Lenny Lipton

Leonard Lipton (May 18, 1940 – October 5, 2022) was an American author, filmmaker, lyricist, and inventor. At age 19, Lipton wrote the poem that became the basis for the lyrics to the song "Puff, the Magic Dragon". He wrote books on independent filmmaking and was a pioneer in the field of projected three-dimensional imagery. Leonard Lipton developed 3D theater technology that is used in RealD 3D theaters. His technology is used to show 3D films on more than 30,000 theater screens worldwide.

In 2021, he published The Cinema in Flux, an 800-page illustrated book on the history of cinema technology.

Lipton was born in Brooklyn, New York. He majored in physics at Cornell University after starting out in electrical engineering. A self-described "mediocre student", he only excelled once he found a field he loved. Lipton urged schools to be more "accepting of eccentric people with a different point of view because we are the people who make the difference."

Lipton was 19 when he wrote the poem that was adapted into the lyrics for the 1963 song "Puff, the Magic Dragon", performed by Peter, Paul and Mary. His inspiration was a 1936 Ogden Nash poem, "The Tale of Custard the Dragon". "Pirates and dragons, back then, were common interests in stories for boys", Lipton said. "The Puff story is really just a lot like Peter Pan." Lipton spent decades denying that the song was about marijuana and believed that the myth was created by New York columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.

In the 1960s, Lipton shot several experimental films on 16 mm stock, most with running times of less than 10 minutes. The best known, Let a Thousand Parks Bloom, a 27-minute film about Berkeley's People's Park, played at the Tate Liverpool Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The following decade, he wrote two books on technologies and methods for independent filmmakers: Independent Film Making (1972) and The Super 8 Book (1975). Lipton on Filmmaking, a compendium of his magazine writings, was published in 1979.

Lipton was a pioneer in the field of projected three-dimensional imagery and was one of the creators of the electronic stereoscopic display industry. His interest dated back to his childhood in New York where he attended movie palaces, with some films shown in 3D. He drew his own 3D comics using red and green crayons on tracing paper, which were viewed using primitive glasses constructed of cardboard tubes and magnifying lenses.

Royalties from "Puff the Magic Dragon" and Independent Filmmaking, which remained in print for 20 years, gave Lipton an independent income that allowed him to follow his interests. His career in stereoscopic display began to gel around 1972. In one early stint, he served as the "convergence setter" for the 1983 3D film Dogs of Hell, determining for each shot the optimal position at which to cross the dual lens axes. Previewing a scene from the film, technical staff from Universal were impressed by the stereoscopic imagery.

He built a prototype of a flicker-free, field-sequential 3D display system and founded StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980 to fund development. The system worked by doubling the display rate of images, thereby overcoming a problem inherent in 3D motion picture projection, where each eye views only half the available images. In 1989, he patented the active ZScreen polarization filter that uses a circularly polarized liquid crystal filter placed in front of a projector, which can then display both the left and right halves of a stereo pair. After Real D Cinema acquired StereoGraphics in 2005, the technology became the basis for the RealD cinema system. The system is in use in more than 30,000 screens worldwide. Lipton was the chief technology officer at RealD until 2009, when he left to do independent consulting.