NEW ULM – The New Ulm Film Society will continue its Steven Spielberg director series with a screening of his top film in terms of financial success. Or maybe that should be tricera-Top film.

The screening is at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 13 at the New Ulm Public Library.

Released in 1993 and based on a novel by Michael Crichton, “Jurassic Park” is science-fiction thriller about the chaotic breakdown of a theme park featuring cloned dinosaurs. The film would become a massive blockbuster success and to this day is Spielberg’s most profitable film. The movie also helped usher in a new generation of spectacle driven films through computer generated special effects.

Spielberg was able to secure the film rights to Crichton’s novel before the book was even published. Several high-profile directors had expressed interest in directing the film, but Crichton ultimately endorsed Spielberg to make the film, believing the director was the only one with the technical talent capable of bringing dinosaurs to the big screen.

In order to make the film work, Spielberg and his crew needed to make it seem plausible for prehistoric animals to share the same space with humans. The secret to pulling off the special effects was to combine traditional animatronic and puppet work with new Computer Generated Imagery (CGI). 

“Jurassic Park” is widely considered to be the film that brought CGI special effects to the mainstream. CGI had been used in films since the early 1980s and Spielberg himself had considered using CGI with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in 1977, but felt the effects were not realistic enough. By 1993, computer technology had caught up to allow more complicated imagery..

Originally, animator Phill Tippit was brought on to create stop-motion visuals for sequences with the dinosaurs. The plan was to use stop-motion animation with some minimal computer effects, but after a test reel of a fully computerized T-Rex was shown to Spielberg, they realized CGI animation would work better than stop-motion. 

Tippit, upon realizing that his stop-motion animation skills were outdated compared to CGI, said to his boss “I think we’re extinct.”

Spielberg heard Tippit say this and decided to put the line in the movie in which paleontologist Allen Grant (Sam Neil) is wondering if he is out of a job now that dinosaurs have been cloned. Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbum) makes a joke, “Don’t you mean extinct.”

The entire “Jurassic Park” movie can be viewed as commentary on the desire to create films and the methods filmmakers will use to achieve their goal. The point of the fictional Jurassic Park and the movie “Jurassic Park” is to entertain the public with never before seen spectacle.

In the film, John Hammond (played by Richard Attenborough) uses groundbreaking technology to resurrect long dead creatures for the entertainment a spectacle of the public. The technology used to resurrect the dinosaurs was only possible using modern sophisticated computers. This is technically the same thing Spielberg did. 

He was able to bring back dinosaurs using groundbreaking computer technology for the purpose of entertaining the public. Spielberg realized during the early production of the film that he and the John Hammond character had a lot in common. This led to changes in the script to make the Hammond character a kinder person who wants to entertain the world with his park rather than simply make money. 

The irony is “Jurassic Park” made a lot of money when it was released. It quickly became the highest grossing film of all time, beating the previous record holder,  “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,” which was also directed by Spielberg. He effectively dethroned himself as the most successful commercial director of all time. However, Spielberg’s success in 1993 did not stop there. While filming “Jurassic Park,” Spielberg was putting the finishing touches on a movie he worked on earlier in the year called “Schindler’s List.” For “Schindler’s List” Spielberg would receive his first Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director. 

From the start of his career, Spielberg was often dismissed by film critics as a “popcorn director,” who had a talent for making popular films but could not create a serious drama with artistic merit. His Oscar win for “Schindler’s List” put most of those criticisms to rest, but the commercial success of “Jurassic Park” in the same year showed there was some truth to his talent for entertaining mass audiences. The back to back success of these two movies made it clear Spielberg was a master storyteller.

The New Ulm Film Society’s screening of “Jurassic Park” is free to the public. Before and after the film, there will be a discussion about the movie’s place in film history.