Chad Taylor

Nobody drives like me. Nobody




Thirty-seven when he starred in The Driver (1978), Ryan O'Neal is no baby. Bruce Dern – pissy, unpredictable – is no cop either. This raises the stakes considerably: you don't know which way Dern's Detective is going to snap and the Driver is a man for whom the threat of a 15-year sentence means something. Isabelle Adjani, beamed from planet France, is as otherworldly as any Marvel heroine, and Los Angeles, filmed mostly at night, is the sci-fi cityscape the space truckers in Alien (1979) might have blasted off from. The connection is writer / director Walter Hill who was leaving fingerprints on Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett's Alien script around this time but The Driver looks backwards, not forwards. It came after Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) had already put new bursts of speed on screen which Vanishing Point (1971) took to its logical conclusion, and the plot is even older, from Melville's Le Samourai (1967), which was written by Jean-Pierre Melville and Georges Pellegrin and one of those movies you only have to see once to never look at stories the same way again.

The pervading sense of doom is suffused with artificial light, sheer concrete and metal reflections: dark gloss on the mayhem. The opening chase is genuinely harrowing with no comforting score or digital editing to aid the getaway in the tight spots and no wisecracks or memes to cushion things for the viewer – Hill is on an open road. The characters exist only because they act. Driver has no father issues or back story – his goal is to do what he does. Doomed but independent, he's an adult.

Hill's The Driver would go on to influence Tarantino (what hasn't? Although 2007's Death Proof is his most disciplined outing) and Nicolas Refn's Drive (2011) – if not James Sallis' novel Drive (Poisoned Pen Press, 2005) on which Refn's movie is based. Drive is diminished even more after you see The Driver but it was a breath of cold fresh air at the time. And finally, parked neatly (why should he pay?), Baby Driver, whose director Saint Edgar interviews Hill in a self-self-referential handover. Hill plays the old nice guy nowadays and has only good things to say.
They loved it overseas, but in those days, that didn’t matter that much. It made exactly zero dollars in the United States. I remember the studio had this huge sheaf of Xeroxed reviews they’d handed me – you could stop a fucking .45 slug with this stack, it was so thick. And of all the reviews in this six-inch thick pile, there was only one good one. And now, whenever they show retrospectives of my stuff, it’s usually the first thing they show. Sometimes you just have to wait it out.

Reproductive cycle



Watching Howard Hawks' The Thing From Another World (1951). Above: Dr. Carrington attempts to communicate with the monster, with disastrous results; below, in Prometheus (2012), Weyland attempts to communicate with the Engineer, which also ends badly. The Hawks-produced movie based on John W. Campbell's Who Goes There? (1938) is directed by Edward Lasker, or not, depending on who you read. It feels like a Hawks: rammed with characters and jibber-jabber to unintentionally comic effect. There are no close-ups, not even of the alien's disembodied hand which becomes reanimated after it's severed, the surrounding observers (nearly all talking roles) clustered like a Rembrandt:


The movie is more of a western than a sci-fi or horror. The Antarctic base looks like a homestead, there's a posse and a Rio Bravo-like siege. Captain Hendry and his airmen are all guts and thumbs. They use thermite to excavate the frozen spacecraft ("A million years of history are waiting for us in that ice!") which causes it to explode ("Well that's just dandy!"). They attack the alien with kerosene ("Here's where we start cooking!") and set fire to the hut. Hendry opens the door on the thing, closes it fast and everyone shoots at it forgetting they also have men posted on the other side of the wall ("Bob, next time raise the sights a little!"). The movie's Cold War message is not so much clear as embedded: alien invasion or not, our planet is not in good hands.

In between the yammering are the sequences that will inspire the original Alien and John Carpenter's 1982 remake, including a spooky corridor showdown that becomes genuinely dire when Dr Carrington tries to talk the monster down. (Goatee and significantly Russian-looking hat = doomed.) All three movies – the two Things and Alien – take inspiration from HP Lovecraft's equally disastrous trip to the ice At The Mountains of Madness (1931). But how funny to see Ridley Scott's Prometheus in it.

What sort of bird are you?




Moonrise Kingdom and Prometheus have a lot in common. Both are made by Kubrick fans: Wes Anderson quotes the camera moves from Full Metal Jacket; Ridley Scott quotes the plot of 2001 and Keir Dullea's old-man makeup. Both movies are set in artificial landscapes and populated by name actors: on first viewing, it's a little hard to work out who the story is really about. And both stories turn on the importance of maps and geographic locations. In Prometheus the key action is laid out in a spooky digital graphic of the alien interior; in Moonrise Kingdom the local geography is described by Bob Balaban.

The ubiquitous Bob Balaban talked to the Onion AV Club about working with Wes:
AVC: There's a succession of shots in the film where you're positioned along the bottom edge of the frame, a technique that only works if you're framed exactly the same in every shot.

BB: Wes planned all that and showed me his various visual experiments before we began. It was a great way of him telling me, without ever saying, "Do what I'm doing, because I'm playing the narrator now." All I could think was, "Oh, I see. I'm not supposed to act very much. I'm just supposed to say what's going on." He never had to tell me that; he just showed it to me. I don't think he did it with any grand plan in mind, other than it's nice for an actor to know where he is in the frame, because it informs you to know those things. But I learned a whole lot more from him.
In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Anderson discussed the influence of Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma:
"Brian De Palma is one of my favorite directors ever, and has such the most sophisticated visual style of anybody," he observes. "But Brian De Palma is somebody who can take a giant complicated action sequence and say, I know precisely how to execute this. I'm a completely different kind of moviemaker -- and the basic crucial talents of that are precisely what I lack, probably."
I saw Prometheus in 2D but dear God, if there is one living director I would like to see make a movie in 3D, it's Wes Anderson. It would be like a two and a half-hour Viewmaster reel, or one of those craft dioramas you used to make in a shoebox on a rainy day. Please, Hollywood: make it happen.

Something's happened


Jon Spaihts talks about writing (i.e. researching and conceptualising) the script for Prometheus:
I wrote the first draft of that screenplay in three and a half weeks, which is a personal record. And then, I was just in the shoot with Ridley for awhile. I would write a draft, and then I would sit in the room with Ridley Scott and his two lieutenants, at that time, and we would talk about the story for weeks at a time. Ridley was tireless and constantly drawing. He has a fierce visual imagination, and was constantly throwing curve balls at the story that I would then need to adjust to the logic of my universe. We worked through five drafts like that, over many months.
And, also on Collider, Damon Lindelof discusses being hired to rewrite the writing:
I thought it was really cool. It was not at all what I expected it to be. But obviously they were giving it to me for a reason. And this is one of those situations where you're given no advance sense of what they like, what they don't like, you just have to walk out on the plank and say, Here is my fundamental reaction to this thing. So when I finished it I went into my office and I wrote an email. [...] I wrote maybe a four or five paragraph email saying here are all the things I love about it, I think there are some incredible set pieces here, I love the fundamental idea behind the movie, I feel like it's a cool think piece. BUT I think it's relying a bit too heavily on the Alien stuff [...] and I just feel that your idea is so strong and the characters can be made so strong that we don't need any of that stuff. We can present iterations of that stuff in different ways.
The pre-release publicity in for Alien (1979) -- trust me, I remember it so well I can practically quote it verbatim -- was all about the "look" of the film, how things had to look and feel "right." Whereas the pre-release publicity for Prometheus (2012) is almost entirely about story: the characters, the plot, how the script was developed, how it evolved. That's a sea change.

In the 80s there was a lot of talk about "the death of the author." In the 90s and early 00's there was a lot of blather about metafiction. 2012 and the author is still here, and the great medium of the writer, TV, is enjoying a golden age. Maybe movies are catching up.

(Pic: Mr. Kerry Brown)
POSTSCRIPT: We were wrong. We were so wrong.

I keep this film journal largely for myself and to take my mind off, well, writing. I write all day and think about writing all night so it's fun to post instead about pictures or music. But the experience of watching, or rather sitting in front of Prometheus while Prometheus thundered past sent me back to thinking about writing again.

Story was indeed paramount in Prometheus: I counted at least six, cut from different drafts and sprinkled across a canvas as broad as the universe itself. It was a movie from the director of Gladiator: big notes, operatic, visually concise and frigid. Some moments were perfect, others completely off-key. Scott has referred to the beast's final iteration as the deacon: the film was a curate's egg.

All the time I was watching I kept thinking: Alien was a script written by four pairs of good hands: Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who came up with the (Lovecraftian) storyline, title, creature and infestation / chest burster idea; and Walter Hill and David Giler, who stripped the screenplay back to Western-style tough guy dialogue (the last 15 minutes of the film are almost silent) and added the android / corporate bad guy subplot.

Crucially, all that writing was done before the director came on board. For Prometheus, Scott developed the script with the writers working under him. Big difference.

I wonder what else was left squirming on the cutting room floor. I bet there's a movie in there that would pop your socks.

Everything new is old again


Ray Kurzweil interviewed by Damon Lindelof at THR:
Kurzweil: There's an issue in portraying the future, which, if you follow my reasoning, will be very different in every dimension. And as soon as you introduce even a single change, you've got to explain what it is. Spielberg's A.I. had human-level cyborgs, but otherwise it was a 1980s reality: The coffeemaker was 1980s; the cars were no different; there's really no virtual reality to speak of. Nothing changed except he introduced this new concept, and then you had some dramatic tension about people's relationships with this new thing. There's actually a reason for that...
Full interview is here.

Bedside reading, 1975 #2


I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:
Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.
Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:
Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.
Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.

The 47th pancake


Mr. Stratford discusses Distance Looks Our Way. When I worked at the Auckland [City] Art Gallery people always seemed to be referencing it. That, the "cinema of unease" and the Edmonds Cookbook.

You know that feeling when you sit up suddenly and a pull a muscle? I think I just did that to my brain. It's been a long week / month / year.

Meanwhile...

20th Century Fox may have leaked a photo of the space jockey. Mr. Trent Reznor and Mr. Atticus Ross have released a free sampler from the Dragon Tattoo soundtrack. (If you buy the whole three and a half CDs' worth you get their Karen O cover of 'Immigrant Song' free. Full of win!) This is Purity Ring and this is The Brighter Future. And tonight, Matthew, Sienna Miller will be Tippi Hedren. The press announcement is not wrong to describe Hedren as Hitchcock's obsession but he had more than one.

Discreet Machinery: Syd Mead (1987)


Five years after Blade Runner came out in theaters, Syd Mead visited New Zealand to lecture at an Auckland technical institute and I swung an interview, i.e. asked a friend of a friend whose father worked at the polytech if I could talk to Syd and Syd said, sure. The self-described 'visual futurist' turned up dressed like a TV detective in a suit and tie and a crumpled raincoat and indulged my very young person's questions; it was only as the conversation progressed that I realised Philip K Dick's fiction was a much larger part of my life than it was of his. Cult movies really were cult movies, then. I had an ex-rental VHS copy of the first cut of Blade Runner and I don't like to think of how many times I watched it.

Mead's lecture consisted of 35mm film slides of his paintings and drawings on twin Kodak Carousel projectors which he operated manually during his narration. The interview was recorded earlier in the day on a Phillips cassette deck and transcribed on a Sharp QL300 electric typewriter. This version of the story was published in the Melbourne-based magazine Tension, issue #12, December 1987. This week Terence Hogan scanned the pages and emailed them to me as PDFs which I converted to text using a free online OCR service and uploaded to Blogger. Give me a hard copy, right there.

*

The future was once a bright and happy place. Built on the social aspirations of the fifties and sixties and fuelled by seventies technology, Tomorrow was a time when two-car families became two-rocket families and holidaying couples went for picnics on Venus. Designers, writers and illustrators assured us that society would ease into the new frontier without so much as blinking.

A designer named Syd Mead, then working as a 'visual futurist' for US Steel and Ford Motors was – and still is – one of the great optimists. His paintings and drawings depict utopian futures filled with sleek transporters and vast buildings. Cities are slotted into mile-wide space-bound cylinders or, as in one future-projection of San Francisco, constructed as a single piece of "discreet machinery" to complement the size of the surrounding landscape as well as its ecology.

Last year a Tokyo company commissioned Mead to imagine a sport of Tomorrow. He suggested "120-foot high robot racing greyhounds." Another painting shows going to work: a giant Lazy Susan slides down one side of a skyscraper, collects the tenants in their cars and serves them coffee before sling-shooting them to work. And if personal transport becomes impractical in a crowded city, he still envisages the social need for a ceremonial form of transport for, say, a night at the opera. Patrons arrive in gold, wheelless tear-drops that hover inches above the ground and flood with light when opened. It's the designer's version of the American dream a thousand years on: Royal carriages for the Everyman.

"Science fiction," Mead smiles, "concerns itself with the technology of the future, and that's a kind of magic. Isaac Asimov has said that magic is just something beyond immediate belief – it's always been one of society's favourite things to indulge in.

"I call science fiction 'reality ahead of schedule' sometimes. You can perceive a trend and other professional futurists, maybe economists, spot trends Looking into the future and creating these scenarios is exciting because you can try and imagine what would happen if you rearranged the flavours in the cake-mix. This is called modelling. Now with our elaborate computers available, this modelling-prediction technique is being used extensively in all industries. Science fiction's been doing that for decades."

Syd Mead has published two collections of his Future: Sentinel 1 and 2. Chromed and rosy-hued, they catalogue every aspect of a day in the life of Tomorrow. They owe as much to the American tradition of landscape painting as they do to the people-using-a-product renditions of advertising; it's their content that's ahead of schedule, not their attitude. This is Mead's catchphrase idea: a future that's as old as it is new. His Future reflects the present with an almost paternal reassurance. There will be fast cars in 3000 AD, but no war.

It took British director Ridley Scott to darken the vision and bring Mead's ideas to a wider public. Scott was filming Philip K Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, cutting its six-word title down to only two - Blade Runner. The plot of the novel had been likewise reduced (with Dick's full approval) to a tight, simple future-cop tale, Chandler with rocket-fins, and this had placed a special premium on the look of the film. Mead was commissioned to design a flying car and ended up shaping the look of everything else.

Blade Runner is now regarded as a watershed in science fiction and much of that credit goes to Syd Mead's visual influence. It's a wry, mature fantasy of high-tech and low-life backwashed with smoke, rain and neon. The future has never been the same since. But Mead shrugs off the movie's influence, almost bored.

"Maybe I did the lob too well on that one," he suggests. "The reason I got involved is that the first book I had published had just come out then. Ridley Scott had my book and Chris Foss's book and Roger Dean's but he picked my approach really just because of my industrial design background. The machines had little screw-holes and the metal looked like it was split in the right place for doors to open and things like that.

"The original story for the film was Philip K, Dick's and Dick's stories were very dreary anyway. I don't agree with that vision particularly, but I was hired to help Ridley make this as interestingly a dreary picture as possible, which we proceeded to do. We invented a socio-economic theory which would fit the story and then I invented the look of things to go along with that. It was a very classical industrial design approach to movie design, which isn't done that much. I like to design for film on a very logical basis and then mix it up or change the format to fit the dramatic necessities. Starting with a genuine design programme first hopefully gives the end result a more believable look."

Mead and Scott took their task seriously. Although Mead dryly reflects on the film's flying-cars ("It would be a nightmare. allowing the average person access to a three-dimensional traffic matrix") the city depicted in Blade Runner points at what is happening in cities now.

"For Blade Runner we just took all the trends in progress today: in Chicago, New York, areas outside of Paris, all the sections that are going high-rise because of land-use – and accelerated the trends already in place to come up with a sort of peculiar vertical society. We found that you need a second layer of streets for access to and from big buildings, about sixty feet above the real street. And this would produce a basement effect on the real street which would become filled with cabling and so forth.

"It all has to do with land use. If everyone wants to be in one space you have to build the buildings taller both to create more floor space within the same acreage and to handle the loan on the cost of construction. It's all a paper accounting game. One mile away there might be nice flat land and lots of room but nobody wants to build there because it isn't fashionable.

"In LA this is now happening in Westwood which is extremely dense. Visiting there is literally not worth the trouble, unless you drop in by helicopter.

"The grid plans of our cities, in general, are not much use for anything other than keeping track of who owns what property. In Europe, the old Medieval cities began at natural pathways and landmarks. As they grew and grew and try to accommodate street traffic it becomes an absolute nightmare. You try and arrange a traffic-light system there and it's almost impossible. Tokyo's like that – an absolute nightmare. It's high-energy! I love to go there. As long as someone else drives. I was asked repeatedly if I'd copied the high-rise look of the Shinjuku area for Blade Runner but I said no, I hadn't been there since before all the high-rises were built."

*

The Japanese zeal for scientific process appeals to Mead, who regards the Sixties hippies as the last flicker of techno-paranoia.

"The whole techno-chic appreciation of machine intricacy is certainly Japanese — they just love that approach. Their mind–set is different, culturally. They can literally pretend not to be next to someone on a crowded subway. Europeans and Americans and people with that same cultural base don't like that degree of proximity – your 'bubble' is that much larger. It's to their benefit that the Japanese allow that because there is this intense pressure in their lives to tolerate things in their work and living conditions which we wouldn't put up with. It's to their benefit right now economically but it's changing — the world is beginning to flatten out in terms of cultural exchange."

It was cultural exchange that first bought Mead to Tokyo. His work in other films (Aliens, Tron, 2010) had caught the eye of Japanese entrepreneurs who commissioned him to design the other-worldly interior of the Alpha-Turia nightclub. Club patrons can phone home from a moon-module phone box and dance below a shuttle-cockpit DJ booth.

"The idea was to create a science-fiction set where the cast changed every night. It had to have cost millions and millions of dollars to build |n Tokyo, with their land prices. So this disco is a space liner, the front end of a luxury intergalactic space-liner. We have the observation lounge where you can see duplicates of all the instrumentation – an intense, information-exchange lobby, if you will. And we have the disco floor which is to the delight of all the passengers; the place where they can look out the front of the spaceship. The owners took bits and pieces of what I had shown them in sketches and then had a production company translate these vocabularies of ideas into finished wall surfaces and fixtures."

Mead says he had a great time designing the club and dancing in it afterwards; like most of his work it was a combination of dreams and day-to-day employment. More practical patrons have made an effort to keep their commissions on par with Mead's imagination but their requests, in general, are odd.

The US Air Force, commissioned him to paint a recruiting poster depicting the Stealth bomber — a project so secret that it may or may not exist. As a result, Mead was supplied with no models or plans from which to work. He would make some drawings and show them to the Air Force officials and they would say – well, they couldn't say if it resembled the bomber which may or may not exist but could he make the fins a little bigger and move the cockpit forward a little? And he would ask, 'Is that what it looks like?' And they'd say, We can't tell you. The final, full-colour poster was printed in a special edition to meet public demand.

Mead's commissioned work includes designs for customised private airplane interiors. Clients such as King Hussein and King Fahud of Oman enjoy travelling in style and the designer panders unashamedly to their aesthetic lunacies. The interior of one 747 was modelled to resemble an l8th century English manor, complete with marble floors and oak doors. Another 747 sports its own jacuzzi with jewelled star-charts on the ceiling. "It's the upper end of the market," Mead says.

*

The things that will really matter Tomorrow, he insists, are the things about which we're becoming the most blasé: electronics, computers and information.

"The manipulation of information – we haven't been able to do this before on this massive a scale. You can take a computer and produce theoretical designs for industry and then do part-trial breakdown runs, all in theory. You can design a part, run it through its tests in, say, an operating engine and have a very real feeling for how it is going to operate without actually making anything at all. Thirty years ago that would have been magic.

"We tend to live, unfortunately, with all the results of the mistakes of the past to date. You can't get rid of everything at once, short of a natural disaster, so you have to adapt. So you can think up a whole new concept and apply it or you can do a clever lob of retro fitting.

"For instance, maybe people can go to work not by cars but by electronics. Which isn't a new idea but it's becoming more possible because of the way we're organising work. Other than manipulative labour, work is tending to be the processing of information that's available from within a closed network, which is what a corporate system is. You can work from anywhere that you happen to be as long as you have access to that network. So if you have middle-management people working in judgemental positions, they really don't have to go to work. All they have to do is tap into the network and they can do their lot. That, for instance, might also be a way of getting rid of so much traffic."

The thought of a 21st century society still plagued with traffic jams: it's that same blend of past and future again. Syd Mead, 54, leans back in his chair and contemplates the futureworld nine-to-five with relish.

"People have been the same for thousands and thousands of years," he concludes. "They just use different tools. The nice use of technology would be to keep the human side of things a little bit nutty, a little bit random and let machines take care of the drudgery – that would be the most ideal, optimistic track. A writer like Philip K Dick predicts things going wrong, but you really do have to take that chance."

-- December 1987

The egg hatched... and a hundred baby spiders came out

Ridley Scott will direct a Blade Runner sequel. For me this is like hearing Stanley Kubrick has only been playing dead. Intrigued as I am by the Prometheus / Alien rerun, Blade Runner is the world I'd really like him to take a second run at: the one I want to see again.

Before he died in 1982 Philip K. Dick saw the movie that would bring his writing to the mainstream:
"All I can say is that the world in BLADE RUNNER is where I really live. That is where I think I am anyway. This world will now be a world that every member of the audience will inhabit... Once the film begins, you are taken from this world into that world and you really are in that world. And I think the most exciting thing is that it is a lived-in world. A world where people actually live. It is not a hygienically pristine space colony which looks like a model seen at the Smithsonian Institute. No, this is a world where people live. And the cars use gas and are dirty and there is kind of a gritty rain falling and its smoggy. It's just terribly convincing when you see it.

"Seeing Rutger Hauer as Batty just scared me to death, because it was exactly as I had pictured Batty, but more so. I could have picked Sean Young out of a hundred different women as Rachael. She has that look.

"Of course Harrison Ford is more like Rick Deckard than I could have even imagined. I mean it is just incredible. It was simply eerie when I first saw the stills of Harrison Ford. I was looking at some stills from the movie and I thought, this character, Deckard, really exists. There was a time that he did not exist, now he actually exists. But he is not the result of any one individual's conception or effort. He is to a very large extent, Harrison Ford's efforts. And there is actually, in some eerie way, a genuine, real, authentic Deckard now."
When the third version of the film was released in 2007 Ridley Scott talked to Wired about creating the future:
The future that I had seen portrayed to that particular point — without being specific or mentioning names, because that means I'm getting really critical — all of the urban films until that moment had been pretty ordinary to not very good. So, it was a challenge to say — it's the same as trying to do a monster movie it's, like, Aliens is a monster movie. Alien is a C film elevated to an A film, honestly, by it being well done and a great monster. If it hadn't had that great monster, even with a wonderful cast, it wouldn't have been as good, I don't think. So, in this instance, my special effect, behind it all, would be the world. That's why I put together [industrial designer] Syd Mead and people like that who were actually serious futurists, great speculators, great imagination, looking to the future, where the big test is saying, draw me a car in 30 years' time without it looking like bad science fiction. Or draw me an electric iron that will still be pressing shirts in 20 years' time without it looking silly. That's the stretch, that was the target: that I wanted the world to be futuristic and yet felt — not familiar, because it won't be — but feel authentic. I could buy it. One of the hardest sets to design was his kitchen. It's not Tyrell's room, which is easy because we fantasize about a giant super-Egyptianesque, neo-Egyptianesque boardroom. But the idea of saying, what is his bathroom and kitchen like in those particular times — that's tricky.
I interviewed Syd Mead when he came to New Zealand, I think late '80s. Of course I don't have a copy of it now: it's on paper in a stack of publications somewhere.*

The script for Blade Runner was written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Fancher started it:
I guess I was approaching it on my own obscure level, thinking that I was making something commercial. 'This is science fiction--people will flock to see this.' Of course, I had themes I was working with that I loved and I was intrigued with. But still I thought of it as a commercial venture... They hustled my script, my fifth or sixth draft, out to all the studios in Hollywood. And so everybody read it. I mean, important people read it, in terms of studio honchos... I was flavor of the month for about two years.
David Peoples (who also wrote Unforgiven) was bought in without Fancher's consent:
I didn't know about it. That was a secret, because I wasn't cooperating with Ridley... I came back at the end, because they called me. They needed something for the rooftop scene. They just had a couple days to shoot and they wanted me to look at rushes. I came back and I wrote some stuff for them. I hated the dailies. They sold this film down the tubes. It's not gonna work. It's not anything like I wanted.
In 1992 Peoples told the LA Times:
Hampton Fancher was the key writer. He optioned the book and made it happen. Though I like the current director's cut a lot better than the original, I have no proprietary sense about the movie. In fact, I get lost trying to figure out where I am in it.
*UPDATE: Found it! The December 1987 version of my interview with Syd Mead is here.

End of days no really

Critics are saying Cowboys & Aliens didn't work, and wondering if the western is dead. Saying the western is dead is like saying the blues or jazz or figurative painting or the novel is dead: some things will always be there, in one form or another. What disappointed me instantly about the film was the aliens: I was expecting a 1950s flying-hubcap saucers vs. cowboys mashup, but I guess Indiana Jones and the Collective Noun of the Crystal Skull put everyone off that. (It nearly worked in Mars Attacks.)

Along the same line, thrillers are back. (THRILLERS! ARE! BACK!) Or rather, we flee to them in a menacing world dada-dada-da-da. As I've said before (somewhere...) I believe readers –broadly – turn to crime / thrillers because the genre commits to telling a story. At a recent literary event a publisher told me she classified a crime novel as being about "something that has already happened" and a thriller as "something that hasn't happened yet."

Screen caps from the Comic-Con trailer for Ridley Scott's Prometheus are up here. I am now officially keen. David Slade has directed S04E03 of Breaking Bad. Collider reviews it here. So that's more viewing to catch up on.

If you watch TV via torrents the New Zealand and UK governments are coming for you. Torrentfreak claims that the consultation process for the UK's Digital Economy Act was a sham and that the decision by then Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson to disconnect downloaders was a foregone conclusion. Exotically, Mandelson supped with Dark Lord Dreamworks founder David Geffen to discuss the matter, a mashup more discombobulating than Cowboys & Aliens / Alien Vs Predator / Frankenstein Vs The Wolfman. (Does Geffen put down the white cat with the diamond collar when he is at table? How does Peter eat with his fingertips touching together?)

New Zealand Sony general manager Andrew Cornwell says the new anti-file sharing / anti-download / You Wouldn't Steal A Car / Hey Kids Stop Tagging law is targeting the muddle:
"You're never going to stop it entirely. There will always be some hard core people who want to take on the system and get a lot of pleasure out of defeating it and proving they're smarter than the next person. The whole thrust of it is aimed at middle New Zealand who might do the occasional download."
So... the industry will be aiming its thrust at the amateurs who don't cost them very much while leaving heavy-duty downloaders to establish a second tier distribution network which will undercut legitimate corporations by supplying what users want, when they want it and at a lower price. Because that is, after all, how the drugs war was won.

But in America – the last country which Americans can't push around – former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill says Limewire was good for artists. And CNET reports album sales are climbing:
Wayne Rosso, the former president of defunct file-sharing network Grokster who now blogs about the music industry, says that the last time the recording industry saw album sales climb was in 2004, when there were a dozen file-sharing services operating, including Grokster, eDonkey and BearShare. Rosso said plenty of studies show file sharing stimulates song sales.
"This minor blip is nothing to get too excited about," Rosso said. "But it really shows it's all about the product...music has to have legs. That's what has been lost in the last decade: quality."
Full story (bar charts, balanced reporting) here.

Your whole life is just a dream

A series of measurements with ground-penetrating radar mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed a massive deposit of frozen carbon dioxide (CO2) — a Lake Superior's worth of dry ice — buried under a layer of ordinary ice near the Martian south pole. "We knew there was some CO2 at the pole," says Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., lead author of a report on the discovery in the current issue of Science, "but there's about 30 times more than we thought.

And there's evidence from a number of Mars probes that the planet's atmospheric pressure has increased, even over the short time that we've been visiting. It's barely at the detectable level, says Phillips, "but it could be that we're seeing this effect."

All signs, in other words, point to the fact that Mars' atmosphere could be bulking up even now. Within a few tens of thousands of years, space colonists could be drawing water from Martian ponds — even as they're choking on Martian dust.
Get your ass to Mars.
"People cannot put their finger anymore on what is real and what is not real," observes Paul Verhoeven, the one-time Dutch mathematician who directed Total Recall. "What we find in Dick is an absence of truth and an ambiguous interpretation of reality. Dreams that turn out to be reality, reality that turns out to be a dream. This can only sell when people recognize it, and they can only recognize it when they see it in their own lives."
(From Wired.) Total Recall was co-written by Ronald Shusett and Dan O'Bannon. O'Bannon, who passed away in 2009, suffered painfully from Crohn's disease: among his inventions were the Mars rebellion leader Kuato, who grows from a man's stomach, and the chest burster in Alien.

In 1997 O'Bannon discussed the development of the movie Alien to Martin Anderson of Den Of Geek:
... In the movie, the Earth men discover a wrecked, derelict spacecraft. Actually no, that's not correct. In the movie, the men discover a wrecked construction of non-human manufacture and inside of it they find eggs of the monster. In the original script the men find a crashed derelict spacecraft and they enter it; they discover that the alien crew are all dead. They return to their own ship to contemplate what may have killed the alien crew and then they discover a pyramid on the planet which appears to be indigenous and primitive. They enter the pyramid and there they find the eggs. They combined these two elements, they squeezes them together into one sort of uneasy entity.

FF: The idea behind that, I would assume that the dangerous aliens were coming back to spawn or something?

O' Bannon: No, they were two different races. In my script, it was a space going race that landed on the planet and had been wiped out by whatever was there. And now the Earth men come and they endanger themselves in the same way. In the new version it's just sort of a surrealist mystery.

FF: And what ever they find there in the alien construct is the alien menace?

O' Bannon: Yes. So they combined, and they did dome things...and there were some changes that were better. There were some improvements made.

FF: In what direction?

O' Bannon: I think they made some of the characters cuter than they were. Some of the dialogue is definitely snappier than it was in the original draft. I think a lot of the designs that Ridley supervised differed because his visual hand is very strong over the surface of the picture. I think may things like that changed. You asked if it was my film. And i said no. And you said, can you name one of the things that disturbs you, well not every way in which it is different disturbs me.

FF: A lot of them okay?

O' Bannon: Ridley has this lavish, sensual visual style; and I think that Ridley is one of the 'good guys.' I really think that he is – was the final pivot point responsible for the picture coming out good. And so a lot of the visual design and a lot of the mood elements inherent in the camerawork, while they're not what i planned, are great. They're just different. Also, it's not 100% Ridley either. It's Ridley superimposing his vision over the cumulative vision of others, you see. Now this could be such a strong director's picture because Ridley's directorial and visual hand is so strong. There will probably be tendency among critics to refer to it as Ridley Scott's vision of the future. And he did have a vision of the future. But it was everybody else that came before, that's what his vision is.
Ridley Scott's Alien prequel / remake is Prometheus.

Old bones

Predators is a time travel movie that takes you back to an age when action movies were bloody, the monsters were some guy in a suit and the digital effects were a bit askew. The original moved the action genre forward a step by being two movies in one. Ahnuld's Predator started off like Ahnuld's Commando, giving the neck-and-pec fans all they wanted from the star in the first quarter hour (one liners, exploding ethnic stereotypes, the star lifting a truck with his bare hands). Once the special ops team had done their stuff and it was revealed they themselves were being stalked, only then did the ten little Indians countdown begin. Predator was an Alien rip off that has aged better than its source, partly because sci fi has diversified but largely because of that stylistic shift. No matter how many times you watch it, Predator is a great bait and switch.

Tasked with a sequel in the shadow of the truly awful Alien vs Predator mash ups, Nimrod Antal / Robert Rodriguez have made a faithful and loving remake in the plural, Predators, that is less daring than Predator and less tense-making than Predators II. Sticking to a single story line and tone, writers Alex Litvak and Michael Finch move the same pieces around the board to much the same effect. Instead of noble Native American soldier who faces off, knife in hand, with the invisible beastie, Predators has a noble Japanese yakuza with a samurai sword (in a fateful field of long grasses, conjured up by the alien world as surely as a Chaucerian knight's longing for a castle will make same appear around the next corner). Instead of a square-jawed tobacco chewing southern state gatling gunner it has a square jawed Russian gatling gunner. Instead of Elpidia Carrillo's "men of my village" speech it has Alice Braga giving a "men of my village" speech. Stumbling on a bad thing the humans escape the same way as Ahnuld did in 1987, falling through the bushes and into a body of water. (It's a stunt worth repeating: Jake Sulley does the same in Avatar. The sequence matches Predator almost shot-for-shot.)

Instead of Ahnuld Predators has Adrian Brody who does a pretty good job balancing knowingness and 'roid rage. It also has similar continuity problems: the troops break cover long before anyone thinks to look up and notice the alien sky, and the aliens have varying degrees of mortality, but with these lies come the satisfying "gotcha" moments, and a bullet count, and a fun cast and some parts when it's almost scary, thus balancing the filmmakers' goal of getting back to action movie basics while meeting the needs of a modern audience whose idea of mystery is a Tumblr link. Recent movies such as The Hangover change gears five times to keep people watching; if modern cinema is any indication then audiences have not been this restless since the Monkees' Head.

Predators is way more fun than Avatar. The movie has been shot on what looks to be a live set, and looks great: the digital effects are often tacky, and the old soundtrack and sound effects have been retained, to its benefit. I stopped counting the references to the previous Predator movies and Alien because it made me feel old, and because I was having fun watching it. There's a lot wrong with it and a couple of things brilliantly right with it. The irony is that this is how movies used to be before the movie that inspired it came along.

The premise of a human hunter who is himself hunted by an alien was the subject of a 1953 short story 'The Ruum' by American SF writer Arthur Porges. When a game hunter in the Canadian Rockies stumbles on the alien's eerie gallery of life specimens, the ruum pursues him to add to its collection. I read the story when I was 11 in R. Chetwynd Hayes' 1975 anthology Tales of Terror From Outer Space; years later when I first saw Predator I immediately wondered if it had been the movie's inspiration. Porges' alien is also liquid, like a rolling bubble of mercury, and morphs into different tool shapes to pursue its prey, just like James Cameron's T-1000 in Terminator II. Someone owes that writer lunch.

Cartoon dilemmas

Finally, the death of Joseph Campbell. Or the first signs that viewers might finally be tiring of scriptwriters doing a find and replace on The Hero's Journey. Writing in the Wall Street Journal Austin Grossman discusses the inherent faults of the superhero movie:
Much as I love the superhero genre, I almost never like films about superheroes. No matter how terrific they start out, the third act degenerates into two people diving away from a giant green explosion, and bloated speeches that make me feel sorry for a talented and honorable actor. It becomes clear that at some point the director or screenwriter or studio has lost their faith in the material, and started copying out of the Robert McKee/Joseph Campbell textbook.
I've written about the third act Big Face Off here and here. That Grossman's article is in the Wall Street Journal shows how much money is in this genre. (Full article here.) It's going to get worse: Kenneth Branagh is making Thor and there's a Green Lantern trilogy FFS and... and... look, I've stopped caring. The biggest problem with comic book movies is that they have to work as a series. Characters can't die, even when they fight using powers that can destroy anything, so conceptually the characters undermine themselves.

Worse, the Marvel universe is really a neighbourhood. The different characters bump into each other again and again, "fight" again and again, and never win. There's no story: only the promise of a story, the raising of tension. There's no resolution, no release. I think that's why the hype preceding comic book movies is more enjoyable than the movies themselves. It's like the cover of the comic, which was always so much better than the contents, or those great two-page splashes that Jack Kirby drew of, say, foreshortened SHIELD agents crawling around a giant machine and so on. The rest of the story was all fretting over dilemmas that were never resolved. 

Ridley Scott is directing two Alien prequels, which would be better news if they weren't going to be in 3D. 3D cameras don't work well shooting low light and 3D projection can't cope with fast edits. Quick: what are the two basic filmic elements of the Alien movies? You got it. Because the Alien prequels will be prequels it won't spoil them to reveal they're about the "space jockey" - the dead pilot of the alien spaceship in which the Alien eggs are first discovered. The jockey figure was a static prop designed by H.R. Giger for effect not narrative so the idea of a movie about it is only slightly less exciting than the back story of the cat, Jonesy. Scott knows where to point a camera but the idea sounds like it's not going anywhere.

I have a soft spot for Alien because Dan O'Bannon's original script is one of the great acts of knuckle-down writing heroism. He wrote it in the wake of Alejandro Jodorowosky's Dune, for which O'Bannon was hired to do special effects. When Dune collapsed, O'Bannon was screwed:
I found myself back in L.A., flat broke, My car I’d given away. I had no apartment, all my belongings were in storage, and I ended up on Ronnie Shusett’s sofa, and it was there that I wrote Alien. I knew that I wanted some of the artists that I had met on Dune to work on Alien, and in particular Giger to design the thing. So some of my experience with Dune went into Alien. But the main reason that I wrote Alien at that time was that I needed money, and the only way I could think of to make any money and get off of Ronnie’s sofa was by writing a spec script that the studios would like and buy.
In the official book about the making of the film O'Bannon recalls going in and waking up Shusett in the middle of the night to tell him excitedly about the movie's title ("it's a noun and an adjective!") and Shusett rolling over and going back to sleep. I'm quoting the latter from memory. My copy of the book is in storage.