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Did Westworld (1973) Start Hollywood's Relationship with Computer-Generated Imagery?

The theme of humans trying to play God by using technology to create lifelike creatures only for said creatures to get the better of them has been one that has resonated with and fascinated the public since as far back as Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein. In the early days of cinema, the lifelike monsters took on the form of robots, such as the Maschinenmensch (German for "robot" or "machine-person") from Fritz Lang's classic silent film Metropolis (1927). This character was not only one of the first robots ever portrayed on film but also one that spoke to humanity's ever-present fear of them being terrorized by machines due to their hubris in trying to control nature and others, through a science fiction narrative.


Fast-forward to 1973 and science fiction author-turned-writer-director Michael Crichton's Westworld, a sci-fi thriller featuring amusement park robots going rogue breaks new ground in the world of cinematic visual effects: early computer-generated imagery (CGI for short), as exemplified by several brief scenes shot from the Gunslinger android (played by Yul Brynner)'s perspective, which consist of several ten-second segments of pixelated footage. These effects were accomplished through a procedure called digital image processing, which dates back to 1964 when NASA launched Mariner 4 to take flyby photographs of Mars. NASA scientists used computers to convert numbers into dots, which they then assembled to create whole images. The act of utilizing digital technology as a cinematic storytelling tool within the past forty-plus years has opened up countless technological opportunities and led to some of the most breathtaking scenes in film history, which leads me to my main question: did Westworld start Hollywood's relationship with CGI?


Before we dive into this essay, here is a quick summary of the movie Westworld for context's sake. In the film, two friends, John Blaine and Peter Martin (played by James Brolin and Richard Benjamin, respectively) pay $1,000 a day to relish in seemingly consequence-free leisure at Delos, an adult-oriented theme park where guests can fight, kill, and have sex with human-like machines in three historically-themed parks: Western World, Medieval World, and Roman World. John and Peter stay in at an old west-style hotel in Western World, complete with reproductions of personalized western hats, clothes, boots, and six-shooters. During their stay, they get drunk at the saloon, engage in bar fights, sleep around at the brothel, and get repeatedly confronted by the park's Gunslinger android (Brynner), who challenges the duo to shootouts (only to lose, to their amusement). Their fun, however, takes a turn for the worse when a parkwide computer virus infects the robots, culminating in the Gunslinger outdrawing and shooting John dead, while the rest of the machines rebel against and violently kill their human guests. As he flees the Gunslinger's relentless pursuit through the different parks, Peter manages to temporarily slow the android down by luring it into an underground maintenance facility and throwing acid in its face, as well as burning it with a medieval torch in Medieval World, where it succumbs from the damage. In the end, a shell-shocked Peter sits down as Delos' slogan runs through his head with a new-found sense of irony: "Boy, have we got a vacation for you!"


According to The Guardian, Crichton's literary work "[harken] back to the fantasy adventure fiction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Edgar Wallace, but with a contemporary spin, assisted by cutting-edge technology references made accessible for the general reader." A few examples of the "cutting-edge technology" of the day included Japan's WABOT-1 from 1973 (which featured a limb control system, a vision system, and a communications platform), and lifelike figures that spoke and moved at technology conventions like Walt Disney's Audio-Animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln built for his Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln exhibit at the 1964 New York World's Fair. On a quick side note, while not a household name, Lee Daniels, an electrician, and Disney Imagineer, was the original creator of the Audio-Animatronics before Disney utilized them for The Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland, and trademarked the term Audio-Animatronics in 1964.


As fate would have it, one of Crichton's main inspirations for Westworld came to him during a visit to Disneyland when he found himself impressed by the Audio-Animatronics, specifically the ones for the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, which led him to write the film's screenplay. On another Disney-related side note, a sequel to Westworld entitled Futureworld (1976) showcased the first use of CGI in a motion picture, in the form of a three-dimensional digital version of future Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull's left hand (taken from his short film A Computer Animated Hand (1972)) as featured on several computer monitors in the film. Catmull, along with former Disney animator John Lasseter, and the financial backing of Steve Jobs, would be instrumental in the production of animated short films like Luxo Jr. (1986), the first computer-animated short film to be nominated for an Academy Award, and Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature film.


Not only is the concept of a 'theme park going wrong' remarkable, but so are the words of theoretical computer scientist Alan Turing, who once stated that numerous computing processes "can be done with one digital computer, suitably programmed for each case." However, the countless computer languages that are currently being developed represent a set of tradeoffs among concerns like efficiency, expressiveness, safety, and complexity, a sentiment shared by actor Alan Oppenheimer's character of Delos' Chief Supervisor:

"We aren't dealing with ordinary machines here. These are highly complicated pieces of equipment. Almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work."

While not directly mentioned, the robots' programming and CPUs play a significant role in that statement. A computer's CPU can run, according to Brian W. Kernighan, "blazingly fast" with a limited repertoire of basic operations. However, once the CPUs are designed to take on more advanced actions and calculate the information being fed into the machine, the more sophisticated in intelligence they will become. With the ever-increasing complexities of computer programmings, the more likely humans will fear that robots or other devices will use their artificial qualities (mechanical behavioral traits) to their advantage, thus manipulating them like in the movie Ex Machina (2014). While the film's ideas are science fiction, humanity has reached a point where big tech corporations can survey virtually everything we do, say, and know, while making billions of dollars off of them, so the possibilities are endless.


While Westworld gained a cult status among sci-fi audiences, Crichton's 1990 novel Jurassic Park, a story centered on a group of humans entering a theme park occupied by genetically recreated dinosaurs as opposed to computer-operated humans, would gain national attention and become a best seller. The novel contemplated the same ethics of replicating living creatures for one's entertainment and whether humans could control them once they develop minds of their own, which director Steven Spielberg adapted to film in 1993. Much of the critical and commercial acclaim was aimed at the film's seamless combination of computer-generated dinosaurs with practical animatronic effects. This is not to say that Westworld was completely forgotten though. Its impact on popular culture is still present in the form of television series, namely the short-lived CBS series Beyond Westworld (which ran between March 5th and March 19th, 1980), and the popular Westworld series on HBO starring Evan Rachel Wood as an android named Doleres who gains consciousness and starts a rebellion within the androids against their human guests.


In the years to come, CGI effects and their constant refinements would be instrumental in the success of future Hollywood blockbuster films like Titanic (1997), Avatar (2009), Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). To an extent, CGI has even been considered a digital substitute for makeup by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese for his movie The Irishman (2019), in which the three lead actors, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci's faces were de-aged to resemble their younger selves. There is a genuine concern that excessive usage of CGI results in the visual effects for Jurassic World (2015), the soft reboot of the Jurassic Park film franchise, which mainly favored computer-generated dinosaurs over the practical animatronics and puppetry that made the original so memorable. However, given how far CGI has come in terms of realism and visual detail, it is important to remember that NASA developed computer-generated imagery rather than Hollywood and that Westworld deserves as much credit as the film titles mentioned above.

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