MOVIES : The New Beastmasters’ Monsters : Sure, there have been lots of dinosaur movies, but new technologies used in ‘Jurassic Park’ will bring some <i> really </i> realistic crunchers and munchers to the screen

It had pretty much been all downhill for dinosaur movies since “The Lost World” in 1925 and “King Kong” in 1933. If the mammoth creatures of prehistory could have survived to see the indignity of their portrayal as overgrown lizards in clunker epics like “One Million B.C.” and “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” they most likely would’ve gone extinct just from shame.

So, to Mesozoic movie buffs, “Jurassic Park” has loomed as the species’ filmic salvation. But this being a Steven Spielberg project, with all the attendant kids’ marketing that entails, some have fretted that the rampaging reptiles of Michael Crichton’s novel might turned out to be, well, adorable .

Not to worry, though: With a few friendly exceptions, the dinosaurs of “Jurassic Park” are carnivores. Of the terrorizing sort that would eat that little wuss Barney for breakfast and spit his purple entrails out in your children’s quivering laps.

After decades of looking jerky and harmless, how did movie dinosaurs suddenly get so scary? Through evolution, of course--of two separate technologies combined here for an huge step forward in believable effects:

* Industrial Light and Magic has, for the first time, been able to use computer graphics to create completely digital animation of animals that looks remarkably like live-action photography.

* And the Stan Winston Studio has taken live-action, on-set “puppetry” literally to new heights with full-scale, mechanized, lifelike dinosaur models, including a 40-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex .

“There’s a minimum of cute,” promises Phil Tippett, the dinosaur supervisor who worked with both the ILM and Winston studios in charting the beasts’ menacing movements. “We really tried to stay in the realm of animal behavior, not having them do any overt anthropomorphic things.”

Master creature creator Winston--whose studio designed all the film’s reptiles in addition to constructing some of them--is more to the point: “These dinosaurs are real dinosaurs ,” he crows, dispensing with understatement. “These are dinosaurs that natural history museums would wish they had under their roofs, because they’re probably the most accurate representations you’ve ever seen.”

Winston’s boast may or may not be found to be paleontologically correct by the scientific community. But Hollywood certainly already takes him seriously, as will the mothers of a lot of toddlers this weekend. The special effects in “Jurassic Park,” which opens Friday, go well beyond anything that’s been done in a motion picture before, combining the different effects crafts to create a variety of smooth, quick-moving beasts that look both healthily naturalistic and scarily stylized.

These two techniques--one full-sized, one byte-sized--have been combined and replace the stop-motion animation that has traditionally been used in monster movies to frequently stunning effect. It didn’t hurt that the four dinosaur effects supervisors--Winston, Tippett, Dennis Muren and Michael Lantieri--and their crews met with paleontologists, studied videos of wild animals ad nauseum and even went to mime school to learn how to make the dinosaurs look convincingly agile and voracious.

Recalls Tippett: “Even though Spielberg knew that the context of the whole idea was that the dinosaurs eat the people, that it was gonna be a monster movie on some level, he didn’t want to let the whole thing slide into that quagmire. The things had to appear like real animals and have background behavioral attributes that were reasonable and not just attack, attack, attack . So for every shot we really tried to come up with some action that was representative of some social interaction or previous set of behavioral patterns that happened a few hundred million years ago that the dinosaurs still retained.”

Mostly, though, what’s been deposited in the dinosaurs’ collective unconscious from eons of history here are the basic instincts of hunger or extreme irritation at humanoid figures. As the paleontologist played by Sam Neill haltingly explains to a pair of frightened children midway through the terror, these non-herbivore colossi “just . . . do what they do,” which is to say, they hunt. Duck and cover, kids.

Making the audience nervously identify with the film’s endangered human prey was no simple task. The plot--kind of an update of Crichton’s “Westworld,” with anarchic T. rexes and raging velociraptors substituting for malfunctioning robots--has scientists and other visitors trapped in a yet-to-open island park designed to exhibit newly bred dinosaurs.

What wasn’t used at all in “Jurassic Park” was the kind of classic frame-by-frame model technology pioneered by Willis O’Brien with “Lost World” and “Kong” and continued on by Ray Harryhausen and Jim Danforth in such ‘60s matinee staples as “Valley of the Gwangi” and “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.” (Never mind those even lower-budgeted B-movies that magnified lizards or iguanas with scary fins glued onto their backs. See Page 68.)

Say goodby to those extinct rubber models and hello to the “morphing” era.

“There are no miniature dinosaurs in this movie,” declares Winston flatly, in case there’s any speculation. “There is no stop-motion animation in this movie.”

Somewhere, presumably in some hangar-sized closet in his San Fernando Valley effects studio, Winston has tucked away the 40-foot T. rex that does a good bit of the bullying in the movie. Being a big believer in the magician not giving the illusion away, Winston isn’t yet letting any nosy outsiders see this mechanical monster or any of the other full-size, live-action dinosaurs his company created (although a tour of his wax-museum-like facility does offer glimpses of such familiar past successes as the Terminator, the Predator, the Penguin and the queen from “Aliens”).

You’ll see that hefty dinosaur and the rest of Winston’s work in the movie, of course. But he and his collaborators are banking on the assumption that you won’t be able to distinguish at all between the live-action magic his unit achieved on the set and the computer-animated magic the ILM unit headed by Dennis Muren achieved in post-production.

“It is a combination of two technologies, each of which is a motion picture first,” says Winston, who talks in the grandiose terms of an old-time epic movie producer, along with a good dose of the giddy sense of wonder of his pal Spielberg. “And the combination of these technologies creates an illusion that . . . in fact does not allow you as an audience to be aware of any technology. There’s no way you could look at this film and say--as you have in the past--’It was wonderful, but I was aware that it was stop-motion animation,’ or ‘It was a big mechanical hand’ like in ‘King Kong.’

“This isn’t a movie where you’re going to be impressed by special effects--they’re characters. We did what Hammond (the Richard Attenborough character) wanted to do,” he enthuses. “We’ve brought them back to life.”

But what will cynical scientific types think of the finished product? “Oh, they’re gonna just be knocked out by it,” promises Tippett, who attends a lot of paleontology conventions in his spare time. “All of Stan Winston’s dinosaurs are very meticulously crafted from over 200 million years of evolutionary development. Stan put all the pivot points for all the bones in the right joints. And starting with that as the basis, you begin to get a very good idea about how these things really could move through space once you’ve assigned them their proper weight and musculature and skin structure.”

Not everyone in the serious research community is wholeheartedly jumping on the “Jurassic Park” bandwagon. The well-respected paleontologist Jack Horner, on whom the Sam Neill character was reportedly based, served as a consultant on the film and has given it his robust endorsement. But Horner’s co-author on two books about the T. rex, Don Lessem, has penned an article in the July issue of Omni magazine that--while generally complimentary to the book and script--points up dozens of possible fallacies or liberties taken with the individual dinosaur types.

Says Winston: “We tried very hard to be accurate and to only take any dramatic license where it was fine. Because there is, for instance, no accurate knowledge of exactly what is the skin texture and coloring. We know what the bone structures are, but it’s all hypothetical how they looked, so we had to use our own judgment in coming up with a lot of things, and it really comes back to your instincts until you finally go yes, that feels right.”

Spielberg bought the movie rights to Crichton’s novel about three years ago, before it was published. The director sent it along at that time in galley form to Tippett, who thought it was “a terrific genre piece” that would nonetheless need some tweaking for the screen.

“Accuracy-wise, it was interesting in that (Crichton) certainly based a lot of the characters and information on recent paleontological information,” Tippett says. “But there were some things when it came to the action sequences that were complete fabrications we had to alter to make it seem a lot more believable. In the book, I think, the tyrannosaur picks up a car and throws it into a tree, and he had him doing some Godzilla things that he can’t do. A car’s too big and too heavy. So we would come up with different kinds of actions, things that the tyrannosaur could do with a car that were more plausible or more keeping with a tyrannosaur’s character.”

What is a T. rex’s “motivation” for auto demolition, though? Blind rage? Rodan envy? Fears that Jurassic Park will get smog-choked like Yosemite?

Mostly it’s just the fact that a confused, terrified child shines a flashlight in its eyes (which promptly dilate). The T. rex isn’t one of the brighter behemoths around the park.

“We had to make sure each of our sequences was true to the character of the dinosaur,” says Dennis Muren, the senior effects supervisor at ILM, the Marin County visual effects studio founded by George Lucas. His company was assigned to do four dinosaur sequences completely with CGI (computer graphics imagery), including a stampede scene. Some other sequences mix and match his company’s CGI animation with Winston’s looming creatures, though no one will admit which were which.

“The tyrannosaurus has got this massive head, and its whole body is really there just to propel the head. When you think about it, it’s like what they said about ‘Jaws’--it’s an eating machine. . . . Whereas the raptors, the smaller guys, they’re a little different. They’re a little smarter and think about what they’re gonna do and are cagey in their actions, and that also comes through in the performance.

“The great thing about CGI now is you can perform . We’ve got shots that are 25 seconds long, to show a performance, with no cuts. And part of the reality of a performance is to be able to do a shot without a cut, and that’s one of the things we were really pushing for on this, to see what that animal’s like in an extended shot.”

Muren got his wish. One scene has an overhead angle in which a girl tries to climb out of the reach of a velociraptor that’s fallen and can’t get up. In a single shot, we see the dinosaur flail on the floor, get back on its feet and leap up toward the camera.

ILM was able to produce these breakthroughs as a result of having experimented with the new technology over the course of three significant science-fiction movies: “The Abyss,” with its humanoid-emulating alien water spout; “Terminator 2,” with bad cop Robert Patrick as the guy who melts into and out of the floor, the door and anything else in sight; and “Death Becomes Her,” last year’s broken-neck, ulcerated-stomach comedy.

“We did something like this in ‘T2’ and ‘The Abyss’ before that, but they were never completely living animals,” says Muren, who won two of his seven visual-effects Oscars for those films. “But this is 10 times harder than ‘T2’ because you’re not making a chrome, shape-changing sort of thing that’s indefinable. Even though you’re making something that people haven’t seen before, they certainly know how big animals look in the real world and how their skin needs to move over the muscles and bones and all that.

“We hit a stumbling block about four years ago in special effects, and we couldn’t get past it--and it was the real world. It was the density of wood and the speed of gravity and things falling, and how fast cameras are able to run and how precise the optical printers can be. And we’d kind of been there for a while and were going nowhere. I didn’t know for sure if we could pull this off with computer graphics. We would’ve failed if they looked like rubber dinosaurs or metal or wooden dinosaurs. But what we’ve got now is a new beginning--a renaissance of visual effects.”

Fortunately for Spielberg, he had the foresight to start assembling the “Jurassic Park” team for pre-production three years ago, before he went off to do “Hook” first. During the time that elapsed before shooting actually got under way, ILM was able to perfect its technology.

Or maybe not. “You know, I haven’t hit the wall on this,” offers Muren (who, according to Cinefantastique magazine, has “presided over practically every major effects innovation in the last 15 years”).

Of CGI technology, Muren says, “We’re limited right now only by the artists’ imaginations. It seems like we can do just about anything. The big thing that a lot of the folks here want, of course, is to do a person--which I’m not personally excited about so much yet, though maybe I could be. But there’s just something in people to want to be able to do a version of themselves. I think that’s gonna happen, and it’ll probably happen here, sooner rather than later.”

Will we someday see entire movies made starring lifelike computer humanoids? Probably, though Muren cautions that nothing will ever replace real actors in audience’s hearts. Take heart, thespians--despite ILM’s best advances, chances are you won’t become extinct and be relegated to an island 150 million years from now called Histrionic Park.