Willis Harold O'Brien (March 2, 1886 – November 8, 1962), known as Obie O'Brien, was an American motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer, who according to ASIFA-Hollywood "was responsible for some of the best-known images in cinema history," and is best remembered for his work on The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933), The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), for which he won the 1950 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
He spent his spare time sculpting and illustrating and his natural talent led to him being employed first as draftsman in an architect's office and then as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News.
San Francisco exhibitor Herman Wobber saw this 90-second test footage and commissioned O'Brien to make his first film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915) for a budget of $5,000.
During this time he also worked on other Edison Company productions including Sam Loyd's The Puzzling Billboard and Nippy's Nightmare (both 1917), which were the first stop-motion films to combine live actors with stop motion models.
The collaboration was not a happy one and Dawley cut the 45-minute film down to 11 minutes and claimed credit for O'Brien's pioneering effects work, which combined realistic stop-motion animated prehistoric models with live action.
The film grossed over $100,000 and Dawley used the cut effects footage in a sequel Along the Moonbeam Trail (1920) and the documentary Evolution (1923), but O'Brien received little financial reimbursement from this success.
O'Brien and the dinosaur models he had created for the cancelled project were put to work on what was to become his best remembered film, the iconic King Kong (1933).
This act of refusing his Oscar hurt O'Brien's reputation as a player in the Hollywood establishment, forever making him a semi-outsider in the industry, and thus whose own film proposals were seldom taken seriously.
While making one of his daily visits to the set, O'Brien, who had remained close to his two sons after his separation from his estranged wife, invited Willis Jr. and the now completely blind William with him to handle the Kong and dinosaur models.
O'Brien went on to do some special effects work, re-using one of the mattes from Son of Kong, on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and George Pal's Oscar-nominated animated short Tulips Shall Grow (1942), as well as developing his own project, Gwangi, about cowboys who encounter a prehistoric animal in a "lost" valley, which he failed to sell to the studio.
O'Brien was assisted by his protege (and successor) Ray Harryhausen and Pete Peterson on this film, and by some accounts left the majority of the animation to them.
Allen hired O'Brien as the effects technician on his remake of The Lost World (1960), but he was given little to do as the producer opted for live lizards instead of stop-motion animation for the dinosaurs.
O'Brien's work was celebrated in March 1983 with the appearance of his wife, Darlene, at a 50th anniversary event commemorating the day of the first screening of the film at Graumann's (later Mann's) Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, complete with a screening of a new print of King Kong and a new recreation of the full-scale bust of Kong that appeared 50 years apart at both events in the outdoor lobby of the theater.