Westworld 1973: How a Killer Robot Changed Movie Special Effects

Long before cinema could conjure dinosaurs, liquid-metal assassins or entire galaxies inside a computer, Hollywood discovered the pixel. It was large, ugly and took an absurd amount of work.

Michael Crichton’s Westworld arrived in 1973 with a beautifully simple premise: wealthy tourists visit Delos, an adult theme park populated by lifelike androids who exist to indulge every fantasy. Then the machinery stops cooperating. Yul Brynner’s black-clad Gunslinger turns from obedient attraction into an implacable hunter, and the holiday becomes considerably less relaxing.

Hellwood’s Westworld T-Shirt celebrates the cult science-fiction Western. But buried inside the film is another legacy: a few minutes of deliberately crude imagery that helped push cinema towards the digital age.

How Does a Robot See?

Crichton wanted the audience to experience the world through the Gunslinger’s electronic eyes. Today, an editor could manufacture an appropriately robotic filter before lunch. In 1973, the problem was sufficiently unusual that conventional special-effects techniques could not produce what the director wanted.

John Whitney Jr., the computer-animation pioneer brought onto the production, later described the challenge in American Cinematographer. The script required the robot’s vision to appear as animated coloured rectangles. Something new had to be invented.

The production initially approached NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. According to a detailed history published by The New Yorker, Crichton was quoted roughly $200,000 and nine months for two minutes of imagery — rather inconvenient figures for an MGM film being made on a tight schedule.

The Computer That Turned Film Into Blocks

Whitney found another route through Information International, Inc. — usually known as Triple-I — a Los Angeles company possessing the rare equipment needed to scan film into a computer and record the result back onto film.

The solution sounds primitive only because fifty years of digital imagery have made it familiar. Live-action footage was colour-separated and scanned. The computer analysed sections of the image, reduced them into rectangular areas and assigned simplified colours according to the original tonal values. Because the Panavision projection process would distort the image, the digital blocks actually had to begin as rectangles in order to appear square on the cinema screen.

The result is the Gunslinger’s unmistakable point of view: human figures, doorways and the Western landscape broken into a coarse mosaic of coloured blocks.

It was not computer-generated imagery in the modern sense. The computer was processing photographed material rather than constructing the scene from scratch. But Westworld became the first feature film to use digital image processing in this way.

Two and a Half Minutes That Took Months

The finished effect occupies roughly two and a half minutes of the movie. Producing it required months of experimentation.

Whitney tested different resolutions by projecting experimental footage onto theatre-sized screens, trying to find the point at which viewers could still understand what the Gunslinger was seeing. The final imagery was intentionally low-resolution because that limitation became the aesthetic: the machine could identify its surroundings, but its world remained visibly different from ours.

That decision also makes the effect unusually durable. Early attempts at photorealistic computer imagery can date badly when technology overtakes them. Westworld wanted its digital vision to look artificial. Fifty years later, it still does exactly what the story requires.

From Westworld to the Digital Blockbuster

The experiment did not end at Delos. Whitney and colleagues at Triple-I continued developing computer-imaging techniques. The 1976 sequel Futureworld pushed further into three-dimensional computer graphics, while films including Star Wars, Tron and eventually Jurassic Park turned digital imagery from an exotic technical experiment into part of mainstream filmmaking.

There is another pleasing historical loop here. Crichton would later return to the idea of a technologically sophisticated entertainment park whose artificial inhabitants become considerably more dangerous than management anticipated in Jurassic Park. Westworld got there first — with six-shooters instead of velociraptors.

For more beautifully malfunctioning futures, browse Hellwood’s Sci Fi Film T-Shirts, Cult Classic Movie T-Shirts and wider Film T-Shirts collection.

The Gunslinger’s digital eyesight now looks almost comically simple beside modern visual effects. That is precisely why it matters. Somebody had to teach the movies how to see in pixels before they could build entire worlds from them.