Behind the Magic of Jurassic Park

By RICHARD CORLISS

All the books said dinosaurs had a poor sense of smell, but this one seemed to do just fine. Anyway, what did books know? Here was the real thing.

Coming toward him.

-- Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

At the boundary between science and science fiction -- in that twilight area where the imaginative sleuthing of paleontology meets the storytelling craft of filmmaking -- lies Jurassic Park. The technicians working with director Steven Spielberg on the film version of Michael Crichton's best seller spared no effort or expense to make the story's dinosaurs as accurate as current knowledge permitted. Dinosaur fans from youth, they cared about getting it right. But on a movie screen, footnotes are not allowed. "We were trying to be credible," co-producer Kathleen Kennedy says. "But we were also making a movie."

So they took a little artistic license. Velociraptor, as described in the literature and in Crichton's novel, was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villains, the Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast. "We were cutting edge," says the film's chief modelmaker, Stan Winston, with a pathfinder's pride. "After we created it, they discovered it."

On June 11, when the movie opens, audiences should discover that Jurassic Park has the most sophisticated dinosaurs a think tank of techno-wizards can produce and $65 million can buy. "There's no way a museum could afford what we did," says Winston. "We created the most accurate dinosaurs ever." Top paleontologists who consulted on the film agree. In most cases, says Colorado paleontologist Robert Bakker, "Spielberg made the aesthetic choice that real dinosaurs are more exciting than made-up dinosaurs."

In Crichton's novel, eccentric zillionaire John Hammond funds a project to clone dinosaur DNA taken from bloodsucking insects that were trapped in ancient amber to "bring them back alive, so to speak." The experiment's success goads Hammond to exploit the made-from-concentrate behemoths for profit. He hatches the dinosaurs on a Central American island and builds a theme park around them. Before the scheduled opening, a few guests -- including craggy paleontologist Alan Grant, lissome paleobotanist Ellie Sattler and Hammond's two young grandchildren -- come to Jurassic Park for a sneak preview. Then things go spectacularly wrong. The novel's first half is a controlled tram trip through this high-tech zoo, the second half a terror- filled obstacle course strewn with dinosaurs amuck: swooping pterodactyls, dilophosaurs that spit venom, a famished tyrannosaurus and a Panzer division of velociraptors, the meanest and cagiest of the menagerie.

The book and the movie, which stars Sam Neill and Laura Dern, are essentially theme-park rides -- say, EPCOT Center's Universe of Energy, the one with the Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs -- which Crichton has given a cunning tweak. The novel is also a dark musing on the hubris that can infect science and capitalism in the heady, dicey enterprise of cloning DNA. The biotechnologist thinks he is God; the businessman dreams he is Croesus.

Spielberg may have designs on both roles: he made the movie, and even donated $25,000 to the Dinosaur Society. (In return the society renamed the oldest known ankylosaur "Jurassosaurus nedegoapeferkimorum "; part of the second word is an acronym of the surnames of the film's cast.) Now he is marketing it. His outfit, Amblin Entertainment, and Universal Pictures, the film's distributor, have signed deals with more than 100 companies (including Kenner, Sega and Milton Bradley) to peddle more than 1,000 Jurassic Park products, from action figures and video games to calendars and candy. If your kids aren't dino-maniacs now, they will be, Spielberg hopes, by the time school's out.

Curators of natural history museums hope so too. They have long recognized that dinosaur watching is prime infotainment, and they are ready to exploit the want-see for Jurassic Park with ambitious exhibitions tied to the film in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, New Haven and other cities. Last month an educational poster on dinosaurs, produced by New York's American Museum of Natural History, was mailed free to 7 million schoolchildren, courtesy of McDonald's -- which will also be handing out Jurassic Park mugs at the local franchises.

But $100 million worth of marketing won't bring the movie, or the creatures, to life. That is the responsibility of the swamis of special effects -- the puppeteers, modelmakers and computer mavens -- working closely with enthusiastic experts. Phil Tippett, an animator and longtime dinosaur buff, would whisper admonitions after nearly every take: "The head would never move like that," or "The claw wouldn't extend that far." He was the chief enforcer of Spielberg's dictum: that the dinosaurs be animals, not monsters.

Also on hand was Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and Crichton's model for the book's hero -- though Horner wryly notes that Alan Grant is "better funded." He advised on every creature feature, from head (they often lost teeth) to foot (when they walked, the heel, not the toe, hit the ground first.) "They have detail inside the T. rex's mouth that no one has ever seen. It's a guess -- a best guess. And a lot of adults will be surprised that dinosaurs don't drag their tails," Horner says. "But the kids will know it's right."

This eminent dino digger was as awestruck as any Barney-balmy child when he saw modelmaker Winston's 9,000-lb. 40-ft.-long Tyrannosaurus rex model. "It was the closest I've ever been to a live dinosaur," he avers. He was standing a few feet from the resting T. rex when its head jerked up with startling speed and swung back and forth, alert and lifelike. "It came up real fast, its eyes dilated, its skin was twitching. When you see it, it doesn't take much imagination to get beyond the fantasy. I jumped about 10 feet backward!"

But the model T. was a dinosaur in another sense; it may represent a vanishing craft. "A model can never be a full, performing creature," says Mark Dippe, a visual-effects supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic. "But computer-generated creatures can run, hop, do anything." To bone up on dinosaurs, Dippe and his colleagues studied the movements of live elephants, rhinos and giraffes and watched footage of alligators tearing meat apart. Ace animator Steve Williams even kept an iguana in his office -- for research, not company.

ILM created its dinosaurs inside out: a simplified skeleton, then skin covering, then coloration, then the fine tuning with wrinkles, scales, dirt. "You see skin moving over bones and over muscles," says ILM's Dennis Muren, who directed the project. "When the brachiosaurus walks, the weight of its chest makes it swing back and forth." Dippe believes the process is so adroit that, "if we had real dinosaurs, we'd probably still do it this way. Our animals don't get tired or hungry."

Audiences will be the judge of whether Jurassic Park lives up to its makers' hopes and boasts. They will be looking not for a museum exhibit but for a good movie -- one that spurs childlike terror and wonder by fooling the eye 24 times a second. They want to be convinced that the artful fraud on the screen is real. The prehistoric creatures from The Lost World (1925), One Million B.C. (1940), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1954) dwelt in kids' nightmares, not because they were realistic -- scientists knew so much less about dinosaurs back then, and film budgets were so much smaller -- but because they were persuasive.

The folks at Jurassic Park are banking that all their expertise will evoke those age-old giggles and screams -- that scientific fact will be alchemized into sublime fakery.

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York and David S. Jackson/Bozeman