FX maestro Douglas Trumbull, 2001, Close Encounters, Blade Runner has died.
Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects visionary who, without CGI, fashioned the kaleidoscopic finale for 2001: A Space Odyssey, concocted the creepy cloud formations in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, filled the Blade Runner universe with smoke and fireballs and helped create the birth of the universe that opens The Tree of Life, has died. He was 79.
Trumbull died Monday after a “major two-year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke,” his daughter Amy announced on Facebook. She told The Hollywood Reporter that he died in Albany, New York; an obituary from the family said the cause of death was complications from mesothelioma.
“My sister Andromed and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that we love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond,” she wrote.
The son of a man who did effects work on The Wizard of Oz, Trumbull also directed two sci-fi features: the eco-themed Silent Running (1972), starring Bruce Dern, and Brainstorm (1983), featuring Natalie Wood in her final film.
The Los Angeles native received three visual effects Oscar nominations (for 1977’s Close Encounters, 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and 1982’s Blade Runner) in a six-year span. The Academy awarded him a Scientific and Engineering Award in 1993 for the creation of his Showscan Camera System and the Gordon E. Sawyer statuette in 2012 for his career contributions.
Director Robert Wise hired Trumbull to handle special photographic effects skills for The Andromeda Strain (1971), then asked him to helm two memorable sequences for the first Star Trek movie — the docking sequence aboard the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk.
On Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, Trumbull’s responsibilities grew rapidly as production moved along, and he found himself tasked with what would become his signature creation, the out-of-this-world corridor of light finale dubbed the Star Gate sequence.
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