the gods of Olympus, not only to shore up the film’s box office cred but to mischievously tweak the ego of his collaborator. “I told Ray that if he thought he was the star of our pictures then I was going to upstage him once and for all,” the producer recalled. “I was going to cast actors who were bigger names than he was, and whose work the world knew better than his. I wanted to see if he could survive.”
The thesping firepower was impressive. Alongside Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith – married to screenwriter Beverley Cross – Schneer bagged acting legend Laurence Olivier to play the father of the gods. “Who else could play Zeus?” reasoned Harryhausen. “I can’t think of anyone more appropriate. He’s the greatest actor in the world.” Schneer wanted John Gielgud to play Ammon, Perseus’s mentor, but MGM overruled him, fearing American audiences would “think it was totally an English picture.” Ohio-born Burgess Meredith took the role instead, echoing his turn as a boxing guru in the Rocky movies.
As stellar as some dream RSC production, the powerhouse cast influenced the choice of director. Enter Desmond Davis, who had a background in BBC Shakespeare (he also directed “The Eagle’s Nest”, opening episode of The New Avengers). “Davis was good with actors and particularly the grand thespians that were involved,” says John Walsh. “He was less good when it came to understanding some of the effects requirements. Rather ambitiously he added filters to some of the shots, which required defiltering when the stop-motion had to be integrated. So some scenes from the film are grainier than they need to be. But it was better to have an actor’s director because Ray was on hand all the time, and he could recognise, certainly for the effects sequences, what needed to happen.”
The role of Andromeda, the movie’s virginal Kraken-bait, went to Judi Bowker, best known to British audiences as Jenny in TV’S The Adventures Of Black Beauty. The camera captured a pure, ethereal quality that was ideal for a mythic archetype, if far from the new breed of blaster-totin’ heroines embodied by Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia. “Judi Bowker had that wonderful, innocent character about her that fit the role of Andromeda,” observed Harryhausen later.
For Perseus, reputed contenders included everyone from Malcolm Mcdowell to Michael York. But Harryhausen and Schneer remained set on an unknown, ultimately gifting the sword and the shield to newcomer Harry Hamlin. They may have come to regret the decision: Hamlin, though inexperienced, was forthright, to say the least. He had completed a thesis on mythology at Yale and was unhappy with the liberties taken by the screenplay. “As I read the words, I went, ‘Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into?’” he recalled. “I love Greek myths but this particular one combined with Harryhausen meant that the monster aspect would be glamourised.” The film’s story, he believed, “mangled the mythology”.
Hamlin was swayed by the cast that had already been assembled. But there was friction between him and the filmmakers. He quibbled with the name Bubo – the name of the mechanical owl that accompanies
Perseus – insisting that linguistically it meant a boil.
Filming a fight sequence against giant scorpions, he
Davis was good with actors and particularly the grand thespians that were involved
improvised a move, lopping off one of their tails – against the wishes of Harryhausen, who needed meticulous choreography for the effects process.
On the first page of his script Hamlin taped a picture of Cellini’s statue of Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa, demanding the image be recreated in the movie. He refused to film the death of the Gorgon as written; the screenplay had Perseus decapitating Medusa by slinging his shield like a frisbee, rather than the sword-slice of legend. “I argued with them,” he admitted. “I said, ‘You can’t do that. This is a Greek myth, we have to try wherever we can to be honest about it, otherwise we are making a bastardisation of the myth.’ When you are making movies you have to have at least some semblance of historical reality.”
Hamlin took to his trailer for three hours until the producers agreed. It was a hot day and they retaliated by shutting off the electricity for his air conditioning, hoping to smoke him out. Ultimately their wilful star had his way, though the Frisbee-kill is preserved in the film’s comic book adaptation.
“If you’re on your first picture, the last thing you want is to be thought of as highmaintenance,” says John Walsh of the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation. “I do wonder, and this is just speculation, whether that meant him having a more extensive career as an ’80s action hero floundered. I’ve always liked Harry
Hamlin: shockingly good-looking, a great actor, he’s brilliant in Clash Of The Titans. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t have had a Bruce Willis-style career. He had everything. It’s not good. I think he regrets doing it. It was a big mistake. Big mistake.”
MONSTER MAKING
Harryhausen, you suspect, preferred his performances to be summoned from latex and armatures. Clash Of The Titans certainly delivered a classic menagerie of his creations, from the winged horse Pegasus to the bosslevel threat of the Kraken. The sinister, swamp-exiled Calibos, meanwhile, was split between a stop-motion model in long-shot and close-ups of actor Neil Mccarthy.
The effects workload proved so demanding – the set-piece flooding of Argo involved high-speed miniatures that stood six feet high – that Harryhausen had to hire assistants. Jim Danforth helped animate the sky-galloping Pegasus while Steve Archer was assigned to Bubo (Colin Chilvers, who had shared an Oscar for his effects work on Superman, built the full-scale model of the mechanical owl).
Dioskilos, the two-headed hound that guards Medusa’s temple, was originally intended for Jason And The Argonauts. The inclusion of the Gorgon herself fulfilled an even earlier desire on Harryhausen’s part. He had considered bringing her to the screen in 1950, part of the plot for an unmade movie titled The Lost City, which would have seen an archaeologist uncovering an ancient temple that held a portal to the underworld.
“I always wanted to animate Medusa,” Harryhausen confessed. “I tried to design her so she wouldn’t have clothes. That’s why I gave her a reptilian body, because I didn’t want to animate flowing cloth. We gave her… the rattlesnake’s tail so she could be a menace from the sound effect point of view.” The writhing snakes that crowned her created their own challenge. “It became a big problem because she had 12 snakes in her hair, and each snake had to be moved, the head and the tail, every frame of film, along with her body and her face and her eyes and the snake body.”
“He based her face on a famous Hollywood star,” says John Walsh. “He would never reveal who it was until that star had passed. Ray would want to say he was basing it on the spirit of that actress, not her actual looks, because she was a very beautiful lady. When you see the red lips and the high browline you’re reminded of Joan Crawford. It’s obvious when you put the two faces together.”
By releasing the Kraken at the film’s climax Harryhausen proved how willing he was to play fast and loose with mythology, bolting Norse legend on to Greek. “We needed a word and I guess the writer thought that was the right word to use,” he said, justifying the inclusion of the Scandinavian sea-beast, now reimagined in an ape-like form that echoed the Ymir from his own 1957 movie 20 Million Miles To Earth. “I wanted to make it semi-human so it would make the story a little more logical. I gave it sort of the arms of an octopus and he developed from that point of view.”
He had no qualms about rewiring the legends but he bristled at the suggestion that Bubo’s presence, complete with electronic chirps, was a sop to the modern mythology of George Lucas. “It certainly doesn’t look anything like R2-D2,” he argued. “It’s an owl, not a tub. I may sound upset but it’s only because these things were in films long before Star Wars. Robots go back to ancient Greece: Talos, for instance, was a robot.”
Opening against Lucas’s latest hero, Indiana Jones, Clash Of The Titans claimed second place at the US box office, grossing $6.5 million in its opening weekend. Reviews were mixed, occasionally outright savage. Variety called it “an unbearable bore of a film… mired in a slew of corny dialogue and an endless array of flat, outdated special effects that are both a throwback to a bad 1950s picture.” But Roger Ebert championed it as “a grand and glorious romantic adventure, filled with brave heroes, beautiful heroines, fearsome monsters and awe-inspiring duels to the death.”
“The audience made up its own mind,” reflected Harryhausen. And indeed Clash went on to be one of 1981’s true hits, in America and across Europe. “It was our biggest financial success ever,” said Charles H Schneer. “It actually saved the studio.”
It was also the final film from the Schneer/ Harryhausen partnership – and the last movie Ray Harryhausen would ever make, even though he had no intention of stepping away from cinema at that point.
“The best producers know how to get a deal done with a combination of honey and vinegar,” John Walsh tells SFX. “Charles Schneer was mostly vinegar! It actually corroded the relationship between Ray and Charles. It was irrecoverable after this film.”
So why does it endure, 40 years on? “If you’re 30 or under it might have been the first Harryhausen film you’d seen on television, because it’s shown so regularly,” says
Walsh. “I’m pleased it’s held up as well as it has. And I think
Ray would be delighted.”
Go to tiny.cc/rayh for details of the Ray Harryhausen: Titan Of Cinema exhibition.
Before Clash you worked on Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. Was that the first time you crossed paths with Harryhausen?
Yes – and his notorious producer, Charlie Schneer! He was a character. Ray was a beautiful man, quiet, unassuming and just a very nice person. He was a genius.
How did you find him as a collaborator? He had a reputation as a one-man band…
He was, for sure. He knew exactly what he wanted and what he needed, and of course with the kind of work that he did he had to be in charge and feel like he was directing it, because he had to use it afterwards to put his critters in. Ray always took the credit for everything. If you look I didn’t have a credit on Clash Of The Titans. But that’s fine. I think that was even written into the contract! That was probably more Charlie than Ray…
We never had any fallings-out. He was brilliant, just a great guy to work for.
Did you work directly from Ray’s designs on Clash?
He had drawings of Bubo and we just copied the drawings, and kept him in the loop as far as showing him the materials and the way things were going. He liked it a lot.
Was it crucial to match the movement with Ray’s own miniature version?
The good thing in that respect was that it was a mechanical owl, so its movements were going to be restricted by the mechanics, both from the point of view of what we were able to do with it and also by what it was supposed to do in the movie. So whatever we could get out of it Ray was happy with, because it was supposed to be mechanical.
Where did you build Bubo?
I had a workshop at Pinewood, up near the 007 stage.
What materials did you use?
Mostly brass, because we had to polish him up to make him look smart. We had two different kinds of feathers. The breast feathers were stamped out – probably tin – and then the gold-looking ones were brass. He’s a pretty smart little owl.
Was it a challenge to fit all the necessary workings inside him?
I had a very talented engineer, Michael Dunleavy, that worked with me on every movie pretty much, including Superman. The owl was just a beautiful piece of engineering, let alone the fact that it looked good. You really had to work from the outside in – you had to decide on what the body was going to be and how it was going to look, and then how to fit everything in there to make it work. Most of that stuff was radio-controlled, little servos and so forth, that would make the wings and the beak and the eyes move. The only problem we may have had was that you couldn’t see an antenna. It didn’t really matter, because we were so close to him – it wasn’t like it needed a big antenna, like you have on a model aircraft.
You were competing in a post Star Wars world. Do you think Bubo was a response to the success of Artoo?
I didn’t even think of it, but maybe. It would make sense. It may not have been a conscious decision because obviously R2-D2 was very popular in the movie and that was a benchmark for everybody: how do you come up to the standard of Star Wars?