The endless government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark never existed. It was painted on a sheet of glass by Michael Pangrazio at Industrial Light and Magic. This episode traces the hidden history of matte painting, from mid-nineteenth-century photographers painting over glass plate negatives, to Norman Dawn's 1907 use of a glass painting to restore crumbling California missions, to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, Xanadu in Citizen Kane, and the bottomless chasm in Star Wars.

The conversation explains the technical demands of matching color temperature and film grain, then follows the digital transition: Chris Evans's scanned stained-glass window in Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985, the hybrid runway shot in Die Hard 2, and the hand-painted Carpathia in Titanic. It covers the uncanny valley of digital perfection, the shift ...