Film Genres: Science Fiction
We've covered television Sci Fi and the literary genre and it's numerous great authors.
Now it's Hollywood's turn. And London's, Paris, Lodz, Rome (actual name Roma) and/or wherever feature films are made.
Feature film sci-fi has had a grand ancestry. Le Voyage dans la Lune was created by Georges Méliès in 1902, and is considered to be the first science fiction film. Drawing upon the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne (see my previous blog), it depicted a spacecraft being launched to the moon by a large cannon. It's ground-breaking special effects (in fact Méliès may well have invented special effects) pioneered the way for future science fiction films.
Thomas Edison's Edison Studios in New Jersey adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
into a film in 1910, and Herbert Brenon directed Carl Laemmle's 1913 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1913.
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was first produced in 1916. This was one of the first feature-length films.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle undertook a remarkable departure from Sherlock Holmes (see prior blog) when he wrote The Lost World, in 1912. Hollywood took this on with Wallace Beery in the leading role in 1925.
In those heady 1920's European filmmakers were not standing idly by. But European cinema of that era took film in a new direction: social commentary, combined with prediction (let us not forget George Orwell of that era). The Russian film Aelita took on the issue of social revolution.
German expressionist Fritz Lang was another film pioneer, with his film Metropolis taking yet a new direction into the heart of a futuristic city. Not all of which, of course, is good. This proved to be the most expensive film yet made, with futuristic sets (of soon-to-be-here 2026!) for the first robot, the inevitable mad scientist, and a dystopian society. Lang ended the silent era.
The 1930's brought the Great Depression, audiences (those who could afford a ticket) needed escape. But early attempts were major failures, such as 1930 Hollywood's Just Imagine. Other failures included the 1936 English film Things to Come: H.G. Wells' predictions of a future a century from then which forecasted World War II. Which, unfortunately, began about 97 years sooner than his prediction.
As a result of these and other failures, the film industry abandoned sci fi until well after WWII, and instead turned to film serials: low budget quickies with almost laughably shoddy futuristic sets, but featuring what would become a Hollywood staple: heroic adventures, rescued maidens, lots of action, gadgets galore, and ditto melodrama.
The first of these starred none other than Gene Autry, complete with ray guns and (imagine!) TV screens! This led to Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy ick Tracy. Not exactly Sci-Fi, but hey, still escapist fun. These brought us space travel, high tech gadgets and weapons, the usual pre-James Bond evil plots for global dominion, and of course, mad scientists.
WWII was mostly propaganda films, but the late '40's and 1950's brought us into a new era: the era of nuclear Armageddon. Suddenly sci-fi wasn't so 'fi.'
The 1950's also brought us the Cold War and it's inevitable global paranoia. But some films were made during that decade. Some have called this a Golden Age of Science Fiction, comparable to the one in literature. released in 1950
The first major success of the new era was Robert A. Heinlein's own adaptation of his book Destination Moon, produced by George Pal and released in 1950. Pal went on to produce When Worlds Collide, The Time Machine, and the infamous War of the Worlds all of which earned Academy Awards for special effects.
War of the Worlds set the stage for a flood of films featuring aliens, especially post-Roswell. The first of these films, the unforgettable The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise, and i.m.h.o. the best of this emerging lot. Later films had color and more tech, but the story of a peaceable alien landing in Washington, D.C. to warn the human race of the danger of nuclear weapons.Another popular classic was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another classic, by Don Siegel, in 1956. because it was a veiled warning about McCarthyism.
The 1950's also brought us the brilliant special effects of stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen, whose name was spoken with reverence back when I worked at Hanna Barbera, and protege of King Kong animator Willis O'Brien. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was a hit in 1953, based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. This featured the revival of a fictional dinosaur (a Redosaurus) which was thawed out of an iceberg in the Arctic due to atomic testing. This was one of the first dinosaur films since The Lost World, which Arthur Conan Doyle book I once adapted as a screenplay for director Jack Arnold, at his office at Universal Studios. Jack Arnold also directed several '50's sci-fi classics, including It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and others. (Arnold also directed one of my favorite comedies, The Mouse that Roared. This was a Peter Sellers tour de force, in which he plays three roles, as he loved to do). Jack Arnold had numerous directing credits in both film and television (Peter Gunn among many others).
Following up on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Jack Arnold's Tarantula, all emerged due to atomic testing. Hollywood producers always did love to copy themselves, it seems.
However, weary of atoms, I suppose, a new line of monster villains emerged, this time aliens. No more wimpy The Day the Earth Stood Still types. These creepy crawlers included The Terror from Beyond Space, The Blob, The Angry Red Planet, and Kronos,
Next came human mutation, purposeful or otherwise. These included The Fly, The Amazing Colossal Man, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Meanwhile, the Japanese, recovering form their post-war shock and awe (and atomic attacks, for that matter) developed a line of nasty creatures of their own. These were the Kaiju ('strange beast') films with huge monsters. Definitely low budget, but sufficiently scary to rake in millions worldwide. The film Warning from Space (1956) may have inspired Stanley Kubrick to make his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
This period made money. A lot of money. Cats were getting fat, in Hollywood and wherever films were being made.
The next target market (audience) would be teens, and there were a host of them, thanks to the post-war baby boom. I would become one of those. And this new market demanded--and got something new. The industry delivered--big time--with the drive-in theater (make out palaces with crappy sound but who cared)? Some even had car service for burgers and such. By cute girls, of course. Another money-maker.
The drive-in became so popular that there were more than 4,000 of them by the Sixties. There are only 330 left, per last count, and they are increasingly decrepit. There was no competing with making out on your couch with a beer (or soda, or just watching TV if someone's watching), which, of course, has led to Netflix, Hulu and such.
But there was a second New Wave to arrive: this time of technology, with 3-D vision, with the exhibitor (theater owner) providing dark 3-D glasses to every audience member upon entry. This was, like, totally awesome, to a kid back then. At least, to a Middle Class kid in suburbia.
One of the first 3D films was Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon.
As with the early '50s, a new round of low budget films (usually under $400,000, which wouldn't even get you a Super Bowl commercial today) began to hit the market again. These low-end but profitable features made stars of directors like Roger Corman, Coleman Francis, and Ed Wood, whose Plan 9 from Outer Space was, according to critics Harry and Michael Medved n their book The Golden Turkey Awards, "the worst film ever made." Ed Wood was 'awarded' (posthumously) the Golden Turkey Award for 'Worst Director of All Time' in addition to 'Worst Film.' Ironically, those films have become cult favorites now, in the 'so-bad-it's-good' category.
The time had come for the big Hollywood studios to step forward with big budget features, with major stars (and minor stars and starlets, extras and wannabes). Big-name directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas led the way with Star Wars and their big time special effects. Lucas, fed up with Hollywood's power system, moved north to rural Marin County and a beautiful location to build his Lucas Films empire. (Note: Frances Ford Coppola, another big-name director, also fled Hollywood and partnered with Lucas to found his American Zoetrope company in San Francisco (shooting mostly on location).
Forbidden Planet was a big budget film with Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis, made in 1956. This was one of the first wide-screen films shot in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor and was well-received by public and critics alike. Screenwriters Alan Adler and Irving Blockcreated a plot and setting loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. (For the record, like Mark Twain I am a Shakespeare doubter--a subject for another blog).
In 1959 producer/director Stanley Kramer made a black-and-white post-apocalyptic epic (I suppose b/w due to bleak content, since color had been an option for decades per Forbidden Planet) On the Beach, based on Neville Shute's novel depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war, set in Australia.
Kramer assembled a who's who cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins.
After the boom years of the '50's for sci-fi, the Sixties brought us little but re-makes, such as of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and First Men in the Moon (1964 film).
2001: A Space Odyssey capped that decade early, in 1968.
The 1970s began with Kubrick again, with his 1971 dystopean freak-out, A Clockwork Orange
perhaps an angry warning about disco to come?
Also from that year was THX 1138, George Lucas' debut act as a director. This film about a dystopean future featuring forced drug addiction and robo-cops was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and written by Lucas and Walter Murch. Not so great for date night, perhaps...
The Day of the Dolphin, starring George C. Scott and directed by Mike Nichols of all people, then Soylent Green--another dystopean thriller-- in Edward G. Robinson's final film, (with Charleton Heston), were both produced in 1973. As was Westworld about which, i.m.h.o. the less written (or said) the better.
1973 was truly a banner year for sci-fi (with more and bigger, if not necessarily better, to come). And Woody Allen (pre-infamy) even invented the sci-fi comedy, Sleeper.
1976, our Bicentennial Year, we saw more dystopea with Futureworld.
Then came Star Wars, and the world changed (again). This media franchise by George Lucas had it all: story (Lucas), cast including--hey, you know all this.
And just down the street, so to speak, Lucas' college buddy and collaborator Steven Spielberg, moved forward from gripping us in his Jaws to his answer to Hitchcock's North by North West, in which Richard Dreyfus plays an Indiana blue collar worker who experiences an encounter to a UFO. This leads him on a driven quest to Wyoming, and the well-named Devil's Tower accompanied by a bewildered wife and family, and meeting and teaming up with a cast of fellow pilgrims including French director Francois Truffaut.
1978 gave us Superman, followed by three important and successful films in 1979: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Ridley Scott's Alien which brought creepiness to a new level; then Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells uses his time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper into the 20th Century.
In 1982, Spielberg gifted us with E.T.the Extra-Terrestrial (which single-handedly saved Universal's fiscal ass). This teen (and pre-teen)-focused film was perfect for it's market. Set in suburban L.A. where a UFO crash-lands (well, in the woods up in the hills above the subdivision location). E.T. presented us with the first lovable extra-terrestrial life form since Star Wars (well, at least there were some lovable robots), but made a superstar of Drew Barrymore, the first child actor to attain that stature since Shirley Temple. Nice blood lines, hers, which sure as hell helped in E.T., if not her teen years when she turned to drugs (and wrote her way out of them, to her credit).
In the 1990's sci-fi did a mind meld with animation, the internet, and semi-human androids, with films like peaking with The Matrix in 1999. Among those were Total Recall (1990) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995).
Disaster sci-fi became the theme of the late '90's, with Armageddon and Deep Impact, coping with the threat of a massive impact from a giant meteor, and Independence Day recycling those '50s evil alien invasion films.
Then came the 2000's, and space travel became for the post part passe, apart from Star Wars remakes and mediocre sequels. The superhero seemed to seize the stage, once again. And more Matrix films. For me, superheroes just seemed to be targeted to an audience raised on comic books, and as an author wannabe from the time I first read Twain, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald (then later John D. MacDonald: my inspiration to move from screenwriting to mystery novels) well, comic book characters just never worked for me. Enough said.
Leave it to Steven Spielberg to save the day once again, this time with A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001, then Minority Report the next year, both dealing with contemporary issues with, of course, all star casts, including Tom Cruise, Jude Law and William Hurt.
Then, we come to present times. Theater complexes are vanishing, like the malls they shared, and drive-ins. And book stores, for that matter. With the advent of streaming, most of us no longer go out for entertainment. We stay at home and watch Netflix. Or Amazon, or Hulu, on our flat screen TVs. Guilty as charged.
On the plus side, people--especially young people--are reading again. This is good news. Very good news indeed. Especially for us authors.
Ciao for now.
E..C.
Now it's Hollywood's turn. And London's, Paris, Lodz, Rome (actual name Roma) and/or wherever feature films are made.
Feature film sci-fi has had a grand ancestry. Le Voyage dans la Lune was created by Georges Méliès in 1902, and is considered to be the first science fiction film. Drawing upon the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne (see my previous blog), it depicted a spacecraft being launched to the moon by a large cannon. It's ground-breaking special effects (in fact Méliès may well have invented special effects) pioneered the way for future science fiction films.
Thomas Edison's Edison Studios in New Jersey adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
into a film in 1910, and Herbert Brenon directed Carl Laemmle's 1913 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1913.
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was first produced in 1916. This was one of the first feature-length films.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle undertook a remarkable departure from Sherlock Holmes (see prior blog) when he wrote The Lost World, in 1912. Hollywood took this on with Wallace Beery in the leading role in 1925.
In those heady 1920's European filmmakers were not standing idly by. But European cinema of that era took film in a new direction: social commentary, combined with prediction (let us not forget George Orwell of that era). The Russian film Aelita took on the issue of social revolution.
German expressionist Fritz Lang was another film pioneer, with his film Metropolis taking yet a new direction into the heart of a futuristic city. Not all of which, of course, is good. This proved to be the most expensive film yet made, with futuristic sets (of soon-to-be-here 2026!) for the first robot, the inevitable mad scientist, and a dystopian society. Lang ended the silent era.
The 1930's brought the Great Depression, audiences (those who could afford a ticket) needed escape. But early attempts were major failures, such as 1930 Hollywood's Just Imagine. Other failures included the 1936 English film Things to Come: H.G. Wells' predictions of a future a century from then which forecasted World War II. Which, unfortunately, began about 97 years sooner than his prediction.
As a result of these and other failures, the film industry abandoned sci fi until well after WWII, and instead turned to film serials: low budget quickies with almost laughably shoddy futuristic sets, but featuring what would become a Hollywood staple: heroic adventures, rescued maidens, lots of action, gadgets galore, and ditto melodrama.
The first of these starred none other than Gene Autry, complete with ray guns and (imagine!) TV screens! This led to Flash Gordon and Dick Tracy ick Tracy. Not exactly Sci-Fi, but hey, still escapist fun. These brought us space travel, high tech gadgets and weapons, the usual pre-James Bond evil plots for global dominion, and of course, mad scientists.
WWII was mostly propaganda films, but the late '40's and 1950's brought us into a new era: the era of nuclear Armageddon. Suddenly sci-fi wasn't so 'fi.'
The 1950's also brought us the Cold War and it's inevitable global paranoia. But some films were made during that decade. Some have called this a Golden Age of Science Fiction, comparable to the one in literature. released in 1950
The first major success of the new era was Robert A. Heinlein's own adaptation of his book Destination Moon, produced by George Pal and released in 1950. Pal went on to produce When Worlds Collide, The Time Machine, and the infamous War of the Worlds all of which earned Academy Awards for special effects.
War of the Worlds set the stage for a flood of films featuring aliens, especially post-Roswell. The first of these films, the unforgettable The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise, and i.m.h.o. the best of this emerging lot. Later films had color and more tech, but the story of a peaceable alien landing in Washington, D.C. to warn the human race of the danger of nuclear weapons.Another popular classic was Invasion of the Body Snatchers, another classic, by Don Siegel, in 1956. because it was a veiled warning about McCarthyism.
The 1950's also brought us the brilliant special effects of stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen, whose name was spoken with reverence back when I worked at Hanna Barbera, and protege of King Kong animator Willis O'Brien. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was a hit in 1953, based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. This featured the revival of a fictional dinosaur (a Redosaurus) which was thawed out of an iceberg in the Arctic due to atomic testing. This was one of the first dinosaur films since The Lost World, which Arthur Conan Doyle book I once adapted as a screenplay for director Jack Arnold, at his office at Universal Studios. Jack Arnold also directed several '50's sci-fi classics, including It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), and others. (Arnold also directed one of my favorite comedies, The Mouse that Roared. This was a Peter Sellers tour de force, in which he plays three roles, as he loved to do). Jack Arnold had numerous directing credits in both film and television (Peter Gunn among many others).
Following up on The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Jack Arnold's Tarantula, all emerged due to atomic testing. Hollywood producers always did love to copy themselves, it seems.
However, weary of atoms, I suppose, a new line of monster villains emerged, this time aliens. No more wimpy The Day the Earth Stood Still types. These creepy crawlers included The Terror from Beyond Space, The Blob, The Angry Red Planet, and Kronos,
Next came human mutation, purposeful or otherwise. These included The Fly, The Amazing Colossal Man, and The Incredible Shrinking Man.
Meanwhile, the Japanese, recovering form their post-war shock and awe (and atomic attacks, for that matter) developed a line of nasty creatures of their own. These were the Kaiju ('strange beast') films with huge monsters. Definitely low budget, but sufficiently scary to rake in millions worldwide. The film Warning from Space (1956) may have inspired Stanley Kubrick to make his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
This period made money. A lot of money. Cats were getting fat, in Hollywood and wherever films were being made.
The next target market (audience) would be teens, and there were a host of them, thanks to the post-war baby boom. I would become one of those. And this new market demanded--and got something new. The industry delivered--big time--with the drive-in theater (make out palaces with crappy sound but who cared)? Some even had car service for burgers and such. By cute girls, of course. Another money-maker.
The drive-in became so popular that there were more than 4,000 of them by the Sixties. There are only 330 left, per last count, and they are increasingly decrepit. There was no competing with making out on your couch with a beer (or soda, or just watching TV if someone's watching), which, of course, has led to Netflix, Hulu and such.
But there was a second New Wave to arrive: this time of technology, with 3-D vision, with the exhibitor (theater owner) providing dark 3-D glasses to every audience member upon entry. This was, like, totally awesome, to a kid back then. At least, to a Middle Class kid in suburbia.
One of the first 3D films was Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon.
As with the early '50s, a new round of low budget films (usually under $400,000, which wouldn't even get you a Super Bowl commercial today) began to hit the market again. These low-end but profitable features made stars of directors like Roger Corman, Coleman Francis, and Ed Wood, whose Plan 9 from Outer Space was, according to critics Harry and Michael Medved n their book The Golden Turkey Awards, "the worst film ever made." Ed Wood was 'awarded' (posthumously) the Golden Turkey Award for 'Worst Director of All Time' in addition to 'Worst Film.' Ironically, those films have become cult favorites now, in the 'so-bad-it's-good' category.
The time had come for the big Hollywood studios to step forward with big budget features, with major stars (and minor stars and starlets, extras and wannabes). Big-name directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas led the way with Star Wars and their big time special effects. Lucas, fed up with Hollywood's power system, moved north to rural Marin County and a beautiful location to build his Lucas Films empire. (Note: Frances Ford Coppola, another big-name director, also fled Hollywood and partnered with Lucas to found his American Zoetrope company in San Francisco (shooting mostly on location).
Forbidden Planet was a big budget film with Walter Pidgeon, Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis, made in 1956. This was one of the first wide-screen films shot in CinemaScope and Eastmancolor and was well-received by public and critics alike. Screenwriters Alan Adler and Irving Blockcreated a plot and setting loosely based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. (For the record, like Mark Twain I am a Shakespeare doubter--a subject for another blog).
In 1959 producer/director Stanley Kramer made a black-and-white post-apocalyptic epic (I suppose b/w due to bleak content, since color had been an option for decades per Forbidden Planet) On the Beach, based on Neville Shute's novel depicting the aftermath of a nuclear war, set in Australia.
Kramer assembled a who's who cast: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins.
After the boom years of the '50's for sci-fi, the Sixties brought us little but re-makes, such as of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and First Men in the Moon (1964 film).
2001: A Space Odyssey capped that decade early, in 1968.
The 1970s began with Kubrick again, with his 1971 dystopean freak-out, A Clockwork Orange
perhaps an angry warning about disco to come?
Also from that year was THX 1138, George Lucas' debut act as a director. This film about a dystopean future featuring forced drug addiction and robo-cops was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and written by Lucas and Walter Murch. Not so great for date night, perhaps...
The Day of the Dolphin, starring George C. Scott and directed by Mike Nichols of all people, then Soylent Green--another dystopean thriller-- in Edward G. Robinson's final film, (with Charleton Heston), were both produced in 1973. As was Westworld about which, i.m.h.o. the less written (or said) the better.
1973 was truly a banner year for sci-fi (with more and bigger, if not necessarily better, to come). And Woody Allen (pre-infamy) even invented the sci-fi comedy, Sleeper.
1976, our Bicentennial Year, we saw more dystopea with Futureworld.
Then came Star Wars, and the world changed (again). This media franchise by George Lucas had it all: story (Lucas), cast including--hey, you know all this.
And just down the street, so to speak, Lucas' college buddy and collaborator Steven Spielberg, moved forward from gripping us in his Jaws to his answer to Hitchcock's North by North West, in which Richard Dreyfus plays an Indiana blue collar worker who experiences an encounter to a UFO. This leads him on a driven quest to Wyoming, and the well-named Devil's Tower accompanied by a bewildered wife and family, and meeting and teaming up with a cast of fellow pilgrims including French director Francois Truffaut.
1978 gave us Superman, followed by three important and successful films in 1979: Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Ridley Scott's Alien which brought creepiness to a new level; then Time After Time, in which H.G. Wells uses his time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper into the 20th Century.
In 1982, Spielberg gifted us with E.T.the Extra-Terrestrial (which single-handedly saved Universal's fiscal ass). This teen (and pre-teen)-focused film was perfect for it's market. Set in suburban L.A. where a UFO crash-lands (well, in the woods up in the hills above the subdivision location). E.T. presented us with the first lovable extra-terrestrial life form since Star Wars (well, at least there were some lovable robots), but made a superstar of Drew Barrymore, the first child actor to attain that stature since Shirley Temple. Nice blood lines, hers, which sure as hell helped in E.T., if not her teen years when she turned to drugs (and wrote her way out of them, to her credit).
In the 1990's sci-fi did a mind meld with animation, the internet, and semi-human androids, with films like peaking with The Matrix in 1999. Among those were Total Recall (1990) and Johnny Mnemonic (1995).
Disaster sci-fi became the theme of the late '90's, with Armageddon and Deep Impact, coping with the threat of a massive impact from a giant meteor, and Independence Day recycling those '50s evil alien invasion films.
Then came the 2000's, and space travel became for the post part passe, apart from Star Wars remakes and mediocre sequels. The superhero seemed to seize the stage, once again. And more Matrix films. For me, superheroes just seemed to be targeted to an audience raised on comic books, and as an author wannabe from the time I first read Twain, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald (then later John D. MacDonald: my inspiration to move from screenwriting to mystery novels) well, comic book characters just never worked for me. Enough said.
Leave it to Steven Spielberg to save the day once again, this time with A.I. Artificial Intelligence in 2001, then Minority Report the next year, both dealing with contemporary issues with, of course, all star casts, including Tom Cruise, Jude Law and William Hurt.
Then, we come to present times. Theater complexes are vanishing, like the malls they shared, and drive-ins. And book stores, for that matter. With the advent of streaming, most of us no longer go out for entertainment. We stay at home and watch Netflix. Or Amazon, or Hulu, on our flat screen TVs. Guilty as charged.
On the plus side, people--especially young people--are reading again. This is good news. Very good news indeed. Especially for us authors.
Ciao for now.
E..C.
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