Throwback Thursday: Graphic Films and Voyage to the Outer Planets

Hollywood’s century-plus of history has provided plenty of breeding grounds for new talent. Roger Corman’s studio, which churned out dozens of quickie movies, was one such well-known place. Another that wasn’t as well-known was Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where Colin Cantwell worked in the late 1960s and early 1970s on several movies, including Voyage to the Outer Planets. We’ll get into more detail about the company in the forthcoming book about Colin’s life, but in the meantime, we wanted to set down a little history on this blog.

Graphic Films’ roster in those days was a “who’s who” of visual effects and sound effects pioneers, including Doug Trumbull, Con Pederson, Hal Barwood, Ben Burtt, and John Dykstra, who pioneered the Dykstraflex motion control visual effects system and ran George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic when Star Wars was made. Dykstra and Colin actually worked together on Voyage to the Outer Planets — the former told me via email, “Graphic Films was the production company (at least for the model and matte painting work).”

A long time ago, on a college campus not too far away

The history of Graphic Films begins in 1941, when ex-Disney animator Les Novros simultaneously started the company and joined

the faculty of the Cinema Department at the University of Southern California (USC). He taught the USC course Filmic Expression to many students, including George Lucas, before his retirement in 1984.

During World War II, Graphic Films produced many training films for the military. In the post-war period, the creation of the United States Air Force and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) gave the company many opportunities to not only create movies in support of the fledgling space program but also use its talented animators and model makers to create spectacular visuals.

One of those films, To the Moon and Beyond, was shown in 10-perf, 70mm at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick as he was planning his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick initially planned to use Graphic Films for the visual effects work, but the difficulty of transcontinental communication in those days led him to poach Trumbull, Pederson, Colin Cantwell, and others from the company and bring them over to England. (More on that in another blog post.)

Making Voyage to the Outer Planets

Another movie Graphic Films had a hand in was Voyage to the Outer Planets, which was produced in conjunction with Showsphere for the then-new Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center in San Diego. The film was made in the OMNIMAX format, a cousin of IMAX that’s used for projecting movies onto the inside of a dome — in particular, a planetarium, like the one at the Fleet Center.

The credits included: Colin as writer, director, and model maker; Dykstra as the special effects cameraman; Novros and his business partner George Casey as producers; and Les’s son, Paul, as the music composer. (Paul Novros now teaches jazz saxophone at CalArts.)

Set in the year 2348, Voyage to the Outer Planets imagines the construction of a spacecraft in Earth’s orbit, where it revolves around the planet 18 times and builds up enough speed to break free and head for Mars and beyond.

In addition to building the spacecraft model, Colin created models of Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and, finally, Pluto, which was demoted to “dwarf planet” status in 2006. The movie imagines the entire trip taking three years, with the narration concluding, “Out there lies the unknown,” as the spaceship heads into interstellar space.

After Graphic Films

Colin later left Graphic Films for Lucasfilm, where he was hired by director/writer George Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz to build the earliest models of the TIE Fighter, X-Wing Fighter, Star Destroyer, Death Star, and other spacecraft for Star Wars. Graphic Films alumni John Dykstra and Ben Burtt later followed him, thanks to the connection Lucas had with his former professor, Les Novros.