The Vancouver Sun from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada • 25

She Vancmircr Sim 5 IBE235335GSEEI (in in iMfc KHi iim iTttii i i hi i hi Birum bor-r-ring By TRISH WORRON TORONTO T'S ONE of those stinking hot sum-mer days in Toronto with the humidity reading topping the scale and irate drivers blasting their "It's not the greatest show in the world and I'm not going to try to convince anyone that it is," he says. And although Gerussi says he has been criticized for "copping out," he believes the show can hold its own against any other popular North American series. "I once was on this talk show in Winnipeg and this woman called and said 'Oh, Mr. Gerussi I saw you at Stratford and you were doing such marvellous things and now you're prostituting yourself with the TV "I said 'Wait a minute lady. Where were you when I was making $150 a week and raising two kids alone after my wife died in 1965? If you don't like what I do, then you can just turn the dial on your Many actors are concerned about being stereotyped and avoid staying in one role for too long.

"I'm not worried about that. You know, if I had gone to Hollywood early in my career I would have been stereotyped as a little Italian gangster. "I've always been able to go out and create my own job and I could do it again if I had to," says Gerussi who headlined a TV cooking show, does commercials and has acted as host for many specials. The Beachcombers has been sold to more than 30 countries making Gerussi a recognizable face in such places as Italy, Greece, Britain, Australia, Hong Kong, West Germany and South America. At home, where it is also dubbed in French and shown on CBC's French network, it attracts an average two million viewers a week.

The magnificent B.C. scenery has had no small part in the success of the series, he says. Foreign viewers particularly like the location shots because they reinforce the romantic vision many have of Canada. Filming on location is filled with such everyday hazards as un-cooperative weather (particularly this spring when the rain seldom stopped), the constantly changing tides of the ocean and difficulty in shooting night shots. Even though it is far more demanding than working in safe, air-conditioned studios, Gerussi wishes the CBC would make more shows of its ilk featuring the other equally impressive geographic areas of Canada.

As long as you can fly to Toronto occasionally? Canadian Press the notion, adds: "Everybody takes lunch at the same time. "Even Vancouver it's very beautiful but it's really just a big town. It doesn't have the energy and drive of Toronto. "When we're filming normally from March until October, I get on a midnight plane to come to Toronto and arrive at 7 in the morning, get a couple hours sleep, have a shower and thenj hit town." Lest some West Coasters take offence at his remarks, Gerussi is quite prepared to admit that they have a healthier approach to life. It simply isn't for him and he makes no apologies for being a big-city creature who likes hustle and bustle and needs to be with friends.

He looks fit and tanned and has always thrived on living hard and playing hard. Still, Gerussi, 53, who is in his 10th season with The Beachcombers reaching the series by way of classical acting at the Stratford Festival and an early-morning radio show on CBC believes that he has mellowed with age. "When I first started The Beachcombers, I used to bang the table and rant and rave everyday about scripts or whatever. Now I just wait for awhile and store it up and then I let them have it." He is proud of the The Beachcombers success and will do it for another 10 years as long as the quality of the scripts and the ratings don't drop drastically. The effects on the show of the CBC technicians strike, which began May 21, is not yet known.

horns at anything that moves. With this backdrop, it doesn't take much for actor Bruno Gerussi to convince an interviewer that Gibsons, B.C. the isolated community just a 45-minute ferry ride from Vancouver where he lives half the year in his spacious mountaintop home must indeed be God's country. And if it weren't for the CBC technicians strike, Gerussi would be in Gibsons now, working on next season's episodes of The Beachcombers the longest-running drama on English-Canadian television. The actor stars as Nick Adonidas, the owner of Nick's Salvage Co.

in the town of Gibsons Landing. But when an interviewer sympathizes with his rotten luck at being stuck in this sweltering city, Gerussi practically jumps out of his chair and snaps: "Are you kidding I can't wait to get back to Toronto." "Everything out there in B.C.is so goddamn slack and laid back it drives me bananas. Sure, it's beautiful but I couldn't live there all the time. There's nothing to do." And Gerussi, sounding somewhat shocked at IT 'V 1 ig'wjii Jt. "'S I BBUNOOEBUSSV Hook! No wires! How Superman flies By BART MILLS Special to The Sun LONDON The man who taught Superman to fly is a squat bespectacled Yugoslav with a goatee, and he bears the villainous name of Zoran.

Zoran arrived from the planet Nowhere at a time when Superman was no more adept above ground zero than Peter Pan. The unheralded Zoran put the Man of Steel in the air and won an Academy Award two years ago in the process. 1 The process, which Zoran calls "Zopticf" received a special second technical award from the Academy the following year. Zoran (real name Zoran Perisic) feels the flying effects in Superman 2 are far more convincing than those in Superman 1. "Very often in the first film we skirted the borderline," he says, "but we got away with it.

This time, the flying looks wonderful no matter how closely you look." Perisic devised a method of coordinating these movements that is based on matching the focal lengths of the projector and the camera. If Superman is supposed to be flying upwards from New York, the image of New York on the screen behind him will get smaller and thus seem to recede. To achieve this, Reeve remains stationary on his pole while the focal length of the projector below him is increased. Technically, this lens movement is known as "zoom." Perisic's innovation was to zoom the camera lens in exact alignment with the zoom of the projector lens. Thus, while the projector's zoom action reduces the image of New York on the screen, the camera's identical zoom action means that the image of New York which it records remains the same throughout.

What does appear to change as the camera lens zooms, however, is the size of the actor on the pole in front of the screen. If the camera records Superman getting bigger and New York staying the same, the audience seeing the film reinterprets the image the opposite way: as Superman flying upwards from New York. I I SUPERMAN IN flight and Zoran Perisic, who put him there ERISIC is especially proud of and New York was reflected through Reeve and onto the screen behind him. The camera was aimed at the see-through side of the glass. Thus it photographed Reeve Dying in the foreground and New York in the background.

That's only the beginning, however. That basic front-projection system just shows Superman stationary in mid-air. Perisic says, "To convince people that Superman is flying, he must fly towards them." He must escape the back-and-forth and up-and-down plane. The Zoptic process is a method of making the flying figure seem to rise from the background or descend towards it. The secret lies in coordinating the movements of the camera, the projection, and the foreground object.

to a sturdy pole. Reeve was suspended in various positions on this pole between the camera and a special screen. The pole was stuck through the screen so that Reeve's body would remain between the pole and the camera, shielding it from view. If the script called for Superman to be flying over New York, a helicopter view of the city would be projected onto the screen behind Reeve. The projector was located below and in front of the camera.

It was aimed, not horizontally toward the screen, but vertically toward a point between Reeve and the camera. At this point was a two-way mirror. The projector's view of New York hit the mirror side of this piece of glass, the sequel's cinematic sequence, when Superman fights a mid-air battle over New York city against the three intergalactic thugs his father had banished eons before. Minor scenes are also worth such as one where Superman flies head-first toward an opponent, wheels. 180 degrees in mid-air, kicks an opponent in the jaw, and flies back in the direction he'd come from.

To achieve such effects, Perisic used an elaboration of the front-projection technique by which spaceships have often flown in films. First, he strapped Christopher Reeve SING a camera able to tilt, pan i llSit Ai "III: 1 1 SfttiilmmiM Tomorrow in Leisure TV Week or rotate, Perisic could give variety to Superman's mid-air movements. The Zoptic superimposition achieved an illusion of depth which avoided the flatness of previous attempts to depict flying. In fact, these previous methods were the methods in use throughout the principal photography of Superman: the Movie in 1977. A large team of special effects wizards was at work in London using the old Peter Pan hanging-from-wires routine, actual aerial acrobatics using a safety net, and another optical special effect called the "travelling matte" or "blue-backing" technique.

Unfortunately, the wires could be seen, the aerial acrobatics weren't speedy enough, and the travelling matte gave an illusion of flying that would fool only the very young. Perisic's first shot was Lois Lane's joyride over Metropolis, including the flight 360 degrees around the Statue of Liberty. "The producer said that was the first convincing shot he'd seen," Perisic says. "I worked on it until the following September, putting on film things they had been planning to sweep under the carpet. Dick Donner, the director, was so excited that if they hadn't stopped him, he would have gone on making that film forever." After Superman became the biggest money-maker of 1979, the producers "wanted to buy all the rights to the Zoptic process." But Perisic holds the patents and says, "I'd be eaten alive the instant I signed them over." Rock to watch competitors in the Canadian Open Sandcastle contest mould it into the stuff of their dreams, "When the tide comes in and reclaims the sand," says former winner Laurie Baxter, "it takes a little part of you too." OTHE BOYS BREAK LOOSE: Neal Hall rides the tour bus with Loverboy, the Vancouver rockers who are collecting gold and platinum all over North America.

Not bad for a bunch that only last winter was playing a club in New CYCLICAL PLEASURES: There is, says Lloyd Dykk, 'great pleasure in knowing well the slender bones Df the bicycle, a skeleton that In motion is virtu-, ally an extension of your own. A man on a bike is the most efficient travelling machine on earth twice as efficient as a salmon and five times as efficient as a seagull. And you'll meet master bike mechanic Louis Racine, who can do anything with a length of two-by-four and a rubber mallet. AND LOTS MORE: Record 'and book reviews, wine, SANDY FANTASIES: Its 'called the best sculotina Out of my way, feller Art, it seems, really can speak to you, particularly when that art is a sculpture of a life-size human figure positioned on a balancing beam and its way is blocked by someone using art as an easy chsir. The sculpture, Balancing, by John Hooper, is outside the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.

It features five figures on a Y-shaped beam Spectator, photography, jazz, Top-20 records, stamps, a brain-teasing crossword and complete TV and entertainment listings. sand in North America, and on Sunday 100,000 people will, gather on the beach at White.