If you’re a member of Hollywood’s special-effects community, Ray Harryhausen needs no introduction. The stop-motion animation master created celluloid magic for myriad fantasy films melding myth and monsters: ‘Seventh Voyage of Sinbad’ (1958), ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963), and his final feature, ‘Clash of the Titans’ (1981). But two motion pictures that weighed significantly in Harryhausen’s history starred overgrown gorillas: ‘King Kong’ (1933), with stop-motion special effects innovated by Willis O’Brien that forever influenced Harryhausen’s profession; and ‘Mighty Joe Young’ (1949), on which Harryhausen became O’Brien’s prot’g’. What Harryhausen fans may not realize is that he and mentor O’Brien shared a Pacific Palisades connection. Harryhausen’s life changed forever on a Hollywood afternoon in 1933, when he entered Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and fell under the spell of a new movie about the bond between beauty and beast. ’I saw ‘King Kong’ when I was thirteen, and I didn’t know how it was done at the time, but I knew it wasn’t a man in a gorilla suit,’ Harryhausen, 88, said in 2007. ‘I finally found out about stop-motion and I started experimenting in my garage.’ Harryhausen remembers how he met his idol after a schoolmate toting a ‘Kong’ script urged him to contact the stop-motion master at MGM: ‘He invited me to the studio. I brought my dinosaurs in a suitcase to show him. His office was filled with wonderful drawings of [the never-produced] ‘War Eagles.’ He said, ‘Your dinosaur legs look like sausages!’ So I studied anatomy and kept in touch. When he started ‘Mighty Joe Young,’ I became his assistant.’ The ‘King Kong’ team” Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, Robert Armstrong, O’Brien” essentially remade ‘Kong’ with ‘Mighty,’ on which Harryhausen handled most effects. Actress Terry Moore was 18 when she played Jill, ‘Mighty”s Fay Wray. ‘Ray was an assistant so we didn’t see that much of him,’ Moore, 79, told the Palisadian-Post. ‘I worked on a blank stage. When I threw a banana, I was throwing it at nothing,’ as special effects were merged later. When ‘Mighty’ came out 60 years ago, it was a big hit, second only to ‘Sitting Pretty.’ It won the special effects Oscar. ’It was the biggest event in my life to be able to work with the people who had made ‘King Kong’,’ Harryhausen told the Post by phone from his London home. Harryhausen moved to Europe in the late 1950s because he didn’t want to interfere with O’Brien’s career: ‘We made ‘Three Worlds of Gulliver’ [released in 1960] in England. I met my wife Diana over here. She’s Scottish.’ In 1962, Harryhausen, shooting in Spain, heard O’Brien had died. ‘I was sorry he had a lot of difficulty in Hollywood,’ his prot’g’ said. ‘He had so many movies that didn’t make it.’ For several years, Obie’s widow, Darlyne, lived in a small Hollywood apartment on a Social Security pension. Out of loyalty to his mentor, Harryhausen let Darlyne live in his Palisades home until her death a few years later. ’She needed a house and we hadn’t been there for a while,’ Harryhausen said. ‘We had a lovely little house on Via de la Paz, a block from the bluffs, and we built a second floor. We still have that house. It’s rented.’ ’Mighty’ inspired a 1988 Disney remake (Harryhausen and Moore made cameo appearances), which, despite special-effects advances, could not match the original. ‘It’s like eating homemade fudge versus store-bought fudge,’ Moore said. Now retired, Harryhausen bumps into Moore at conventions. His career is covered in Mike Hankin’s book, ‘Ray Harryhausen: Master of the Majicks,’ and Ray and Tony Dalton’s ‘A Century of Stop-Motion Animation.’ Today a Santa Monica resident, Moore had no idea while filming ‘Mighty’ the impact Harryhausen’s work would have on audiences”herself included. ’I watch everything I can on gorillas,’ Moore said. ‘I may make a trip to Africa. While making the movie, I fell in love with Joe myself.’ Visit www.TerryMoore.com and www.RayHarryhausen.com.
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