TRON: A Mouse Divided

After two years of development, Steve Lisberger and Donald Kushner personally put up $300,000 dollars to assemble a demonstration package to shop Tron around to the major studios, featuring a 300-page binder of production artwork, complete script with storyboards. They also come armed with special effects test reels demonstrating the composite process and the backlit animation they would use to illuminate the characters. Warner Bros., MGM, and Columbia all pass on the project. The team’s last choice is Disney, having assumed that since the studio is the vanguard of traditional animation, they would have no interest in the experimental CGI required in Tron.

By 1981, though, Disney is in the doldrums. Corner-cutting has decimated the lush visual quality of its traditional animation work, and the studio has been involved with (through a partnership with Paramount) or spearheaded a number of underperforming, high-profile live-action films like Popeye, Dragonslayer, The Devil and Max Devlin and Watcher in the Woods. Its share of U.S. box-office proceeds has dropped precipitously to only 4%.

Although it DID have a magnificent score by John “James Bond” Barry, heard in the movie’s opening credits

Disney has also failed to make itself relevant in a post-Star Wars world with the $20 million 1979 SF misfire The Black Hole…. although the opening credits sequence does provide a peek into their future with a 75-seconds long sequence featuring a CGI-rendered, wireframe black hole, accompanied by the swirling soundtrack of John Barry. Thus, in June of 1980, do Lisberger and Kushner find a surprisingly receptive audience of executives when they haul in their bursting pre-production binder and present Disney with their unique idea about a character trapped inside a computer world, realized by experimental backlit animation and CGI. The project’s biggest booster from within Disney is probably Tom Wilhite, who at 29 years old is the youngest production head in Hollywood. He is out to change his studio’s stagnant, old-guard beliefs and sees Tron as the perfect, avant-garde project to do just that. In order to fully sell Disney execs on the idea of giving a 31-year-old writer-director with little experience in long-form film-making millions to make his movie, Lisberger has to prove he can do what he says he can do. He spends six months making tests for Disney, culminating in a short test sequence utilizing the backlit process planned for Tron. In it, wearing a leotard and pieces of hockey gear, former national Frisbee champion Sam Schatz plays a character who escapes from a jail and de-rezzes a guard with a light disc. It is shot against a white background, with the backlighting effects applied in post-production. The guards in the short film wear costumes left over from The Black Hole.

The $50,000, 2-min film, combined into a 5-minute sizzle reel featuring various pieces of concept art, backlighting special effects tests and demo reels from the various CGI effects houses like Triple-I, helps Wilhite to convince Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law, and Disney CEO, to greenlight the project.  Lisberger will have an anvil hanging over his head during production, however: a looming director’s strike puts time pressure on the production and leaves little leeway for script changes.

Brilliant Visions of TRON

Tron has a production budget that would ultimately equal $17 million, with between $4 million of that going towards the creation of the computer generated effects. $6 million is further earmarked for the more prevalent, non-CGI SFX budget, including cell animation work, backlighting and matte effects. Pre-production work at Disney takes nearly a year, from June of 1980 to April 1981. Brought on-board early to help create the vision that all this time and money will bring to life are Syd Mead and Jean “Moebius” Giraud, as conceptual artists. Mead had previously worked as a “futurist” on such films as Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Blade Runner (1982), with the flying Spinner cars from the latter being a particularly famous piece of his from that film.

Moebius is a renowned French illustrator, having founded the highly influential adult comics anthology magazine Métal Hurlant in 1974, along with fellow artist Philippe Druillet, and Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Bernard Farkas. An American version of the magazine began publication as Heavy Metal in 1977, and a movie inspired by its material released in 1981.

Not only would Moebius contribute to the visual look of the costumes and design the solar sailer in Tron, but he also ends up re-doing all the storyboards for the film. Mead designs the film’s hardware, such as the tanks, lightcycles and Sark’s carrier. In early 1981 he also designs the future-cool Tron title font. Often, the work of the two visualists overlaps, such as when Mead steps in to help Moebius with the costume design by recommending they apply a circuit board look to the suits. It is the job of another member of the art team, commercial artist and colourist Peter Lloyd, to take the designs of Moebius and Mead and airbrush them into a finished product. As a matte artist, Lloyd also creates the expansive backgrounds and environments that the actors inhabit. A young animator at Disney by the name of Tim Burton also does some uncredited work on the film.

Corralling CGI Talent for TRON

Lisberger assembles his technical team to make Tron a visual reality, first bringing in Richard Taylor II from Culver City, CA-based CGI effects house Information International, Inc. (Triple-I) to co-direct the CGI portions of the film. This is Lisberger’s first stop because he has been hanging around the Triple-I offices for ages, keeping an eye on the direction of computer animation and continually showing the gang there his ever-growing binder of concept art he hoped one day to turn into on-screen CGI. He has also been adding personality aspects of the computer nerds he interacts with there to characters in his script, as well as adding bits of their technical jargon. Richard Taylor of Triple-I has left his mark on the advertising world with a series of startling Levi’s and 7-Up television commercials using computer graphics. He is matched with Harrison Ellenshaw, the other co-director of special effects, a respected VFX technician at Disney who had also supervised the matte painting on Star Wars over at Fox. He was also on the Oscar-winning visual effects team for The Empire Strikes Back. Ellenshaw provides matte work in Tron as well, including expanding a cubicle farm at Encom to immense proportions.

Also involved in this aspect of the film is Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees, each wielding the unique credit of Computer Image Choreographer. Kroyer himself would return to the world of video games when he directs Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure in 1994 , a video game for Activision spawned from David Crane’s classic Pitfall! for the Atari VCS. 53 minutes of Tron takes place within the electronic world, and 15 minutes of that uses CGI action. This, in addition to 200 other scenes with actors inside computer generated surroundings. For these composited sequences, four key reference light sources or “witness points” are placed on-set, used by the computer to match viewpoints, lens focal lengths and perspective movements.  All this CGI work is divided between four leading companies specializing in computer effects. The lightcycles, flying recognizer, and tanks are created by MAGi. Sark’s carrier, the solar sailer and the menacing MCP are done by Triple-I. CLU/Flynn’s companion Bit, a character whose design goes through several iterations and who’s role in the film is drastically cut due to time pressures in making a summer 1982 release, is made by Digital Effects in NYC. They also handle the Tron creation sequence that opens the film. The transition of Flynn into the computer world is done by Robert Abel and Associates in L.A..

Game Players of TRON

When Jeff Bridges is approached to play Flynn, he jumps at the chance to do something far out and different. Boxleitner, however, is a tougher nut to crack. He receives the script for Tron while portraying legendary law man Wyatt Earp in the NBC TV movie western I Married Wyatt Earp, out in the wilds near Tucson, Arizona. Sitting on a horse between takes, reading a script about RAM and Recognizers and computerized hackers sucked into the digital world, he isn’t sure what to make of it all. After returning to California, he gets another call about the movie, gives the script another look, and then goes in to talk to Lisberger about the role. Seeing the storyboards and talking to Richard Taylor about how the effects would work convinces Boxleitner to sign on, along with the fact that Jeff Bridges has already joined the project. Peter O’Toole is initially tapped to play the evil Sark, although he originally lobbies Lisberger for the role of Tron, holding a meeting with Lisberger at the Beverly Hills Hotel and leaping from furniture in the room to prove he has the athleticism for the part. Reluctantly accepting to play the villain, O’Toole is aghast when he arrives at Disney, looking for the sets and expecting to see the tanks and lightcycles being built, and is told that everything is going to be created by computers. He walks, and David Warner is brought in to replace him as Sark/Dillinger/MCP.

Cindy Morgan comes to Tron having played Lacey Underall in the Bill Murray/Chevy Chase raunchy comedy Caddyshack, her character’s name revealing the sex kitten-ish nature of the role. In contrast, Morgan gives her roles of Lora/Yori in Tron an aura of innocence, naive to the complicated world of Users. Yori does exhibit some of her alter-ego’s smarts, however. Character actor Barnard Hughes as Encom founder Dr. Walter Gibbs/I/O gatekeeper Dumont and Dan Shor as fellow on-the-run actuarial program Ram fill out the major cast.

With the spandexed troops assembled, principle live-action photography on Tron begins on April 20, 1981 and continues through to early July. Lisberger has blown out his early obsession with Atari’s PONG into various light-disc battles contained in the movie, in a kind of electronic jai alai where competitors hurl a glowing disc at each other with the risk of derezzment ever-present. To facilitate these scenes, Sam Schatz returns to coach Boxleitner and other primary actors in frisbee throwing. In order to give the actors a further sense of the world they will exist in, Lisberger takes the unusual step of littering the soundstage with arcade games. Pac-Man, Asteroids, Missile Command, Space Invaders, Centipede and Scramble all vying for the cast’s attention, with Bridges showing the most proficiency at them, and is also the hardest to tear away from when it’s time to shoot a scene. Bridges had suffered the same obsession with video game industry grand-daddy PONG as Lisberger had; he and co-star Harry Dean Stanton had ended up at a local bar playing the game nearly every night while filming Rancho Deluxe in 1975, with the game ending up having a prominent role in a scene in the movie between the two men. Always a fan of computers rolling out a 3-D world for people to travel through, director Lisberger has his own personal favourite game, in the form of Sega’s graphically startling isometric flight-shooter Zaxxon.

The costumes in Tron are full body spandex suits with black lines drawn onto them with a Sharpie marker to form circuit patterns, along with modified hockey helmets. While most of the cast find them revealing, Morgan goes the extra step of disappearing from the set for a day, in order to lose five pounds to more better fit into the outfit. The cast is also encouraged to wear colourful clothes to the set, to compensate for the all-black studio they must act in, onto which the backgrounds would be added by both artists and computers. Shooting with all this live-action talent only takes about three months, by far the least amount of work in Tron. The vast bulk of time in making the movie will be taken up realizing its dazzling visual look.