A Dino-Mite Tale

“Dino” Don Lessem Shares About Working With Palisadian Steven Spielberg on “Jurassic Park,” Has Exhibition at Pierce College Through December 18

By SARAH SHMERLING | Editor-in-Chief

Pop quiz: How many minutes were dinosaurs on screen in the original “Jurassic Park” movie?

Out of more than two hours of film, dinosaurs have just 13 minutes of screentime, according to “Dino” Don Lessem, who served as dinosaur advisor to the film’s director, Palisadian Steven Spielberg.

Lessem shared with the Palisadian-Post that he has always had an interest in dinosaurs, dating back to when he was a child from ages 3 to 8.

“I lost it, as kids often do,” he said. “Back when I was a newspaper reporter for The Boston Globe, they sent me out to do a story about two very colorful dinosaur scientists. I found it so interesting the way they see an environment—a world that we can’t see—from the clues they find in our environment. It’s like a big scavenger hunt, trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and you don’t have all the pieces.”

Lessem wrote a book about all of the dinosaur discoveries being made around the world during a time he described as “the golden age of dinosaur discovery,” with a new kind found every three weeks. He traveled to places like Argentina, China and Mongolia.

“I went to all the dinosaur digs in the world, pretty much,” he shared, “because it turns out, there’s only about 40 people who actively dig dinosaurs in the world.”

He returned to the newspaper for a brief time, where he met and interviewed author Michael Crichton, who wrote the eponymous novel on which “Jurassic Park” the film is based.

“I started a charity to raise money for dinosaur research,” Lessem explained, because “for all the money that’s made on dinosaurs, none of it goes back to them.”

Crichton introduced Lessem to Spielberg, and Lessem had the thought that he could get some of the money for the movie or dinosaur products into dinosaur research.

“I was frustrated throughout the process of the movie with the fact that the story is written, it’s fiction and it has to be exciting,” Lessem explained. “It’s not true to dinosaurs. So I asked Steven if I could have all the sets of props of the movie, and I’ll make an exhibit about what’s wrong with this movie and we’ll tour it to museums all over the world, which we did. We raised $3 million for research.”

Of the experience of being on set, Lessem said watching the movie being made was “amazing,” that Spielberg “obviously is a genius.”

One of the first scenes that Lessem saw being filmed was the opening scene of the movie, which takes place in a town in Montana—but it was really filmed in the Mojave Desert.

“Because it’s a state park,” Lessem explained, “you can’t dig. So what I came to see was a bunch of people pretending to be scientists, digging pretend dinosaurs in a pretend hole—they had to make a mound so that they could create a hole … so it was a little bit surreal.”

The first thing he noticed, Lessem said, was that everyone was wearing button-down shirts, which he said was not true to a real dig.

“So they said, ‘Where do we get the clothes?’” Lessem recalled. “I said, ‘Well I have all the dirty T-shirts you need. So there was my major contribution to the movie, which was to give dirty T-shirts to the cast.’”

Lessem officially met Spielberg on set after pointing out an error in how long it would take for  rigor mortis to set into a dinosaur, when the crew brought Spielberg over to review it. Spielberg and Lessem got to talking, he explained, which is when he mentioned the charitable goal.

“It’s quite amazing that the movie was made actually in 28 days,” Lessem shared, “which was incredibly fast for a movie”—though they spent two years doing the CGI work on the dinosaurs.

Over the last four years, Lessem said that he began turning his company—which used to do dinosaur skeletons in museum exhibits—into making “giant robots,” designed to be the “best robots outside of the movies.”

“We make them as they looked and sounded,” Lessem explained. “It was nice to make dinosaurs the way they looked, because the sense of awe that the kid in us you can still have, to look at an animal that’s 10 times the size of an elephant, that’s as tall as a five-story building. That is awe-inspiring. In a child, it can really shape their interest in nature and science.”

Palisadians are invited to see Lessem’s work, which is on display in the world premiere of his outdoor walk-through experience, through December 18 at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, located at 20800 Victory Boulevard. The “Giant Dinosaurs in the Valley” display features more than 100 “true-to-life dinosaurs,” coming in at up to 40 feet tall and more than 70 feet long.

“We are making the dinosaurs as they were, with sounds derived from their living cousins (birds),” according to organizers, “with nests, feathers, fossil cast excavation pits and arranged in scenes of dynamic interaction through all of dinosaur time.”

Previously, Lessem’s robots have been on display at zoos around the world, but this marks his first exhibit of his own. Billed as “the most scientifically accurate life-size and life-like dinosaurs ever created,” visitors are invited to “travel back in time and walk among Jurassic, Triassic and Cretaceous period dinosaurs.”

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit dinosaursinthevalley.com.