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I find this little phone and I cold call Stanley Kubrick and I say,

I've been working on these drawings and I want a job.

And he said, okay.

This was Douglas Trumbull, as quoted in a 2005 interview with Sean Axemaker, explaining

how a bold and naive ask led to his role creating special photographic effects for the film 2001,

A Space Odyssey.

Trumbull was still in his early 20s when he relocated from

Los Angeles to London to work on Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece, in which he oversaw the now

legendary psychedelic Stargate sequence, among other set pieces. Trumbull, himself the son of an

effects artist, turned to aerospace engineer, amassed a staggering set of VFX credits over a four-decade career,

including Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner,

and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Trumbull would also direct movies of his own,

though his most widely seen directing credit may have been another collaboration with Spielberg,

a motion simulator called

Back to the Future, The Ride. The interactive version of Zemeckas' time travel franchise opened

at Universal Studios, Florida and Hollywood in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and became a beloved

attraction among theme park enthusiasts. The neighboring park grounds also house the similarly

adored, though a bit of a non-sequitur, Doc Brown's fancy fried chicken, named for the film's

Einstein-coded inventor, played by Christopher Lloyd. However, in 2008, in the aftermath of the

...