SPECIAL EFFECTS:
An Oral History.
By Pascal Pinteau. Translated from French by Laurel Hirsch. Abrams.
566 pp. $37.50

The rarest of all special effects in a Hollywood movie these days is a good script. But though oral intelligence is in short supply on the screen, there’s an abundance of technological intelligence, sights to distract you from the dialogue, sounds to drown it out. If you’ve ever left a theater—or theme park or Céline Dion show (see p. 21)—wondering “How’d they do that?” here’s the book for you. Pinteau interviewed more than three dozen special-effects wizards, who shared with him the secrets of the illusions they’ve worked over the years. Be warned, though. After lots of the explanations, you’re likely to have a follow-up question: “Huh?”

Pinteau honors the antic genius of individuals who’ve been largely anonymous to the public, though they’ve shaped our dreams and nightmares, and that recognition is overdue. How many otherwise awful movies have been redeemed by a good explosion? Or a wayward asteroid? Or an oversized reptile? Or a gaggle of flesh-eating ghouls? As you might expect of a journalist and screenwriter who’s done special-effects work himself, Pinteau takes a spacious view of the subject, exploring not just “film and manipulated reality,” but animation “from paintbrush to pixel,” the art of makeup, TV illusions, and theme parks. (The last no longer feature pop-out skeletons in a downscale haunted house. Visitors to these stupendous sites are now prey to fire and flood and the false hope of extras in a disaster movie, or they’re pinned by twice the force of gravity while blasting off in a space shuttle—and they expect nothing less.)

But to call this book an “oral history” is misleading on two counts: the oral part and the history part. The featured interviews have no consistent pattern, and, in any case, they’re by no means the whole of the book. They’re dropped at random into Pinteau’s own narrative, which suffers from a kind of journalistic ADD and is much too jumpy to qualify as disciplined history. (From the early special effect of an eight-legged horse in a Paleolithic Spanish cave painting, it’s a two-page gallop to the 19th century.) What’s more—or, rather, less—the book has only a skeletal table of contents, which makes no mention of the interviews, and it has no index at all. The publisher of this oral history must be headquartered in Babel.

Why, then, is Special Effects such a guilty pleasure? For the pictures, of course: 1,136 of them—982 in full color—and twice that many would not have been excessive. Without turning a page, you’re hooked by the photo on the laminated front cover: a mechanized head of the current governor of California, looking green and ravaged, with half his steely skull exposed. (A good day terminating, or a bad day in Sacramento?) Recall your favorite screen illusion, and you’re likely to find it, if only by accident, somewhere in Pinteau’s lavish compendium.

When movies were new, a century ago, the mere motion of people and objects was special effect enough. Now we want whole new worlds to turn and tumble. And they do, ingeniously, interchangeably. But though all the commotion in those artificial worlds may tickle the mind, does it touch the heart, or supplant the memory of movie moments that needed no technological goosing? It’s 66 years since Rhett swept Scarlett off her feet and up that dusky staircase, with no help from a computer. Yet the thrill of that moment persists, wicked and authentic still, even as the recollection of last weekend’s digitized apocalypse already fades.

—James M. Morris