The Empire of Effects

Immaculately researched, passionately argued, and hugely informative, The Empire of Effects is in its way as game-changing as the much-ballyhooed technological innovations it historicizes, contextualizes, and critiques. Julie Turnock adds powerfully and memorably to a growing body of scholarship on the aesthetics and industry of visual effects while establishing a trailhead for future academic work in these areas. Valuably, she dismantles an easy binary between visual effects and perceptual realism—the argument that effects work best when they mimic the world as we see it—to show instead how the ILM style enshrines a particular '70s cinematic aesthetic that audiences have been trained to receive as more believable and 'real.'

— Bob Rehak, author of More Than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise

Julie Turnock’s The Empire of Effects makes a crucial contribution to the literature on special effects, both historical and contemporary. Among Turnock’s interventions is her challenge to ILM’s official history of how 'special visual effects' developed from an optical-photochemical field to a digital one, in an argument that expertly maps stylistic history onto the terrain of studio economics. She has pored through thousands of pages of trade journals and four decades’ worth of FX magazines in addition to the voluminous scholarly work on New Hollywood’s infrastructure, form, and style, and from this broader perspective has also formed a compelling take on the peculiar ideology of auteurism that surrounds effects artists and their work.

— Paul Young, author of The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet

Turnock finds new ground to cover in The Empire of Effects...a captivating look at digital realism and the success of ILM.

— The Film Stage

Turnock’s expansive study of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and by turns of the wider special effects industry provides insight, nuance, and practical reactions to an industry that often dominates the filmmaking process and erodes the elements of story, direction, or performance...Highly recommended.

— CHOICE

As a close study of [Industrial Light & Magic], the book is enlightening. But it’s also about far more: Turnock chronicles the rise of the contemporary effects industry in the 1970s and ’80s, the emergence of an oligopoly of studios based in California, and the way that mega-budget franchises like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter came to shape the effects industry of today...By tracing the history of special effects since the 1970s, Turnock shows readers how the tools that shaped the counterculture’s alternative visions lent themselves to a new set of labor relations in which a stronger, more concentrated corporate bloc took more and allowed less.

— The Nation

Any historian of merit would commend and envy her usage of these primary source materials.

— The Journal of American Culture