Lenny Lipton Useless: ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist Was 82

Lenny Lipton, the New York-native who wrote the lyrics to what grew to become Peter, Paul and Mary’s widespread people music “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” died on Oct. 5 from mind most cancers on the Cedars-Sinai Medical Middle in Los Angeles, his spouse advised The New York Occasions. He was 82.

In 1959, Lipton was a 19-year-old physics main at Cornell College. Feeling impressed after studying Ogden Nash’s poem “The Story of Custard the Dragon,” he borrowed the typewriter of his schoolmate Peter Yarrow — one-third of the Peter, Paul and Mary trio — to scribe a creation of his personal. However when Yarrow noticed Lipton’s poem deserted on the keys, he determined to place it to music, changing into the well-known 1963 music “Puff, the Magic Dragon.”

Lipton obtained a co-writer credit score on the observe, which was an on the spot hit amongst listeners. By way of royalties, Lipton generated sufficient cash to maneuver to the Bay Space in California, the place he grew to become cohorts with a various scene of impartial filmmakers. It was right here he was launched into the movie trade and started engaged on experimental shorts like 1969’s “Doggie Diner and the Return of Doggie Diner.”

Lipton additionally entered into the studio system throughout his profession, receiving a manufacturing assistant credit score on the 1975 greatest image winner “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

All through the 70’s, Lipton wrote two books for impartial filmmakers, the primary titled “Unbiased Filmmaking” (1972) and the second titled “The Tremendous 9 E-book” (1975). Writing wasn’t new for Lipton, seeing as he secured a job at Time journal shortly after graduating in 1962, earlier than shifting to an editor place at Widespread Images. Within the years that adopted, Lipton continued to contribute columns to leisure magazines. His writings have been finally aggregated right into a compendium referred to as “Lipton on Filmmaking” in 1979.

Lipton was additionally on the helm of experimentation with three-dimensional know-how for filmmakers — an curiosity that started in to his youth, when he would draw comics with crimson and inexperienced crayons to view with make-shift 3D glasses. As a toddler, Lipton was amongst a few of the first audiences to see 3D movies in theaters. Although the early know-how was removed from good, the idea resonated with Lipton and impressed a life-long profession devoted to the craft.

The multi-talented artistic held 68 patents associated to 3D know-how. One instance is a pair of glasses with shutters that open and shut in sync with the display to ship imagery to the viewer, dubbed CrystalEyes. The Smithsonian Establishment honored Lipton for the invention of CrystalEyes in 1996.

Improvement for these tasks was funded by Stereographics Company, an organization Lipton created in 1980, till RealD Cinema bought the company in 2005. On account of the acquisition, Lipton labored as chief know-how officer at RealD till 2009. His work stays the inspiration for RealD’s fashionable cinema methods.

“I had an excellent training at Cornell however I used to be a decidedly mediocre scholar,” Lipton mentioned with modesty in an interview with Physics World journal in 2007. “I’m a artistic and decided particular person and I bought so much smarter as soon as I discovered a area I beloved. I see the world changing into one through which kids are pointed within the path of cash as an finish in itself. I hate dwelling in that sort of a world. Faculties have to be extra accepting of eccentric individuals with a distinct perspective as a result of we’re the individuals who make the distinction. We’re the individuals who invent.”

Lipton is survived by his spouse, Julie, and his kids, Anna, Noah and Jonah.