Entertainment, Military Share Technologies Engineers Leave Defense Work For Bright Lights Of Hollywood

From the time he was a boy, Mike O’Neal wanted to “put something on another planet.” He earned degrees in aerospace engineering and then worked for eight years at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, helping design the Mars Pathfinder.

But by the time the spacecraft touched down on the Red Planet in July, O’Neal, 31, had quit NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and joined a movie special effects company where his skill in computer-aided design has been applied to tasks like simulated lava flows in “Dante’s Peak” and a shipwreck for “Titanic.”

Call it the military-entertainment complex. The aerospace and entertainment industries, which in the past inhabited parallel universes even as they sat side by side in Southern California, are starting to cross-pollinate, bringing a new level of technology to entertainment and perhaps returning dividends to the Pentagon.

With the sharp cutback in defense spending since the end of the Cold War, some aerospace companies and individual aerospace engineers are seeking their fortunes in the entertainment business. They are applying their expertise to areas like movie special effects and rides for theme parks, casinos and shopping centers.

The flow of engineers, while small, reflects a much larger shift in the Southern California economy. Since 1988, the aerospace and electronics equipment industry - once the region’s largest - has lost 135,000 jobs in Los Angeles County alone. In the same period, the county’s entertainment industry has added 144,000 jobs and become the area’s biggest employer. Abandoned aircraft hangars throughout the region are being converted into sound stages.

Another lure is that entertainment technology has become, in some respects, as sophisticated as that in the aerospace industry. O’Neal noted that a few movies now cost almost as much to make as spacecraft like the $250 million Pathfinder.

A flow in the other direction, though still a comparative trickle, is under way, too, as the Pentagon looks to the entertainment industry for low-cost technology.

The U.S. Marine Corps, for example, is beginning to use shoot-‘em-up computer games like Doom to help in training. Metavision Corp. of Burbank, Calif., which sells giant-screen video projection systems to theme parks and theaters, spun off a company to sell the products for military simulators and war rooms.

“Off my desk suddenly went Rolling Stone and Variety and onto my desk came Defense News Weekly,” said Theo Mayer, who heads the spinoff, Panoram Technologies Inc. “It was a real culture shock. I’m an ex-Hippie.”

The National Research Council issued a report late last month saying that the entertainment and defense industries share many technologies related to computer models and simulation and could benefit from greater cooperation.

“You have two different communities that almost never talk to each other,” said Anita Jones, a professor at the University of Virginia and a former director of research and engineering for the Department of Defense. “I think it’s an exciting juncture.”

The trend, however, has its down side for the Pentagon. There is a concern that the nation’s brightest minds will be lured away from defense work by the excitement of Hollywood.