Arnold David Clapman  

The 80's

 

 

As Arnold circulated through the art venues of 1980's New York, his work, though still surrealistic and fantastical, became more representational. He formed a production company with the folk-singer, Richie Havens; created album-cover designs, comic-book art for Heavy Metal Magazine and illustrations for various magazines and greeting card companies; celebrity art projects for Richie Havens, Muhammad Ali, and Cheech Marin. When not working on art projects, Arnold did double duty playing music with Ritchie Havens in various venues such as Studio 54, TV appearances on The Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show, and a college tour.

 

Because Arnold was more comfortable in the underground art markets, he, wisely or foolishly, walked away from the opportunity to become a mainstream illustrator for advertisers such as Breck Shampoo, Kawasaki Motorcycles and Big Tobacco ads, where he was expected  to paint beautiful people having fun.

The remainder of the 80's was spent in ARM Productions developing a project involving film colorization and restoration. Arnold pitched his idea for a one stop, real time,  film processing studio to RKO and was given a reel of the movie "King Kong" to experiment with. He also pitched this idea to a software development firm in Los Gatos CA  and secured a one year development agreement to work with their engineers and produce a demo that he could show to Hollywood film studio heads and film archivists. This led to his move to California, in 1985. 

The demo material was previewed at the 1986 annual NAPTE trade show at San Francisco's Mosconi Center by Arnold and Ritchie Havens. They met alot of movie stars and garnered many letters of intent from all the major Hollywood movie studios. The next step was to get 2nd round financing to develop and build the machine.