The Business Card
Since my early years in the film business I’ve always had a business card photographed on real 70mm motion picture film.
It started in 1972 when I was working on The Concert for Bangladesh with producer/director Saul Swimmer. Saul had shot his groundbreaking documentary concert film on 16mm ECO (Ektachrome Commercial) and then took it to the best visual effects wizards to ‘blow it up’ to 65mm negative in order to release the film in widescreen 70mm with stereo sound.
And it looked and sounded spectacular.
Well, he took the effects and the blow up to the best man in the business – and that was Lynn Dunn. Linwood Dunn has always been the acknowledged wizard in old-fashioned optical effects and visual imagery.
Linwood G. Dunn (with associate Cecil Love) shoots the title card of West Side Story (1960)
Lynn ran the effects department at RKO for dozens of years in the ’30s and ‘40s, pioneering most of the kinds of effects we still use today. He designed and built his own cameras and special effects equipment as he needed, to solve a particular visual effects problem. He’s best known for filming the miniatures and creating all of the extraordinary visual effects for the original 1933 King Kong. Very famous and highly revered within the industry.
When Saul brought Bangladesh to Film Effects of Hollywood, Lynn, invented a new 70mm print format called ‘Dynavision’ which was basically a 1.85 aspect ratio (wider than the original television screen proportion ratio) and similar to the ratio that Bangladesh was since it was shot on the old Academy frame ratio of 1.33:1. What was 4 perforations deep per frame on 35mm became 8 perfs on 70mm Dynavision. A normal 70mm wide screen frame is 5 perforations deep.
So Lynn could blow up each frame – using his superior lenses that his men hand ground – one-to-one, frame for frame directly to Dynavision keeping the grain to a minimum and not lose any picture information.
While designing the titles for the film I had to conform to this new 70mm screen ratio and therefore I learned about Lynn’s new baby. I immediately thought of how cool it would be to have my business card on a piece of 70mm film in the direct proportion of Dynavision.
I designed the card, thinking that film was presented by a projected image with an incandescent light-source, and – since I designed things that were thusly projected, I was designing graphics for “incandescent illumination.” So I prepared artwork with a design image of an old silent film crew shooting a movie. I then asked Lynn to shoot about 50’ of footage and process and print it. Then I cut them up in single frame pieces and began handing them out. It was a smash.
When I completed The Concert for Bangladesh Saul’s producer came by Film Effects to see the finished product. That’s when I gave George Harrison my new 70mm card. He grinned and thought it was terrific.
In later years as I changed my credits and created The Movie Titles Company. I re-designed the card and had Lynn shoot it onto 70mm stock.
When I opened an office in New York I briefly experimented with a 35mm card but soon went back to the 70mm since it was more unique and by then I was known by my card and couldn’t let down my followers.
My latest card has rows and rows of my credits so people can get a quick feel of what I’ve been up to.
More stories and anecdotes like this can be found in my book.