How to Bridge a Gorge

In 1941, animator Ray Harryhausen was working for producer/director George Pal on his famous Puppetoons shorts when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. Realizing he would soon be drafted once war was declared (he was twenty-two at the time), he quickly prepared to make himself useful in the service. In his autobiography, co-written with Tony Dalton, he recalled, "I attended six months of evening classes on combat photography sponsored by Eastman Kodak at Columbia Studios. I was unaware at the time that combat photographers were as expendable as clay pigeons but the courses did teach me a great deal about using different 35mm camera, rapid loading and many other techniques vital in the field. What little spare time I had I used to make a 16mm 5-minute colour demonstration training film called How to Bridge a Gorge. I made it to illustrate how model animation could be used for troop training, and it was exactly what the title said it was, based on military photographs and articles from Life and National Geographic magazines." How to Bridge a Gorge would soon prove to be important in Harryhausen's development as a filmmaker. After enlisting in the army in 1942 and being assigned to the Army Signal Corps, he learned that a division of the S.C.P.C. was producing animated shorts. He obtained references from his former employers, filmmakers George Pal and Willis O'Brien, in an effort to get transferred to this unit but received no reply. "Fortunately, I had shown How to Build a Gorge to one of my teachers," Harryhausen said, "who in turn contacted Colonel Frank Capra and Major Sam Birkin, then starting up the Special Service Division that would be making orientation films for the U.S. Government, with the director Anatole Litvak. Consequently the film was shown to Capra, Birkin and Litvak, resulting in my transfer from the Army Signal Corps to Special Service Division, the headquarters of which were located at the old Fox Studios at Western Avenue and Sunset Blvd. Because of my evening classes in combat photography, I was commissioned a Technical Sergeant T/3." Harryhausen would go on to work with Frank Capra on his Why We Fight series, composing transitional effects (traveling mattes, composite pictures, etc.) between the linking archival footage segments in the films. His involvement in these Capra wartime films, such as Negro Soldier, led to collaborations with such well regarded Hollywood professionals as composer Dimitri Tiomkin and editor William Hornbeck, a hero of Harryhausen's who had worked on some of his favorite movies, Things to Come (1936), Jungle Book (1942), and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). How to Bridge a Gorge and his experiences in the Special Service Division would soon lead to his next project, another war time short entitled Guadalcanal (1943). Producer/Director/Animator: Ray Harryhausen by Jeff Stafford