The Sci-Fi Boys

The documentary tells how science fiction and special effects cinema developed. The starting point is the era of cheap B pictures. From there it reaches the large productions of today. At the centre of the account is a generation: young people who made amateur films as children. What set them going was Famous Monsters, the magazine Forrest J Ackerman put out. Those same children grew up and went to work in Hollywood. The work they did was to build the technique needed to film anything that could be imagined. Peter Jackson, Ray Harryhausen and Dennis Muren are among those who speak in it. Paul Davids’s American documentary, eighty minutes long, was completed in 2006.