Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.

Jed's good people. Anyone who hangs out at AICN Chat knows that. Right now, I'm trying to finish up my latest evil project with Harry Lime before Bush figures out where our cloning lab is. As a result of the enormous pressure, I've had to skip any number of inordinately cool things. I have missed filing stories here, missing the time deadline on a number of reviews. It's driving me crazy.

One thing in particular broke my heart to turn down: a trip to the Stan Winston Studios workshop in Van Nuys. I've been before, but this sounded like a kick, a chance to see some of the JURASSIC PARK dinosaurs in the "flesh." When I had to find someone to send in my place, I couldn't help but think of the pride of Orange County, a hardcore geek (he works in a comic shop, fer pissakes) who would appreciate the environment. He's got a review of the JPIII DVD coming up soon, but for now, here's his account of that afternoon. Sounds like it was fun...

"Dude, I got A Shovel!"

Stan Winston Studios.

Van Nuys, California.

I had arrived.

LA traffic hadn't had the best of me, and the untrustworthy directions from Map Quest (normally, it's "yay, map Quest!" from me, but I was operating Windows ME at the time, and I had no faith in anything my computer was telling me) had miraculously put me on the right street in the right city, and twenty minutes early. It's overcast, the sky subtly hints at rain, maybe, a little later. I'm in a business park. It's dingy. Unglamorous buildings housing unglamorous businesses abound; Box City and the kosher bakery caught my eye. The landscaping isn't up to the immaculate grounds I'm used to seeing at places like these, the roads are badly paved, and it's next to Van Nuys Airport. Nevertheless, this is where I'm supposed to be.

Parking my beloved Big Byrd on an adjacent street, I perform a quick equipment check. Recorder. Batteries. Wallet. Keys (lock the car, this doesn't look like the nicest of neighborhoods). Turn off the phone, but keep it handy, as you don't have a watch. Straighten up. Study the address enough that you don't have to bring them with you.

A blonde woman and a man in a baseball cap get inside of a Nissan Supra. Her breasts are preternatural, somewhat frightening, and she is dressed in a fashion that can only imply that they are to be the center of any attention addressed towards her. It's even apparent from fifty feet away that this person's primary source of income is their ability to titillate.

What the hell kind of FX is Stan Winston Studios involved in these days?!

One of the SWFX staff would confirm that one of the direct neighbors to the studios is, in fact, sexyvideos.com.

Good Company.

There is a large gate (open) and a small parking lot at the address I arrive at. I have to get rather close to the building to confirm that this is the place; the building is covered in ivy, all but totally obscuring the address above the door. The windows & glass door are tinted, but there's no bell or lock on the door.

There's a T-rex the size of a Shiatsu on a pedestal to my right; across the waiting room is a similarly scaled Alien Queen. Bingo. I approach the front desk.

"Hi I'm, uh, here with..."

"Hi, okay, we'll need you to sign this, and then we can take you into the conference room."

This is a very small room. After I sign my life away, I look at the small stairs leading, presumably, to other offices, and make my way down the narrow hallway, past a few small offices on one wall, various film posters on the other. The door at the end of the hallway opens, and the promotion ladies greet me.

And a Predator.

And a T-rex head.

And a Raptor.

This is the conference room. It's dimly lit, and there are creatures crammed into every conceivable crevice and we're invited to take pictures and I have no camera and so now I must apologize very very sincerely, but I can say that pictures don't readily convey how daunting it is. Terminators menacingly bristle with weapons. Small Soldiers, good and bad, are braced for battle. Gray Gorillas loom overhead. Teddy unassumingly sits next to a dilapidated robot from AI. Over there is Pumpkinhead, and above and to the right rocket-fitted penguin holds court with a face-hugger pod. GHOST & THE DARKNESS Lions, TANK GIRL Kangaroos, DR. MOREAU catthings. Sarris from GALAXY QUEST, Norm the Gnome, Paulie, and Edward Scissorhands.

My mouth hangs open for a good five minutes.

Other folks pace the room in similar states of gawkery. They take pictures, being smarter than I, having remembered their digital cameras. They are careful to follow the instructions we were given not to take any pictures of the Lestat model. I should be receiving some credit here for resisting the urge to make a scientology reference. Just think of the lawsuits.

The other journalists and I meet and greet, making small talk that pretty much amounts to variations on the theme "Holy shit, this is cooler than I expected."

Snacks are brought in, and this is our cue to find a seat at the table. I situate myself rather unstrategically far from where Mr. Winston and Mr. Rosengrant will be, but the Rice Krispy Treats are within easy reach. We are informed that they'll be with us in a few minutes, Don't Ask To Read the T3 Script Or We'll Tazer You Like Wild Howler Monkeys, etc.

John Rosengrant and Stan Winston enter and sit down. I miss the jokes that Winston cracks as an icebreaker because I'm fumbling with the tape recorder. Good Times.

The first question anyone asks is why we can't take pictures of Tom Cruise. Again, fighting the Lord Xemu reference.

It's that kind of meeting.

Some poignant quotes from the charming and decidedly un-tech guy-like Stan Winston with occasional commentary from your wisenheimer journalist without a damn camera:

"People are always [Asking me] is CG going to replace live action? Which is about the silliest thing I've ever heard. It never will. It won't replace anything, embrace it. It's a great technology, it's a wonderful art. It's a tool that I will always use as much as we need, I founded a digital company, and so I'm not sitting here saying boo to CG and yay to live action."

I had, in preparing for this, come up with a question that would both be relevant to JURASSIC PARK and his entire body of work as a whole. In FX work such as his, I would ask, making striking journalist eye contact and enunciating assertively, is the secret in selling the believability of the creature or effect to the audience, or selling it to the actors on-set, who in reacting sell it to the audience? Unfortunately (for my exciting career in the field of entertainment journalism, at least), Stan had this to say before I could ask:

"The greatest actors in the world will tell you that their best performance is when they're acting with another good actor. If it is important that at the core of any movie, if you buy into the concept that nothing is more important than the performance of an actor, then it is your job as a filmmaker to give the actor as much as possible in the way of tools to create a good performance as you can. Give an actor another good actor. Imagine being an actor [and having] nothing there. It's stripping the actor of a tool and it's saying 'I don't care about your performance, I care about this thing that's not there'. We wanna give actors more to work with, and that's basically where the future is; as long as we can imagine it, we'll end up doing it. I don't know when, but we will."

Crossing this off from the pitiful list of questions I'd generated, leaving what amounted to be a thinly-veiled plea for a second MONSTER SQUAD movie, thoughts about filmmaking with FX and exotic characters began reverberating off of Stan's words. Chiefly, I wondered about a film I took great issue with -- let's just call it THE MANTOM PHENACE -- and complaints that some of the actors had about not being given actors (any actors, in some cases) to work with. Of course, pretending the spinosaurus is there when it ain't is par for the course for actors. But when you take away a costar, human or otherwise, hand 'em a bag of Ruffles for arm positioning, and point to a mike-stand with gaffer tape for sightlines, who's more important in that movie? There's no question that the raptors are the stars of movies like JURASSIC PARK, but what would they be if the actors weren't there to be plausibly chased, menaced, eaten, etc?

I, as is my talent, digress. Moving on.

"At the end of AI I was approached by a young lady named Cynthia Brazil from MIT, she was the... technical advisor for Steven at MIT, they have the media lab and the AI lab... this is where the real thing is happening... She came to see me, and she said she was involved in creating a new artificial intelligence at MIT. She realized... that a great part of the energy of what it's going to take to advance artificial intelligence is the concept of human interaction. And to enhance human interactivity, she realized the technology they were missing at MIT was kind of art and organic performance of the technology that we've created in our robots... and wanting to know if I would collaborate with them. Dribble Drool, Tongue Hanging Out, and share technology. I'm now a sponsor of MIT. A group of students from MIT spent a week here with our technology, and I spent a week over there. We are collaborating technologies, and we're creating the real deal."

I don't think there's anything I need to say to spell out how breathtaking the possibilities of this partnership are. Details are hush-hush, but expect something very cuddly, very kid-friendly, and very, very, very cool to come out of this endeavor. My own Supertoy? I can't wait.

Taking a break from the Q&A, we are led single file through a small door, and suddenly, the frantic, dimly-lit office becomes a GINORMOUS workshop. This is T-rex birthing space, right here. There's a mural on the wall of a CONGO ape reaching out to a Terminator a la the Sistine chapel. Heads, hands, feet, claws, and parts unknown of dozens of different critters are suspended on nigh every surface that can support them. We are led into a largish clearing in the workshop overseen by a JPIII pteranadon.

So there's this Raptor...

The thing is fucking alive. A living, breathing, clawing, biting, winking, velociraptor from JURASSIC PARK III, the one with the feathers on its head. It is very real, and very scary, but somewhat endearing, and even a little cute. As much as a credit to the performers wired to telemetry devices that control the beast, the raptor gives us all thrills by virtue of its presence. Being cooped up in storage since the shoot nearly a year ago, she gets a little rambunctious from being visited by so many delicious looking snacks; the poor thing begins urinating hydraulic fluid and lurches back into a somewhat comical mouth agape, claws-at-the-ready pose. Such is the nature of beasts this fragile. The skin, while painted to be reptile-leather, is a foam rubber. These puppies are built to function, not to last.

Stan leads us into another section of the labyrinthe studio, the art department. An extremely toy-netic display of the new line of SWFX CREATURE CREATIONS action figures are on display. Horrible Monsters, Cat Gods, and Cyborgs abound in this impressive collection, but this one specific fella captured my soul and imagination: a salmon-pink mutant warrior with a missile launcher for an arm, and in the free hand, a novelty-size wooden mallet. That... that just says it all. A Quake III Skin meshed with a Whack-A-Mole. Bliss.

An hour later, after a second crack at the Rice Krispy treats and more dinosaur discussion, much of which can be heard straight from the horse's mouth on the informative-yet-loose commentary track Mr's Winston & Rosengrant recorded for JURASSIC PARK III, it was time to go. We thanked our hosts and very slowly made our way for the exit from the conference room. I did manage to thank John for taking the time out of his schedule to talk to us, and ask how any sort of productive meetings were held in a conference room as wonderfully distracting as his. I made chat with the other star-eyed journalist-types as we waited to use the restrooms -- there's this critter facing the men's room toilet that everyone wanted to see -- right after we received our review DVDs. The JPIII DVD and the new bonus disc BEYOND JURASSIC PARK came in a nice backpack which also contained:

The sky outside made good on the promise of rain. It came down hard, and I had not yet discovered my rain poncho, though I do remember commenting on how nice it would be if there were one. The rain prevented me from seeking out sexyvideos.com; my next assignment, perhaps. I went slogging towards Big Byrd, tired but giddy, stoned on FX porn and prepared, apparently, to face the apocalypse if the south-bound 405 at rush hour didn't get to me first.

I made my way home, muttering half-crazed sentence fragments into the remaining length of my tape recorder.

Thanks again for going, Jed, and I'll be looking for that JPIII review any day now.

"Moriarty" out.