Three-time Academy Award nominee Douglas Trumbull, trailblazing special effects artist best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and the first Star Trek movie passed away at age 79.
His passing was announced by his daughter, Amy Trumbull, in a Facebook post. She wrote:
My dad, Doug Trumbull died last night after a major two-year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. He was an absolute genius and a wizard and his contributions to the film and special effects industry will live on for decades and beyond. He created the special visual effects for 2001 A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, Star Trek and The Tree of Life. He directed Silent Running and Brainstorm.
My sister Andromeda and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that we love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond.
I love you Daddy, I sure will miss you!
Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942 and was the son of Donald Trumbull, who created visual effects for the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. By the time Douglas Trumbull was born, his father was in the aerospace industry.
Initially, Trumbull’s career ambition was to become an architect; however, his portfolio was filled with illustrations of spaceships and alien planets caught the attention of Graphic Films which made technical films for NASA and the U.S. Air Force. During Trumbull’s early tenure at Graphic Films, there were three different projects being made for the New York World’s Fair in 1964 with the most interesting one being a short film called To the Moon and Beyond.
Among the audience members at the New York World’s Fair were Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick who were collaborating on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick hired Trumbull and flew him to London for the production. Trumbull’s first task was to create the dozens of animations seen in the data display screens in the Aries moon shuttle and the Discovery.
After 2001: A Space Odyssey, he returned to Los Angeles and Trumbull set up his own company and subsequently bid on the job to produce special effects for the science-fiction film The Andromeda Strain. For his directorial debut, Silent Running, he experimented with computerized motion-control photography.
The film was based on his original treatment: America’s last great forests are preserved and sent into space inside huge geodesic domes, in the hope that one day they can be returned to an earth that can once again sustain them. When orders are issued by faceless bureaucrats to abandon and destroy the domes, the ship’s botanist (Bruce Dern) rebels and takes over the ship, aided by three anthropomorphic “drone” robots.
He steers the ship away from the fleet and hides among the rings of Saturn, out of contact (silent running), attempting to keep the forest in good health, alone except for the drones who follow him around like pets. Silent Running was produced by Universal on a shoestring budget of one million dollars, one-tenth the budget of 2001.
In 1975, Trumbull turned down an offer to provide the effects for George Lucas’ Star Wars due to other commitments, but in 1977 he contributed effects to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In late 1978, Trumbull’s Future General Corporation, a research/special effects house that was funded by Gulf + Western and Paramount Pictures, was offered the job to produce the special effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. In 1981 Trumbull directed the special effects for the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner.
Trumbull later in his career moved away from Hollywood and the demands of the business and retreated to the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts, but he did design the theme park ride for Back to the Future at Universal Studios in 1990, which has since been redesigned to be the Simpson’s ride. Trumbull would eventually return to Hollywood films after some 30 years with work on Tree of Life, where he consulted on the beginning of the universe sequence, and an experimental sci-fi short UFOTOG among other projects.
In 1994, his company Ridefilm Corporation merged with IMAX, helping develop the plan to take IMAX public. He served as vice-chairman of IMAX for three years.
He shared Oscar nominations for best visual effects for Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner.
Trumbull was twice honored by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). In 2010 Trumbull was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame citing first his stature as “innovative master of special effects”. Trumbull also received the Gordon E. Sawyer Award in February 2012, an honorary Academy Award given to an “individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry”.
Many in the industry took to social media to pay their respects:
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Trumbull is survived by his wife Julia Hobart Trumbull, daughters Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; stepchildren; Emily Irwin, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild; a sister Betsy Hardie, half-sisters Kyle Trumbull-Clark, Mimi Erland and a stepsister Katharine Trumbull Blank.
