Lenny Lipton

The first money my new company StereoGraphics made in 1981 was from my consulting fees working on a 3-D movie called Rottweiler: Dogs from Hell. Chris Condon, the president of StereoVision International (which was a Burbank-based supplier of stereoscopic optics for the motion picture film industry), and StereoGraphics formed a venture called Future Dimensions, in which I would help market his line of lenses and provide consulting expertise.

Stereoscopic motion picture camera systems are difficult to use without a stereographer/consultant but in the film business consultants may be a perceived source of trouble. This may be a result from the days when the Technicolor Company required a color consultant who would dictate passing or failing grades on the choice of colors for costumes and set decor. One of these consultants, Natalie Kalmus (who was at one time the wife of the president of Technicolor, Herbert Kalmus), had a reputation as a tyrant. Nevertheless, a consultant is necessary, if a production company is doing its first stereoscopic movie.

Condon and I put together a deal with Earl Owensby, who had a filmmaking/hardware fiefdom, E. O. Productions, in Shelby, North Carolina. He had seven large sound stages which were also used for warehouses for his hardware supply business, and many country acres including his own motel, baronial dwelling, business center, aforementioned sound stages, and an airstrip for his two planes.

I was hired to train his crew for two months, after Earl had negotiated a 99-year lease on Condon’s stereoscopic lenses. After Rottweiler: Dogs from Hell, that crew went on to shoot several stereoscopic movies and, although the only film I’ve seen was Rottweiler, I’ve heard that the stereo in the films, under the direction of cinematography Earl Dickson, was pretty good.

Just before shooting was to begin I flew with from Shelby to Miami with Mike Allen, who was Earl’s pilot. Mike and I got into Earl’s little Aeronca STOL craft – a plane that requires a short runway. We flew off in a thunderstorm with an Arriflex camera that needed to be properly mated to the stereoscopic lenses. For much of the day we flew through the gray unnamable. The Aeronca was outfitted with sophisticated instrumentation electronics so we could fly in zero visibility conditions.

Mike decided to test me and I decided I would pass the test. He was a good old boy from Carolina, and I was some wise-ass fool from California. When the weather cleared, Mike showed me what the STOL aircraft could do. Mike was inhibited only by the fact that the camera was on board and he didn’t want to damage it. I did a meditation that lasted hours, relying on what I had learned from Uncle Bill, a sociable Buddhist hermit, and no matter what weird dip or roll or dive Mike pulled I remained calm, because I was wasn’t even there. I used the sound of the engine as a mantra, a technique I have used to steady my nerves on commercial flights, which are more horrible than anything Mike could dream up. At the end of the trip, Mike decided I was one hell of a guy (or victim).

For much of the time we flew over the coast of Carolina, Georgia and then Florida. It is improbably beautiful — the vivid blue-green of the water and the shapes of the sandy barrier reefs. At one point we flew by Cape Kennedy and saw a rocket on the launch pad. We refueled several times en route at small airports and Mike knew people all along the way which only gave him additional excuses to show off the plane’s aerobatic capability. At one of the airports we encounter a World War II fighter, a Hellcat. I had no notion of how immense these machines were. I thought of them as single person small aircraft, but it ain’t so. The engine was mammoth — half the length of the plane. As a boy I watched these planes win the Second World War in triple features at the People’s Cinema in Brooklyn. Landing in Miami Mike took me to that part of the airport where there were score of aircraft, some of them the size of a DC 3, parked row after row, all having been seized by federal authorities from drug dealers. I suspected that Mike may have been a pilot playing in that game.

After visiting the Arri repair shop we returned the following day. The first week or so that I was on the set, a producer from CBS’s 60 Minutes showed up. He and his crew did some shooting and nosed around and said that in a couple of weeks Morley Safer would be coming back with the 60 Minutes to do a segment on Earl.

There was a good Indian restaurant in Charlotte where I would eat on weekends with a girlfriend who was a news cameraperson for a local TV station. I told Earl about their terrific food, and he told me he had never eaten Indian food. It seemed to me that a movie producer ought to have eaten Indian food.

Earl told me that his desire to make films came from observations he made while watching a film crew at work. One day he decided there wasn’t that much to it, and he was going to get into the business. And his films and his studio made money. One day I ran into David Nelson coming out of an editing room — a blast from the past for me because I had been a fan of Ozzie and Harriet on both radio and TV in my youth.

Earl enjoyed acting in his pictures and he had a part in Rottweiler. He was a good-looking man who easily fit the part of the southern sheriff who liked to point his six-gun right at the lens so it would poke out of the screen in killer 3-D. Not many people get to fulfill the fantasy of being a movie producer or movie star. Earl might have never been given such an opportunity had he migrated to Hollywood, but here he was the king of world, a smaller world than Cameron’s, but his and his alone. One day I rode through the green hills of North Carolina to our location with Earl in his Rolls and he suggested that I stick around and direct one of his films. Although I was flattered, life would take me elsewhere.

The plot of Rottweiler involves dogs with super intelligence who escaped from the U.S. Army, which was breeding them to be super weapons. After they escape they go on a killing rampage in a town. Earl’s plot has the classic science fiction motif of Frankenstein. The problem is technology — meddling in things nature that irked the creator. Bruce, the shark in Jaws, is not a man- made threat – he is nature itself. But the human race made the hell dogs that live to kill.

The dogs could not have succeeded harming so many people if the character in the film behaved with common sense. Nobody would have been hurt if the Army told the town the dogs were on the loose. And naturally enough the scientist who made the dogs what they were does everything he can to protect them no matter what price is paid in human life. The citizens of the town act in increasingly stupid ways to guarantee their doom, like characters in a many melodramas. Given a chance to get away from a dog these people managed to get cornered on rooftops, in dead ends, or in burning buildings.

People who don’t know about working on movies may have romantic notions of the experience, but it’s a lot of hard work and mostly waiting; waiting for something or somebody to get ready. It was 110 degrees or more every day, but fortunately it was an evening shoot and it was a little cooler after dark, unless we were in one of Earl’s non-air-conditioned sound stages. Most of the show was location photography, and Earl had a large generator truck which wasn’t muffled. That meant much of the sound had to be dubbed, even though it was recorded sync sound to serve as a guide track. The soundman with his boom had such pride in his work but little of what he recorded was used.

Many of the members of the crew of 40 carried sidearms. I was told they needed protection from the snakes in the kudzu. Kudzu is a leafy vine that has taken over a lot of the south. I felt it was prudent not to get into any arguments. Despite the six day weeks, the heat and the fourteen hour days, tempers never flared.

The director, a young man named Worth Keeter, also carried a side-arm. Worth was a competent technician who had no real interest in actors or acting. His areas of interests were action, makeup and effects, and the set would grind to a dead stop when Worth was required to add his scar and wound makeup, which were frequently called upon since the dogs were tearing hunks of flesh out of the characters. I learned from my camerawoman friend in Charlotte, who had gone to high school with Worth, that he dressed in a Dracula costume on a daily basis, and slept in a coffin. Worth got his start at E.O. doing makeup and then graduated to directing. Years later Worth directed many of the Power Ranger TV shows.

My job as a stereoscopic consultant placed me between the camera and the Rottweilers. One recurring shot was to have the Rottweilers leap out of the screen as they say on the 3D posters, into your lap. The stereoscopic “convergence” control, which is used for placing devil dog drool onto the audience, turned out to be at the front of the lens, and it was my job to stand there (or actually hunker) working a knob pulling convergence while Rottweilers jumped at the camera. Since I have nerves of steel (more like dead broke), I was suited for the job. Sometimes the Rottweilers were chained to a plywood plank so they couldn’t go too far, and sometimes they weren’t, because the shot wouldn’t allow it. And every now and then they had to chain me to the camera so that I wouldn’t run away.

The dogs were smacked with switches so they’d develop a foamy lather and look like angry dogs, because Rottweilers aren’t necessarily mean dogs. I didn’t speak out at the time because I wanted to remain gainfully employed. There were Rottweilers spread all over Earl’s domain, usually behind chain-link fences and there was a large turnover in the population of Rottweilers and their trainers. Many of the crew wound up wearing T-shirts from various training establishments all of which had drawings of snarling dogs.

I was given a small part in the film playing a tourist in a Hawaiian shirt tucked into my pants, wearing suspenders. My line was dubbed on a looping stage in New York many months later. The actor who spoke my dialogue decided that my character should have the voice of Groucho Marx. Since I was a Groucho fan in my youth that was kind of fun.

Finally 60 Minutes returned with Morley Safer, sporting a silk cravat. While the crew was hanging out and shooting the making of the film, the 60 Minutes producer invited me to be interviewed. But I was coached to complain about Earl Owensby; about Earl’s tyranny, about Earl’s bad treatment of the crew, about Earl’s lousy movies. Earl wasn’t a tyrant; he was a fair man who was giving people an opportunity to get into the movie business. He gave people jobs, which were I come from is a good thing. His movies, to my lights, weren’t terribly good or terribly sophisticated, but there are a lot of movies made in Hollywood that aren’t any better than Earl’s, and they’re distributed by major studios and made by people who are supposed to be talented. When I declined to cooperate with the 60 Minutes producer my interview was canceled.

The most serious criticism I had of Earl was that we had an opportunity to have excellent food on the set, but passed it up. There was a restaurant outside of Shelby that served good Mediterranean cuisine, but Earl’s son, who was working on the crew, voted it down. Instead we got served grits and fried chicken every day, but I withheld this comment from 60 Minutes, because unlike the Rottweilers, I was not going to bite the hand that fed me. As it turned out the piece about Earl was favorable, and I have one moment on the screen standing near my favorite Rottweiler, Brutus.

On the day I left E.O. Studios a big fire scene was set up. This time those pesky Rottweilers had set fire to a hotel and were attacking the fools within. Rubber cement was used to coat the walls of the house, which was then set on fire but it got out of hand and the fire department was called. This occurred as I was on my way to the airport and was described to me later by one of the crew. Nobody was hurt that day.

A year later I sat in a screening room in the shadow the Black Tower at Universal Studios, watching a print of Rottweiler with the head of Universal Optical, Pete Comendini, and the man who was going to be the director of Jaws 3D, Joe Alves. I was peddling my services and Condon’s lenses for use on the new production, which promised to be the biggest budget stereoscopic film in years. Pete and Joe sat in the row directly behind me and as the film unfolded Pete and Joe began to speak over the dialogue. I turned around and Joe removing his cardboard 3D glasses and said: “The 3D is great. This is the best I’ve seen. Easy on the eyes and the effects are great. Much better than anything else that has come through the door. You would be amazed what crap people have shown us. But the picture itself, it is shit.”

“Yes,” said Pete, “This is a terrible picture. I don’t think we can show it to the guys in the Black Tower.” The Black Tower is the office building on the edge of the Universal lot. They felt that given the poor quality of the picture, they could not screen it for the executives who would make the final decision about who would get the job of doing the 3D on the film.

A year later I sat in a mammoth theater in the outskirts of Detroit wearing cardboard 3D glasses watching Jaws 3D. This film was just as poor as Rottweiler but the 3-D was a disgrace. My feeling was that I was sitting through one of the worst movies ever made with technical mistakes so serious that it was only with an effort of will that I was able to continue to look at the screen.

FESTIVAL AWARD WINNERS:
AUDIENCE AWARD AND JURY FIRST PLACE
Fractal Odyssey
by John Hart and Jerry Oldaker
3D Motion Art. Mandelbrots, Fractal Flames, and IFS Fractals are featured in this artistic study of the eveolution of fractals transforming and morphing under slow parametric variations

John Hart is a stereo photographer and filmmaker from Boulder, Colorado.  He took up 3D in 1998, after pursuing normal (2D) nature and wildlife photography for almost 30 years.  His primary photographic subjects are rock climbing, canyoneering, and whitewater kayaking, along with an emphasis on stereoscopic visualizations of scientific phenomena like high-speed ballistics, liquid drop collisions, and fractals.  His images have been published in magazines such as Adventure Sports, Outside, American Canyoneering, and on the covers of such journals as Science, Microscopy Today, and Stereo World.    www.crystalcanyons.net

Jerry Oldaker is a stereo artist from Eugene, Oregon.  His artistic goal is to create visually exciting fractal compositions using fantasies of form and color.  His work has been shown at the 3D Center for Art and Photography, The Oregon Historical Society, and he won the Best Stereo Artist award at the NSA Grand Rapids Convention in 2008.  His two collaborations with John Hart, Fractal Fantasy and Fractal Odyssey, have won several awards including Best of Show at National Stereoscopic Association conventions.  www.gostereoartist.com

JURY SECOND PLACE
MICROWORLDS
by Greg Passmore
MicroWorlds is a live-action 3D educational science film that explores the world of life that goes on, unseen, all around us.  From the earthworms in our backyards to the alien beauty of a garden snail, MicroWorlds examines the patterns, cycles, and daily rituals that are repeated on every scale, both in nature and in the lives of all creatures.  Examined closely, nature reveals these patterns through the hands of time, the rotation of our planet and the flora and fauna that surround us.

Greg Passmore has a 30 year career in technology innovation and creative
imaging. His firm, PassmoreLab, has about 75 employees in three countries
performing software development, 3D conversion and live action filmmaking. With an academic background in math and software development, Mr. Passmore also has a creative side– he is an accomplished photographer, with his fashion photography work appearing in Vogue, Cosmo, Wired, textbooks, numerous photography books and exhibitions. Now, running film crews, software teams and a state of the art conversion lab, his firm, PassmoreLab, is growing over 100% per year in revenues and production capacity. www.passmorelab.com

JURY THIRD PLACE
Spinteck 3-D Shorts
by Nat Bartholomew
A 4 minute bicycle freeride segment in Utah, followed by 3 minutes of “My Best Stuff!”

Nat Bartholomew was born 1971 in the Philadelphia suburb of Pottstown PA.
Was a pro downhill mountain biker during college 1993-1995. B.S. degree in Biology and B.S.E. degree in secondary education. Started filming action sports in 2004. Fell in love with 3D in 2007. Produced, filmed, and edited Truth and Beauty, the first 3D freeride/downhill mountain bike movie. Working on another project at my own artsy pace, for now know as M.E.S.C and applying 3D to my home movies. Equipment, too embarrassed to tell. Proud father of 3, all under the age of 4 1/2       www.spinteck.com.

Thank you to all of the filmmakers who made this year’s festival possible!

When stereophotography was invented and the market for stereoscopes and stereoviews proliferated, the use of a blinking eye technique alternately opening and closing the left and right eye, was present as a simple means of creating binocular movement of the image. For many years, magic lantern showmen had made use of mechanical slides to animate the projected image. Rackwork slides achieved motion through the action of a rack and pinion that were turned while the slide was projected. There were also pulley slides consisting of two glass discs mounted in brass rings that turned in opposite directions by means of two bands and projected patterns of brilliant color or moving shadows.

Theodore Brown was a prolific inventor of optical entertainments who was active at the turn of the 19th century and made many experiments with early motion pictures, stereoscopic photography and an anaglyphic system of moving picture drawings for children that he called Magic Motion Picture Books. Brown was the author of the 1903 book Stereoscopic Phenomena of Light and Sight (reprinted in a facsimile edition by Reel 3-D in 1994) and a mail-order merchant of stereoscopic devices such as a mirror attachment enabling ordinary cameras to take stereophotographs.

Brown first published red/green stereographs which he called Magic Post Cards using anaglyph glasses that were attached in 1904. By 1908, Brown had developed the Pocket Kinematograph, producing Magic Motion in anaglyph pictures by sliding the red and green lenses back and forth in a cardboard sleeve. Brown subsequently published numerous children’s books which used green and red filters to create motion with titles such as the Book of Moving Pictures, Children?s Encyclopedia and The Cinema Book.

A stereo polymath of the first rank, Brown also developed a stereoscopic application of Pepper’s Ghost for live performance, motional perspective which was a monocular application of the Pulfrich effect years prior to its discovery in 1922, and, for his whole life, worked to perfect an autostereoscopic motion picture process he called Direct Stereoscopic Projection. At the end of his life and up to his death in 1930, Brown achieved great success as a paper engineer for clever Pop-Up Books.

The anaglyphic blinker has survived to the present day. In 1953 Joe Kubert and Norman Maurer used it for 3-D Magic pages in the St. John 3-D Comics. A humorous example from The Three Dimension 3 Stooges instructs the reader to view the page from the RED lens only. The view through the GREEN lens reveals a clever twist to the gag that has been set up through the red lens. Other St. John 3-D Magic pages such as The Story of Evolution in 3-D Tor by Joe Kubert revealed what happened to the Wooly Mammoth after millions of years of evolution.

Harvey 3D Comics also used the technique in 1953 for one page Three D Blinkey stories which featured two different endings viewable through either the red or green lens of the anaglyph glasses. This technique was also used for a 1922 anaglyphic feature film produced by Harry K. Fairall called The Power of Love that premiered at The Ambassador Theater in Los Angeles. The last reel of The Power of Love could be viewed through either the red or green lens depending on which ending the viewer wanted to witness, happy or tragic.

There have been other more recent examples of the anaglyphic motion blinker in publication with the Normalman 3-D Annual #1 (Renegade Press: 1986), 3-Dementia Comics, (3-D Zone: 1987), The Alf Stickerbook (Diamond Publishing: 1987) which included a Slide-O-Scope Movie Viewer and a one-shot issue of The Flintstones comic book in the 1990s.

Theodore Brown’s Pocket Kinematograph made reading an interactive experience years before the concept even existed. 19th century stereographic pioneers foreshadowed in many different ways the multi-media of the 21st century.

References:

Brown, Theodore. Stereoscopic Phenomena of Light & Sight (facsimile of 1903 edition). Reel 3-D Enterprises, Inc. 1994.

Ceram, C.W. Archaeology of the Cinema. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. (no date).

Herbert, Stephen. Theodore Brown’s Magic Pictures, The Art and Inventions of a Multi-Media Pioneer. London: The Projection Box. 1997.

Reprinted from – LA Weekly September 5-11-03

Stereoscopes: The First One Hundred Years

Now, Paul Wing, a true giant in the field of stereography has shuffled off the standard mortal interocular for hyperstereo glories elsewhere. Paul passed away on March 7, two days before his 89^th birthday. The importance of Paul Wing in contemporary stereography cannot be overstated. Paul was a veteran of more than a half century of stereoscopy and was one of only four Lifetime Members in the Stereoscopic Society of America (SSA). Member number 385 in the SSA, Paul was an internationally recognized master stereographer and the author of “Stereoscopes: The First One Hundred Years,” (Transition Publishing: 1996), the definitive history on the subject and one which will undoubtedly remain so for a long time to come. In 1997 Paul graciously inscribed a copy of his book for me: “To Ray Zone, 3-D Enthusiast!”

“If 3-D is involved, I am interested,” wrote Paul in the 1999-Year Book of the SSA. “As a photographer I have enjoyed making pairs with other than normal eye spacing from close up (birds and flowers) to miles away (aerial hypers).” Despite six decades of experience in stereography Paul was never limited in his approach. In a recent SSA folio I sent around a stereocard that was a “blinker,” in which 2-step animation could be created by alternately closing and opening the left and right eyes. Some stereographers might consider this a radical or inappropriate use of the medium. But Paul enthusiastically responded by sending in the next folio historical notes and a blinker that had been created in 1870.

Paul was first intrigued with stereocards in the early 1920s and by the time he finished high school during the Great Depression he was making “cha cha,” stereo photographs using side-step with a [2D] Kodak Brownie camera. In the 1940s, Paul met Dr. Philip Batchelder, a stereo collector and a member of the American Branch of the Stereoscopic Society of Great Britain. “It opened a New World,” Paul wrote in the foreword to his book on stereoscopes. “After a visit to his home, I couldn’t sleep all night. His collection of [stereo] views and viewers, neatly presented in a special room, overwhelmed me.”

As a collector of stereographic views, viewers and cameras, a stereo historian and a practicing stereo photographer, Paul was unique. When it came to 3-D, Paul did it all. A few years ago, along with Ron Labbe and Dan Gosch, Paul exhibited his stereo photography at an art gallery in Boston. I remember a great stereo slide-show on Old China that Paul presented at the NSA Convention in San Diego in 1997. The images were copied in a pristine manner from old stereoviews and Paul’s commentary was a delight.

I first contacted Paul in 1987 at the suggestion of Susan Pinsky. Paul graciously lent me dupes of French tissue “Diableries’ which I printed in a comic book called “3-D Danse Macabre.” Paul has written several definitive articles on the subject in the pages of Stereo World. Paul has also unfailingly assisted me with research into the history of stereodrawing. His fund of historical information on stereography was practically limitless.

Most recently, I was delighted when Paul joined the SSA Speedy Alpha I and II folios where everybody benefited from the views Paul enclosed as well as his informed and funny comments on their work. Some of the views Paul sent around were stereocards of his children that he had made in the 1940s! Of course, they were very well executed and composed.

The Speedy folios are limited to only 12 participants so the views make a rather quick circuit. I treasure the stereo view sleeves on which Paul has inscribed his comments about my views in a rather spidery hand. “There are a number of things I could say,” wrote Paul regarding a hyperstereo card with wide separation I sent around in 1999. “I free vision pairs with even wider separation, but I think butting two 3 1/2″ squares together is going too far!”

For another radical hyperstereo card I had sent, Paul actually made a corrected version of the card and enclosed it in the sleeve. “I marvel that none of you mentioned having a bit of trouble viewing this,” he observed. But Paul’s comments were always instructive and encouraging. “I look to your envelope for something really different,” he wrote most recently.

We all looked to Paul Wing for something really different. He was a stereographic fount of invention and history. He will be more than missed. He is irreplaceable in the pantheon of stereography. As I write, it’s very likely that Paul is now setting up a stereo photograph (in some radiant new medium). And he is undoubtedly creating a stereo base that is measurable in light years, parsecs instead of inches.