Jurassic Punk
Directed by Scott Leberecht
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour, 21 minutes
Now in select theaters, and available on demand

by Daniel Pecoraro, Staff Writer

(content warning: addiction, alcoholism)

I’ve worked at a few places run by or including someone who is brilliant (or at least seen as brilliant) but is regularly an unrepentant jerk, trying to push people’s buttons. I’m sure many MovieJawn readers have had the same experience, and know how much that can make a workplace feel like hell on earth. So I am sorry to report that Jurassic Punk, a new documentary on the career of Steve “Spaz” Williams, is a well-made 80-minute study of a genius manchild, whose presence in the film is, while necessary to the ultimate success of the project, almost too odious to bear. 

The film is a chronological view of Williams’ life and career to this point. After studying both classical animation at Sheridan College and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Industrial Light and Magic got wind of Steve’s ability to combine animation, computing, and fluid dynamics. This led him to become chief animator for the classic water-tentacle scene The Abyss (1989), . Fulfilling James Cameron’s vision of fantastic, yet also photorealistic, imagery for the scene led Williams to eight years at ILM working in “the pit,” the basement animation studio which used to be one of ILM’s recording studio. Here he worked with such contemporaries as Mark Dippé and Stefan Frangmeier, and got the ironic nickname by which he would be known throughout his career. (It should be noted that when Jurassic Punk premiered earlier this year at South by Southwest, it was entitled Spaz. I’m presuming the retitling of the film was borne in large part out of this summer’s reckoning with what is typically seen as an ableist term.) 

Here Williams burnished his reputation as an artist and as the “bad boy” of animation and visual effects (or as Dippé puts it in the film, “this macho Canadian” aesthetic). Throughout the file photos and home movies featured in the documentary Steve is typically shown either riding a motorcycle, drinking a beer, smoking a cigar, flipping off the camera and the world, or some/all of the above. We are treated to a look behind his career successes: the stunning footage of research shots done of Robert Patrick in preparation for the liquid-metal animation sequences in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (also dir. Cameron, 1991); the process behind the computer-generated T. Rex skeleton Williams developed in secret as proof-of-concept for Jurassic Park’s (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1993) effects, and the zany CG manipulations of Jim Carrey for The Mask (dir. Chuck Russell, 1994).

But to get there, we also have to sit through Steve bristling at the corporate structure of ILM and his supervisors Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett; his refusal to tone down his in-your-face demeanor for any friend, lover, or colleague; and his ruefulness amid Hagen and the ILM higher-ups not recognizing him for his work at the Academy Awards (where The Abyss, T2, and Jurassic Park all took home Best Visual Effects). His series of “Pit Parties” entitled “Nailed: An Evening of Social Penetration,” where he and the rest of the animators got drunk, occasionally took ‘shrooms, and regularly destroyed their own workspace, gets a lengthy feature in the film. As does a dinner at Skywalker Ranch, where Williams, Dippé, and the rest of the “pit” cohort arrive on their motorcycles, Steve and Mark sneak off to walk about the property, and end up smoking cigars in George Lucas’s private office anteroom, giving the names of two colleagues as their own to the private Skywalker police force and fire department. Any other people would get fired for the stunt, but since this is going on while they’re working on T2, they are immune from practically any action against them

Dippé and Williams both left ILM after The Mask premiered to work as director and second unit director/VFX supervisor on Spawn (1997). We see at this point that this is when Hollywood, spurred by the success of T2 and especially Jurassic Park, go absolutely gaga for CGI. Here the Gen-X’er CG artist Williams and Baby Boomer stop motion pioneer Tippett agree: it led (and still leads to) more junk destroying the art form of animation and film. (It’s fitting that the film opens with Steve dismissively watching the trailer for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.) After Spawn, and an unrealized Incredible Hulk project, Steve goes scorched-earth on ILM, calling top brass a bunch of “pencil necks” in an interview piece. Muren, once again tired of Steve’s hijinks and insubordination, finally gets Steve fired.

At this point in the documentary, Steve’s bridges within the film world are burnt. His partner Adrienne Biggs (who directed marketing and promotion at ILM for two years) splits up with him over his idiosyncracies and his increasing drinking. He gets into directing commercials (including Blockbuster’s 2002 Super Bowl “dancing rodents” ad), in the process making his way back into the feature-film world one last time, directing Disney’s The Wild (2006). After The Wild bombed critically and financially, he went back to commercials, then the video game Road Rash 3D, and then with nowhere else to turn, attempted a failed reunion at ILM. 

Amid all of this, Steve remains Steve: the hard-partying, harder-drinking, hard-to-get-along-with Canadian macho man. (Suffice it to say that in the spectrum of punk, Steve is far from the relatively monkish Ian MacKaye or Henry Rollins.) His marriage with Ellen Schade (assistant editor on The Wild) falls apart when she gets sober and he doesn’t. For the first 75 minutes or so of the film, Steve is seen in virtually every present-day shot drinking a can of beer or cider, or wine straight from the bottle. By the film’s coda, his bedroom features a small mountain of cans. He ends up in rehab, with one last tallboy of cider in the back of the car on the way. By the end of the film, eight months after rehab, Steve seems more vulnerable. According to his daughter Hannah (who was raised primarily by Adrienne Biggs) is more self-aware, and more aware of others and their needs. He’s realized that, in his mid-50s, “it’s time to smarten up. Time to grow up.”

But this late in the film, this redemption feels unearned. Were Scott Leberecht (who also shot and edited the film, and deserves praise for such an emotionally affecting documentary) to have taken a few more years working on Jurassic Punk, perhaps this chapter of Steve’s life, and this final story arc in the doc, would be more fleshed out. Perhaps as a viewer I’d come around to like Steve, and, from afar, forgive him for his actions over the course of his career. Perhaps I’d come to see Steve Williams’ career as, in the words of the tagline, “the untold story of a cinematic [r]evolution.” But we don’t get the personal evolution, merely animation’s revolution. So instead, Jurassic Punk is at once a portrait of a brilliant, pioneering, successful artist and a cautionary tale of what happens when the shield provided by that brilliance and success goes away and all that remains is the resident office jerk underneath.