communication, including the influence of the
Internet on news coverage.
Koldozy, Janet.Convergence Journalism: Writing and
Reporting Across the News Media. Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. An introductory text
on how to think, report, write, and present news
across various media such as newspapers, televi-
sion, and the Internet to prepare journalism stu-
dents for the future of news reporting.
Sterling, Christopher H., and John Michael Kittross.
Stay Tuned: A Histor y of American Broadcasting.3d
ed. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
- A thorough review of broadcasting history
in the United States from radio to cable television
and the Internet.
Eddith A. Dashiell
See also Albert, Marv; Arnett, Peter; Blogs; Cable
television; CNN coverage of the Gulf War; Drudge,
Matt; Internet; Limbaugh, Rush; O’Reilly, Bill; Talk
radio; Telecommunications Act of 1996; Television;
World Wide Web.
Jurassic Park
Identification Science-fiction film
Director Steven Spielberg (1946- )
Date Released on June 11, 1993
This award-winning film introduced unprecedented visual
effects, presenting full-motion dinosaurs on the big screen.
Stories about prehistoric beasts that live in modern
times date back at least to 1912, when Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle publishedThe Lost World. His story of a
remote plateau where beasts from the Jurassic pe-
riod dwelled was made into a silent film in 1925, with
stop-motion special effects by Willis O’Brien, who
also supervised the effects forKing Kong(1933).
Stop-motion is a painstaking procedure in which
realistic models are moved one frame at a time and
integrated into live-action scenes. It remained the
preferred way to animate until director Steven
Spielberg abandoned it in favor of computer-
generated imagery (CGI) forJurassic Park.
Based on the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton, the
film centers on an amusement park that holds
cloned dinosaurs, which were re-created from DNA
found in Jurassic mosquitoes that sucked dinosaur
blood and were later preserved in amber. The park’s
founder, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough),
invites a group of scientists—Dr. Alan Grant (Sam
Neill), Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and Dr.
Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern)—to reassure his investors,
before the park opens, that nothing can go wrong.
Things do, of course, and the story follows the group
as they try to survive the chaos.
Universal Studios bought the rights to Crichton’s
novel even before it was published. Spielberg used
realistic, computer-generated dinosaurs, a quantum
leap from the stop-motion work of O’Brien and
his successor, Ray Harryhausen. At the time,Jurassic
Parkbroke the record as the highest-grossing film
ever. The film earned three Academy Awards: Best
Sound Effects Editing, Best Visual Effects, and Best
Sound.
In 1995, Crichton published a sequel,The Lost
World, in tribute to Conan Doyle’s 1912 dinosaur
novel. Crichton’s novel was adapted to film in 1997,
and Spielberg directed.
Impact The film sparked interest in dinosaurs and
in educational programs as well as films. Computer-
generated imagery became the preferred choice for
creature special effects and was used in such films as
the American version ofGodzilla(1998), a remake of
King Kong(2005), andJurassic Park III(2001).
Further Reading
Crichton, Michael.Jurassic Park. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1990.
DeSalle, Rob, and David Lindley.The Science of “Juras-
sic Park” and “The Lost World”: Or, How to Build a Di-
nosaur.New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Shay, Don.The Making of Jurassic Park. New York:
Ballantine, 1993.
Paul DellingerSee also CGI; Cloning; Film in the United States;
Genetic engineering; Genetics research; Science
and technology.The Nineties in America Jurassic Park 475