Admission $4.00

Ray Harryhausen, pioneer of dimensional animation, has created some of the most delightful and inventive creatures the screen has known. Tonight, Mr. Harryhausen shares with us his own delight in invention, discussing his career and the influence of Willis O'Brien and the 1933 King Kong, along with film clips from his own movies. Mr. Harryhausen also brings with him film footage of himself at work on his soon-to-be-released Clash of the Titans. Introducing Ray Harryhausen is Jeff Rovin, author of “From the Land Beyond, Beyond,” and a regular contributor to Omni Magazine. Mr. Rovin opens the evening's fun with a short history of the art of special effects presented in clips of films from Ben Hur to 2001.
In his films, Ray Harryhausen draws on traditional myths, fantasies, and stories of many cultures. “Fantasy in art and literature,” he writes, “is as old as mythology itself.... No other medium of expression can project the complications of the imaginative, the wondrous, or the bizarre as well as the motion picture. Its extension, dimensional stop-action animation photography, can make it possible to burst the bonds of the mundane and materialize any form or thought the mind's eye may conceive.... Most of our subject matter and my style of staging were the direct result of choosing a type of story that could not be photographed with conventional techniques.... Three dimensional animation, in any language, must be an art: a creation of something out of nothing; a projection for an hour and a half of pseudo-reality of the most bizarre stretches of the imagination - the injection of the illusion of life into the basically inanimate.” (in “Film Fantasy Scrapbook”)

Jason and the Argonauts
In this imaginative embellishment of Apollonius' “Argonautica,” the legendary Jason contends with a host of Harryhausen hazards before he finds the mythical Golden Fleece: the Giant of Talos (a bronze statue come to life), a multi-headed gigantic serpent, and, in the most celebrated sequence of the film, seven sword-wielding skeletons who (having nothing to lose) are set to battle to the death. “Technically, it was unprecedented in the sphere of fantasy filming. When one pauses to think that there were seven skeletons fighting three men, with each skeleton having five appendages to move each frame of film, and keeping them all in synchronization with the three actors' movements, one can readily see why it took four and a half months to record the sequence.... Bernard Herrmann's original and suitably fantastic music score wrapped the scenes in an aura of almost nightmarish imagination.” --Ray Harryhausen, “Film Fantasy Scrapbook”