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 on April 10 in Los Angeles after a short illness, his wife, Mariana Campos-Logan, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
In an Instagram post, Logan’s daughter, Mary Grace Logan, paid tribute to her late 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.”
During a five decade career, starting in Britain and then in Hollywood, Logan worked with directors like Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Robert Wise, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, George Lucas, Jonathan Demme, Joel Schumacher and Terry Gilliam.
He was born May 15, 1946, in Bushey Heath, England, and educated at Merchant Taylor’s Guild School. Having never gone directly to film school, Logan learnt much from his father, 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 the age of 14 began making animated films, which in time led him into visual effects. At 19, Logan received his first screen credit when he was hired by Stanley Kubrick to work for over two years under Douglas Trumbull — the legendary film director and VFX supervisor — on visual effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey 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. 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!” Logan recalled of his work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, a classic Hollywood movie about space exploration and man’s first encounter with extraterrestrial life.
Trumbull also hired Logan to work on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in 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 for George 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 upwards 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 in hand.
The multi-layer 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 effect photography and DOP credits included the 1980 satire Airplane, Firefox, High Road to China, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Big Bad Mama and Jackson County Jail.
A major milestone for Logan came in 1982 when he was the cinematographer on Disney Studio’s Tron, director Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi actioner that was among the first Hollywood films to use computer generated animation in its creative process. In a 2019 interview for ProductionHUB, Logan 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. 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 of scissors. What the computer has done for those elements is to democratize them and made all the filmmaking processes accessible to everyone,” he argued.
In 1986, he directed the prison action film Vendetta. Another milestone came when Logan produced Madonna’s second music video for Borderline, which was directed by Mary Lambert.
Logan is a two time Emmy Award-winning writer and director, and is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Director’s Guild of America and the American Society of Cinematography.
