Bruce Logan, the special effects pioneer and cinematographer whose credits include Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and blowing up the Death Star in Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope, has died. He was 78.
Logan died April 10 in Los Angeles after a short illness, his wife, Mariana Campos-Logan, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In an Instagram post, Logan’s daughter, Mary Grace Logan, paid tribute to her father: “Before CGI ruled the screen, there were visionaries who lit the future by hand. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Tron, my dad didn’t just work on movies — he made magic. A rebel with a camera, a pioneer with a story, and my personal hero.”
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During a five-decade career, starting in Britain and then in Hollywood, Logan worked with such directors as Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Robert Wise, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, George Lucas, Jonathan Demme, Joel Schumacher and Terry Gilliam.
He was born on May 15, 1946, in Bushey Heath, England, and educated at Merchant Taylor’s Guild School. Having never gone directly to film school, Logan learned much from his dad, Campbell Logan, a BBC classical drama director.
“My father told me that every frame of a film should be a perfect picture. He told me how to do my first special effects — a split-screen. He is responsible for all my knowledge of film history and for introducing me to the films of all the great directors of the day, including Stanley Kubrick,” Logan recalled in a 2014 Star Wars tribute profile.
As a self-taught animator, Logan from age 14 began making animated films, which in time led him into visual effects. At 19, he received his first screen credit when he was hired by Kubrick to work for more than two years under Douglas Trumbull — the legendary film director and VFX supervisor — on visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for MGM.
In a 2020 profile by the Los Angeles Post Production Group, Logan recalled the baptism of fire he faced working alongside Trumbull to create visual effects of technical exactitude demanded by Kubrick, who designed and directed all the special photographic effects.
“I was hired by Douglas Trumbull and he had the run of the studio,” he said. “So as his assistant I got to do live action, miniatures as well as animation, which I had been teaching myself since I was 12, and then doing professionally for three years. Preparation met opportunity, and there I was working for the director I idolized. It was trial by fire in the hot seat defending my work in dailies with Stanley scrutinizing my footage for two and a half years. Phew!” The film, of course, was about space exploration and man’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life.
Trumbull also hired Logan to work on Michelangelo Antonioni’sZabriskie Point (1968).His other memorable eye-filling visual effects work, and more specifically miniature explosions, included blowing up the Death Star for Luke Skywalker in Star Wars Episode IV — A New Hope (1977) for Lucas. The challenge was creating an explosion to simulate what would happen in zero gravity space, and doing so from a Los Angeles soundstage back on Earth.
In a 2019 interview with the Manhattan Edit Workshop, Logan recounted having to shoot with high-speed cameras directly upward at the explosion overhead, with only a plank of wood with a hole cut out for the lens to serve as protection for the camera crew — one of whom held a fire extinguisher.
The multilayer bomb explosion itself was caused by a black powder and silt bag and yet another bag filled with napalm. “I do remember wiping some burning napalm off one of my arm after one of the explosions while walking away. Simpler days,” Logan recalled of a bygone Hollywood.
His work on VFX eventually led to a celebrated career as a cinematographer. Logan arrived in Los Angeles in 1968, and his special effects photography and DOP credits included Big Bad Mama (1974), Jackson County Jail (1976),I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), Airplane! (1980), The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), Firefox (1982) and High Road to China (1983).
A major milestone for Logan came when he served as the cinematographer on Disney Studio’s Tron, (1982), director Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi actionerthat was among the first Hollywood films to use computer-generated animation in its creative process. In a 2019 interview for ProductionHUB, he recalled how the computer after Tron and Jurassic Park slowly, yet surely, became a key tool for creating visual effects.
“Well, clearly the biggest change in the industry has been the addition of the computer as a tool for filmmaking,” he said. “I have to say that the basic elements of film are unchanged for over a century now. A story, an actor, a camera and a pair ofscissors. What the computer has done for those elements is todemocratize them and made all the filmmakingprocessesaccessible to everyone.”
In 1986, he directed the prison action filmVendetta and in 1990 the second music video for Madonna’s Borderline.
He also is survived by another child, Campbell.
