In celebration of his 90th birthday and the July 6 Blu-ray release of his iconic “Jason and the Argonauts,” Sony Pictures Digital Productions is renaming and formally dedicating its 119-seat screening theater after visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen on July 12.
It’s been quite a year for Harryhausen, whose 1981 film “Clash of the Titans” was remade after a Blu-ray re-release of the original. He was also recently feted for his contributions to film with a special award by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Harryhausen also worked on the original movies featuring King Kong, the character on which Universal Studios Hollywood’s newest tram tour attraction is based.
Harryhausen is best known for seamlessly blending stop-motion puppetry with live-action footage, such as the battle scene between seven articulated skeletons and Jason in the 1963 film.
The Sony ceremony will include a reception, a screening of “Jason and the Argonauts,” and the unveiling of a sign heralding the Ray Harryhausen Theater which recently got a state-of-the-art technical upgrade to allow projection in digital 3D stereoscopic with Sony’s 4K CineAlta projector system and RealD Z Screen technology and a modernization of the THX-rated theater’s audio reproduction system for 7.1 Surround sound.
“It’s an incredible honor to have this theater named at the studio I called home,” says Harryhausen. “It means as much to me as my Academy Award and the BAFTA honor I just received, especially knowing that it is a working theater where visual effects artists and animators work every day.”
“Jason” was originally produced and released by Columbia Pictures (now part of Sony Pictures Entertainment). Its release on Blu-ray by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is the fifth Harryhausen Blu-ray title from SPHE, the most of any filmmaker from the label, and features new commentaries by Harryhausen, Peter Jackson, film historian Tony Dalton, and visual effects expert Randall William Cook, as well as a new interview of Harryhausen by filmmaker John Landis.
The theater, located on the Culver City, Ca. campus of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is the screening theater of Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Imageworks Interactive. Used on a daily basis in the creation of modern visual effects and animated features, the theater represents the living legacy of Harryhausen’s lifelong career.
After being inspired by the work of Willis H. O’Brien, the stop-motion photography pioneer of 1933’s “King Kong,” Harryhausen eventually found himself working alongside his mentor for 1949’s “Mighty Joe Young.” In the mid-1950s, he moved on to Columbia Pictures, where he created groundbreaking special effects for such films as “20 Million Miles to Earth” (1957), “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), and, later, for M-G-M, “Clash of the Titans” (1981).
Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Creative Head, five-time Academy Award-winner Ken Ralston (the original “Star Wars” films, “Back to the Future,” “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”) met Harryhausen when Ralston was 14 and has enjoyed Harryhausen’s mentoring for decades.
“What’s amazing – and unique – about his work is that he often brought a sympathetic quality to the creatures, especially during their demise,” said Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures’ Sr. VP, Asset Management, Film Restoration and Digital Mastering. Crisp, a film archivist and restoration specialist, and his team did the restoration of “Jason and the Argonauts.”
— By Scott Hettrick