which Duff produced the final image. (“Stuff in weird file
formats no one’s ever seen always wound up on my desk,” says
Duff, long since a pillar of Pixar’s engineering team. “I was too
stupid to know that the computers we had at the time were
completely inadequate for doing the things we wanted to do
with them.” )
“And voila, we had a very high-resolution picture of a retina,”
Poor says. “And I swear, it was like the next day the special
effects director for ‘Star Trek II’ came over and says, ‘We’re
looking for some kind of special effect to authenticate Captain
Kirk, like, maybe like a voice print, or a retina print or
fingerprint or something.’ Just so happened that we had a retina
ready to go.”
The image that the crew ended up with was “not even high
resolution by today’s standards,” Poor says, chuckling. “Today
you use your iPhone and you have ever higher resolution now
on that.”
And, he adds, as a stunt eyeball, it was actually his left
ocular standing in for Shatner’s right retina. But why Poor’s
retina, and not that of any of his colleagues? “I had the final
say, but I was not trying to choose mine over everybody’s
else’s,” he says. “To be fair, I looked over everyone’s retina, and
we decided that mine was actually the most interesting. The
vein patterns of mine were more dense and spidery, and there’s
more color contrast.” (Indeed, Poor’s sole visual effects entry on
IMDb is informed by a 1982 article for American
Cinematographer magazine by his boss Alvy Ray Smith, whonoted his own eyeball had been one of four contenders. “Rob’s
retinas,” he conceded, “were the most interesting.”)
The use of Poor’s eye raises an interesting question: As
possessor of the retina, is he due any royalties or residuals? “I
don’t know how SAG would have handled that, then or now,”
he muses. He says that having a cameo in such an iconic film is
more than enough perpetual reward. But it’s true: Blink and
you’ll miss it.Jason Vest lives in California.Never Clean Your Gutters Again!
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