Douglas Trumbull

The American special effects legend speak at length about his amazing career so far and reveals what the future holds for his craft.

American director, special effects supervisor and inventor Douglas Trumbull has worked on everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Blade Runner and more recently The Tree of Life. He spoke to LWLies recently about his extraordinary career so far and what the future holds.

LWLies: Your father, Donald Trumbull, was an incredibly gifted technician, winning two Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscars, working on The Wizard of Oz and designing a wide range of process projection systems and special film production equipment. How large was his influence on you?

Trumbull: He had a tremendous influence on me, although when he was first in the movie business as a young man working on The Wizard of Oz and some other movies, I was just a twinkle in his eye, I didn’t know anything about that at the time. By the time I was conscious he was already out of the movie business and in the aircraft industry. My relationship with him throughout my life as a young man was that he was an engineer and inventor. I always hung about where he worked at home and I was surrounded by his machine tools, lathes, mills, drill presses, pedal saws and welding machines. So I grew up surrounded by technology.

It wasn’t until I was about to direct my first film, which was Silent Running, that I asked him to come back into the movie industry and he said he would really like to, so he came and started at my little studio and built the robot arms for Silent Running. That was really the beginning of a long relationship with him doing all kinds of technology for movies.

Can you describe your work as a young illustrator at Graphic Films in Los Angeles on the documentary To the Moon and Beyond?

Well, To the Moon and Beyond was basically a space film, similar in some ways to what many people know as Powers of Ten, the film Charles and Ray Eames made, because it was the universe from the Big Bang to the microcosm in 15 minutes. It started out with a huge explosion, it was projected on to a hemispherical planetarium screen and it was photographed and projected in this process called Cinerama 360, which was 65mm negative film, ten perforations high, so it was a circular image on 70mm film projected into a dome with fish eye lenses. It involved a lot of special photography of artwork, including multi-plane photography and multi-layer exposure photography in which each layer of film might consist of 50 different exposures of objects.

I painted all the artwork for this movie, which was all the stars, all the planets, all the spacecraft and then down into the microcosm of cellular life and things like that. Then it culminated in a pre-slit-scan dome sequence that was made by John Whitney and that was my first exposure to the whole idea of streak photography. Anyway, that was a short film that was in the Travel and Transportation Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and 65, it was sponsored by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and among other things it was seen by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke when they were thinking about making 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think it was this movie To the Moon and Beyond and another called Universe, made by the National Film Board of Canada, that – Kubrick saw Universe any number of times, I frankly don’t know how many times he saw To the Moon and Beyond – were really the validating influence on Kubrick’s belief that it was feasible to make 2001.

How did you go from being a young illustrator to working with visionary director Stanley Kubrick on 2001?

After To the Moon and Beyond was made Kubrick contacted Graphic Films, where I was working, and talked to my boss Con Pederson, who has credits with me on 2001, and we started doing illustrations for 2001 while we were at Graphic Films. It was a very limited preliminary contract to look into designs for spacecraft and moon bases, things like that, for 2001, which at that time was actually called Journey Beyond the Stars. That contract went on for about two weeks and we were mailing drawings to Kubrick in New York. However, when Kubrick made the decision to go shoot the film in London at Borehamwood Studios, he terminated the contract, because he thought it was just too distant to communicate over seven thousand miles. Of course, we didn’t have fax machines so everything had to be air-mailed, and he decided it was too difficult and started hiring professional designers and illustrators in London to do the job.

So, I got laid off actually, because there was no more work at Graphic Films at that time, they were kind of between contracts. I really liked working on 2001 and certainly knew of Kubrick and had seen Dr Strangelove and other movies, so I asked Con Pederson for Kubrick’s phone number. I said I wanted to call him and see if I could get a job. He said that he couldn’t tell me because he was under a non-disclosure agreement, but I found out that Kubrick’s phone number was actually pencilled on the corner of a bulletin board in the office. So I went there, found the number and cold-called Stanley Kubrick and told him that I had been doing these designs for him and that I wanted to come over and work on his movie. Kubrick invited me to come over, got me airfare for me and my wife, put us up in a hotel in London, and we went and met him and that was the beginning of a terrific opportunity and adventure.

How old were you when you cold-called Stanley Kubrick?

I was 23 years old.

Despite your young age, you were given a great deal of creative freedom and responsibility by Kubrick.

Well, it was incremental. It didn’t just come right out of the box. We didn’t know each other very well, but one thing led to another and I kept being able to solve certain problems he was facing. The first project I undertook on the movie was the HAL readouts, which entailed figuring out how to create synthetic computer graphics, because we obviously didn’t have any computers of any kind at that time. We could kind of predict what we thought computer graphics might look like, but we had to create them using animation techniques. So I was designing these readouts to be photographed on an animation stand at a little studio, I can’t remember the name of the animation company, but we were contracting the work out. During the animation process you have to fill out long pieces of paper which are 10 inches wide and 24 inches tall, with all these columns of numbers and layers, so that you indicate where every artwork is and what colour gel and what frame it’s located on and so on...and so you have to indicate every frame’s position and colour and size etc, etc. We started calculating that if we were to use these techniques it would take us several years to create the readouts alone.

So we decided to go outside of normal animation and we built our own animation stand at the studio, which Wally Gentleman helped build, and by that time Con Pederson was there. We took an old Bell and Howell 35mm pin registered camera and put a zoom lens on it and aimed it at a sheet of glass that we could put various kinds of pin registration devices on. We actually worked out a technique for building the readouts right on camera. We would just have very general indications, just saying look at this for five seconds, then take it off and look at another thing for five seconds and change the gel to red or whatever. This gave a lot of creative freedom to the animation photographer Bruce Logan, who originally worked at this animation camera company, and we had met him and liked him and hired him to come and work on the movie, and he just turned out to be instrumental in many things we did throughout the movie.

Can you describe your working relationship with Kubrick?

Kubrick was really my mentor. It was film school for me! He was finding out that I kept discovering solutions to problems that the journeymen experienced industry professionals at Borehamwood could not figure out. Because I was young enough to think outside the box and I didn’t think anything had to be done a particular way. So I would come up with radical little ideas and Kubrick would say 'Okay, do that.'

So it was important that you hadn’t had that kind of training, hadn’t been schooled in one train of thought, because it actually worked to your benefit?

Right, because I came from the world of animation, shooting one frame at a time, so we were doing the AE-35 readout and I suggested doing an X-ray of it, but it was an animated X-ray, from a hundred different angles. Kubrick said, ‘Well that’s a clever idea, nobody ever thought of that before, go ahead and do it.’ So I built a rig with an aircraft gyroscope, mounted on an angled plywood rig that rotated and made a slot in it for X-ray plates to be positioned and looked at a way to increment all animation techniques and gave the X-ray technician frame numbers for each of the shots, I would drive into London to an X-ray lab with this rig and with the prop and the instructions. Kubrick would let me go in with his driver in his Bentley, and I was still just a 23-year-old kid, and do these weird things and bring them back, shoot them on the animation stand, make it in a strange colour. This working process just kept leading to more and more complicated things like the Stargate sequence and the Jupiter machine.

When did you have the idea for the Stargate sequence? We understand Kubrick was unsure how to do that section of the movie himself and was searching for ideas?

Kubrick was looking for ideas; everybody on the production was looking for ideas! Tony Masters, who was probably I think one of the biggest masterminds behind the visual look of the movie, couldn’t figure out what it should be. Originally, it was going to be a slot in one of Jupiter’s moons and at the other end of the slot would be another universe, if you can imagine a physical hole in space that had some multi-dimensional sensibility to it. We couldn’t really make one of Jupiter’s moons properly, we couldn’t make the slot look realistic, we just weren’t getting along, but I came up with this idea of how to make a corridor of light, based in part on the work of John Whitney, who had worked on To the Moon and Beyond, which was this idea of leaving the shutter open during a long exposure and creating a controlled blur, a process called streak photography. The animation stand had been equipped with a Polaroid camera in front of the lens, because we used Polaroid photographs all the time, to document every shot in the movie, there were simply thousands of Polaroids shot of everything, and Kubrick kept a huge archive of them all. So with this Polaroid camera on the animation stand, so I could run it up and down from far away to close to a piece of artwork.

I had this idea that I could just make this very thin slit with the light behind it and be able to crank some artwork behind the slit and move the camera on a long time exposure over the full travel of the vertical movement of the animation camera and create this streak of light that actually had a controlled design, a pattern and colour to it. It worked the first time out. I shot this Polaroid. I took the Polaroid down to Kubrick’s office and I said, ‘I think this could be the answer to the Stargate.’ Kubrick said, ‘Well, okay, I think you’re right, what do we do now?’ I said, ‘Well, I have to build this giant machine, which will do this all day every day automatically with giant pieces of artwork.’ Kubrick said fine and told me that whatever I needed to do I could just do it. I was able to use the engineering department, the props department, the rigging department, the camera department, everybody just pitched in.

Did you have an idea that what you were creating with 2001 would revolutionise cinema?

I didn’t think at all about revolutionising cinema, I was just doing my thing. But I had a buzz about the movie the whole time. I was just so excited and enthusiastic that there just weren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things that Kubrick wanted to see. I was just having a great time and felt all along that we were doing something extraordinary. However, since it was my first film, I had no idea how extraordinary it was because I had nothing to compare it to.

Have you visited the Kubrick archives at all?

No, I have not, that was one of the next things on my plan of action. We were going to visit and shoot there.

A definitive study of 2001 would be most welcome, Alison Castle edited a magnificent book Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. Although a documentary looking at archived unused footage would be fantastic.

Well, keep your eyes open, I presume somewhere along the line Warner Bros will release something using footage from the archive.

Did you remain in contact with Kubrick after 2001? You seemed to be kindred spirits in experimenting with the camera itself to create a more immersive experience.

Oh sure, I kept up with him over all the years and I was actually at his memorial.

You shared Kubrick’s and Arthur C Clarke’s fascination with UFOs. Did you ever discuss the phenomena with them?

No, I never did. I read, when I was researching for the documentary, that Kubrick and Clarke had in fact had some kind of a weird sighting above a building in New York. They called NASA who tried to explain it away with what sounded just a completely baloney explanation. I must say that if I were an alien I would have kept an eye on Kubrick too.

I believe you have developed new technology to analyse photographs of UFOs?

Yes, the project is called UFOTOG, which I have worked on for years and will continue to work on for years. It’s not about analysing old photographs of UFOs at all. It’s all about an aggressive scientific endeavour to get really good spectrographic analysis and scientific trajectory, altitude and velocity, detailed information on UFO behaviour and function, if we can, because all the photographs you have seen of UFOs are just captured at the spur of the moment under bad conditions. We’re completely inundated with fake UFO photographs these days and all kinds of UFO websites and videos and confusion. I just think there’s really something real about the whole subject and I think it’s one of the biggest stories that are going to be told and that ever will be told and I would like to be involved in it and would like to know more about it. So, I’m continuing my objective to find financing to actually do a very serious UFO project.

Will this be a scientific UFO film project eventually?

Ideally, I would love to make a feature film, yes.

You mention on your website that the UFO phenomena has been somewhat trivialised in films, which is unfortunate given the sheer amount of evidence which warrants serious analysis.

Right, so all that has created this confusing environment wherein nobody in the academic community would be caught dead talking about UFOs, because they will lose their tenure, lose their job and be laughed out of town. There is so much derision associated with it because of science fiction and all that stuff that nobody really takes it seriously.

You then created the special effects for cult favourite The Andromeda Strain. I understand you underbid for the job?

Yes [laughs], I almost went bankrupt because of it!

Your directorial debut Silent Running was beautifully made on a shoestring budget with a heartfelt ecological message at its core and continues to enjoy a cult following. What were you saying about the effects of man’s technological evolution on the Earth and the universe at large?

I was trying to react, in certain way, to 2001. 2001 went very much toward a dehumanisation of people. The astronauts were very unemotional and the flight controllers were very methodical and all the Government people were basically keeping the whole thing secret. I thought well maybe I will do the opposite of that and do something that is very earthy and humanistic, even though I was dealing with these drones, my little robots, and those sprang from an idea called Freaks, directed by Tod Browning, which featured a guy called Johnny Eck, who was this amazing guy who walked on his hands because he had no lower body. He inspired the design of the drone robots, which would be anthropomorphic and seem to be lifelike, but designed so that it wouldn’t just look like a guy in a suit, because I was so annoyed by all the robots depicted in movies, that were obviously just a man in a suit. So I started developing this whole ecological story with the domes and the drones, having it end on this odd note that the tragedy of Freeman Lowell’s (Bruce Dern) life is that he is so dedicated and passionate about preserving these forests that it leads to a situation where he must commit suicide in order to cover up that he has let one dome loose in the care of a robot. Putting anything in the care of a robot is kind of like a Von Neumann probe. It’s the whole idea that we may be surpassed by our own robotic intelligences in the future.

Did you turn down George Lucas’ offer to create the special effects for Star Wars because you were now a director?

Yes, it was after I had made Silent Running, so I was directing and had development deals to direct more films with a number of Hollywood studios. I didn’t feel it was my role in life to be special effects guy to another director. I didn’t want to miff George, I thought he was obviously on to a magnificent idea with his project; it simply wasn’t my cup of tea at the time. A lot of things went wrong because the studio system was just so screwed up, projects I was developing to direct didn’t happen, and didn’t happen, and didn’t happen – until, I became desperate and then, later on, Steven Spielberg approached me with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and that was different enough in its nature and as a challenge to interest me. I thought Spielberg was a really interesting young director, having just done Jaws, and his vision for Close Encounters was pretty interesting to me, because it dealt with the whole UFO phenomena in a more mature way.

I subsequently found out only recently that a lot of what Close Encounters is based on was written by Jacque Vallee, the real life French UFO expert the character Claude Lacombe (played by Francois Truffaut) is based on. The French UFO expert is a real person who has written many books about the UFO phenomenon, he is a very serious and dedicated UFO researcher and has now become a friend of mine. He helps me keep up with the whole story. It made me realise that even though Close Encounters is depicted as a fictional story it is based on real events. Some were invented by Spielberg, but some were not. I think in retrospect Close Encounters actually becomes more interesting. It’s not like someone just invented the whole idea of UFOs or a mothership or abductions, these things were being reported over and over again. The movie is based on real reports.

What was your working relationship with Steven Spielberg like?

It was great, because he was adventurous in the same way that Kubrick was. He didn’t want to do another movie using the same old same old; he really wanted to break some new ground. I said to him that we had some really terrific opportunities to do things that nobody has ever seen before, including the use of motion control and the ability to move the camera during a composite shot, and to do all the special effects in 65mm and retain quality. There was also the new idea of shooting in deep smoke and using all kinds of lens flares and lighting effects, which was exactly what he wanted to get, he just didn’t know how to do it. We had a great collaboration on that movie.

You then directed the special effects for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, how did you become involved in the project?

It was an ideal time for my company, because by that time we had this special effects company called Entertainment Effects group, which was a partnership between me and Richard Yuricich, and we wanted to keep our crew busy because I was finally getting a greenlight to do Brainstorm at MGM, who picked it up after Paramount. They weren’t interested in making it in Showscan but they were interested in making the movie, so we wanted to keep the crew together until I got around to doing the special effects for Brainstorm. Ridley came along with Blade Runner, told us what he wanted to do but he had very little money, really a very low-budget, and he wanted to do the Spinners, the Hades landscape, the matte paintings of the Tyrell building and the blimp, that futuristic look of the movie, and we realised that in fact all the equipment that we built for Close Encounters would be perfect for Blade Runner.

If you watch the films there is a tremendous similarity between the Spinners and UFOs and a tremendous similarity between the blimp and the mothership. We used exactly the same lighting techniques and model techniques, so we were able to hit the ground running with Blade Runner and do really good work for Ridley, for a lot less money, because we already had all the equipment and technologies. The deal was that half way through Blade Runner Richard Yuricich and I were going to move on to Brainstorm. Richard became the director of photography and I was directing. We hired David Dryer to finish Blade Runner and he did a fantastic job, he’s a really good effects technician, came out of commercials so was very familiar with cameras, effects, optics and motion control. He finished it beautifully.

The effects are still breathtaking; it’s incredible that there are no digital effects in it.

Well there are now! The ‘Final Cut’ has some digital fixes to the original movie; it’s really beautiful, fixing some of the little flaws.

Brainstorm was to be a showcase for your Showscan technology. Can you describe what the technology entailed?

Showscan was photographing and projecting at 60fps using 65mm film and cameras, and 70mm projectors. The only difference is the width of the film to accommodate the magnetic sound stripe. But by photographing and projecting at 60fps instead of 24fps, you can project each frame only once instead of twice. Most people even today are simply not aware that when they watch a 24fps movie each frame is shown twice, which creates a juddering motion and flatness to the image that doesn’t move very smoothly. This means that cinematographers and directors have to be careful about how fast they pan the camera and how fast action happens because there is a lot of juddering, strobing and blurring that happens at 24fps. The Showscan process solved all that and we could project on much larger screens, we could project much more brightly, so you could see better colour saturation, there was no blurring, strobing or flickering, it was like a window on to reality, an incredibly vivid experience that many people today still remember and talk about. We did a lot of World’s Fairs, expos and theme park projects, things like that, but we couldn’t get traction because of this Catch-22 with projectors in theatres that I told you about.

A number of disasters befell Brainstorm, including the tragic mysterious drowning of one of the film’s stars Natalie Wood during production.

That was a terrible time, really awful. The studio used that as an excuse to try not to complete the film and claim on the insurance. My frustration at that time was unbelievable and that’s why I left Hollywood altogether. It was the worst professional experience I had and ever hope to have. It was completely reprehensible from the studio’s standpoint to take that position, because they clearly had no interest in finishing the film and had no interest in finding out that Natalie Woods’ role was complete and that I had no problem editing the film without requiring any further footage, they simply didn’t want to know that. It seemed they had already decided not to complete the film. The studio was just about bankrupt, they may not have had enough money to keep the studio operating and desperately wanted this insurance claim. I was the only person standing between their $15 million and getting the movie made, which was an extremely uncomfortable position to be in, working at a studio that hates my guts and getting it distributed by a studio that hates my guts. It was really horrible. I’m glad I got the movie finished; otherwise it would have been a worst tragedy with it languishing in a vault somewhere.

Exasperated with Hollywood, you moved to Berkshire where you focussed on developing film production and entertainment technologies for the last 30 years.

Yes, I worked with Steven Spielberg again on the Back to the Future ride at Universal Studios Theme Park. I also created three attractions at the Luxor Hotel, some of it actually utilised the Showscan technology. It was really amazing, people did not know it was a film at all, they thought they were live performers on stage. It was a very successful operation and was a very interesting project to work on, it was a lot of fun and we broke a lot of new ground with computer graphics and high-resolution rendering, and we shot everything at 48fps way back then in 1991. We projected at 48fps in VistaVision, on giant screens at high brightness and it perfectly matched computer graphics, live action and miniatures. It was an excellent project.

Were you friends with James Cameron at this point?

Yes, he was aware of the technology we were developing; I met him off and on. I had never been very close with Jim, but he was very respectful of me and we’ve met a few times. I’ve just met him recently actually at NAB Show, because he was there to talk about Avatar 2 and 3 and his interest in higher frame rates and has been talking about Showscan and my work and recognising that this territory was unearthed a long time ago.

You have also played an important role in the development of IMAX too.

Yes, well one of the Luxor projects was the simulation ride, which was a distillation of all the best of the Back to the Future Ride and was much improved over it. There was a new motion base, it was a 48fps VistaVision automated projector and was a very powerful new medium that I called Ridefilm. I patented it and then started up a company called Ridefilm Corporation, to do simulation rides all over the world, and I was talking to some investment bankers in New York about raising the capital to launch this new company. Right at the time I was speaking to them about that, I found out that IMAX was in terrible trouble and was for sale and they were kind of desperate.

I suggested the idea of combining IMAX with Ridefilm and taking it public, bringing it into the commercial marketplace. They thought this was a great idea; we formed a company and went through all the dynamics to acquire the rights to IMAX and to take the company public, organising an ideal roadshow where we travelled to show this to investors all over the world and sell the stock. The whole idea was to bring IMAX from being in its restricted business of just doing science museums to doing commercial films. It was a very successful operation that led to the current situation in which IMAX is considered the best movie process on the planet and shows much higher profitability than the same film shown in 35mm. It was really IMAX that broke the ice and validated that 3D was a valuable business.

Can you describe how you came back to filmmaking with your special effects work on Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life?

Well, this is an independently financed movie, all my work with Terry was in Austin, Texas. Terry and I have known each other from the very beginning, way back when I was making Silent Running and later when he was making Badlands. We met each other at Universal, kept up an on and off relationship over the years, as you know he became very reclusive and didn’t make many films for twenty years or so. Then he emerged again and contacted me and told me of this idea he was working on and asked if I had any thoughts and I said, ‘Sure I do, I have a lot of ideas for that.’ So we began a collaboration.

I must say that my collaboration was mainly conceptual. I only worked on The Tree of Life as a friend to Terry Malick, not because I contract special effects or anything like that. He had his own crew of special effects guys led by Dan Glass, who did a really beautiful job of bringing together a number of companies and executing the effects for The Tree of Life. I worked with Dan and Terry over these long weekends, which we called Skunkworks. Or I would come out to Austin and we put together a crew and a small stage and do some really far out experiments toward finding ways to create astronomical phenomena that would not be computer generated, using liquids and high-speed cameras and various techniques. That turned out to be quite successful and Terry was very happy with the results. I have a small credit on the movie, I don’t lay claim to being deeply involved in it. I had nothing to do with any of the live action or the script. I was just helping Terry as a friend.

During the recent BP oil rig disaster you created an apparatus and a video demonstrating how it might be the solution to stopping the spill. However, the US government and BP paid no attention. Have they explained why?

I don’t know why, I can only guess why. I’m pretty sure that just about everybody, whether it was BP or the government or the news networks received so many submissions from so many millions of people that their firewalls got really thick. They had no way of sorting out all the incoming stuff, so I think I had a pretty good idea and think I was pretty correct about it and I think the truth about the BP oil spill has still been hidden from the public. It’s only because I had so much experience with hydraulics, building simulation rides, which meant I learned about pressure and temperature and underwater stuff, hydraulic manifolds and things like that.

Because my father was an engineer it kind of comes naturally for me to understand it. I did some back in the envelope calculations of what they were saying about the leakage rate and the pressures of the wellhead and it didn’t make sense to me at all. I realised that I could develop an effective solution and I made a little movie, because I’m familiar with working in water tanks, and had just been working with Terry Malick on The Tree of Life using water tanks and pumps, so I thought I could do it easily, and built it here in my workshop and photographed it and made that little film. Nobody ever picked up on it, but I just felt a moral obligation to do it anyway.

You have had some heavy setbacks during your career, what kept you going in the face of such adversity?

First of all, I must say everyone in the movie industry faces adversity. It’s not special to me; I hope I haven’t had to endure any more difficulty than any other filmmaker. You have to have a pretty thick skin and a high degree of determination to survive in an industry that can sometimes be unfriendly. I’m very lucky, an extremely fortunate man to live in an incredibly beautiful place and have a very high quality of life, living here in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where we have beautiful seasons and fresh air and clean water and great weather. I live on a farm with lots of animals. We’re very much in touch with nature here. I have my own laboratory and workshop and everything in my buildings here, but we’re surrounded by donkeys, sheep, goats, fields of grass and a big pond. I think very few people can say they have those kinds of qualities in their life. It’s very beautiful and I’m proud of it. You have to give up something, you know, to not be in LA and playing the movie game 24/7, going to all the parties, but that’s just not the way I want to spend my life.

What is your vision for the future of film?

I have a couple of projects I’m developing right now, that I hope will get made. They are going to be science fiction. They will have an ecological angle to them, because they are going to be about the future of human life and our survivability. I can’t tell you much more than that, except that I am developing a whole new photographic technology that adapts very easily to the existing digital projectors already out there. So I hope I won’t have the same problem that I had with Showscan. The infrastructure to do what I’ve developed is already in place. It just requires a clever modification to be able to do this whole new technology that I’ve been working on. I’ve been shooting a demo, I hope to be able to show something in a few months and I’ll be doing private screenings for various companies and individuals, and trying to raise money for a new kind of a movie studio concept that I’ve been developing.

I believe that we’re in a whole new age of movies, in which you can make a movie with something as inexpensive as a $1,000 digital single lens reflex camera, you can edit on a laptop, you can do your own special effects with green screen software for $500. It’s a whole new world and it’s leading to a paradigm shift in the way people view movies. The theatrical movie experience has got to dramatically improve or it will go extinct. I think I can contribute to that improvement. However, I also think it is possible to self-distribute movies directly through outlets that do Video on Demand and Pay-Per-View, so you do not necessarily have to go through the whole studio system, which I frankly think is pretty dysfunctional right now. It’s a tragedy that you could make a really good and quite successful movie at a good price and never see any profits. That’s a tragic situation that stultifies a lot of movie making. So, I’m looking at setting up a distribution company and, well, just about everything really.