Willis Harold O'Brien was born on March 2, 1886, in Oakland, California, United States, the son of William Henry O'Brien and Minnie Gregg. His father directed a military academy and was assistant district attorney in Oakland, but fell on hard times early in O'Brien's life.
William O'Brien quit school, left home and started to work at thirteen years old.
William O'Brien started to work at thirteen and pursued a succession of occupations for the next four years: hand on chicken and cattle ranches, trapper, wilderness guide, and bartender.
At age seventeen, while working as a draftsman, O'Brien became interested in cartooning. Eventually he worked as a sports cartoonist for the San Francisco Daily News. Covering boxing for the paper, he developed an intense interest in the sport, and embarked on a brief career as a professional boxer. He lost his first major fight, quit the ring, and began working for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He quickly became unhappy with this job, and finally settled down to work for a stonecutter in San Francisco. His major responsibility was modeling fireplaces in clay; stonecutters later used his models to create fireplaces of marble. O'Brien, always restless, began modeling small clay prizefighters.
The relatively new art of the cinema fascinated O'Brien, and he started to study conventional animation techniques, which consisted of drawing series of individual pictures. He came to believe that a more realistic effect would be achieved if the films could be produced by using pliable, miniature figures of clay over wood framing. He began work on a test film using a small clay dinosaur and a "caveman. " For this one-minute film O'Brien exposed each frame individually and then slightly altered the position of each model, achieving the cinematic illusion of movement.
Herman Wobber, who exhibited films in San Francisco, heard of the experiment and advanced O'Brien $5, 000 to develop a longer film for commercial distribution. O'Brien worked for more than two months on the film, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, and late in 1915 Wobber began the search for a distributor. Eventually the five-minute film was purchased by the Edison Company, and O'Brien went to New York to produce additional films for Edison's "Conquest Programs. " Forming Manikin Films, he worked for Edison from 1916 until late 1917, when the Edison firm was sold. Although his association with Edison was brief, O'Brien gained valuable experience, handling virtually every creative and technical element of the seven films he produced there.
O'Brien returned to Oakland and collaborated with producer Herbert M. Dawley on a lengthy film, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919). The film earned $100, 000 against costs of only $3, 000, and represented a significant advance for O'Brien. The dinosaurs created for the project were the most lifelike he had ever produced. The partnership was brief, though, for upon completion of the film Dawley attempted to claim complete credit. Worse, he obtained patent rights to the processes and models O'Brien had created - but O'Brien later demonstrated his ownership of the stop-action techniques.
O'Brien began to look for new projects and soon met Watterson Rothacker, a producer of advertising films who had secured rights to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. The pair sold the idea to First National Pictures. Realizing that production of the film would be a major project beyond the capabilities of a single animator, the two assembled a crew that included Marcel Delgado, Ralph Hammeras, and Arthur Edeson. The film was released in 1925 and was an enormous success. The Lost World combined animation and live action, a process that O'Brien had helped to develop at Edison, and the film is still considered a cinema landmark.
After two projects fell through - one was an animated version of Frankenstein - O'Brien left First National and went to Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) in 1929. He was just in time to begin work with directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack on a major and spectacular film about a giant ape, eventually entitled King Kong (1933). O'Brien's special-effects work achieved unprecedented realism by combining actors and animated miniatures. The models he designed had mechanisms that allowed them to "breathe, " and the several "Kongs" used in the picture exhibited remarkably anthropomorphic mannerisms and facial expressions.
Later O'Brien's personal and professional lives became a series of tragedies and disappointments. On October 7, 1933, while O'Brien was arguing with Schoedsack and Cooper over the production of Son of Kong (1933), his wife shot thier sons and tried to kill herself. After King Kong O'Brien worked on numerous films but never again enjoyed the complete freedom he had been given on that picture. He developed several film stories and worked without credit on a few films, including This Is Cinerama (1952) and a remake of The Lost World (1960). The latter was a major disappointment because the producers elected to use live lizards and miniature sets rather than the more expensive animation process. O'Brien was signed to assist in the animated sequences of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), but soon discovered that he had no real work to do. The producers wanted only the prestige of his name. He died at Hollywood, California, while the film was in production, and was not credited.
The high point of O'Brien's career as animator was the release of The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), where he achieved realism by combining actors and animated miniatures. Willis O'Brien was granted an Academy Award for his work on Mighty Joe Young (1949). O'Brien was posthumously awarded the Winsor McCay Award by ASIFA-Hollywood in 1997.
Willis O'Brien married Hazel Ruth Collette late in 1917. They had two sons. She had been suffering from tuberculosis and cancer. In 1933, she shot and killed their sons and attempted suicide, after that she remained in the hospital for more than a year before dying on November 16, 1934. O'Brien married Dolly Darlyne Prenett the next day.
