In “The War of the Worlds,” Tom Cruise flees an alien invasion in a Plymouth minivan. The camera swoops around and around, capturing the drama inside the van as it swerves through traffic, and rising from a point below the bumper to look down on the chaos from high above.
That shot was made possible by the Russian Arm, a gyro-stabilized crane mounted on the roof of a car. The technology was introduced in the late 1990s, and has become a mainstay of the “Fast and Furious” and “Mission: Impossible” franchises as well as Marvel and DC superhero films such as “Black Widow” and “Wonder Woman.” Whenever there’s a car chase or a cavalry charge or a stampede of giant robots, the director calls for the Russian Arm.
But wait.
The arm is not — strictly speaking — Russian. The company that makes it is based in Ukraine.
And now that Russia has invaded Ukraine, the manufacturer, Filmotechnic, has decided to rally around its national flag. The arm’s new name: the U-Crane.
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“The NEW OFFICIAL name of Filmotechnic’s world famous system is now U-CRANE in honor of (its) country of origin and their heroic fight against Russian aggression,” the company’s U.S. branch announced on Instagram on Feb. 28. “The gyro stabilized crane system was designed and built in Ukraine by Filmotechnic and will continue to be built in Kiev for years to come!”
Filmotechnic has about 250 employees in Kyiv. Some have fled to safe havens in Europe. Some are hiding in bunkers and parking garages. And some joined the Ukrainian army. So far, the company’s headquarters remains intact and no employees have been injured, according to Kevin Descheemaeker of Filmotechnic USA. The company also has offices in Europe and Canada, and its technicians continue to show up on sets as normal.
According to Descheemaeker, the international team decided to officially retire the term “Russian Arm” as a tribute to the company’s founder and owner, the Ukrainian film engineer Anatoliy Kokush, and to the company’s Ukrainian employees.
“I emailed our international group to take down all the signage on our arm cars, trucks and trailers, websites and no longer use the hashtag #russianarm,” Descheemaeker said in a statement. “As a group we decided that U-CRANE would be a more respectful alternative and that is how the movement on social media started.”
Descheemaeker added that the response from crews so far has been positive.
“We see first assistant directors getting corrected by random crew members when they call out the Russian Arm,” he wrote. “‘Pssst, it’s called a U-CRANE now.'”
But Filmotechnic has never been in complete control of the name. When he first began marketing the equipment abroad in the mid-1990s, Kokush called it the Autorobot. It was American film crews who — displaying a loose grasp of post-Soviet geography — christened it the Russian Arm, largely because the crane’s original operators spoke to each other in Russian.
Filmotechnic has since spawned numerous competitors — the Edge, the Pursuit Arm, the Ultimate Arm, the Scorpio Arm — all of which do basically the same thing, and all of which are commonly called by the generic term, “Russian Arm.”
“In my opinion, I believe the people in the film industry will not stop calling it that,” said Art Villasenor, a Technocrane operator on films like “Iron Man” and “Transformers.”
“Everybody knows the Russian Arm,” said Rob King, a stunt coordinator who has worked on “Thor” and “Skyfall.” “It’s a disaster what’s going on (in Ukraine), no doubt about it. But changing names — I don’t know, I’ve never been a big person on changing stuff up.”
Filmotechnic did not start using the term “Russian Arm” until 2003, when two former employees — George Peters, a grip, and Lev Yevstratov, a technician — started a rival company, Adventure Equipment. They began selling the Ultimate Arm, which they sometimes described as a Russian Arm, and they registered the web domain russianarm.com.
Yevstratov has a Ph.D. in engineering, specializing in gyro-stabilizers, from a technical university in Moscow. He worked with Kokush to develop the original arm, and is listed as a co-inventor on the patent. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and served as Filmotechnic’s public face for many American film crews, explaining how the arm worked in a thick Russian accent. His departure from the company — on less than amicable terms — and his decision to work for a competitor sparked a heated legal battle over who had the right to the name.
Filmotechnic sued Adventure Equipment in 2004, arguing that its product was first to the market. The company argued that even though it did not call its product a “Russian Arm,” its customers did, and Adventure Equipment’s use of the term was bound to cause confusion. Adventure Equipment argued that the term had become generic, and that Yevstratov — as a Russian — had more right to the name than Kokush, a Ukrainian.
In 2006, an arbitrator sided with Filmotechnic, finding that it was first to establish the brand in the public’s mind, and that Adventure Equipment had acted in bad faith in an effort to deceive customers. The arbitrator, retired judge Stephen E. Haberfeld, ordered Adventure Equipment to pay $117,000 in profits, costs and fees.
“The fact that claimant’s business origin and ownership is Ukrainian, not Russian, is not determinative,” Haberfeld wrote. “The use of ‘Russian’ in ‘Russian Arm’ was and is an immaterial inaccuracy.”
The same year, both Kokush and Yevstratov were awarded separate Academy Awards for scientific and technical achievements. Kokush won two — one for the Russian Arm, and a second for a crane capable of extending to 70 feet. Yevstratov and Peters were honored for the Ultimate Arm, which the Academy called an “evolutionary improvement” in the field of gyrostabilized camera cranes.
Kokush has since said that he would have preferred to have been recognized for inventing the Autorobot, but was told to put “Russian Arm” on the application because that’s the name people understood.
Filmotechnic then obtained a trademark for the term Russian Arm, arguing successfully that even though the name misstated the origin of the product, the brand had become distinctive and strongly implanted in the minds of its customers.
But in 2015, Filmotechnic failed to file the paperwork needed to maintain the trademark, and it was canceled. And when Filmotechnic tried to re-register it a few years later, the examiner rejected the application, finding that the term had by then become generic.
After all that, no one has the exclusive right to the term.
“It’s kind of like Kleenex,” Peters said in an interview. “My name is the Ultimate Arm, but everybody still calls me the Russian Arm.”
Peters added that he has no ill will toward Filmotechnic, even though he had to pay them $117,000 for using the term.
“I don’t want to use that name,” he added. “I don’t want anything to do with anything Russian.”
Peters and Yevstratov have also now parted ways. Yevstratov now works with the Edge crane, which he has used on films including “Tenet” and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”
In written responses to questions, Yevstratov said he was proud of his association with the Russian Arm, and not annoyed that Filmotechnic has decided to stop using the term.
“It doesn’t bother me at all,” he wrote. “I am happy to live and work among many wonderful people in the U.S. and other countries. The best technology is created only by large teams of specialists. There is no place for division, theft and deceit.”
Descheemaeker said that when a crew recently replaced the Russian Arm sticker on its crane with the a sticker that reads “U-CRANE,” there was a standing ovation.
“The film community is really embracing the name change,” he said. “It went viral and people from all of the world are supporting the change and they tell us it was long overdue.”
