BRAIN
STORM
wo years ago Douglas Trumbull had
■ reason to be optimistic about his fu
ture: after ten years of false starts and unkept
promises, he was less than two weeks away
from completing his first feature film since
1971’s Silent Running. His film, titled
Brainstorm, dealt with thought transference
to video tape and the re-experiencing of
someone’s life and death
Then tragedy struck. Natalie Wood, co
starring with Christopher Walken and Louise
Fletcher, drowned while vacationing off
Catalina Island. The death of the forty-three
year old actress was sad enough, but then
MGM turned personal loss into corporate bat
tle: the executives at MGM announced there
was no way for Trumbull to complete his
movie as intended, and they pulled the plug
on the production. What the studio wanted,
instead of a movie which could play in theat
ers, was a quick insurance pay-off. “I knew if
this film didn't come out I’d never direct an
other movie. I was fighting for my life.”
In a way MGM was also fighting for its cor
porate life. The company was mired in as
tronomical debts and a cash pay-off from an
insurance company looked soothing. Trum
bull now says his only ally during this time
was the insurance carrier, Lloyds of London.
"I showed them [Lloyds] the movie and ex
plained what still needed to be shot. 1 always
said that Natalie’s crucial scenes were com
pleted. There were some minor bits of busi
ness and one scene I had re-written for her
which originally belonged to another charac
ter, but nothing that couldn't be eliminated or
re-scripted. Lloyds of London listened to me,
looked at what I had shot and said the movie
could be finished.”
Trumbull insists no one seeing the movie
will suspect that Wood had not finished her
role as originally planned. "If she had died
just one day earlier in the shooting schedule I
wouldn’t have been able to finish my film.
The last day I worked with her we shot a cru
cial scene — the one in the laboratory where
her husband (Walken) records her thoughts
about him on tape — thoughts that are very
hostile. He then replays that tape and learns
what went wrong with their marriage and is
able to patch things up. Without that scene I
wouldn’t have had a movie.”
Trumbull ultimately dedicated Brainstorm
"to Natalie.”
Today, as Trumbull’s movie is about to
reach the public, not one of the executives
who wanted ax shelve Brainstorm is still at
the studio. A whole new regime is calling the
shots and Is supporting the film
Trumbull is no stranger to the vicissitudes
• of the movie business. Born and raised in Los
Angeles, the son of a painter and an inventor
(his father works for special effects rival John
Dykstra), Trumbull became a technical illus
trator while at college and later worked for
the Navy and Air Force making movies. By the
time he was 23 he was working full time for
director Stanley Kubrick who had seen a
Trumbull-conceived short called To the Moon
and Beyond Kubrick was then assembling a
special effects team which would make movie
by Jacoba Atlas
First the Star Died.
Then the Studio
Wanted to Kill the
Picture. But Director &
Special Effects Wizard
Doug Trumbull
Persisted. “Tm an
Optimist about the
Future; / Think Itll Be
Just Like Today.”
Brainstorm star Natalie Wood, whose
crucial thought-transference scenes
were completed the day before she
drowned. Christopher Walken (The
Deer Hunter, Pennies from Heaven)
plays her scientist-husband who devel
ops a unique method of transferring
experience. Director Douglas Trumbull
(above right) with actress Louise
Fletcher and a mad jumble of technol
ogy; Trumbull is a renowned special
effects innovator, but he insists that
the story is most important.
history. The film they created was 2001 A
Space Odyssey
“I spent 2-1/2 years in London working for
Stanley,” Trumbull recalls. The experience
remains unique. "We had no budget for spe
cial effects — Stanley simply told us to come
up with whatever we wanted and to take the
time and spend the money needed to make it
work on the screen.” MGM, which financed
2001, would tear out its corporate hair on the
cost overruns, but Kubrick had his dancing
planets. Incredibly, Kubrick worked without
storyboard or pre-planned shots, the kind of
preparation that is considered basic to the
next generation of filmmakers, Lucas and
Spielberg.
Trumbull returned from London still on
the rosy side of thirty with a yen to direct. In
the early Seventies movie companies were
desperate to embrace the "youth culture"
(remember Easy Rider?) and Trumbull was
given a chance to direct by Universal's Ned
Tanen, the man who would later greenlight
American Graffiti and say no to Star Wars.
Silent Runntnft, which starred Bruce Dem
in his first non-maniac role, was about pre
serving greenery in a polluted universe and
featured three adorable robots nicknamed
Huey, Dewey and Louie, an idea later em
braced In pan by both Star Wars and E.T Si
lent Runntnft, however, was not a box office
success. Trumbull announced several other
pending movies, but none got off the ground.
Trumbull supported himself and advanced
movie experimentation with his Entertain
ment Effects Group, a special effects house
which, along with Dykstra’s Apogee and
George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, rep
resents the state of the art in effects EEG’s
projects have indued Close Encounters, Star
Trek the Motion Picture and Blade Runner
“1 no longer get all that involved in doing
effects for other people. With Kubrick I was
into everything and a real pain in the neck.
With Spielberg on Close Encounters it was the
same. I was never isolated, 1 always felt part of
the whole.'’ Now Trumbull tends to let others
on his staff work out the details.
Although Trumbull is known primarily
as an effects expen, he insists that what
matters in movies is the story. Brainstorm is
about people: scientists, who except for their
brave new world visions, are just like
everyone else — trying to make a marriage
work, trying to raise a son, trying to under
stand and come to terms with death. It’s that
transference to tape of the "death experi
ence" of scientist Louise Fletcher that makes
up the climax of Brainstorm
Trumbull based his images on the work
done by psychologists Stanislav and Christina
ampersand
Sept ./Oct 83, page 18
Grof, who study near-death experiences and
have a theory that our lives are lived in re
spoase to our birth experiences. "They say
we relive that trauma throughout our lives
and the way we face a crisis relates all the way
back to the way we were born.
"How to do that sequence took up a major
part of our debate on the film," confides
Trumbull. “When to cut back to Walken and
when to stay with a point of view of the death
trip. 1 didn’t want the trip to overpower the
character. Brainstorm was to me always a film
about people, about the human experience,
so 1 wanted to keep cutting to Walken to force
you to deal with his character and not just go
along for the ride."
The temptation to do otherwise must have
been enormous. Much of Brainstorm's power
comes from the special visual effects that pull
us into the movie and keep us gasping. Be
cause the tapes recreate experience, Trum
bull packs his movie with cinematic joy-rides
that put us — almost literally — in the drivers
seat. Roller coaster, jet planes flying through
space, sexual hijinks. "We do the fun stuff
in the film because it seems so real; then
when we go inside the brain that will also
seem real.
"I wanted the sequences when we go in
side the brain to be superior technically to
the rest of the film. In other movies, when
you go into a character's mind in a flashback
or whatever it’s black and white or fuzzy or in
some way less than the rest of the film; with
Brainstorm it’s just the opposite."