Jurassic Punk, 2022.
Directed by Scott Leberecht.
Starring Steve “Spaz” Williams, Phil Tippett, Robert Patrick, Jamie Hyneman, Mark Dippe, Scott Ross, Stefen Fangmeier, Bill Kimberlin, John Schlag, and Jody Duncan.
SYNOPSIS:
Steve “Spaz” Williams is a pioneer in computer animation. His digital dinosaurs for Jurassic Park transformed Hollywood in 1993, but an appetite for anarchy and reckless disregard for authority may have cost him the recognition he deserved.
You probably don’t know the name Steve “Spaz” Williams, but if you’re at all interested in how effects-driven blockbuster movies are made, you absolutely should.
A mascot for Hollywood’s visual effects revolution, animator Williams played a pivotal role in shepherding blockbuster cinema’s widespread adoption of CGI, per his game-changing work on The Abyss, Terminator 2, and especially Jurassic Park while working at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & Magic in the early 1990s.
Scott Leberecht’s new doc Jurassic Punk attempts to deliver a sliver of justice for the under-appreciated Williams, an irreverent, fastidious man whose hellraising personality couldn’t seem further from the stereotypes associated with VFX artists, yet ultimately tarnished his standing in the industry.
It’s immediately difficult to reconcile the contemporary footage of Spaz, today a depressed, out-of-work alcoholic, with the ground-breaking fusion of artistry and engineering he spearheaded during his years at ILM. More than anything, it seems absurd that he isn’t better known by the wider film community, and one hopes that Lebrecht’s film offers a well-earned corrective.
In typical docu-profile format, Spaz begins by chronicling Williams’ young life and the influences which drew him towards a life in animation, and how ultimately the digital effects field was so barren when he entered it that he was effectively paving the very road he was also travelling down.
But he absolutely pulled it off; the success of The Abyss‘ surreal effects prompted James Cameron to go all-in on Terminator 2, which of course remains a VFX landmark over three decades later. But Spaz’s defining moment was pushing aggressively for Jurassic Park‘s dinosaurs to be entirely CGI-rendered despite massive resistance from his superiors, enough that he built the first prototype in secret and on his own time.
But once Spielberg saw his VFX test, everything changed; the original stop-motion plans were halted, and a prominent existential threat to the practical side of the effects industry had evidently been born.
“I am not a diplomat,” Spaz flat-out tells us during an interview, as became a major issue for him when dealing with corporate culture and politics at ILM. Much of the film focuses on Spaz’s acrimonious relationship with ILM’s Visual Effects Supervisor Dennis Muren, who he feels received far too much of the credit – that is, many Oscar wins – for his work, all while himself and others garnered no accolades and little recognition.
Incredibly, despite Spaz’s inestimable contributions to the field of VFX, he has just a sole Oscar nomination to his name for The Mask, all while Muren scooped triple Academy Awards for The Abyss, Terminator 2, and Jurassic Park. Studio politicking aside, there’s certainly a compelling argument to be made here that Williams is deserving of an Honorary Oscar for his creation of the CGI dinosaur alone, yet Spaz’s refusal to “play the game” within the corporate infrastructure was seemingly his undoing.
A resentment-filled Williams went off the rails after Jurassic Park, as he argues too did big-budget filmmaking, becoming increasingly corporatised and obsessed with flashy visual effects whether they serviced a good story or not. Williams eventually left ILM in 1997 and went on to direct more than 200 commercials as well as helm Disney’s 2006 animated film The Wild, which was unfortunately a critical and commercial flop.
Despite attempts to return to ILM, it was made clear to Spaz that he’d burned his bridges at the studio through his candid, outspoken words on the company in the press. Today, he’s left struggling to pay the bills, interminably bored, and desperately attempting to curb a drinking problem.
“I don’t think it’s gonna end well for me,” Spaz tells us late in this film, shortly before we watch him stare mournfully at a pile of booze cans in his house. Though there are thankfully flecks of hope at film’s end as Spaz enters rehab for the third time in his life and makes an attempt to reclaim his legacy, it’s certainly painful to watch someone so passionate be so thoroughly chewed up by an industry that generates such enormous corporate profits.
There’s an incredibly shrewd balance of information throughout this documentary, delving just enough into the technical particulars of visual effects to be interesting yet not overwhelming. Similarly, we glean enough of Spaz’s troubled personal life – namely his doomed relationships and aforementioned sobriety issues – yet never at the expense of his wider career story.
The package is bolstered by generous access to Spaz and those around him, melded with terrific archive materials – especially of a scantily-clad Robert Patrick being put through the body-scanning process for Terminator 2 – and a heartbreaking trove of home video footage where Spaz captures so much of his own spiritual anguish.
And so Leberecht’s film offers a concise profile of a prodigiously talented if undeniably troubled artist, a combustible collision of character traits that’s unfortunately all too common. Jurassic Punk is a snappy, sad, and irreverent portrait of a tragically unsung pioneer of modern blockbuster filmmaking.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
