"If I had to point to a single event that made the biggest impact in the live event production industry, it would have to be the development of the Vari-Lite VL0," says PLSN editor Richard Cadena. "As the leader of the project development group that invented the very first commercially available automated lighting system, Jim Bornhorst helped move the industry a giant step forward." "I have been blessed with recognition, but know that these things were hardly a solo effort on my part, and two others, Tom Walsh and John Covington, have been heavily into development with me," Bornhorst says. He adds that the leadership of Rusty Brutsché was another critical element. Yet in Bornhorst was a love of music, photography, and ability to envision the improbable that brought about the moving light, changing live event production forever.
Working his way up through Showco in the 1970s, he was part of the team that prepped the infamous Van Halen world tour of 1978-1979 that went out with a mind-numbing 1,000 PAR cans. The breaking point had been reached. "This tour really catalyzed our need for a gel-changing fixture to gain system efficiency."
Strange things can happen in Texas barbeque joints, as anyone who has ordered a plate on a Saturday night can attest. But what happened one day during lunch at Salih's Barbeque in Dallas is legendary. At a table with little elbow room and never enough napkins sat Brutsché and his Showco partner Jack Maxson, Tom Littrell and Bornhorst. After laying out the light's motor-intensive design, it was Maxson who commented: "Two more motors and it moves."
"I just remember coming away thinking, ‘Sh*t! We've got a lot more to do if the fixture is going to move."
Thus in 1980, Bornhorst and the team that would become part of Vari-Lite set about bringing the dream of a viable, remote-controlled spotlight to reality. He could imagine combining pivoting dichroic filters, the MARC 350 arc lamp and a single digital data link that would be an automated spotlight. Less than 12 months later, the revolution began.
"There are numerous engineering categories," former Showco employee Littrell says, "mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, optical engineering, software engineering. Jim gets his own category – ‘all of the above.' It's easy to put artists in one world and engineers in another, but Jim takes engineering to the level of art. This, and the fact that he is a sound guy who likes lights, makes him one of a kind."
Bornhorst's place in the annals of live event history would have been cemented with the VL0, but he has continued to contribute to new projects from all the VL incarnations all the way through to the recent PRG Bad Boy. "I am very fortunate to have worked with Jim on a number of projects," says Nick Whitehouse, lighting and production designer for the likes of Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Coldplay. "His passion and talent for the development of technology in the lighting industry is second to none."
The Roadie's Roadie
Perhaps there should be a study on the connection between military brats and pro lighting developers. Like last year's Parnelli Visionary honoree Richard Belliveau, Bornhorst is the son of a military officer. He was born in 1945 in Salt Lake City, where his Air Force officer father was stationed. Early years were spent in Germany and England and then in 1954 Lt. Col. Clarence H. Bornhorst was transferred to the Pentagon in Washington D.C. There his father spent "four horrible years" working under General Curtis "Bombs Away" LeMay at the height of the Cold War. From there he was transferred to the much more placid town of Waco, Texas.
"I was always into the sciences and photography," Bornhorst says, of his youth. "I was always working in a dark room, working with light, and liked the scientific aspect of it." He was also taking radios apart and fixing them, and by the time he hit high school was one of those certifiable audio geeks who had to constantly be improving his "hi-fi" system.
"I had the speakers and a turntable and a hodge-podge of audio gear. I'd build kit amps and put them together, and listened to The Kingston Trio, Dixieland jazz, Rachmaninoff – a diverse mix."
His plans to be a "jet jockey" nosedived when he flunked out of school the first year. "I was never good at academics, and I didn't study," he chuckles. He then enrolled in an adjunct of A&M University in 1963 when it was an agricultural and mechanical college. "So I went to a technical school and loved it. I built circuits, tested things, and then went to work for Collins Radio Company," which was a major player at the time providing communication tools to NASA.
Bornhorst would receive his draft notice, but he managed to get lucky and got into the National Guard in Bryan, Texas, where he served six years as a paratrooper.
By December 1971 he had graduated from A&M with a BS in electrical engineering and a three-year commitment to the military. He ended up in Dallas, where a friend's wife showed him a little ad from burgeoning audio company called Showco. They were looking for help with rock ‘n' roll audio – degree required.
"I showed up for an interview, and here were these guys building P.A. systems and putting them on the road," he marvels. The company put him to work as a "roadies' roadie."
"He was pretty quick," Brutsché recalls, from his early days as Bornhorst's boss. "We needed technically-trained people to go on the road, and he answered the call." They sent him out with the then wildly-popular Three Dog Night, driving a truck. He got right away that the company's business plan was designing good pro entertainment products that could be assembled quickly and was fascinated by the possibilities.
Bornhorst would spend a few years touring with Alice Cooper, too, including the Billion Dollar Babies Tour. "His productions were marathon events and so much fun. [Alice Cooper] was crazy, but an incredible showman. We'd put on a show that would just shock the local population." It would "awe" them, too. During his time with Alice Cooper, the audio guy gained greater appreciation for what lighting could do. "They had a lighting designer, Charlie Carnal, who was really talented, with a great sense of drama."
Bornhorst also toured with Jackson Browne, including the landmark Running on Empty tour, among others. But his talent for product development would lead him off the road permanently. He built a cross over system network that separated the low and high frequencies in the early days of integrated circuits.
By 1973, he was working closely with Brutsché. Together, they built Showco's first major audio console, the Superboard. "I did the mechanical design and he did the electronics, basically inventing the circuitry and creating the first live mixing board to have parametric EQ," Brutsché says. "He also built an automatic feedback unit – that he was a brilliant guy became obvious real quick when he started working on things."
Genesis of the Moving Light
The 1970s were days of wild growth for Showco, which expanded beyond audio into production, sets, trucking and lighting. "We were a huge operation, and I became involved technically with many aspects of the company," Bornhorst says. As the touring shows got bigger, so did the number of lights, and along with that, the number of headaches, culminating with Van Halen's 1978-79 world tour. "The lighting design called for 1,000 1kW PAR 64s and each fixture was connected to a 2.5k Colortran dimmer with a long piece of 12AWG SJO cable terminated in a Hubbell twist lock connector. The cable pick leading up to the trusses looked like a tree trunk on each side of the stage. It was an overwhelming amount of gear that took forever to set up and tear down."
Surely there was a better way.
The challenge being kicked around the office was, could there be a gel-changing device that would cut down on the increasing number of lights demanded on tours? "Tom Walsh had some ideas that were pretty esoteric involving liquid dye chambers, but nothing practical came of it." Meanwhile, all that growth caught up with Showco, and the sudden death of Led Zeppelin's John Bonham took from them a major tour that they had already invested in. So Brutsché got back to roots and just focused on sound. But he would extend a lifeline to Covington, Walsh and Bornhorst, allowing them to continue their moving light quest – but only for 90 more days.
"I had become familiar with John Tedesco's work and tried to use his 350-watt arc lamp instead of a PAR, as the arc used one third the power and was just as bright. It would allow us to make something small and compact … but we'd put a gel in front of it and it would go up instantly in flames." Bornhorst's lifelong love of photography came into play, and he started experimenting with dichroic filters. "We stuck that in front of the light, and they survived, and that was the beginning."
Walsh worked out digital issues, Covington focused on the motors, and Bornhorst worked on the optics and thermal issues. "In three months, we built what we now call the VL0, a color mixing/fading wash light with four dichroic filters that would pivot in the beam to change the angle and color. It was a parametrically variable color system. Versatile control for lighting seemed important to me, and we had a light that you could tune color and was pretty bright."
Next Brutsché, Bornhorst and LD Alan Owen flew to England to show it to an important Showco client at the time – Genesis. A demonstration for the band was set up in a 500 year-old barn.
The band was blown away, and informed the team they wanted no less than 50 of them. Brutsché said, "Well, we might need a million bucks." The band said "Fine, but we want to be business partners and exclusive use of it for the first couple of years." And thus the lighting designers and the rock band got into bed together, forming a new company which Genesis manager Tony Smith named Vari-Lite.
So the elated – and stressed – team went home and built 55 units in nine months. But before the tour went out, there was another "ah-ha" moment. When they were rigged on a huge U-shaped truss, they put a little smoke in the room and fired them up. When Littrell inadvertently moved them and all the lights swept up in unison, the team was stunned. "None of us conceived of moving the lights when they were on," Bornhorst says. "When we saw the effects of the beams in the air, moving, changing colors, it was like, ‘Oh sh*t!'"
Audio Guys Make Good
Genesis opened their Abacab tour in Barcelona on September 25, 1981 with 50 VL1s in place along with a new multi-processor control desk featuring software written by Brooks Taylor. That fateful day, Bornhorst and the crew walked into the bullfighting ring where the concert was being held, and saw a couple of guys dragging what looked like an old carpet away – but it was actually a bull hide from a kill the night before. Ignoring the blood, they put the show together on a temporary stage.
With Littrell at the console, they let the first few songs go by, waiting for the opening notes of "Dodo/Lurker." Then, the lights came on and swept up through the crowd. "Thousands of Spaniards jumped on their feet and were raising hell," Bornhorst recalls. Joy and pride was followed by concern and stress.
"There were thousands of scary days," Bornhorst says of that tour. "The units had a lot of problems, mostly mechanical. Every night we were fixing lights and hanging them back up for the show. But the effect was overwhelming. The dichroic colors were beautiful."
Back in the shop, the next challenge was to refine it to make the fixtures more reliable, and, after all, "we were audio guys!" he laughs. The next important breakthrough came in 1986, when the team used new techniques including local processing with cue memory and bi-directional data links. This led to the new VL2 Spot and VL3 Wash – both of which featured microprocessors for better communications with the Artisan lighting board. The team received their first EMMY in 1991 for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering for the efforts. Meanwhile, Brutsché put the lights on a 1987 production of Tristan und Isolde at the LA Opera. When Broadway embraced the lights, television and everything else followed.
The VL4 came next, featuring a brighter arc source. It used the same color mixing system as the VL3, but had an improved beam control device that worked like a roll-top desk.
"But it was the 300 Series that marked the next big leap, and it was because of the VL5 that we won another Emmy in 1994 for outstanding achievement," Bornhorst says. The VL5 was the first tungsten wash light with crossfading colors. It also featured the Dichro-Tune radial color mixing system, and it was silent because there were no fans – a big plus in the TV market. "PRG still owns thousands of original VL5s," Bornhorst notes. "Then came the VL6, which were small, bright and quiet, and they were a huge success."
The VL 1000 was designed to serve as a low-cost but functional unit, embraced by civic and school theatres, trade shows and churches; it even made sense for architectural applications.
The Aughts and Beyond
In 2001, when Vari-Lite became part of Genlyte, which later became part of Philips, Bornhorst stayed with Brutsché and became part of VLPS, focusing on rentals. VLPS then merged with PRG in 2004.
"Rusty convinced PRG that the Vari-Lite business plan was a good model," he says. "A rental company needs proprietary equipment; otherwise everyone is just having a price war on MAC 2Ks."
"Three years ago, we started developing a high-powered hybrid luminaire. It is a remarkable instrument and extremely efficient optically. U2 was the first major tour to use them, and they took out 200. Willie Williams did a beautiful design with them."
Bornhorst returns to his theme that any honors he gets, he accepts only as a member of a team. "In large part, the success was because we were all deeply involved in the productions of live events from the very beginnings of the industry," he states emphatically. "Had we all not had to deal with broken equipment and the harsh conditions and rigors of the road, we would not have been driven to build robust products. It was this dedication, held by so many wonderful people within our group at Showco and Vari-Lite, that produced the extensive line of products that I get far too much recognition for!"
Today he is still in the lab working with optics, "measuring lights and colors." He credits Tom Hough, hired in 1996 fresh out of college and now an independent consultant, with the design of the optics of PRG's latest success, the Bad Boy. "My days of holding lenses up in front of lamps are over," he smiles. "I stick to the bench, still trying to squirt light through holes" – a modest way of saying he continues to take a lead role in the development of integrated entertainment technologies accessing all of PRG's lighting, audio, video, projection and scenic products.
"He's hardheaded and opinionated, but a good person," Brutsché declares. "He's good with people and a natural technical leader. We built things in groups and had some really talented, creative people. But I credit Jim for coming up with the big ideas. He's a generalist, deep and broad in knowledge, with an unusual gift for creativity. No question he had to have the proper environment to work in, but I really credit him for being the creative force on the technical side of the company all these years."
"I was lucky enough to be there at Showco during the early days and watched multiple ideas evolve into one complete system," Littrell says. "Jim was the shepherd of this process – his ability to deal as an equal with mechanical, electrical, electronic, software and optical experts was astounding. I should also mention that he is also good at dealing articulately and skillfully with management. No small task there, either … [and] if you are reading between the lines and seeing the phrase, ‘epic battles with management,' you are correct. He is more than deserving of this recognition."
Bornhorst is also a licensed glider pilot and PADI-certified scuba diver. For kicks, he's been known to build things like an all-metal sailplane that flies up to 170 mph. His son Daniel graduated from the University of Texas in computer science and is a musician, and his daughter Samantha also graduated UT with degrees in geography and journalism. His wife, Becky, is an active environmentalist.
"This is a wonderful industry with great people, and I'm honored to receive this Parnelli," he says. "I'm humbled and honored."
