Seven-time Emmy Award-winning senior visual effects supervisor and second-unit director for television’s “Star Trek: Enterprise" Dan Curry was in the U.S. Peace Corps and was stationed in Khon Kaen, Thailand
A Galactic Feat
by Wendy Butler
The Eureka Reporter
Caption: Dan Curry, senior visual effects supervisor and second-unit director, at work on the “Star Trek: Enterprise” set last week. Photo submitted by Dan Curry
A typical day for Dan Curry is spent aboard the starship “Enterprise.” A vague, but philosophical explanation of his job is to refer to it as a responsibility to make real what is unreal.
The Humboldt State University alumnus is a seven-time Emmy Award-winning senior visual effects supervisor and second-unit director for television’s “Star Trek: Enterprise.”
“Not many people get to do spaceship jobs and blow things up,” he said lightheartedly during a phone interview from his home in Bell Canyon last week.
In fact, he’s been with the “Star Trek family” for 18 years. Other “Star Trek” series he has designed are “Voyager,” “Deep Space Nine” and “The Next Generation.”
Prior to “Star Trek,” Curry has worked on 118 feature films, including “Flashdance” and “Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom,” and on 45 TV productions.
Curry is a painter and drawer, as well, but not with the purpose of selling it commercially, he said.
He graduated from HSU in 1979 with a master’s degree in theater and film after receiving an undergraduate fine arts degree, with a minor in theater, from Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vt.
Curry said he has always been a fan of science fiction and his thesis work at HSU was a combination of theater and visual spectacle. He created a one-act play titled “Krorg’s View,” which swallowed his audience.
“I didn’t want the audience to be one place and the actors to be someplace else,” he said.
So, he designed it so the audience was part of the set, playing the role of “hydroponic plants” sitting in pits between the aisles.
“They were draped in ponchos and told they were a plant,” he said.
The set was an “alien prison” of sentient species.
“It’s about societal controls and what happens when they’re lost and when individuals can revert to control free behavior,” he said.
Submitted by Dan Curry
“Devin Tree” is a charcoal drawing Curry created from a sketch he had drawn of his son.
Curry said he’s fascinated with realities that can’t possibly exist, unless he puts them there, “realities that can’t exist in our world, but can exist in a convincing cinematic reality on the screen,” he said.
His “Star Trek: Enterprise” designs include bladed weapons, such as the Klingon bat’leth, the signature weapon of the Klingon race.
Curry also developed the Klingon martial arts form Mok’bara for the show.
“In my misspent youth, I studied martial arts in Asia,” he said.
Before his time at HSU, Curry was in the U.S. Peace Corps and was stationed in Khon Kaen, Thailand.
He said a dept of gratitude for getting him started in the visual arts were his childhood visits to art museums in his native city of New York and a kindergarten teacher.
He went back to visit Floral Park Bellerose School and found that a pastel drawing of a cowboy and a horse in front of mountains he made in grammar school is still hanging on a wall, where his teacher had put it up years before.
“I slipped my ‘Star Trek’ business card into the corner of the frame and said I’m the kid that did this so many years ago,” Curry said.
Recalling that a simple gesture from a teacher had helped pave the way for a lifelong love of art and the drive to make a business of it, he said that California’s investment in school arts programs is troublingly low.
“It’s not that everybody is going to be an artist,” Curry said. “(But), everybody dismisses it as superfluous. … If we lose leadership in creative thinking, we lose leadership in the world.”
He has won seven Emmy awards and been nominated 15 times. And, winning does validate his work.
“It means you have earned the respect of your peers,” he said. Curry added, however, that “‘Star Trek’ is a team effort.”
He said he makes his living doing ever-higher technological feats, but also enjoys what some might consider low-tech — drawing and painting.
For Curry, it comes back to his life substance — creativity.
“It’s like breathing,” he said. “If you’re not doing something creative, you’re not alive.”
