Art Directors Guild Honors Ray Harryhausen with Screening of 'First Men in the Moon' July 21, 2007

ART DIRECTORS GUILD FILM SOCIETY TO PAY TRIBUTE TO VISUAL EFFECTS ARTIST RAY HARRYHAUSEN WITH A SCREENING OF
FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1964) ON JULY 21 AT THE EGYPTIAN THEATRE

LOS ANGELES, --The Art Directors Guild (ADG) Film Society will pay tribute to the legendary career of Academy Award® winning Visual Effects Artist Ray Harryhausen at a screening on July 21 of the 1964 classic First Men in the Moon. The screening will take place at 2:00 PM at the Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., followed by a Q & A discussion with Harryhausen. John Muto, screenwriter, Production Designer and founder of the Art Directors Film Society, will moderate the discussion.

Ray Harryhausen has made dinosaurs walk the earth, horses fly, statues come to life, apes play chess, and skeletons fight. Harryhausen calls his work “kinetic sculpture”; it is a method of stop-motion filmmaking that has made him a cult figure in the world of cinema. Born in Los Angeles, June 29, 1920, Ray Harryhausen was educated at Audubon Junior High and Manual Arts High School. School held little interest for him, but at an early age he conceived an overwhelming passion for the film King Kong, a fascination that became the basis of his future life. The film inspired Harryhausen to begin experimenting with his own models and led to a career in visual effects on films such as Mighty Joe Young (1949), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).

During the 1960s, Harryhausen also contributed to notable films such as The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The First Men in the Moon (1964), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969). He finally brought the curtain down on his film career in 1981 with his and Schneer’s Greek mythological epic, Clash of the Titans. In 1992, at the sixty-fourth Academy Awards, Harryhausen was honored with an Oscar for his lifetime of extraordinary achievements.

Based on the H.G. Wells story, First Men in the Moon (1964) begins in the 1960s, with the USA working towards a rocket flight to the Moon. Once astronauts land on the Moon and they find a British Flag and a note claiming the Moon for Queen Victoria. An investigation ensues and leads United Nations representatives to Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), an elderly patient at a mental hospital. Bedford then tells them that as a young businessman, he and his fiancée Katherine (Martha Hyer) traveled to the moon with a brilliant but eccentric scientist, Dr. Cavor (Lionel Jeffries). But when they reached the moon, they encountered a lunar civilization unlike anything they could have imagined -- and faced dangers beyond their greatest fears.
General Admission is $10; $7 Cinematheque; $9 Seniors (65+ years) and students with valid ID card. For 24-Hour ticket information please call 323.466.FILM.

The ADG Film Society, established in 1998, gives all who attend the unique opportunity to take a closer look at the process of designing feature films and television programs through first person accounts of the Production Designers and Art Directors who created them or through those closely associated. Co-chairs of the Film Society are ADG President Tom Walsh and John Muto.

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