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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ghostwind" data-source="post: 1428031" data-attributes="member: 3060">Here's the article from the NY Times... Mr. Invisible and the Secret Mission to Hollywood</NYT_HEADLINE><NYT_BYLINE version="1.0" type=" ">[size=-1]By JOHN HODGMAN[/size]</NYT_BYLINE><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gif" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />Published: March 14, 2004<NYT_TEXT><img src="http://graphics7.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/k.gif" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" />erry Conran is not what you would call descript. He has very short, tan-colored hair, usually covered with a clean, logoless baseball cap. He is 37, somewhat baby-faced and often quiet, with a smile in the corner of his pale blue eyes that suggests he is observing you from a far-off world of his own. And while he can be genial and funny, his default setting seems to be self-deprecation to the point of self-erasure. The second thing of any note he ever said to me was ''I am basically an amorphous blob of nothing.'' The first thing was ''I'm shy.'' This was on the set of his movie ''Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.'' You might expect a little more brio from a writer-director who is making a summer blockbuster with almost unlimited creative control. Set in 1939, the movie stars Jude Law as the daring flying ace Sky Captain, who teams up with his former flame, the intrepid reporter Polly Perkins, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, as they track down a mysterious mad scientist named Totenkopf. It is in part a nostalgic homage to the movies of the 30's and 40's: the hammy fisticuffs and golly-inspiring proto-technology of sci-fi cliffhangers like ''Flash Gordon'' alongside the snappy patter (and even snappier clothes) of the era's noir thrillers.  But like the old serials it emulates, ''Sky Captain'' is mainly preoccupied with the strange promises of the future. The astonishing things you will see in the world of tomorrow include: an immense, silvery zeppelin docking at the Empire State Building; an elephant that fits in the palm of your hand; a troop of giant robots marching down Sixth Avenue and the carpet at Radio City Music Hall. None of these things actually exist, though. Conran has not constructed a single set or miniature. Rather, they are computer images, built and animated in a virtual 3-D environment, or stitched together from photographs, which are then draped around the flesh-and-blood actors, who have been shot separately on an empty set in front of a blank ''blue-screen'' background, along with those few minimal props with which they actually interact (a ray gun, a robot blueprint, a bottle of milk of magnesia). The film, in other words, is one long special effect with Jude-Law-size holes in it. ''The goal was to make a live-action film, but to use conventions of traditional animation,'' Conran said. The reason? ''First and foremost, to do it cheaper.'' It's a model that would appeal to anyone who, like Conran, does not seem entirely comfortable spending other people's money; to anyone who might dream of shooting in Nepal or Paris (or in the 1930's) but doesn't have the means to get there; to anyone who is shy. For Conran, the question, as he put it, was ''Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?'' And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it. At first, he was a mystery. Word of ''Sky Captain'' began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring -- extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn't touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ''Risky Business'' and directing ''Fried Green Tomatoes'' but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don't think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan. Conran grew up in Flint, Mich., in a pre-cable, pre-VCR period when the Sunday afternoon television crackled with old movies. Kerry and his older brother, Kevin, made capes out of towels and pretended to be superheroes. They steeped themselves in science fiction serials and film noir and the Universal monster movies. After high school, Conran moved to Los Angeles to attend the CalArts live-action filmmaking program, but he mainly hung around with the animators, because they were doing what he wanted to do: they were building worlds. Even as students, they could create anything, go anywhere. ''If you wanted something gigantic,'' he said, ''they could do it. Just draw it.'' --to be continued below...</blockquote>

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