How did they do that?

I can only imagine what it was like for my dad to be sitting in the movie theater in Johnstown, Pa., circa 1933, with his eyes wide open and his mouth wide open and his imagination wide open, staring up at the silver screen watching King Kong climb the Empire State Building. It must have been incredible and spectacular watching this for the first time — and it wasn’t just his first time. This was 1933. It was the first time for everybody.  Movies had only started talking four short years earlier. It must have been like watching a toddler performing brain surgery.

Back at the turn of the century, when Edison was tinkering with this “moving picture” stuff, just watching a man sneeze was the awesome equivalent to watching “Avatar” in 3D ; before they knew it, they got a giant gorilla climbing up the Empire State Building and swatting at airplanes trying to shoot him down!

I was about the same age as my dad when he first saw King Kong when he took me and my brother to movies to see what would become his all-time favorite movie. It was “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” For the time, the special effects were outstanding and had me and my brother and my dad scratching our heads on our way out of the theater wondering, “How did they do that?”

Not much later I saw an army of sword-wielding skeletons in the movie “Jason and the Argonauts.”  Us kids were buzzing about that for weeks: “How’d they do that?”

Turns out, they did that by stop action animation. The same way they did King Kong. It took thousands of hours, painstakingly placing each tiny statuette into position, an eighth of an inch at a time and snapping the shutter … and again … and again … The first fully animated feature, Snow White, took dozens of artists and animators working 24/7 for years – thousands, maybe millions of cells!

Flash forward: 1988. I’m taking my two young boys to see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” perhaps the last of the great “How did they do that?” movies. It was the dawn of computer enhanced animation and, sad to say, the end of an era. Ten years or so later we went to see “Independence Day.” That scene in the trailers where the White House evaporates got me! The movie was really cool but on the way home no one in the car asked, “How did they do that?” And no one will, ever again.

Yesterday I saw the trailer for the new “Planet of the Apes” movie. Talk about gorillas climbing the Empire State Building! Here we have monkeys and baboons and gorillas crashing through the windows of a building en masse and leaping into the cabins of helicopters as they fly by! My reaction? A mild yawn.

Well, maybe it’s for the better. I mean all this computer-generated stuff has really liberated storytellers. They can now put their vision up on the screen exactly the way they imagined it in their minds. That’s a good thing, right? The actual craft of the special effects no longer gets in the way of the telling. The viewer simply accepts the creator’s vision. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But is the shortest distance always the best way to travel? Especially in the world of art?

My favorite painter is Edward Hopper. When I look at a Hopper painting, of course, it’s the overall image that strikes me first, that simple portrayal of everyday banality. But it’s more than that: It’s his technique, how he handles the paint and the brush, his point of view. These things don’t take away from the image. Indeed, they add to it the dimension of the artist’s eye. Can anyone watch “Citizen Kane” without marveling at Orson Welles’ grubby cinematic fingerprints all over the celluloid? Do they get in the way of a great yarn?

“The Incredible Shrinking Man” is still one of my favorite movies, for a bunch of reasons: It’s one of the few movies my dad ever took me to; It still holds up on every level, from hokey sci-fi thriller to existential exercise; and, it’s one of those movies they simply don’t make anymore. It still makes you ask …