The future of movies and reality
By Michael McCarthy, special to the Pacific Sun, 2006
Many years ago Spaz Williams and I played hockey together in Marin County, California, just north of San Francisco. I was a freelance writer for the prestigious Pacific Sun, and unknown to me Spaz was the genius who basically invented CGI in the movies. Canadians crowded together at his ranch on Saturday nights to watch the hockey games on satellite TV. One day I wrote a cover story about Spaz and his prediction where CGI was headed in the future. Today his predictions about the negative impacts of movie violence, virtual reality and artificial intelligence ring more important than ever. Where the hell are we headed next?
“Spaz is a walking cartoon, sort of half-Neanderthal, half Einstein. He’s a master on some of the most sophisticated machines ever built, yet he looks like he just walked in off the farm. Which he probably has. If you took 99 other directors, they’d all die to work with Industrial Light and Magic, yet Spaz talked his way out of there and then he walked out.”
Spaz Williams (only his mother calls him Steve) has been described by many in the digital animation industry as the most amazing special effects whiz in the world. This is the bent and twisted brain that animated Jabba the Hutt for Star Wars, designed the T-Rex for Jurassic Park, built the water woman in The Abyss, created the Terminator, The Mask, Spawn; well the list goes on and on. Chances are if it’s totally synthetic but looks awfully real, it comes from a computer that Spaz Williams had his paws on. So it comes as a big surprise that the genius who helped launch computer animation into a billion dollar industry has turned his back on special effects and denounced them as an insidious force with grave danger for the human race.
“Movies have turned into special effects pornography. They’re just thrill rides now. Kids start off shooting objects in video games, now they’re shooting each other in real life, and it’s all learned in a world of synthetics,” swears Williams. “Special effects are merely a blueprint for the tangible. In computer-generated synthetics, anything is possible. Robert Oppenheimer got into splitting the atom as an interesting challenge, but it was too late when he realized the horror he had unleashed. Is that where we are going?”
Where we are going is over the San Rafael Bridge, if we can only find a way to get through the tollbooth. Williams is driving the Chicken Truck tonight, home from beer league hockey in Oakland in his ancient 1976 Ford pickup that looks like he stole it from the set of the Beverley Hillbillies (which he might have done). Williams, a former hockey tough guy in his youth (he once played with Wayne Gretzky), is making a comeback on the ice at age 38. He pulls up to the tollbooth in a trail of dust, what looks like chicken feathers and the odor of stinking hockey equipment drifting in the wind, but Spaz can’t open the door. The window handle, you see, doesn’t work right. That, along with a couple of failed marriages, may be the only thing in the life of Spaz Williams that doesn’t. Movie director, digital animator extraordinaire, celebrated wingnut and obvious disturber of the peace, Williams is a man on a mission and he doesn’t mind who knows it. In fact, he insists.
“I left Industrial Light and Magic because I was sick of them and they were sick of me. I get angry when people tell me that things are impossible.”
Since we are driving about 85 miles per hour only six feet behind a minivan in a pouring rain, angry is not good. While the radio, windows and God-knows-what-else don’t work, the horn certainly does. The driver of the van takes one look at the looming horror in his rear view mirror, realizes that discretion is the better part of valor, and pulls over.
“I agree with that quote: ‘The greatest satisfaction in life lies in doing what other people say you cannot.’ It’s like you are commissioned to do the painting but the guy who made the pencil gets his signature on it. That’s like the Pope taking credit for the Sistine Chapel. George Lucas is a great guy but he is surrounded by a bunch of management clowns. The true ILMers are the ones in the trenches, and I don’t mean the army of ex-real estate salespeople who browbeat animators and directors.”
The next afternoon at his ranch in a hidden canyon behind Fairfax, Spaz shakes hands with a handshake that would crush a bear. Where a falling-down shack on a small lot in Marin County will set you back a million bucks these days, Williams enjoys a rowdy lifestyle on a 20-acre ranch with a quadruple garage crammed full of Harley Davidsons, wild cars in various states of repair, and a very large beer fridge. There’s also a stable with four horses, a big old red barn of a house freshly painted ‘CNR red’ that has seen former lives as a brothel and a speakeasy during prohibition, and a commune where Big Brother and the Holding Company used to party (although it’s safe to say that it’s never seen the manic energy as it does these days). There’s also a giant satellite dish on the hill that Williams uses to beam in hockey games from around the world.
In the sea of mud and horse manure that passes for a front yard there’s a black Porsche, a silver Ferrari, a red tractor, a horse, two brown dogs, a yellow cat, and a lot of empty Miller Lite cans. From the front porch of the house hang several rusty children’s bicycles, several movie props, and a long dead pumpkin. The smell of fresh horse manure intermingles amid the aroma of marinated sirloin steaks sizzling on the barbeque and the reek of acrid gun smoke.
Evidently Williams has just fired off a shotgun wake-up call at the crows squawking in the big old oak tree that were disturbing his hangover, honestly earned during the weekly Hot Stove League party the evening before. A strange mix of high tech specialists, hockey players, moviemakers and Marin County wackos gather here Saturday nights to watch hockey games and talk cybershop.
You never know who will pop by. “Titanic” director James Cameron is a friend. At the center of the cyclone paces Williams, the Hunter S. Thompson of Marin County, restlessly wandering, talking, and waxing forth on the state on the universe. Williams does not look like a computer geek. With a two-week stubble going gray, a red lumberjack shirt, big motorcycle boots, and a Marine buzz cut he looks more like Kurt Russell recovering from a Richard Burton bender.
The interior of the house is covered with strange doodles and drawings. Where other parents lecture their children about sketching on the walls, Williams’ gorgeous five-year old daughter Hannah — a precocious bundle of energy like her dad and a dead ringer for an early Shirley Temple — is encouraged to scribble all over the house. Upstairs a boxing heavy bag hangs from the rafters, looming incongruously over a box of little girl’s toys. There is no toilet paper or towels or drapes in any of the washrooms.
Williams grew up in Toronto, fascinated with Saturday morning cartoons and was soon drawing them himself. To this day he can identify and analyze every cartoonist from the 1930’s onward through Disney and Warner Brothers. At an early age he was taking apart and rebuilding engines. In 1981 Williams attended famed Sheridan College in Ontario, studying animation. At the same time he started fooling around with early computers. Upon graduation he quickly took his computer skills to a company called Alias Research.
“I picked up on the machines so fast, Alias sent me all over the world showing people how to do it, building elaborate models. My model building as a kid helped me a lot. I figured it all out myself without instruction and I got real fast,” says Williams. “I was really the first guy to make software animate. I remember seeing for the first time the third dimension moving interactively. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘I’m home free. This is digital clay. Here we go.’ So I started building everything in sight.”
His reputation reached the Analytic Sciences Corporation in Massachusetts, who were working on the Pentagon’s Star Wars Initiative, and then after that Industrial Light and Magic in Marin called. While today ILM has a staff of 1,200 and over 450 people working in digital creation, in 1988 Williams was their very first digital animator.
“They were blown away by how quick I was and that I could model and animate and do all this wonderful stuff on the two Silicon Graphics machines they had. You know, they looked like a couple of old Evinrude boat engine covers,” he laughs outrageously.
The list of digital creatures that he has created is endless, but it was really Jurassic Park that launched Williams into fame and fortune. Originally the film was supposed to contain a herd of gallimimus (small dinosaurs that run on their hind legs) in the background and everything else was going to be stop motion, but Williams thought he could design and animate a live-action Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“The supposed experts in the company thought it was impossible, including the people who picked up the Oscars later on, so I started clandestinely building it bone-by-bone. I did a walk cycle and had it conveniently playing when Spielberg’s people came by and then it got real serious,” he says. “My attitude has always been that computer graphics or everything you see on a screen is just like a bathtub full of ball bearings. Eventually you can organize them anyway you want. It’s just a question of time and money.”
Money is a major part of the equation. Computer-generated animation is fabulously expensive. A one to four-second animated digital shot runs approximately $250,000. Figure a minimum of $1 million a minute and you begin to understand how much money it costs to shoot a 90-minute special effects film, and just how much profit they must generate to justify such an investment. While Williams was lauded for his ground breaking efforts — his six-ton T-Rex in Jurassic Park is one of the most ominous movie monsters ever created — his tendency to ignore orders and strike out on his own would lead to consequences. He was suspended three times from ILM, including one famous incident for boozing it up with psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, both of them sitting in George Lucas’ personal office.
“Yeah, they were a trifle stiff down there,” admits Williams. “The place needed a little livening up.”
After Jurassic Park, Williams was given complete leeway to control the special effects on The Mask, starring Jim Carrey. The film is still viewed as a landmark in the special effects industry and shot both men straight to stardom, one on front of the cameras and one behind the computer. The film cost $16 million to make in 1994 and subsequently earned its investors $150 million. Offers to do more of the same stuff flooded in, but to Williams fevered brain the thought of doing the same thing twice reeks of boredom.
“I was rewarded for my work by being offered Casper the Ghost. That’s like running a triathlon and being handed a roll of toilet paper,” he remarks in his ever-diplomatic style. Calling a huge corporate client like Steven Spielberg “a hack,” and “an accountant” in national magazines didn’t help his standing within the hierarchy of ILM either. Neither were his comments about the Star Wars trilogy.
“Going to Star Wars was like going to a funeral. Despite what people say, there was really no story there,” he says. “It was the beginning of a tumor, a cancer that was about to take over. It’s sad to see the death of a once-great idea all in the name of cash.”
To Williams, the storyline must always be paramount. Special effects are merely toys used to bring the story to life. But today, he says, the cart is before the horse. Movies have become merely massive marketing devices, where the storyline must create the possibility of flogging vast amounts of toys and assorted consumer rubbish to innocent children. The father of a young daughter is horrified how synthetics are corrupting children.
“Kids believe things are real. What we have made here is a weapon. The human race is in trouble if our value system is based on synthetics,” he insists. “Look, the only people with more Silicon Graphics machines and money than the movie industry is the government. What you see from ILM is up there on the screen, but what are the other guys doing? Hey, Analytic Sciences has already geo-mapped the entire Earth.”
Indeed, at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists are well into The Oxygen Project, so-called because their intention is to make computers “as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.” Within a few years computers will be in the air, implanted in our bodies, secreted in the walls and furniture, brought forth and controlled by voice-command. The British Broadcasting Company has already invented a synthetic news announcer. The most creative imaginings of Star Trek and Star Wars will soon be a reality.
“You know, Lucas went to court to stop the government from calling the Strategic Defense Initiative the name of ‘Star Wars,’” says Williams. “He didn’t want to be associated with real weaponry, yet because of computer-generated imagery we are now destroying entire solar systems on the screen. How long will it be before we have the real thing?”
So Williams quit the most lucrative gig in the business and struck out on his own, co-directing a movie called Spawn with partner Mark Dippe, a $45 million science fiction production. At the time it was the most money ever given to new directors for an initial film. Today he concentrates on directing outlandish TV commercials. “In order to afford to live in Marin County, I make commercials. It gives me time to be with my child, it allows me to be funny and I’m in and out in six weeks. You don’t have to sweat over a project for two years and then hate the effing thing.”
At Industrial Light and Magic headquarters in San Rafael, art director Mark Moore agrees with Williams that many special effects movies are now just big thrill rides.
“People are getting so used to special effects that they need to be totally blown away. The effects are getting more and more dramatic. Yes, sometimes the special effects lead the movie and the plot is secondary,” he says. “Synthetic actors are now possible and the Japanese have already created synthetic rock stars. The word is ‘synthespians.’ There’s a big audience for re-creating Marilyn, Elvis and Bogie too, but the trouble is that nobody in the industry wants to do it. We are 99 per cent there, but the character has to be perfect before directors will touch it.”
As for violence in today’s motion pictures, Moore is unsure of the effects on children. “My mother used to get on me about violence when I was a kid,” he admits. “Once you are a parent yourself you feel differently about violence. I know it has a powerful effect on kids but don’t know if it has any lasting effect.”
The future of special effects? Moore points to the possibility of “huge scale reproduction” in recent movies like The Perfect Storm and Gladiator. “There was a fantastic shot of the Roman Coliseum, like it was taken above by a helicopter. People are so used to seeing that type of shot from football games they don’t realize what was done. The next step will be an expansion of virtual reality, like you saw in The Matrix. The computer is going to tell us what is possible and what isn’t.”
In Williams’ downtown San Francisco office in the hip SoMa district, all is Pandemonium. Executive producer Stelio Kitrilakis of Pandemonium Inc. agrees that Spaz Williams is a walking contradiction, one of the world’s great animators and certainly one of its biggest nutbars, a man who simultaneously spouts philosophy and hockey while being a gentle father and a kindly man who attracts friends like bees to honey.
“He’s a walking cartoon, something out of Bugs Bunny,” says Kitrilakis. “He buys a new pair of Levis, the kind so stiff they can stand up on their own, and then wears them for years until they fall apart. He comes in the studio with bbq sauce on them, they reek of animal fats and old hockey gear. I don’t think he shaves; he just rubs up against the side of his barn. Spaz bristles with non-conformity but he’d give you the shirt off his back. Not that you want to wear it, mind you. Everyone loves him and his work. He’s always got lots of different projects to choose from. He has an amazing technical sense of how things are put together. He works very hard to make great things happen. Oddball humor appeals to him. It’s his bizarre sense of humor that pulls it off.”
The inspiration for Williams’ hilarious TV spots — his crazy productions for McDonalds, Lexus, Blockbuster, Intel and dozens of other spots, costing up to $1 million each, won him a place in the New Directors Showcase at Cannes in 1998 — evidently comes from his strange family members. Brother Harland is a stand-up comic who has appeared on Letterman several times, and now has a sitcom of his own. “Everyone in my commercials looks just like my family. They’re always surreal. I love old Laurel and Hardy movies. My work is a screwy tribute to them.”
Back at the ranch, it seems a brand new Dodge Ram has been added to the fleet. Certain comments about the infamous Chicken Truck have apparently inspired Williams to go buy a new truck, $55,000 paid in cash. Busy taking apart the brake pads on a 1966 baby blue Cadillac, a beer in one hand, a monkey wrench in the other and a fat cigar between his teeth, Williams is typically forthright about what we can expect from the world of synthetic reality in the future.
“Imagine a synthetic President of the United States,” he says. “The people at ILM told me that building a computer-generated human was impossible. Of course it will happen. It’s just a matter of money and will. We are slowly getting deeper and deeper into this virtual world and one day we will be able to make synthetic human beings, synthetic brains out of composite material. It won’t be the decision of nature, it will be the decision of capital.”
“People come up to me and say I just bought my 7-year old a Mac. I tell them to bury it in the back yard and buy the kid a block of wood,” he grins. “Cyberlife is a destructive medium, a window to a reality that doesn’t exist. Kids are coming down with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome these days who have never had a walk in the woods.”
Wood smoke drifts out of the potbelly stove and Boogie the quarterhorse sticks his nose in the door, looking for a handout. “Big game on TV tonight,” says Spaz. “Leafs and Sharks. Burgers and beer. Ya coming over?”
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