A story lives on in Russian film folklore: in 1988, George Lucas came to Moscow and asked for one meeting—he wanted to meet Pavel Klushantsev, a Leningrad director he considered the “godfather” of Star Wars. Soviet officials did not know the name, and the meeting never happened. By then, Klushantsev had not made films for sixteen years and was writing children’s books about space. He died in 1999 without ever meeting the man behind one of the highest-grossing franchises in history—the man who, according to retellings, called him his godfather.
Hollywood, meanwhile, took plenty from Klushantsev: techniques, imagery—and even finished footage, recut twice under someone else’s credits. Not a penny in royalties ever rolled back his way.
One line flashed past in a digest about the Atomic Heart effect: Planet of Storms was the “godfather” of Star Wars. The digest did not unpack it, so I went digging—and pulled out a story whose concentration of irony beats most movies about Hollywood.
First, methodological honesty, because the subject is wreathed in fog. I could not verify the claim that “Lucas personally uttered the words ‘godfather of Star Wars’” through a direct primary-source interview—the quote lives in English- and Russian-language retellings tracing back to people around the director’s family. Everything else, though, is documented hard: two American recuts of Planet of Storms, the second made by the future classic behind The Last Picture Show; Coppola’s debut recutting a neighboring Soviet film; a letter from an Oscar-winning special-effects specialist containing fifty questions. And a technical backstage operation that makes any engineer’s eye twitch with admiration.
Klushantsev was born in 1910 in St. Petersburg, into an aristocratic family, in a house on Bolshaya Monetnaya Street. His father, a district doctor, had been granted personal nobility and died in 1919. His mother would perish during the Siege. At fourteen, Pavel supported his mother himself: tutoring, drafting, chess sets turned on a homemade lathe and sold for cash. He dreamed of engineering school—but a questionnaire with the entry “of noble descent” barred him from the Technological Institute. He went instead to the Leningrad Phototechnical College: they did not ask about class purity there—and graduated from its cinematography program in 1930.
Then came Stalinist roulette, with an unusual ending. Kirov’s murder, the arrest of an uncle—a former White officer, seized by mistake—who vanished into exile along with his wife. Young Pavel drew the cold, correct conclusion: in a system that writes people off over a questionnaire, only the indispensable survive. So he made himself indispensable. Over the years, he produced some three hundred inventions for filmmaking: an underwater camera rig, a stabilizer for aerial filming, his own method of producing color images, a spot exposure meter, a prism that filmed live action and drawings simultaneously. In 1938, he founded a special-effects workshop at the studio—the film people called it the “trick room”; it kept the studio afloat as it churned out 120 films a year.
During the Siege—third-degree dystrophy: his mother hauled her dying son on a sled across Leningrad to a clinic for dystrophy patients, then came evacuation to Novosibirsk and work at Sibtekhfilm. After the war—his directorial debut with Northern Lights: nobody knew how to film the aurora borealis, so Klushantsev built an apparatus that reproduced every phase of the glow—and was accused of “anti-Sovietism” because the film attributed the solution to Norwegian scientists. The references were cut from copies already printed.
And then—an episode that feels dangerous to put in a biography, lest it sound like a joke. Klushantsev submitted a proposal for a film about space and received an official reply: “We will have to wait another two hundred years for flights! Right now we need films about increasing sugar-beet yields.” The film was greenlit anyway. Road to the Stars (1957) came out in the year of the first satellite: viewers saw a spacewalk, the assembly of an orbital station, and a Moon landing for the first time—twelve years before Apollo 11, all of it shot in a model workshop. Its starry sky was a rotating shield several meters wide, with lamps positioned according to an actual star chart, at the proper brightnesses.
The models were so convincing that the KGB regularly summoned him for questioning: the designers of real classified vehicles suspected a leak. He got himself off with blueprints and theory—and walked away. He met Korolev; the scientific consultants on his films included one of Tikhonravov’s people, Academician Kotelnikov, and the astrophysicist Shklovsky. The system’s paranoia was rational: a man who renders secret rockets’ appearance exactly from his own imagination is either a genius designer or a problem. He was the former, but convincing the system required methods of his own.
Planet of Storms was Klushantsev’s first and only narrative feature. Its premiere is funny: Soviet sources name April 14, 1961—two days after Gagarin’s flight—while IMDb gives the same date in 1962; even the film’s birthday is an archival dispute, which feels symbolic for Soviet distribution. The plot: a joint Soviet-American expedition to Venus—in the height of the Cold War, mind you, joint. Three ships, one destroyed, a landing, a planet populated by dinosaurs, eruptions, and a robot named John.
With a budget many times smaller than Hollywood’s, Klushantsev delivered a list of “firsts”:
The trick-work kitchen is a pleasure in its own right. The planetary rover alone cost 400 thousand rubles—the price of sixty Volgas—even though on screen it moved as a toy model. Underwater scenes were filmed through an aquarium full of fish—a technique that would win Titanic’s special effects an Oscar almost forty years later. The robot costume was built after the 1911 McDuffy cast-aluminum diving suit, with 42 points of articulation—one of the most complex robot costumes of its time; inside was Boris Prutkovsky, a Master of Sports, because only a trained wrestler could move in metal armor (two years later, he would become USSR champion in freestyle wrestling). And John’s death was filmed using dyed dough.
That was Klushantsev’s entire method—“documentary science fiction,” where every shot had to look like newsreel footage from the future. Visual-effects specialist Robert Skotak would later put it this way in an interview: Americans, with their expensive studios, could not understand how it had been done with a couple of wires and ropes.
The film ran to queues at the Znanie cinema on Nevsky Prospect for six months; distribution rights were bought by 28 countries, including the United States. And in the U.S., Act Two began.
The Americans bought the distribution rights. Then begins what RIA called “the story of a film stolen twice”—with quotation marks, though the facts hardly require them:
A separate branch: The Sky Calls (1959, Kyiv Film Studio) was bought by Corman in 1962 and released as Battle Beyond the Sun. The adaptation was made by a UCLA student named Francis Ford Coppola—his feature-film debut. One Soviet science-fiction workshop—three American careers: Harrington, Bogdanovich, Coppola, all passing through Soviet raw material.
The original Planet of Storms was never released theatrically in the United States—it reached viewers only on home video in the ’90s. The special effects, meanwhile, circulated through Hollywood as if they belonged there.
Let us carefully separate the documented from the legend.
Documented. Robert Skotak—an Oscar-winning visual-effects artist who worked on Terminator 2 and Titanic—wrote Klushantsev a letter with fifty questions decades later: he was studying his methods for a book on the history of VFX. They met in person in 1992. Klushantsev’s quote from those conversations: “Americans, with all their expensive filming equipment and studios, could not figure out how we did these things with a couple of wires and ropes.” The director’s daughter, Zhanna: her father never asked for money for the work used overseas and received nothing from Hollywood.
Strong coincidences, recorded in the press. The scene of a robot dying in lava—Terminator 2, worked on by that same Skotak. Underwater filming through an aquarium—Titanic, again Skotak. Spacesuit design—Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. A flying air-cushion vehicle—the Star Wars landspeeder, retaining, according to Russian-language sources, even the principle and the look.
A legend one wants to believe. Kubrick, according to MK, said that Road to the Stars inspired him to make 2001; Spielberg and Lucas, according to Russian Wikipedia, acknowledged the influence of the American cut of the Soviet film they had seen in their youth—an influence passed through a double bottom. Lucas and the “godfather” belong to the same category: an unproven quote inside a documented context.
And here is the interesting part: even when they did pay for rights (Corman, by his own account in a 2003 interview, had to cut “anti-American propaganda” from the Soviet films he bought), nothing went to the author of the original inventions. Authorship is something that does not make it across the editing table.
In the USSR, Planet of Storms was criticized, strangely enough, for misogyny: the emotional portrayal of Masha, who nearly derails the mission after suffering a crisis in orbit—Culture Minister Furtseva, while noting the film’s interest, pointed out that a Soviet woman cosmonaut had no right to cry in space. According to researchers, the criticism damaged the director’s career: he returned to popular-science films—The Moon (1965), Mars (1968), I See the Earth! (1970). In 1972, according to MK, he left the studio himself; according to English Wikipedia, the studio parted ways with him. From then on, he wrote children’s books about space, translated into 16 languages—including All About the Telescope, republished in Russian, English, Spanish, and Polish.
He died in 1999, at 89, in St. Petersburg. His daughter keeps the archive—her father bequeathed that it remain in his homeland. At one point, she had to hear that “Dad supposedly made a fortune selling his inventions to Americans”—a fortune was attributed to him, but there was no money. He never asked for it.
In 1994, American Cinematographer published a two-part study, “Klushantsev: Russia’s Wizard of Fantastika”—the West’s belated discovery of his name. In 2002, the Danes made a documentary about him, The Star Dreamer. And Planet of Storms entered the curricula of American film schools: a special-effects textbook by a man who had no studio, no budget, and no right to make mistakes.
It was worth digging into this for two reasons.
First—indispensability as a strategy. Klushantsev survived a system that erased his uncle and drove his mother into starvation during the Siege only because he could do what nobody else could. The system recognized that—and backed off as many times as it tried to write him off. But that same strategy has a dark side: the indispensable are neither promoted nor released. They are preserved like a unique machine tool: without them, the soundstage stops, but they themselves never get beyond the workshop. Indispensability saved him from the hammer—and never let him out of the shop.
Second—the idea of special effects. Hollywood mythology says that miracles are born from budgets. Klushantsev proves the opposite: miracles are born from constraint. A prism filming live action and drawings at once is not a “compromise because there was no computer,” but another architecture of the shot, one the industry would later reinvent under the names front projection and compositing. An aquarium full of fish is what would later be called enormously complex underwater filming. A steel cable and the right camera angle are what would later be called a zero-gravity scene. For forty years, the industry solved the same problems—just with more zeros in the budget.
People who built the future out of wires and ropes usually end up in the credits of other people’s films. Sometimes—not even on screen. But every time a robot walks into lava with its hand outstretched, the physics of that shot comes from the Leningrad “trick room,” where a wrestler in a 1911 McDuffy aluminum suit stood in a cold soundstage and endured—so the shot would look like newsreel footage from the future.