The Culver City Historical Society meeting on July 22, 2025, gave a large crowd an opportunity to listen to author Robert Welch. Welch has a book, The Wizard of MGM, and the grandson of A. Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie took the evening to look at how special effects worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from the late 1920’s up to the 1960’s. Showcasing Gillespie’s Academy Awards in the front of the presentation, Welch showed film clips with the insights into how the famous effects were created and shot.
Gillespie was the head of Special Effects at MGM for four decades, and his exhaustive resume includes dozens of movies, beginning at a time when the studio scheduled the release of one feature film per week. The earthquake in “San Francisco,” the tornado in “The Wizard of Oz,” the bombing run in “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” and the plane crash in “A Guy Named Joe” all received fascinating scrutiny. Welch gave inside stories on many films in Gillespie’s catalogue, and highlighted his Academy Awards acceptance speech lauding the whole department for the work. “No one does this stuff alone, and there are a lot of people to thank,” Gillespie said in a featured black-and-white film clip from the ceremony.
While the use of miniatures and ‘bigatures’ played a key part in creating illusion, Gillespie was quoted as saying “”You can’t make miniature water. And you sure can’t make miniature fire.” The use of camera angles and editing were essential to selling the illusion.
Several in the crowd were part of the old MGM family, and spoke about parents or relatives who had worked on those films, often in Gillespie’s department.
While the current standards of Computer Generated Images, it was intriguing to see how Special Effects were created out of cardboard bricks and fishing line to create film scenes that were completely convincing.
Welch gave away copies of the book via raffle tickets, and several attendees stayed to have their copies signed by the author.
Judith Martin-Straw
