Biography

John Dykstra was born on June 3, 1947 in Long Beach, California, USA. He is a producer, known for Spider-Man 2 (2004), Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and Lifeforce (1985). He is married to Catherine Louise Mccune. They have one child.

For Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) he designed and built the first computer-controlled motion control system. This system was dubbed the "Dykstraflex."

He studied Industrial Design at Long Beach State.

Member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) since 1995.

The alternate, European pronunciation of his last name is, "Yik-struh".

[on becoming a producer on Battlestar Galactica (1978)] It all boils down to who actually does the work, because the titles don't really mean a thing, other than that you can drive your car on the lot, because the producers can drive and everybody else has to have a Teamster.

[about re-using shots on Battlestar Galactica (1978)] The problem is that when there's a hole in the dramatics, the tendency is to fill it in with some special effects. Unfortunately for them, I didn't shoot enough special effects to have spares lying around to fill in holes with. I shot all the shots I said I was going to shoot, and we got all of them in the show, but we ended up having to use some of them a couple of times.

There are three ways to do any shot. There's fast, there's good and there's cheap. But you can only work in combinations of two. You can have it cheap and you can have it fast, but can't have it good; you can have it fast and you can have it good, but you can't have it cheap; you can have it good and you can have it cheap, but you can't have it fast. True words.