16 Facts About Willis O'Brien

Willis Harold O'Brien was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer, who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history, " and is best remembered for his work on The Lost World, King Kong, The Last Days of Pompeii and Mighty Joe Young, for which he won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

San Francisco exhibitor Herman Wobber saw this 90-second test footage and commissioned Willis O'Brien to make his first film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy for a budget of $5,000.

The collaboration was not a happy one and Dawley cut the 45-minute film down to 11 minutes and claimed credit for Willis O'Brien's pioneering effects work, which combined realistic stop-motion animated prehistoric models with live action.

The film grossed over $100,000 and Dawley used the cut effects footage in a sequel Along the Moonbeam Trail and the documentary Evolution, but Willis O'Brien received little financial reimbursement from this success.

Willis O'Brien was reportedly forced into it, and rebelled with drinking, gambling, and extra-marital affairs.

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Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences proposed giving O'Brien an Oscar for his technical effects on King Kong but Willis insisted that each of his crew receive an Oscar statue, which the AMPAS refused to do, so O'Brien refused to accept the Oscar award for himself.

Willis O'Brien went on to do some special effects work, re-using one of the mattes from Son of Kong, on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and George Pal's Oscar-nominated animated short Tulips Shall Grow, as well as developing his own project, Gwangi, about cowboys who encounter a prehistoric animal in a "lost" valley, which he failed to sell to the studio.

Credit for the award went to the films producers, RKO Productions, but Willis O'Brien was awarded a statue, this time proudly accepted by him.

Willis O'Brien was assisted by his protege Ray Harryhausen and Pete Peterson on this film, and by some accounts left the majority of the animation to them.

Willis O'Brien subsequently worked for Cooper at the new Cinerama corporation with plans to do a remake of King Kong using the new wide-screen techniques but ended up contributing a matte for the travelogue This Is Cinerama when this project fell through.

Willis O'Brien worked with Harryhausen one last time on the dinosaur sequence for Irwin Allen's nature documentary The Animal World .

Willis O'Brien worked with Peterson again on The Black Scorpion and Behemoth, the Sea Monster, but the two animators subsequently struggled to find other work.

Willis O'Brien'sinterment was located at Chapel of the Pines Crematory.

Willis O'Brien wrote the script for an earlier version of the story which was released as The Beast of Hollow Mountain, but Willis O'Brien did not handle the effects for that movie.

Willis O'Brien's work was celebrated in March 1983 with the appearance of his wife, Darlene, at a 50th anniversary event commemorating the day of the first screening of the film at Graumann's Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, complete with a screening of a new print of King Kong and a new recreation of the full-scale bust of Kong that appeared 50 years apart at both events in the outdoor lobby of the theater.

In March 1984, Willis O'Brien's work was the subject of a special exhibit at the Kaiser Center in Oakland, California.