Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2005 - 72

Book

reviews

Arnold Wengrow

editor
Let There Be Light
Entertainment Lighting Design Software Pioneers in Conversation
By Robert Bell. Great Shelford, Cambridge: Entertainment Technology Press, 2004. ISBN:
1904031242, 388 pages, GBP32.00, softcover.
Reviewed by Jim Hunter

Every once in a while someone writes a niche
book that will also have wide appeal across a
discipline. Let There Be Light: Entertainment
Lighting Design Software Pioneers in Conversation by Robert Bell is such a book. If you
are a lighting professional in theatre, dance,
opera, music, film or television, or if you are a
teacher or student of lighting design, you will
want to read this book. Sure, there's enough
computer tech talk-like "64-bit data bus, 32
bit address bus and all the I/O on that board is
in the gate array"-to keep the software expert happy and perhaps even numb the novice.
But there is a real payoff for the non-technical
reader as well. These interviews reveal, in firsthand accounts, the merging of computers and
the lighting industry. This is primary source
history that, at its essence, is about the personal journeys of some extremely creative entrepreneurs riding an exciting wave of
technological change. It is also the impact of
that change on show business.
Author Robert Bell, creator of the popular and influential WYSIWYG control and visu-

alization software, has interviewed ten other
pioneers of the entertainment lighting computer revolution. Using his access as an industry leader, Bell interviewed such pioneers as
Gordon Pearlman, who created the first computer-based light board used on Broadway,
David Cunningham, father of the Source Four,
Anne Valentino, a primary in the development
of the Obsession light board, as well as seven
other innovators. The road these inventors
blazed from the early 1970s, just before the
personal computer revolution, to today's hightech, big-dollar lighting industry, was one of
success and failure, profit and loss, destiny
and coincidence, here revealed by those who
made it happen.
The Gordon Pearlman interview relates
an interesting anecdote that illustrates how
these advances occurred by happenstance, as
well as innovation and exertion. In 1975
Pearlman had just taken a position with Electronics Diversified in Portland, Oregon, and
while moving into his house a week before his
job was to officially start, the company president dropped by to say that the computer control board in development for A Chorus Line
was not going to make the imminent deadline.
Pearlman, before signing up with the company,
had introduced a prototype control board at
USITT just two months before. Could he have a
working version of his prototype computer
ready to ship to New York in two days? Sure, no
problem. Yet Pearlman's prototype was only a
demo model and had no control signal output-it had never actually driven dimmers.
Twenty-four hours later, Pearlman loaded up a
working console, flew to New York, and put
the board immediately to work realizing
Tharon Musser's Tony Award-winning lighting.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2005