In Walt Disney Productions next foray into “parental discretion advised" – the $12.5 million electronic science fiction fantasy TRON, due for release July 9th – the studio will notch a few tradition-breaking firsts. For one, Disney has agreed to finance a project developed by freelancers outside the influence of the studio. And extensive computer graphics effects, expected to “pioneer the combination of digital animation and live action," will be farmed out to two outside firms. Information International Inc. in Los Angeles, and Magi Inc. in New York.
But perhaps the studio’s most extreme departure is the choice of one of TRON's shooting locations: the govermnent's largest nuclear-weapons research installation, Lawrence Livermore Lalmratory in Livermore, California.
Until now, no film crew had ever received permission to film at the top-secret, mile-square research lab, but top brass at LLL liked TRON's pro-computer slant, and approved four days of location shooting for director-screenwriter Steven Lisberger and his 85-person crew. Every member of the production had to submit to rigid security measures, including fingerprints and identity photos, but LLL had special props that Lisberger felt were worth the trouble: Cray-I and Shiva, the world's most powerful computer and laser, respectively. Then too, LLL's hermetic world of humming computer banks, attended by white-cloaked engineers, would lend credence to TRON's elaborate special effects finale: a chase through a sort of fourth-dimensional world inside a powerful computer.
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