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Marty and Barbara Mueller are in the business of opening windows on the world. Big windows.
As owners of MSM Design, in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the Muellers design and build cameras and other high-tech gadgetry that help transform artistic ideas into spectacular scenes. Their wizardry has made it easier for IMAX Corp. and other large-screen movie producers to film documentaries under difficult circumstances.
Last month, Marty Mueller received the movie industry's ultimate acknowledgment when he won an Academy Award. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences honored him with a scientific and engineering award for developing the MSM Model 9801 camera.
The Muellers traveled to Southern California to receive the award along with 22 other recipients at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The plaques for scientific and technical achievements were presented a few weeks before the more-familiar Oscar statuettes were awarded on national television to actors, directors, writers, and others during Hollywood's biggest annual gala.
While the presentation of plaques for scientific and engineering achievements lacked the glamour and pageantry of the Oscars, it was a more intimate and personal event, which honored important contributions to the industry, Marty Mueller says.
"It was a big, 'Atta boy,'" says Mueller, with a smile.
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The hustle and hype of Hollywood are a far cry from the solitary retreat where the Muellers work their magic: The couple and their two golden retrievers usually are holed up in a rustic 1,400-square-foot shop near their Mokins Bay home on the east side of Hayden Lake.
The Muellers mostly are problem-solver. Marty tackles technical shortcomings in film-making technology and figures out ways to improve on it. Barbara helps manufacture MSM products and manages the business.
Back in the '60s, Marty studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University, while Barbara was a pre-law student at the University of Illinois. Neither graduated. He went to work in 1969 for Carter Equipment Co., a film industry supplier in Los Angeles. She opened a weaving studio and shop in Chicago in 1971. They met on a plane while enroute to New York, and she joined him in Southern California, where they were married.
Marty Mueller...