On a flight from London last week, the man who practically invented movie special effects came face to face with his legacy. Unable to nap, Ray Harryhausen decided to watch the in-flight movie, The Matrix: Revolutions.

"What was that?" the genial 84-year-old Harryhausen says in characteristically soft tones that belie his urge to rant.

"I have no idea what that was about. There's an explosion every few minutes. Everybody gets stabbed and shot and they're still alive, and they fly through the air like Superman. What on Earth does it add up to?"

Quite a contrast to the movie experience that informed his entire life. As a 12-year-old boy he saw King Kong at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in a 17-act presentation with live native dancers and acrobats.

To Harryhausen, King Kong was everything The Matrix is not. "It had a story to comprehend. It took you by the hand from the Depression into the most outrageous fantasy adventure. I've always pitied people whose first exposure to Kong was on a little box."

That trip to the theatre changed movie history. While still in his teens, Harryhausen would become the protege of Willis O'Brien, who created Kong. He would take O'Brien's techniques of stop-action miniatures and almost singlehandedly create spellbinding film effects that set the bar for decades to come.

The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms became the template for Godzilla and every other monster-stomps-a-city epic; Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers presaged Independence Day right down to the primal destruction of Washington landmarks; One Million Years B.C. and The Valley Of Gwangi inspired kids to become paleontologists just as Jurassic Park would do 30 years later. And his sword-and-sandals epics, such as Jason And The Argonauts and The Seventh Voyage Of Sinbad -- with their animated Medusas, Cyclopses, harpies and skeleton warriors -- were the benchmark for scary monsters for more than a generation.

Small wonder, then, that such ardent fans as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and James Cameron offer tributes to Harryhausen in his autobiography Ray Harryhausen:An Animated Life. I tell Harryhausen the first movie scene I can remember that truly blew me away was at age 7 when I saw 20 Million Miles To Earth, about a monster from Venus who is transported here. The scene, in which the Ymir kills an elephant, was included in a Toronto tribute to Harryhausen last week at U of T's Innes Town Hall.

"I think our films are more appreciated today than when they were first released. Thank heaven for video and DVD," Harryhausen says of the films he made with lifelong producer Charles Schneer. "We just ran Jason And The Argonauts at the Lincoln Centre on the big screen and the audience loved it."

He also created a bit of a stir in New York when he got together with old friend Fay Wray, the Canadian-born leading lady who screamed her way through Kong all the way to the climax atop the Empire State Building.

"She's 96 and rather fragile, but she's a delightful person. I met her for lunch one day and we decided to go to the top of the Empire State Building for old times sake. The Empire State people gave us terrific VIP treatment, and I guess they told the press because there were cameras flashing like mad when we got there."

The attention had to have been a little discomfiting to Harryhausen, an admitted introvert who, nonetheless, managed to befriend some soon-to-be well-known people in his youth. His best friend as a teen was a wannabe science fiction writer named Ray Bradbury. In the army, he found work as a cameraman in special services, working with Frank Capra and a head of the cartoon department named Maj. Ted Geisel, who'd later become known as Dr. Seuss.

After the war, Harryhausen got his big break when his mentor "Obie" hired him for another gorilla picture, Mighty Joe Young. He wore various hats on subsequent films -- producer, visual effects technician, animator, etc. "A part of me wanted to direct. But I was afraid I'd water myself down. And I was very shy. I hate confrontations, and I think when you work with actors, you have a lot of confrontations. My creatures, on the other hand, do exactly what I want them to. They don't talk back," he says with a laugh.

On the other hand, the director's role was severely limited in Harryhausen's world. "Typically, Mr. Schneer, the writer and myself would formulate the pictures. These were not directors' pictures in the European sense of the word, otherwise costs would go up. We planned them out so there'd be a minimum

of waste, and that accounts partly for our longevity as filmmakers."

His influence extends beyond the film world, of course. Recently, he says, he received a fan letter from two professors at the Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. "They said if it hadn't been for One Million Years B.C. and Gwangi, they wouldn't be paleontologists."

Which affords me the opportunity to chide him about One Million Years B.C., the movie that gave us Raquel Welch in an animal-skin bikini. Movies that suggest humans and dinos lived together have always brought out the nitpicker in me.

"How do we know?" he says. "We may discover humans lived longer ago than anticipated." I must have greeted the statement with a smirk, because he immediately follows up.

"Of course, the real reason is there's no drama without humans and dinosaurs. A bunch of dinosaurs roaming around by themselves, that's a documentary. So you take that licence. And of course," he adds with a laugh, "if Neanderthal women looked like Raquel Welch, we'd willingly regress."

Harryhausen's last film was 1981's critically slammed but commercially successful Clash Of The Titans, with Laurence Olivier as Zeus and Harry Hamlin as Perseus. "I felt I had enough after that film," he says. "CGI (computer FX) was the future and the taste of the public seemed to be headed in that direction rather than the past. There were other reasons, some of them personal."

These days, he's still an accomplished artist and sculptor, living in London. Recently, he created a study sculpture of the explorer David Livingston fighting off a lion (his wife is Livingston's great granddaughter) -- a template for a statue that was recently erected in David Livingstone Park outside of Glasgow, Scotland.

"It's all images for the imagination," he says. "Some people think it's childish to do what I've done for a living. But I think it's wrong when you grow to be an adult to discard your sense of wonder."


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