Fred Sersen

Czech-born Ferdinand Sersen arrived in the U.S. in 1907 and made his home in Los Angeles around the year 1920. Having completed an extensive education at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design, the Portland Art Academy and the San Francisco Institute of Art, he went on to become a prodigious painter of watercolour landscapes, many of which have been exhibited in galleries along the West Coast. Sersen also began forging a career in the film industry. By 1930, he worked in the art department of Fox as a set designer and scenic artist. He was among the first to successfully combine live action scenes with both matte shots and miniatures. Becoming the leading visual effects photographer at the re-formed 20th Century Fox, Sersen set up one of the best special effects departments in Hollywood, by 1937 supervising a large team of matte painters, optical effects experts, miniature builders, editors and cameramen. Sersen was nominated for no less than eight Academy Awards, winning two. Possibly his finest achievement was staging the spectacular earthquake and flood scenes of The Rains Came (1939), inundating an expensive set of 24 buildings, including a lavish Indian palace, with 2,250,000 gallons of water. His numerous other credits include masterminding the impressive destruction sequences for In Old Chicago (1938); the canal building of Suez (1938) and the massive sirocco delivered by 34 wind machines (which ended up propelling five hapless stunt women across a 20-acre fake desert); the maritime miniature and pyrotechnics work for Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944); and Michael Rennie's flying saucer (a miniature, just eight feet across) from The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Sersen's work was eventually carried on by his closest collaborator, Ray Kellogg, who took over the reigns of special effects at Fox in 1954. Sersen nominally retired at this time, but continued on for several more years as an unofficial consultant.