4 MARCH27, 2022
also claim a quirky bit of sub rosa fame, and when he revealed
it over dinner that night, I nearly fell out of my chair.
It was Poor’s eyeball that stood in for Shatner’s. That is, a
very early digitized photo of Poor’s eyeball, which seemed
almost impossible to pull off at the time.
Poor’s story illuminates not just how far our technology has
come in the past 40 years, but also how the effects wizards
working on “Star Trek II,” in swinging for the fences, helped
lay the foundation for something we take for granted today: the
digital cameras of our communicators (er, cellphones). As such,
I asked Poor if he would be willing to revisit the tale of his role
in a pioneering filmmaking moment and technological advance
— and one that has seen him achieve on-screen immortality, if
uncredited, as ... William Shatner’s stunt eyeball.
As a young engineer at Stanford in the early 1980s, Poor
had helped build one of the first laser printers in the United
States. Up across the Golden Gate in West Marin, filmmaker
George Lucas was keen to develop digital laser technology for
filmmaking, and in 1981 Poor was recruited into Lucas’s
nascent and secret Computer Research Development Division
to begin early work on digitizing images for film.
Lucas, the genius behind “Star Wars,” took intelligence-
agency-level pains to obscure any indicators that he had his
own little digitization DARPA. It was housed off a frontage
road in San Rafael in a nondescript building “with a little sign
in front that said ‘Kerner Optics’ or ‘optical division’ or
something like that,” Poor tells me. “There was no indication at
all that this was part of Industrial Light & Magic”—Lucas’s
special effects lab. It was, Poor says, “hidden intentionally.”
Poor shared offices with computer graphics visionary Tom
Duff. “One day he said, ‘You know, we have all these tools for
building models. We can make a building out of computer
graphics, and that’s great, but we don’t
have any organic digital images to work
with. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did?’ ”
Because Poor and a few of his
colleagues were working with extremely
high-powered lasers, Lucasfilm’s insurer
had required detailed still photographs
of their retinas, for use in considering
any possible future accident claims.
“What I got out of it,” Poor recalls, “was a
set of slides of my retina, little 35-
millimeter slides in the little paper
holders like we used to [get]. And a
couple of my colleagues had theirs, too.
And we’re sitting around, comparing
retinas, and I’m thinking about Tom
Duff saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice.’ And
I’ve got this photo of my retina, right?
We now had some real photos of real
organic things, so we could manipulate
them. And I thought that’d be kind of
cool.”
A process we take for granted now,
digital manipulation, begat one of the
earliest digitized photo images of living
matter used in a major film. It took, in
its first part, most of a day. Poor drove to
Palo Alto to the Stanford Research
Institute, which had the only high-
resolution drum scanner capable of
scanning 35mm film. He returned with
magnetic tape full of digital data, out ofAbove: William
Shatner as Admiral
James T. Kirk in “Star
Tr ek II: The Wrath of
Khan.” Right: The film
stars, from left,
DeForest Kelley,
George Takei,
Nichelle Nichols,
Walter Koenig,
Shatner, James
Doohan and Leonard
Nimoy. Photographs
from left by CBS/
Getty Images;
Paramount/Kobal/
Shutterstock