Lenny Lipton, who as a school freshman wrote the lyrics to the traditional folks tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” after which used the track’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering analysis in 3D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.

His spouse, Julia Lipton, stated the trigger was mind most cancers.

Few folks go away a lot of a mark on in style tradition; Lipton was among the many few who received to go away two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folks music and cinema know-how.

He was a 19-year-old pupil at Cornell when he sat down on the typewriter of his pal and fellow physics main Peter Yarrow. He had simply learn a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Story of Custard the Dragon” and felt impressed to put in writing his personal.

A while later, Yarrow discovered the poem, nonetheless in his typewriter, and felt an analogous inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folks trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, launched it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the ocean / And frolicked within the autumn mist in a land known as Honah Lee.”

Yarrow tracked down Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit score as a co-writer. (As Lipton advised reporters repeatedly, regardless of persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)

The track was such a direct and lasting hit — Lipton known as it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to go away his job and transfer to California. Within the Bay Space, he fell in with a circle of unbiased filmmakers and made a number of brief movies of his personal.

He obtained much more royalty earnings from his e book “Impartial Filmmaking” (1972), which grew to become a distinct segment however sturdy success, giving him sufficient of a monetary cushion to discover yet one more abiding curiosity: stereoscopy, the technical title for 3D know-how.

Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early Fifties Brooklyn when the primary wave of 3D movies arrived in theaters. He noticed all of them: “Home of Wax,” “Bwana Satan,” “The Maze.” And whereas the craze handed — the know-how was crude, the projectors had been laborious to synchronize, a budget eyeglasses that needed to be worn to see photographs in 3D had been clunky — his perception that 3D was the way forward for movie didn’t, and in California he started tinkering with concepts to make that perception a actuality.

“‘Puff’ gave me a number of freedom,” he stated in a 2021 interview with Transferring Photographs, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t must get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Level Richmond growing my stereoscopic innovations.”

Lipton accrued some 70 patents associated to 3D know-how, amongst them a display that switches quickly between left- and right-eye photographs, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and shut in sync with the display.

He developed that know-how, which he known as CrystalEyes, within the early Eighties. It quickly discovered purposes far past the movie show: Variations had been utilized by the navy for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.

CrystalEyes and different advances devised by Lipton seeded the emergence of a brand new era of stereoscopic filmmaking, utilized in 3D variations of flicks like “Avatar,” “Hen Little” and “Coraline.” As we speak, some 30,000 film screens throughout the US use 3D methods that advanced from his improvements.

Lipton “modified the paradigm of the viewers’s expertise in cinema tradition completely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3D animation at Arizona State College, stated in an e-mail.

Leonard Lipschitz was born on Could 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda store and died when Leonard was 12. His mom, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later modified their surname to Lipton.

His mom impressed his love for movie by taking him to a few of Brooklyn’s many grand previous film palaces, just like the Ambassador and the Paramount, whereas his father impressed his love for filmmaking by bringing residence a toy movie projector. Leonard quickly assembled his personal, utilizing aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.

He entered Cornell intending to check electrical engineering however rapidly switched to physics, the place he felt extra freedom to experiment.

After graduating in 1962, he received a job at Time journal in New York, then grew to become an editor at Common Images. After work he would head to a small theater within the Morningside Heights part of Manhattan, the place he and a few pals offered the most recent motion pictures to emerge from town’s underground movie scene.

He did a lot the identical in California, although with out the necessity for a day job. He wrote a weekly movie column for The Berkeley Barb, another newspaper, and made a number of brief documentaries shot on 16 mm movie, together with “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” concerning the clashes surrounding Individuals’s Park in Berkeley, and “Kids of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural pals.

Along with “Impartial Filmmaking,” Lipton wrote a number of different books, amongst them “The Tremendous 8 E book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Movement Image Know-how from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Period,” an 800-page opus on the historical past of film making.

Alongside together with his spouse, he’s survived by his youngsters, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there. Lipton had an idealistic certainty concerning the coming dominance of 3D movies, however he was additionally important of the best way Hollywood had restricted its use to cartoons and motion motion pictures.

“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema could be about actors and performing and contain folks in tales concerning the human situation, however that’s not what occurred,” he advised Transferring Photographs. “What occurred is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”

Nonetheless, he held out hope for one thing totally different across the nook.

“As quickly as somebody has success, monetary success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he stated.