---
name: "Douglas Trumbull"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/douglas-trumbull"
roles: ["Producer","Director"]
born: "8 April 1942"
died: "7 February 2022"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 6
average_as: "producer"
average_over: 0
updated: "2026-09-21T03:22:45.155034+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Douglas Trumbull

Producer and director. Born 8 April 1942 in Los Angeles, California, USA. Died 7 February 2022.

## Details

- **Work:** Producer, Director
- **Born:** 8 April 1942, Los Angeles, California, USA
- **Died:** 7 February 2022
- **Active:** 1968–2011
- **Also known as:** Douglas Hunt Trumbull
- **Titles on Fi1m:** 6: 1 directing, 5 crew
- **Academy Awards:** 3 Oscar nominations
- **Fi1m score by decade:** 1960s 92 (1), 1970s 75 (3), 1980s 85 (1), 2010s 84 (1)
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Trumbull, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q599657, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0874320/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/12112

## Fi1m on Douglas Trumbull

> Trumbull built the future from things you could photograph: smoke, projections, miniatures moved an inch at a time, and it is why his spaceships look heavy. As a director he was sincere to the point of embarrassment, and *Silent Running* is the better for it.

Two drones sit at a table on a spaceship and one of them considers its poker hand. It is a joke, and it is also a demonstration. Douglas Trumbull put actors inside the casings, so Huey and Dewey rock slightly when they walk and turn their heads a fraction late, as if thinking, and he had them photographed in flat working light so that nothing about them looked like a trick. That was the habit of his working life. He built the thing, then he pointed a camera at it.

He started in the mid-1960s at Graphic Films in Los Angeles, drawing for NASA and the Air Force, and went to *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968) to make screen graphics. He left it having supervised the Stargate sequence, shot with a slit-scan technique he pioneered. He then made one film of his own, *Silent Running* (1972), as director and producer, and spent most of the next decade back on the effects floor: *The Andromeda Strain* (1971), *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* (1977), *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979), for which he delivered a great many complex shots against a deadline that had the film in trouble, and *Blade Runner* (1982). He directed once more, *Brainstorm* (1983), then gave most of his time to large-format and simulator work, including *Back to the Future: The Ride*, before coming back for *The Tree of Life* (2011).

The strength is weight. His freighters in *Silent Running* are long, boxy things hung with domes like lanterns, and they pass Saturn's rings slowly enough that you believe in the mass, because the model existed and the camera moved past it. The Los Angeles of *Blade Runner* is smoke, projections and miniatures, and the smoke is what makes you believe in it. With Richard Yuricich, who worked beside him on three films, he refined the motion-control photography that gave Spielberg the UFOs and the mothership in *Close Encounters*. Robert Wise used him twice. Directors who hired Trumbull got a cinematographer for the parts of the film that did not exist yet.

As a director he is harder to defend and easier to like. *Silent Running* is a fable about a man who loves trees more than people, and Bruce Dern will not stop talking; the speeches are shrill and the songs are worse. We laughed at the poker game, and then Trumbull cut to Dern eating alone at a long mess table and we stopped, because the company he had made for himself was company and it was not enough. That cut is direction, not effects, and it is why we scored the film higher than its script deserves. *Brainstorm* tried an experimental large-format camera on the subject of virtual reality, and we have not reviewed it.

He said in 1978, "I'm in the area of creating experiences that are beyond the realm of physical reality." The freighter passing Saturn is the case for that. The rabbit in the grass under the dome is the case against it, and it is the shot we think of first.

## Biography

Douglas Trumbull (1942–2022) was an American film director and visual effects supervisor. Born in Los Angeles, he began his career working on special photographic effects for *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968).

Trumbull directed and produced *Silent Running* (1972), his feature directorial debut. He supervised visual effects on *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* (1977), *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979) and *Blade Runner* (1982). He also directed *Brainstorm* (1983). His father, Donald Trumbull, had worked in visual effects on *The Wizard of Oz* (1939).

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com, bfi.org.uk, nytimes.com.*

## On Fi1m (6)

### Directed (1)

- *Silent Running* (1972), Fi1m 76, Producer, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/silent-running.md)

### Crew (5)

- *The Tree of Life* (2011), Fi1m 84, Visual Effects — [page](https://film.one/film/the-tree-of-life.md)
- *Blade Runner* (1982), Fi1m 85, Visual Effects — [page](https://film.one/film/blade-runner.md)
- *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979), Fi1m 64, Visual Effects — [page](https://film.one/film/star-trek-the-motion-picture.md)
- *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* (1977), Fi1m 85, Visual Effects Supervisor — [page](https://film.one/film/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind.md)
- *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968), Fi1m 92, Visual Effects Supervisor, Visual Effects — [page](https://film.one/film/2001-a-space-odyssey.md)

## Complete filmography (22)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *The Alien Perspective* (2025), Actor
- *Splice Here: A Projected Odyssey* (2022), Actor
- *The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot* (2019), Executive Producer
- *UFOTOG* (2014), Director, Writer
- *C 299,792 km/s* (2013), Thanks
- *The Tree of Life* (2011), Visual Effects — Fi1m 84, [page](https://film.one/film/the-tree-of-life.md)
- *2001: FX and Early Conceptual Artwork* (2007), Actor
- *In Search of the Obelisk* (1993), Director
- *Back to the Future: The Ride* (1992), Director
- *Brainstorm* (1983), Director, Producer
- *New Magic* (1983), Director
- *Blade Runner* (1982), Visual Effects — Fi1m 85, [page](https://film.one/film/blade-runner.md)
- *Star Trek: The Motion Picture* (1979), Visual Effects — Fi1m 64, [page](https://film.one/film/star-trek-the-motion-picture.md)
- *Night of Dreams* (1978), Director
- *Close Encounters of the Third Kind* (1977), Visual Effects Supervisor — Fi1m 85, [page](https://film.one/film/close-encounters-of-the-third-kind.md)
- *The Starlost* (1973), series, Executive Producer
- *Silent Running* (1972), Director, Producer — Fi1m 76, [page](https://film.one/film/silent-running.md)
- *The Andromeda Strain* (1971), Visual Effects
- *Candy* (1968), Visual Effects
- *2001: A Space Odyssey* (1968), Visual Effects, Visual Effects Supervisor — Fi1m 92, [page](https://film.one/film/2001-a-space-odyssey.md)
- *To the Moon and Beyond* (1964), Visual Effects
- *To Dream Of Roses*, Director

## Gallery

- ![Special effects artist en:Douglas Trumbull, famous for his works on films such as Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (2007)](https://film.one/media/person/289214/gallery-a9f00292796b.jpg) Special effects artist en:Douglas Trumbull, famous for his works on films such as Star Trek: The Motion Picture. (2007) — Jorge Ferrer from Zaragoza, España, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Douglas_Trumbull_2007.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Douglas Trumbull](https://film.one/media/person/289214/gallery-c409a25f1d41.jpg) Douglas Trumbull — Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/27/Douglas_Trumbull_FMX_2012.jpg/1280px-Douglas_Trumbull_FMX_2012.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)
- ![Douglas Trumbull (right) on a panel discussion with Ray Feeney (left) and Bill Desowitz at FMX 2012. (Haus der Wirtschaft, Stuttgart, Germany)](https://film.one/media/person/289214/gallery-a9a624ec7f33.jpg) Douglas Trumbull (right) on a panel discussion with Ray Feeney (left) and Bill Desowitz at FMX 2012. (Haus der Wirtschaft, Stuttgart, Germany) — Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e7/Douglas_Trumbull_Ray_Feeney_FMX_2012.jpg/1280px-Douglas_Trumbull_Ray_Feeney_FMX_2012.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail)

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 3 nominated

- 1983: Best Visual Effects (nominated), for *Blade Runner*
- 1980: Best Visual Effects (nominated), for *Star Trek: The Motion Picture*
- 1978: Best Visual Effects (nominated), for *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*

### Other awards — 2 won

- Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame 2010: Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame (won)
- Time Machine Award 1997: Time Machine Award (won)

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/douglas-trumbull