Douglas Trumbull, Hollywood Effects Legend Who Worked On 2001, Blade Runner, and Star Trek, Dies at 79

Hollywood special effects legend Douglas Trumbull has died. He was 79 years old. He left his mark on cinema several times over as an effects supervisor on such films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and The Tree of Life. He was also a director, helming the films Silent Running and Brainstorm. Trumbull’s daughter Amy confirmed the news via Facebook, saying his death came after a cancer diagnosis, brain tumor, and stroke. 

“My sister Andromed and I got to see him on Saturday and tell him that he love him and we got to tell him to enjoy and embrace his journey into the Great Beyond,” she wrote.

Born in Los Angeles, Trumbull had an affection for alien movies as a child and soon began to show a talent for building things. His career in filmmaking began in the 1960s, and his work continued through 2018 when he executive produced and worked on special effects for the movies The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot. That same year, the documentary Trumball Land was released, offering a comprehensive look at Trumball’s life and work. He earned Academy Award nominations for his visual effects work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Blade Runner. He also earned several honors and awards from visual effects organizations during his career.

Working on Star Trek: The Motion Picture under strict deadlines exhausted Trumball to the point that he entered the hospital after completing the film. ComicBook.com spoke to Trumball in 2019 around the movie’s 40th anniversary. With distance, he seemed to have come gained a greater appreciation for the film despite the stresses it put on him.

“I feel now that I’m more happy with the picture than I ever was,” he said. “And I’m beginning to understand the film better than I did at the time because I’ve had to rewatch it, getting ready for interviews, and I had to kind of brief myself getting ready for the Star Trek convention last month in Las Vegas. A couple of things happened to me, about not just the film but the whole Star Trek universe and the Trekkies, as they call them, the whole phenomenon of Star Trek as a whole. It’s a profoundly important kind of cultural event of some kind that I – it’s hard for me to describe. I’m not a writer, but people who love Star Trek are intrinsically very sweet and very thoughtful and very much looking forward optimistically to the future.

“I just think it’s just so charming and so sweet and so endearing. Being in an elevator at a hotel with a Klingon and a star trooper or whatever you want to call them is really fabulous. I just have nothing but good things to say about it. In the days that I was coming off 2001, as I was saying, I was kind of arrogant about what I thought science fiction should be or could be. Now I realize that Star Trek really is bigger than I thought it was at the time.”