O'BRIEN, Willis H(arold)

(1886-1962)

   US special-effects supervisor in the film industry. For his own amusement he early began to experiment with stop-motion photography. A 1min home movie of an animated caveman and dinosaur, involving 960separate exposures, led to a producer advancing him $5000 to make a more elaborate version of the same subject: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1917) ran for only 5 mins but took 2 months to make. It proved successfuland later the same year he made a series of similar films for the Edison Company. In 1919 he made the more elaborate The Ghost of Slumber Mountain,one of the first films to combine footage of live actors with animated models.WHO's first full-length film was The LOST WORLD (1925), whose success led him to start work on a project of epic proportions, Creation, a variation on the LOST-WORLD theme. It was never completed, but he incorporated much of its material (including improved designs for his models, which by then had metal skeletons with ball-and-socket joints) into KING KONG (1933), which proved to be the peak of his career. A sequel, SON OF KONG (1933), was hurriedly made, but after that WHO found difficulty in getting backing for his increasingly expensive projects. In the late 1930s he began work on The War Eagles (it was to climax in an aerial battle between airships and men riding giant eagles over New York City), but the film was abandoned, as was his 1942 project, Gwangi, aboutcowboys who discover dinosaurs on a Texas mesa (it was eventually filmed as The VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969)). It was not until 1949 that he was able to complete another partially animated feature, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (an unambitious rerun of the King Kong theme), assisted by his new young protege, Ray HARRYHAUSEN. It was the last film over which he had real control. During the 1950s he worked on MONSTER MOVIES for other people but was unable to obtain backing for his own films. He died in 1962 while working on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963 dir Stanley Kramer). Despite his comparatively small output, he is widely regarded as one ofthe great pioneers of special effects in fantastic cinema.

   JB