Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 15

All I do know is that I enjoyed the Chronicles of Prydain fantasies by Lloyd Alexander on which the film is based . . . but in no way slavishly or with that fan elitism that contends no film can top the original material; I was wide open to be dazzled or merely pleasantly entertained, whichever; I am not a recidivist who believes the best work of Disney is past and can never be topped.

And even so, I was bored.

It's not a bad film, it's merely a bore. There is nothing new here. The usual funny sidekick (but Gurgi isn't Dopey or Jiminy Cricket), the usual unis.e.x hero and heroine (but Taran and Eilonwy aren't Prince Phillip or Cinderella), the usual pure-black villain (but the Horned King, for all his death's head and sepulchral wailing could never be, on the most evil day of his life, Queen Grimhelde the Wicked Witch or even Stromboli).

It is a flat film, and I think it is so flat because it was apparently not scripted. Ill.u.s.trators went from scene to scene and the movie reflects that episodic method. Momentous events turn out to be pa.s.sing fancies, magical implements are introduced and then are discarded as if all the hue and cry about them had been intended merely to rope you in, characters pop up and never payoff, and the clear intention of the producers to return to some small degree of the genuine fright we felt at the perils pa.s.sim the first Disney cla.s.sics is simply not realized.

I nodded off twice.

This seeming recurrence of filmic narcolepsy on my part disturbs me. Yes, I've been working hard, but who the h.e.l.l falls asleep in either a Disney film or a James Bond adventure? I'll tell you who. Someone who loves movies and wants to be thrilled.

So it is with considerable joylessness that I report The Black Cauldron is empty, and the film is emptyheaded.

Which brings me at the final outpost to Stephen King's new film, Silver Bullet (Paramount). Based on Steve's Cycle of the Werewolf, with screenplay by Steve, directed by newcomer Daniel Attias, and produced by a charming and intelligent woman named Martha Schumacher, this is, I fear, one more in the litany of misses made from King product. Not as bad as Cujo or Children of the Corn or Christine, but as emptyheaded as any of the films I've reviewed this time, Silver Bullet hasn't much to recommend it save a few nice insights by Steve, two extraordinary performances by a young woman named Megan Follows and a little boy named Corey Haim, who play brother and sister, and a scene in a foggy forest that is cinematically enthralling.

Beyond those minor joys, this is simply another feast of ghast in which heads are ripped from necks, vigilantes get half their faces clawed off, and a young woman is disemboweled. The story is pretty traditional, nothing much innovative after you've seen Werewolf of London or the original Lon Chaney, Jr. cla.s.sic. The attempts at resonance with To Kill a Mockingbird can be credited to Steve, who knows what quality is, but laid into such a stock plot, they are likely to be lost on the sort of audience for which the film is intended.

A word about that audience. I saw this film at a special prerelease screening at Paramount. Steve was in town and was kind enough to invite me to see it with him. As we sat in the back of the theater on the lot, the seats filled by a carefully selected, demographically-perfect crowd of young people-I'd say between seventeen and twenty-five years old-Steve expressed mild surprise that the audience applauded the scenes of strongest violence. I was not surprised. I saw The Omen with just such an audience, and I know how they love their blood sports. Steve knows that, too. Maybe sometime soon I'll tell you about an encounter I had with kids at Central Juvenile Hall in L. A. that speaks to this phenomenon. But not right now. It's bad enough that I'm rewarding Steve's and Dino's courtesy with a negative review. Suffice to say, this film will no doubt make money, but it is emptyheaded summer fare, with a soundtrack of the sort that Tara used to call "rats digging their way to China" music.

As for this season's Spielberg offering, well, last year I warned you away from Gremlins; and those of you who heeded my gardyloo later thanked me. Some of you who sneered at my vehement contempt sh.e.l.led out your shekels, laid out your lire, plonked down your pennies, abused your eyeb.a.l.l.s, and later wrote me toe-scuffling, red-faced, abnegating appeals for absolution. This year, on the basis of utter emptyheadedness and a soundtrack mix that renders every line of dialogue to spinach, I warn you off The Goonies, which I will not mention again. Perhaps you will take a word to the wise this time. If not, well, caveat emptor and don't come crying to me. (The superlative E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is being re-released, however, and you're better served spending your hard-earned to see that Spielbergian wonder this summer.) And so that you don't think I'm merely a cranky old f.u.c.k who is determined to follow in the footsteps of, say, John Simon, let me urge you to rush out immediately to see Ladyhawke and Coc.o.o.n, both of which are fresh and dear and worth the laying out of pfennig.

Also, ignore all negative reviews of Return to Oz, which I will review at length. Ignore Siskel and Ebert of ABC's At the Movies; ignore Robert Denerstein of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Robert Osborne of The Hollywood Reporter and KTTV; ignore my friends Leonard Maltin of Entertainment Tonight and David Sheehan of ABC-TV; ignore Jeffrey Lyons and Neal Gabler of PBS's Sneak Previews, and Janet Maslin of The New York Times. Shine 'em on, every last one of them. They are wrong, wrong, wrong in their looney denigrations. Return to Oz is smashing! For those of us who are familiar with the Oz canon of L. Frank Baum and those who lovingly continued the history of that special wonderland-even though we adore the 1939 MGM cla.s.sic, watch it again and again, and know a masterpiece when we (and posterity) see one-the Judy Garland musical was hardly the definitive interpretation. And comparing the two films is sheer foolishness. And vilifying Return to Oz because it has some genuinely inspired moments of real terror on the grounds that the 1939 film had a purer heart, loses sight of the horrors MGM built into that movie. Or have you forgotten those d.a.m.ned blue, winged monkey monsters schlepping Dorothy into the sky as their buddies stomp the c.r.a.p out of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman? No, my readers, turn a deaf ear to the boos and catcalls of the trendy critics who refuse to judge this absolutely marvelous film on its own merits. Take your kids, let them scream, let your eyes drink in marvels. Return to Oz is everything we hoped for.

Also, if Night of the Comet comes available on videoca.s.sette, catch up on what you missed when it was briefly in theaters, and treat yourself to the same kind of pleasure you derived from Repo Man. But these four films come with a warning: they may make you think. And that can be painful for the head what am empty.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/October 1985 INSTALLMENT 13:.

In Which Numerous Ends (Loose) Are Tied Up; Some In The Configuration Of A Noose (Hangman's)

As I write this, another film murder is in progress.

I leave for London and Scotland tomorrow (5 July), and this column is my final ch.o.r.e in front of the typewriter. When these words get to your eyes, I'll have returned to Los Angeles; I'll have sat in William Friedkin's back pocket as he directed my teleplay adaptation of Stephen King's "Gramma" for The Twilight Zone; I'll have voyaged far to Australia Incognita and will have returned with or without a Hugo for non-fiction; I'll have watched with pleasure the Friday-night-in-September premiere of CBS-TV's revival of TZ . . . and the murder will be merely another footnote in the history of the cinema.

Much will have happened between this writing and your reading of what I'm about to set down.

And were it not that your faithful hawkshaw got the wind up, this killing of a movie-like the crib-death of Dune, about which I wrote two columns recently-would be yet another perfect crime. Nor would you be apprised of how willingly you were accomplices.

Much of life will have transpired and in the impression of humanity's footsteps left behind, no one will notice, I fear, that another b.u.t.terfly has been crushed underfoot. That's poetry.

Last time, I urged you to rush out and see Return to Oz (Walt Disney Productions). I managed to slip that appeal into the column when the galleys were returned for proofing because I'd gotten the wind up, had begun to smell the deja vu of what had befallen Dune, and I didn't want the murder to go unnoticed because of a delay in getting the word to you, resulting from this magazine's monthly publication schedule. I wanted you to catch this film before it vanished from your local theaters.

And it did vanish, didn't it? Quickly.

I have given you the date on which I'm typing these words, because the months between this date and your reading of the words have not yet pa.s.sed. So what I write is, at this moment, prediction. As you read the words, it's history. If I smelled the charnel house smell, and am not merely a victim of paranoid conspiracy-theory, then you will know what I'm about to say has the ring of truth in it; otherwise how could I have predicted it?

If the events of the intervening months do not back up my a.s.sertions, then I'm dyin' cuz I'm lyin'.

I began to smell the odor of filmic crib-death even before Return to Oz opened; and I implored you to ignore the witless and intransigent negative reviews that were everywhere to be found; to treat yourselves to an afternoon or evening basking in the marvels of this wondrous fantasy while you could.

Because if my snoot was accurate, if you put off the going to see it, Return to Oz would be gone; and who knows how it'll play on videoca.s.sette or cable television a year from now?

In the trade, they call it "dumping."

I call it crib-death. Strangling the infant before it gets its legs through word-of-mouth. (In the trade, mixed metaphor works. In the trade, everything works, including executives who've been exposed as embezzlers, charlatans, wrong-guessers, idiots and knaves.) If you followed the reasoning I put forth in the matter of Dune's early demise, you were no doubt left with one nagging question: why (if Ellison's correct that Universal sabotaged its own release) did a major film company program the catastrophic failure of a forty million dollar epic that should have made its year-end p&I sheets vibrate with profits?

I had the same question.

It was only recently that an Informed Source gave me the answer. (Informed, but also, necessarily, Unnamed. Bamboo slivers under the fingernails cannot drag the name from me. You'll just have to take my word for it that said Source exists, oh yes said Source do. Everybody in the trade talks, and many there be who will summon up the cojones to blow the whistle; but swift and ugly reprisal is a fact of life in the trade, and I see no reason why an act of honesty should result in someone's losing his/her livelihood. Rather would I have you consider what I say with skepticism.) My Unnamed Source called to tell me that the budget on Dune was not, as I and every other American journalist reported, a mere forty million dollars. It was more than $75,000,000!

So unless Dune had been a runaway hit on the level of Beverly Hills Cop or Rambo there was absolutely no way Universal was going to come out on the black side of the ledger.

It was very likely going to be a loser, but it need not have been such a loser. Sabotage from within, it now seems obvious, was the final nail in Dune's coffin. But why? The answer lies in the power politics and job-hopping of studio executives.

When I expressed disbelief at such a berserk answer, my Informed Source chided me for naivete. It is not, however, wide-eyed innocence on my part that forces me to express doubts. It is the canker on the rose called libel. In Synopsis of the Law of Libel and the Right of Privacy, by Bruce W. Sanford, a pamphlet for journalists published by Scripps-Howard Newspapers, among the words and phrases "red flagged" as containing potentially actionable potency, we find the following: altered records, blackguard, cheats, corruption, coward, crook, fraud, liar, moral delinquency, rascal, scam, sold out, unethical and villain. Also on the list are booze hound, deadbeat, fawning sycophant, groveling office seeker, herpes, Ku Klux Klan and unmarried mother. But those have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Just thought I'd get them in for a little cheap sensationalism.

So what I will report here is carefully written. Facts and some philosophy. The linkages are yours to make.

Success and failure in the film colony are adduced on the basis of one's most recent production. Even an inept booze hound or fawning sycophant affiliated with a hit movie glows with the golden radiance of its success. A set designer or actor who did a splendid job in connection with a flop gets tarred with the same brush as the fools who came a cropper. Take director Martin Brest, as an example. Marty's first film after creating the brilliant Hot Tomorrows while still in attendance at the American Film Inst.i.tute, was Going in Style (1979), which did not do well. Marty could not get arrested (as it is warmly phrased in the trade) for three years. That's a long time to go without a job if you're a young director. Then he made Beverly Hills Cop in 1984. We all know how big that film hit. (Which was a fluke that Destiny had in its rucksack for Marty, who deserves all good breaks, for he is an enormously talented artist; a fluke in that Stallone was originally set to play the lead, backed out for whatever reasons, and was replaced by Eddie Murphy, who can do no wrong onscreen.) But now, Martin Brest is the hottest director in Hollywood.

And everyone with the film at Paramount-including then-studio heads Michael Eisner and Barry Diller-got hot with him. So they moved over to Disney. But that gets relevant later in this essay.

The point being that executives hop from studio to studio on the basis of how good they looked when they left. And frequently that has more to do with what happens to a movie than how good or bad the film is intrinsically. So a fact of film industry life that you've never known till now is the truth that an exec wanting to look to his shareholders as one who saved a studio in decline, necessarily tries to make his/her predecessors look bad. The worse they look, the better he/she looks if/when the new exec presents a bountiful p&l sheet at year-end.

I present the preceding as philosophy only.

Here is a fact. In 1982, when Universal picked up Dune for distribution from Dino De Laurentiis, the administration of that film mill was under the aegis of President Bob Rehme (now Pres./CEO of New World Pictures). But by 1984 when Dune was released, Rehme was gone and Frank Price (who had hopped over from Columbia) was President of Universal.

As I recounted in detail in installments 9 and 10 of this column, what happened to Dune bore all the earmarks of a cla.s.sic "dumping" scenario. That's how it looked to those of us who write about the film industry, and the conclusion is borne out by my Unnamed Source. Change of administration, a disaster credited to Rehme, and the new Priests of the Black Tower can only move upward, appearancewise, even if the next p&l is only adequate.

The same is happening to Return to Oz as I write this.

The film is being orphaned by Disney's new management, the Eisner-Diller combine. That's how it looks to me.

The evidence is out there for you to integrate, if you look even casually: no television advertising to speak of; small newsprint ads; few positive quotes; the film yanked from movie houses after a short run. And only now, several weeks after its premiere, are talk-show interviews with princ.i.p.als from the film being booked. The film came in around $32 million. The studio cut out most of the publicity back in March, three months before Return to Oz was scheduled to open; and it had an opening week advertising budget of approximately $44.5 million. This is extremely low for a major release. A typical figure for a comparable film would be $710 million, aided by heavy saturation on the talk-show circuit. Those are facts; evidence.

But here's what was going on behind the scenes.

The old Disney marketing department was essentially in place from the start of production late in 1983, until early in 1985. Then the new studio management of Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg started playing a direct hand.

Barry Gla.s.ser, the Vice President of Publicity, was unhappy and left the studio in March for a production development position with a j.a.panese animation company, TMS.

Frequently, studios hire outside publicity and advertising agencies to work with the in-house marketing department. The new management of Disney hired Young & Rubicam in February or March of 1985. Gordon Weaver, a former head of Paramount's marketing division and head of Y&R Entertainment, was given charge of the Return to Oz account. Unlike most agency/studio relationships, the agency started giving the orders to the studio personnel, leaving the marketing department in an unusual and untenable position. Barry Lorie, head of marketing for Disney, was so undercut by these goings-on that he was left with virtually little authority. It is common knowledge that Lorie bided his time, taking what was dished out, until an opportunity to hop presented itself. (It was announced during the last week in June that he would be leaving Disney due to "philosophical differences with the new management of the studio.") If one were to examine the facts, the evidence, and consider the modus operandi of dumping in the trade, one might feel that the situation as regards Return to Oz is philosophically consistent with historical precedent. I think that is a safe legal locution.

It is not enough to say, "Well, the critics hated the movie," because audiences seem to love it; and hideous films of virtually no value are hyped in huge measure to get the potential audience's appet.i.te whetted. But nothing much was done for Oz, and now the new Disney administration can say, "Well, it isn't reaching the market we thought would welcome it. We have to cut our losses." Orphaned. Dumped. Murdered.

And as producer Gary Kurtz knows, and as he told Disney, it is important to remember that the 1939 Wizard of Oz was a box-office disaster, and remained so until it was purchased for television in the early '60s, from which time it has been regarded by the general public (not just us enthusiasts) as a "cla.s.sic." But such need not have been the case with Return to Oz. It is a remarkable piece of movie making, true to the Baum canon, and worthy of being successful.

So we must ask the question, how did Eisner know Return to Oz wouldn't reach its audience back in February or March, long before it opened? Because that is when the advertising budget was cut and helter-skelter was introduced as the standard operating procedure. Unless he possesses a clairvoyance that ought to be scrutinized by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (3151 Bailey Avenue; Buffalo, New York 14215; publishers of The Skeptical Inquirer; an organization and a magazine you should support if you, as I, despise all the obscurantism and illogic from Creationism to Astrology that pollutes our world), one of the few rational explanations is that dumping has occurred.

If there is another rationale that can fit in with the evidence, this column is anxiously waiting to publish such an explanation. From Paramount. From Disney. From anyone who feels compelled to let us know that the world is not what our intellect tells us it is.

Until that time, it saddens me to have to advise those of you who went for the okeydoke that Return to Oz was a stinker, that you have been willing accomplices to the murder of a piece of cinematic delight.

And how does it make you feel to be one of those P. T. Barnum was referring to when he said . . . aw, shucks, you know.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/November 1985 INSTALLMENT 14:.

In Which We Sail To The Edge Of The World And Confront The Abyss, Having Run Out Of Steam

As fit subject matter for motion pictures, science fiction and fantasy are a pair of dead ducks. We have reached cul-de-sac and the curtain is about to be rung down. There has been a power failure in Metropolis; the Thing has been diced, sliced, riced in a trice and dumped into a pot of goulash; the Forbidden Planet has been subdivided for condos and a mini-mall; things to come has gone and went; and green cards have been denied Kharis, Munchausen, Gort and Lawrence Talbot.

What I'm telling you here is, they're dead, Jim, dead!

The trouble with this parrot is that this parrot is dead. I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now. It's stone dead. I took the liberty of examining this parrot and I discovered that the only reason it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there. And don't tell me that of course it was nailed there because if it hadn't been nailed it would have muscled up to the bars and voom! This parrot wouldn't voom! if you put four thousand volts through it. It's bleedin' demised. It's not pining for the fjords, it's pa.s.sed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired, and gone to see its Maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If it hadn't been nailed to the perch it would be pushin' up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible. This is an ex-parrot!

(And no, we haven't any gouda, muenster or red leicester.) Man and boy, I've been looking at fantasy movies since 1940 when, at age six, I saw the first re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Utopia Theater in Painesville, Ohio; and I'm here to tell you that in a mere forty-five years the filmic genres of fantasy and science fiction have been wrung dry, have sprouted moss and ugly little white squiggly things, and are no more. Gone. Done. Finis. Kaput. As empty as a line of sappy dialogue emerging from Jennifer Beals's mouth.

This is one of those p.r.o.nunciamentos one lives to regret at leisure. (My last one, "the mad dogs have kneed us in the groin," has hounded me, er, make that dogged my footsteps, uh, make that blighted my life . . . since my teens.) The sort of I don't know fer sure, Gen'ral Custer, but they look friendly to me one has thrown up to him ten years later, at the peak of a new golden age of cinema fantasy. Nonetheless, I have been going to the pictures a lot of late, and the scent of mold is in my nostrils. I have witnessed the best the film industry has had to offer from the well of sf/fantasy ideas, and I am here to tell you-despite the risks to my otherwise impeccable reputation-that if this is what pa.s.ses for the best and brightest, then the end of the road is before us, and sf/fantasy has nothing more to offer.

All in the same month I have seen the latest variations on Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man, not to mention a lamebrain time travel picture that seems about to pa.s.s Rambo: First Blood, Part II as the most popular flick of the summer. I speak of Back to the Future, of course. A film that has received almost unanimous salivations of delight from within and without the field. Kids love it, adults love it, sailors on leave off the Aisukuriimu Maru love it; intellectuals love it, h.o.r.n.y-handed sons of toil love it, Manchester chimney sweeps love it; young women in their teens love it, grizzled pulp magazine sf writers love it, defecating Russian ballerinas love it. So what's not to love? I'll tell you what's not to love!

(Back to Frankie, Drac and Fangface in a moment, but permit me to savage the sf end of this argument first.) Understand this: Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. Circa 500 B.C.: Herac.l.i.tus, the early Greek philosopher (there were no late Greek philosophers), lying around the agora like all the other unemployed philosophers, just idly thinking deep thoughts and providing a helipad for flies, said it for the first time, as best we know: Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe.

And if you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future.

This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repet.i.tion and time that has been killed. But I digress.

Of all the pure fantasy plot devices, time travel is the second most prevalent in the genre of speculative fiction-right in there chugging along, trying harder because it's number two, close behind invasion-of-Earth-by-moist-things movies. (And make no mistake, it is fantasy, not science fiction. I don't want to argue about this. As that good and dear Isaac has told us: "Science fiction writers have dreamed of finding some device that would make travel along the temporal dimension to be as easily controlled as along any of the three s.p.a.cial dimensions. First to do so was H. G. Wells in 1895 in his novel The Time Machine. Many [including myself] have used time machines since, but such a device is not practical and, as far as science now knows, will never be. Time travel, in the sense of moving freely backward and forward at will along the temporal dimension, is impossible.") But as the ultimate literary device for a story of what-if?, time travel abounds in the genre of speculative fiction, notable in such works as Robert Heinlein's cla.s.sic "By His Bootstraps," in which a man goes through a time portal again and again, meeting himself over and over (a story to be dramatized for the first time this year on the upcoming revival of The Twilight Zone); the late Philip K. d.i.c.k's The Man in the High Castle, in which n.a.z.i Germany won WWII; Pavane by Keith Roberts, in which Queen Elizabeth I was a.s.sa.s.sinated and the Protestant Reformation was crushed, Mary Queen of Scots ascended the throne and the world became wholly Catholicized; and the late Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, in which the South won the Civil War.

For shrugging off the toils of the here-and-now, for allowing human curiosity to fly unfettered, the what-if? theme cannot be bettered.

It is thus little wonder that the motion picture screen has returned to this plot-device with regularity, if not much depth of intellect.

There immediately spring to mind the most obvious films that have employed the time machine: Somewhere in Time (1980), based on a marvelous Richard Matheson novel called Bid Time Return, in which Christopher Reeve, using something like a Tantric trance, thinks himself into the past so he can woo and win Jane Seymour; Time After Time (1979) in which Malcolm McDowell as the young H. G. Wells pursues David Warner as Jack the Ripper from c. 1892 to San Francisco in the present day; the George Pal version of Wells's The Time Machine (1960) with Rod Taylor as the temporal traveler, finally linking up with Yvette Mimieux in the far future (as good a reason for going to the far future as one might wish); Planet of the Apes (1968) in which a contemporary s.p.a.ce probe goes through some kind of timewarp in the outer reaches and returns to a far-future Earth now ruled by simians; Time Bandits (1981), in which a little boy abets a group of time-traveling dwarves as they rampage from era to era plundering and s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up The Natural Order of things; Slaughterhouse Five (1972) in which Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck in time"; and 1984's The Terminator (some say based on writings we will not name here), in which an android a.s.sa.s.sin from the future is chased back through time to our day by a soldier determined to keep him from slaying a woman whose death would detrimentally affect the world of tomorrow.

But that's only the first calibration on the cinematic chronodial. How many filmgoers realized they were seeing a time-travel fantasy when they watched Bing Crosby as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1949)? (Actually, Rhonda Fleming ain't a bad reason to travel back to yore, either.) How about Brigadoon (1954) or Berkeley Square (1933) with Leslie Howard? It Happened Tomorrow (1944) in which the device is the next day's newspaper that falls into d.i.c.k Powell's hands; the cla.s.sic Portrait of Jennie (1948) from the famous Robert Nathan novel; and even A Christmas Carol, in its many incarnations, has strong time travel elements when Scrooge is taken by the ghosts to see his past and future; all are examples of the ineluctable hold the concept has on the creative intellect and on the curiosity of typical filmgoers.

Why should this be so? Well, consider the following: If time is like a river that flows endlessly through the universe, then might it not be possible that by going into the past and altering some pivotal moment in history, the river's course could be changed? By damming the past at some seminal nexus, could we not alter our world today?

Say, for instance, you stepped into your time machine today and stepped out in 1963, in the Texas Book Depository, behind Lee Harvey Oswald as he was drawing a bead on JFK, and you yelled, "Hey, you a.s.shole!" might it not startle him for that precious moment during which Kennedy would get out of the target area, and history be forever altered?

What if you were on-site during one of the nexus moments of ancient history; during those months in 218 B.C. in which Hannibal crossed the Italian Alps with his elephants to attack Imperial Rome? And what if you set loose on the mountain a rabbit that dislodged a pebble, that hit a stone, that rolled into a larger stone, that broke loose a rock, that hit a boulder, that started an avalanche, that closed the mountain pa.s.s? The flow of Western Civilization would have been utterly diverted.

With such Wells of invention inherent in even the shallowest of time travel stories, with such fecundity of imagination born into the basic concept, it would seem impossible for a filmmaker ladling up riches from that genre to produce a movie anything less than fascinating. Not even forty-five years should run it dry, right? If one thinks so, one has not seen Back to the Future (Universal), a celluloid thing as trivial as a Twinkie and, like much of the recent Steven Spielberg-presented product, equally as saccharine.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, currently a "hot talent" by dint of having trivialized both romance and high adventure with last year's Romancing the Stone, this flapdoodle from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment uses a plutonium-powered DeLorean to send seventeen-year-old Michael J. Fox back to 1955 so he can set up the meeting between his mother and father (as high schoolers), thus securing his own future birth. Naturally, his mother gets the hots for him, and the lofty time paradox possibilities are reduced to the imbecile level of sitcom.

With the arrogance of what the great French director Alain Resnais has called "the wise guy auteurs," Zemeckis and co-producer Bob Gale have had the effrontery to write a time travel screenplay with seemingly no knowledge of the vast body of such literature. And the story is by turns cheaply theatric, coincidental, obvious and moronic. Not to mention that Robert A. Heinlein and his attorneys are rumored to be murmuring the word plagiarism because of the film's freightload of similarities to Time Enough for Love, the master's 1973 time travel novel, as well as the famous Heinlein short story "'All You Zombies-'."

Yet even with such embarra.s.sing trivializations of a concept that seems dolt-proof, if-as Bogdanovich suggests-movies are merely pieces of time*, then surely this idiom as a source for fresh and imaginative films has barely been tapped.

*Actually a phrase from Jimmy Stewart.

At least one would think so.

Yet here it is, less than sixty years since filmmakers denied the wonders of modern technology, computer graphics, robotics and even the freedom of using models made of plastic or hydrocal, not to mention color or sound, drawing merely from the treasurehouse of imagination, were able to create Metropolis; and their artistic descendants can offer us nothing more meaningful or inventive than Back to the Future.

If we date the "beginning" of cinematography from Edison's Kinetoscope in 1891-rather than from Roget's Theory of the Persistence of Vision in 1824, or Rudge's 1875 magic lantern projector, or from Muybridge, or from Jules Etienne Marey-then we are talking about a self-proclaimed "art-form" whose age is less than a hundred years. Yet if we are to judge by the trite product that the most advanced crafts and talents offer us-the endless sequels, endless remakes, endless "hommages" that are little better than inept plagiarism-this is an "art-form" that has already gone stagnant, if not wholly, then d.a.m.ned certainly insofar as sf/fantasy is concerned.

I think I've reached the core of my thesis.

If we date the age of modern science fiction from Wells, rather than from Verne or Mary Sh.e.l.ley or Lucian of Samosata or the nameless author of the Gilgamesh Epic, we have a second artform whose age is less than a century. (I'll let adherents of the Verne-versus-Wells school hammer out the rationales for my picking Herbert George over Jules. I don't mean to be either capricious or arbitrary; I merely feel that modern sf as we know it, for purposes of this discussion, is better defined as proceeding from Wells's more thoughtful dystopian view of technology's effects on people than from Verne's less-critical utopian fascination with things mechanical.) Proceeding thus: speculative fiction as a coherent genre is a medium as old as cinema, and the two have been inextricably linked from the outset. h.e.l.l, the first movie of them all, according to many experts, was a science fantasy: Georges Melies's Le Voyage Dans La Lune, 1902. But in less than a hundred years, sf in the print medium has come from the naivete of Verne, the didacticism of Chesney, and the technocracy of Hugo Gernsback to a sophistication that produces writers as various as Lafferty (our answer to Thurber), Gene Wolfe (as one with Bierce), Kate Wilhelm (Dostoevskian), Benford (Faulknerian), Le Guin (equal to C. S. Lewis), Silverberg (d.i.c.kensian), Ballard (Joycean), John Crowley (whose resonances are with Colette) and Moorc.o.c.k (in the tradition of Fielding) . . . while filmed sf gives us vapid and grotesque, unnecessary remakes of Invaders from Mars, The Thing, Cat People and King Kong. Even as the newer writers-Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Shepard, Bishop, Connie Willis, Tem, Curval, Bryant and Simmons-a.s.similate all that was the best of "the New Wave" of the Sixties/Seventies, melding it with elements of traditional sf, to develop ever subtler and more innovative ways of dealing with what-if, the cutting edge of sf in film is Explorers, Coc.o.o.n, Baby, Weird Science and Back to the Future.

Even extolling the virtues of Coc.o.o.n and Weird Science, the reality with which we must deal is that sf cinema has come, in a few years (comparatively speaking, as regards the life span of an art-form), to a weary recycling of the same tired themes with mere fillips of variation, cosmetic repaintings of last year's models. In any other art-form, such a manifestation of aridity of invention, such an obvious stasis, would signal the end of development. In just this way did the epic poem give way to the novel form.

A moment's pause. How is that written sf, for all its wrong turns, faddish detours and periodic recidivism, has continued to show constant growth and revitalization, while film-with its mushrooming population growth of new, young talents and astonishing technical expertise-has turned more and more in on itself, cannibalizing the core subject matter and paying false homage to its most trendy newcomers, even as it ignores the experimental work of men and women whose vision opened new paths fifty years ago? Gil Lamont suggests, and I agree, that sf in the print medium continues to show vitality, in defiance of the natural order of such things, precisely because it is a ghetto. Since we need not please the ma.s.ses, the Great Wad, as do television and big-budget films, we continue to produce that which interests us. And the us that is pleased is one raised on The Word. Not an us, like those who come to work in tv and movies, raised on thirty-five years of repet.i.tive sitcoms and episodic series.

Only ma.s.s-market sf-"sci-fi"-gives us repackagings of the same old themes: s.p.a.ce opera, heroic fantasy, things with fangs, haunted houses. Here in this ghetto, for all its death of soul for writers who aspire to the larger playing fields of general literature, there is a welcoming of the daring and experimental. So the best we have to offer, even thirty years old, is ignored by the motion picture mentality in favor of hackneyed treatments of h.o.a.ry cliches. Starman, Ice Pirates, The Last Starfighter and Back to the Future are prime, current examples.

It is clear: those who pa.s.s themselves off as creative intellects-Joe Dante, Spielberg, Lucas, Landis, Carpenter, among many whose names fall from the lips unbidden-are truncated things, capable of limited imagination. Oh, their technical flourishes are beyond cavil. They know every new camera lens and stop-action technique. But what they choose to put up on the screen is empty. It is either devoid of intellectual content or so sunk in adolescence that it can appeal to none but the most easily dazzled. Now we get an hommage, en pa.s.sant, in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome to a line from Buckaroo Banzai; Explorers tips its dunce cap to Gremlins; and Steven Spielberg is on record as having said of Back to the Future, "It's the greatest Leave It to Beaver episode ever produced."

Isn't that a daring project for the most powerful and artistically unfettered talent in film today!

You'll notice I'm not even attacking these films on their lack of internal logic or extrapolative rationality. This note of the death-knell strikes simply in terms of which stories have been chosen for the telling.

Which brings me to The Bride (Columbia), Teen Wolf (Atlantic Distributing) and Fright Night (Columbia).

All three have been popular. Teen Wolf, a quickie, has a ma.s.s appeal based, apparently, solely on the current hot actor status of TV's Michael J. Fox. The other two did well at the box office, it seems, because of subject matter. And what is the subject matter? Is it something fresh and new in the canon of fantasy? Is the subject matter sophisticated and newly-slanted as was the case with Liquid Sky, Repo Man and Night of the Comet, three innovative films that died at the box office, and have become cult favorites precisely because they are purely ghetto films that eschew all the Amblin-like appurtenances of moron media hype? Are they even as fresh as, say, 1940s sf films?

No, they are minuscule variations on Dracula and Frankenstein.

All in the same month, rechewings of the three cla.s.sic film fantasy archetypes.