wargames2

As a bit of catch-up, Sosna’s friend Steve Grummette was a huge help in making the film, and spent many hours programming just about everything that was on a computer monitor. Bob Wilcox remains a friend still, although we see each other rarely since he opted out of the film business (good for him). I do occasionally see John Badham and Walter Parkes, but have not seen Sosna since he left WarGames. Not to be catty, but I had to dismantle all the infrastructure to make the film that Sosna built, because it flat did not work. Of course, the big technical achievement for the film was the 50,000 or so feet of negative we managed to make into over 100,000 feet of print for the big screens in the front of the set. It was a huge undertaking, especially for the time (we built our own film recorders and file management system to control it all). The crew making those “plates” worked in shifts 24 hours a day for 7 months, if I remember correctly. Oh, and the Hewlett Packard computers we used were H-P 9845c’s I believe. They were lent to us by H-P because we were lucky enough to have Colin Cantwell, who had a relationship with H-P and was a consultant to them, as the lead designer of the missile scenarios displayed on those big screens. Colin did an incredible job and it is because of him that I looked so good.