Chad Taylor

I can't watch


I had a copy of Blade Runner on VHS. This was 1988, 89 – ? Incept dates. A flatmate of a friend had two machines and could dub copies and he made me one from a rental, with a black and white photocopied cover and I would leave it in the machine at home. I would come home from my day job and make dinner and open a bottle of wine and put on Blade Runner and leave it playing in the lounge while I wrote. I literally can't count the number of times I've seen that movie, in all its incarnations. Personally? The first cut with the voiceover is the best. It was compromised but the whole movie is compromised, like everything, and the voiceover gave it shape. I love the small things in it, like the bad matte painting when Deckard leans over his balcony, or the looping that doesn't match, the stuntwoman whose face is visible when Zhora crashes through the window, or every single moment Sean Young is on screen. The movie was a failure when it was released and criticised by everyone, but everyone got it. It had a ramshackle scope movies don't have now. It felt like a movie. Now movies are perfect they don't feel like movies anymore. They're apologies. This is our point of view but please, if you're offended, the protagonist's father, it was all his fault...

Blade Runner sequel is like the Velvet Underground getting back together. It's too late and there's no point. And you still have the Velvet Underground and you still have Blade Runner. Why would you want anything more?

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.

Snapshots





Needle and the damage done


Sunday was the wrap for REALITi. Director Jonathan King finished the principal shoot and pickups with a reshoot of the first scene, going in tighter / darker / better. Big ups to actors, crew and our location hosts for the day, Chow Wellington. After thirty non-sequential days of shooting the micro-budget has brought out the best in everyone.

Now all there is to do is the editing, some digital trickery, ADR, sound mix, colour timing, score...

The dream factory





For the last few weeks I've been working with director Jonathan King on our film Realiti, picking off one day of scheduled shooting at a time. Production on the feature has been made possible by the generosity and spirit of all involved, from location owners to the local film students and hardened professionals who've worked on the crew, and to the wonderful actors who have found time between stage, TV and (very) big film productions to come and be part of Mr King's third feature. When I was writing the screenplay and casually dashing off phrases such as 'EXT. HOTEL EXTERIOR - NIGHT' it never occurred to me that the result would be six people standing on a wet, rainy city street at 11p.m. with their faces turning blue. But stand there they did, until they got it right, and not a complaint from any of them. Honestly, guys, I thought 'INT. NIGHTCLUB' was keeping it simple. And don't get me started on how easy I thought it would be to film 'INT. OFFICE - DAY'.

Realiti is still a work in progress. Without giving too much away I can tell you that I've seen the rushes and they're amazing. But don't tell anyone: we don't want to peak too soon. In the meantime my ongoing thanks and gratitude to Chow and Good Luck Bar; to the crew to date which includes Jack Barrowman, Oren Graham, Joseph Hambleton, Cath Maguire, Kelly Manu, Lee Tolley and Niki Winer; and my admiration and respect to the immensely talented actors including Michelle Langstone, Johannes Meister, Nathan Meister, Miranda Manasiadis, Graham McTavish, Aroha White, Richard Whiteside and Tim Wong. All of whom are being corralled, encouraged and captured by the directorial eye of Mr Jonathan King. Jonathan has been shooting a lot of handheld, and can hold a half-crouch for a really long time.

And hats off, too, to Wellingtonians. Their city might be home to one of the most expensive film productions in the modern world but the locals still brake for a micro-budget New Zealand movie. Literally, sometimes: we've been filming on the street. Sorry about that, chief.

Pictured: Graham McTavish and Miranda Manasiadis between takes at a very special house; cast and extras in the club; Graham, Oren Graham and Nathan in the wind; and Michelle Langstone -- a star and a star on Twitter.

All tomorrow's parties







Futureworld (1976), Logan's Run (1976), Rollerball (1975), The Stepford Wives (1975), Westworld (1973)

All of this has happened before and it will happen again

Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready!"
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise. Three . He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors. Faster! Leg up, leg down!
"Four!"
The people sleepwalking in their hallways.
"Five! "
He felt their hands on the doorknobs! The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt rust and his eyes were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.
"Six, seven, eight !"
The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors.
"Nine!"
He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.
"Ten!"
The doors opened. He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like grey animals peering from electric caves, faces with grey colourless eyes, grey tongues and grey thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.
-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Who's gonna pay attention to your dreams?


Ungraded set pic: Nathan Meister in the passenger seat c/- director Jonathan King.

Shadows and fog





Some more thumbnails from the set of Realiti, the micro-budget SF movie that director Jonathan King is shooting around Wellington and parts of Auckland. Top to bottom: Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister lurking in the shadows; Graham McTavish giving the news; Nathan Meister hearing it; and Michelle Langstone on her way to something that may or may not happen. Jonathan has been shooting in digital in real locations with found light and a crew so small I'm not sure whether to call it a guerilla or a skeleton.

Realiti is pared-back science fiction: my idea, when I wrote it, was that the characters would come into a room and just talk. I keep referring to it as a science fiction film with no special effects, although when Jonathan is through with it there will be some opticals: removal of objects, fiddling with backgrounds, that kinda thing. Much of our discussion about the movie is what it won't be, and what won't be in it. In many ways it's a noir... but more colourful than that: stranger.

I wrote the script for Jonathan a long time ago. We revived the project after putting our toes back in the water by making on a comic strip, City Lights, which I wrote and he drew. One of the many things I love about these images as they trickle through is the way they evoke the director's drawing style. It's a good sign, I think: evidence that the movie's visual style is evolving naturally.

These preview pics are very small and have not been graded. And the shoot is just coming up to halfway: there's a long way to go yet. But the actors are looking way cool and the footage is looking great. Build it simple, fly it slow...

Crisscross




Director Jonathan King has wired some more production stills from REALITi: Aroha White as Jessamine; Michelle Langstone as Holly; Miranda Manasiadis and Nathan Meister as Meg and Vic. Currently shooting in Wellington: it's all coming together. I wrote the script years ago but only now do I realise that these were faces I had in mind.

Watch this: Space!



If you're in Wellington in the coming weeks and spot a film crew not on a $500+ million budget from Warner Brothers, it might be Jonathan King making REALITi, a new full-length feature film. Jonathan will be shooting with a small team in and around Wellington which, through the magic of cinema, will be transformed into a New Zealand city in the kind-of present day.

REALITi is a script I wrote for Jonathan in 2008. It's a talkie: a science fiction film with no special effects; an adult fantasy set in the New Zealand now. Pictured: Nathan Meister as Vic and Tim Wong as Lo.

There was something aboard





"On 16 July mate reported in the morning that one of the crew, Petrofsky, was missing. Could not account for it. Took larboard watch eight bells last night, was relieved by Amramoff, but did not go to bunk. Men more downcast than ever. All said they expected something of the kind, but would not say more than there was SOMETHING aboard."
-- Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897) The Demeter is the Russian ship that brings Dracula to England. During the voyage the vampire sustains himself on the crew, picking them off one by one until only the captain remains.

Star Trek, 'Where No Man Has Gone Before' (1969) Samuel A. Peeples, Gene Roddenberry. Two crew members become invested with terrifying mental powers. As their abilities grow they lose all human empathy and threaten the crew.

Alien (1979). Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shusett. An alien infects a crewmember, hatches on board the vessel and infests it, feeding off her crew.

Firefly, 'Our Mrs Reynolds' Joss Whedon: (2002) A stowaway con artist overcomes the captain and crew, betraying the vessel to her cohorts.

The Star Trek and Firefly episodes are two of the most satisfying of their respective series. In each, the antagonist's actions force the protagonists to reveal their character through action. By the end the audience requires no further introduction to the characters: the exposition is an integral part of the drama, and the story is complete.

Prince of Darkness


October 31 I always think of John Carpenter. Halloween changed horror movies and he went on to shift things a few more times. Even his bad work is stuffed with good ideas, and his "mainstream" efforts are spiky and challenging. But most of all when you look back on his body of work you see an artist with a voice. A John Carpenter movie is as distinctive as a Scorsese or a Kubrick: the same every time but different.

From Soundtrack:
Halloween is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this month, and the score was just re-released, and they had that "other" film come out earlier this year. What are your thoughts on the apparent success of the franchise? Did you ever expect it to have such a following all these years?

You can't beat it! I get a check every time they make one of those movies. I get paid a lump sum of money every time they make a sequel. Debra Hill and the partners and I made an agreement to go ahead and have a mechanism for making sequels, since that's apparently what people wanted. They would use my music, since that's part of the film - and I would stay out of it. It's good for them - they go off and make the movie they want and they don't have me bitching at them.
Den of Geek talked to him about the prescience of his movies:
Escape From LA was a prescient film – it kind of makes more sense now than when it came out...

[laughs] Yeah!

...and the same dynamic seems to apply to They Live. What's your reaction to getting it right, but no-one believing you at the time?

It's the story of my life! [laughs] A lot of my career has been like that. I've made a couple of films that later on, upon reflection, you say 'My God'...I just wrote those things on instinct, so it's not anything I planned out. It's just my view of the world.

It's the same on The Thing, which, three years after release, would have been a trenchant social commentary...

But that's what happens in the movie business – you have to know what's going on when you make a film. I've always been a little bit out of touch with the immediate sense of the audience, I really have. So that's my fault.
One of my favourite John Carpenter movies is Prince of DarknessHalloween had the gag about the killer ducking across the screen behind the victim; Prince of Darkness had the "found footage" of something indistinct and very scary, decades before Paranormal Activity. AICN's Quint also likes the movie:
Quint: Tone is a huge thing with me for your films. One of my favorite movies of yours, and I feel it's really underrated, is PRINCE OF DARKNESS.

John Carpenter: Thank you. You know I've heard that a couple of times recently. I agree with you.

Quint: I've talked to a lot of people and I'm like "Listen, you can look at HALLOWEEN or THE THING or ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and those are all amazing films," but there's a tone that you hit I think in PRINCE OF DARKNESS that gets under my skin more than anything else in your filmography. It's hard for me to actually put a finger on it. It's like watching a Paul Schrader movie. There's something that instantly just in the mix of the visuals, the sound design and the story that kind of gets on to your skin as a film viewer.

John Carpenter: Well, thank you. You know as I recall at the time there was a television interviewer who said PRINCE OF DARKNESS was the worst movie of 1986. Worst movie. Worst.

Quint: Well, they were wrong.

John Carpenter: Well, not necessarily. (laughs) It wasn't at the time so much fun to be the target of that, but I don't care. It was a badge of honor for me.

Upfront


Looper is very good. I saw it on the recommendation of a colleague -- the trailer didn't attract me at all, and I wondered early on if I was going to like it (the irony of time travel is so much of it has been done before) but then it turned great and, perhaps even more importantly, stopped at just the right moment. I mostly enjoyed it for the things I've been writing about here: a minimum of special effects and a lot of talking for its own sake. And the editing: the memory flashbacks between present and past felt like an old-fashioned movie where the cuts told the story instead of chopping between multiple angles to smooth over preposterous or hard-to-get action.

I've seen a lot of movies with Emily Blunt in them now. Is it me or does she always dress the same?

Anyway... recommended. Can't say more. Will spoil it.

Good indie movies now are becoming what TV used to be: genre, low-budget, heavy on drama and dialogue. It's the new age of talkies.

On the same (4K digital) screen beforehand, a trailer for the Prometheus Blu-ray with spoilers and an additional scenes that made me hope it was going to be good all over again. Because that's what a movie theater has become: a first-look enticement to partake in the real viewing experience -- the high-def home theater drilldown into What You Missed. The deleted scenes on the Prometheus Blu-ray take apart the theatrical cut like it's Last Year At Marienbad. That's the experience audiences pay for now: a deconstruction. In a weird way, they're watching Godard movies.

Directions


In preparation for the Frankfurt Book Fair I downloaded the German + Travel app, which supplies and speaks useful phrases. The sound files are preloaded so there is no wait to play them, and no network traffic charge. And you can play phrases at random to make up robo-conversations: it's the app Kurt Schwitters would have liked.

Since upgrading to iOS6 I've been using the Apple maps app too -- I thought it was fine. Consumer Report rates the app as not that bad. 'Apple’s problem is that is replaced best-in-class with pretty-good.'

There is a new and best Amazon Kindle out. Gizmodo says the Paperwhite is for 'anyone who wants an ereader with a great screen. Which is basically anyone who wants an ereader.'

You may have Sherlock Holmes' on your e-reader, but you will not find his address on any map. The suspiciously well-named Jimmy Stamp deconstructs and reconstructs the mystery of 221B Baker Street:
As a real manifestation of a fiction, the many 221Bs attest to the power of Arthur Conan Doyle's writing. So strongly do the Holmes stories resonate with our culture that we have manifested his home in our own reality, creating shrines and sites of pilgrimage across the world. But these "replicas" also attest to the power of architecture and interior design, which by their very nature make things real.
Gavin Polone at New York Magazine talks about why TV is better than movies. If you're interested in popular culture you should print out this article and nail it to the wall. Almost a coda to Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, it does well to explain the most significant shift in mainstream entertainment since the rise of the movie blockbuster in the 1970s.
I would bet that you have noticed that your friends are more excited for new episodes of a favorite show than they are for the release of a super-hyped studio tentpole movie...  [A] malaise has taken hold of the movie audience, which is illustrated by the oft-heard phrase, "There is nothing out worth seeing.".
But why? Polone:
There are too many networks now competing for attention and they don't have the luxury of spending the huge sums movie studios can to cut through the marketing clutter and get the consideration of the potential viewer. So, they have no choice but to make shows that stand out from everything else based on their quality and distinctiveness. That is why, in recent years, you've gotten to watch not only Breaking Bad, but also The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and Homeland. None had pricey CGI, huge stars, or a flashy, unavoidable ad campaign; all they had was terrific writing, acting, and originality that made people want to recommend these shows to their friends.
On the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Graeme McMillan at Time discusses how the series changed pop culture forever:
These days, of course, we're used to the idea of rebooting series and franchises and getting new takes on what had come before, keeping the best bits and discarding what doesn't fit for something that everyone hopes is better. That wasn't the case back in 1987. Back then, translations between media tried their best to faithfully replicate previous iterations, and even oddities like the Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks Dragnet movie that predated The Next Generation by a matter of months tried their hardest to offer affectionate homage to their predecessors, even as they pretended to parody them. Star Trek: The Next Generation may not be a reboot in the common usage of the term today: It takes place in the same continuity as the earlier series, and doesn't seek to replace it or undo anything that came before, but for all intents and purposes it was a reboot for the concept and a chance for Roddenberry and staff to correct whatever mistakes or bad decisions had been forced on the original.
In Hollywood, pitching is everything. TV writer Bill Barol remembers being with Al Franken for the worst meeting in the history of show business:
After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

"Hi, honey... No, still having meetings. What? CNN? No, why?" He listened for a long moment, and then I saw all the color drain from his face. And I heard him say: "He's DEAD?"
However a study published in the Journal of Aging and Health has found that creativity predicts a longer life:
A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy.

The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself: new on Kindle


A new edition of my original 1995 short story collection The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself is out now on Amazon Kindle.

The collection features twelve short stories: 'Running Hot and Cold' (deeply offended the publisher. "Breaking her hip? Perhaps if you made it all a dream"), 'Calling Doctor Dollywell' ("A casually menacing story that has something to do with health problems and lesbians" – Steve Braunias),  'The Man Who Wasn't Feeling Himself', 'Fire in the Hole', 'Archie and Veronica' (S&M on the west coast, and the most popular story, to judge by the many emails I've received over the years), 'No Sun No Rain' (the first appearance of detective Ellerslie Penrose, who went on to helm Shirker), 'Somewhere in the 21st Century' (SF), 'Oilskin' (upset people no end, but some of the students at the Auckland University writing course liked it, and a Waikato student went on to make it as a student film. Kids!), 'John', 'Me and Misspelt' (currently under option as a film),  'From Soup to Nuts' ("Unnecessarily violent" – Graeme Lay, Metro) and 'Another White Gown'.

All here, now, just for you, in the new digital™ format, with brand spanking new cover art by Christchurch artist Ian Dalziel. A snip at US$2.99.

A leaf on the wind


A moving and clear-eyed piece by Peter Carey on the late Robert Hughes:
Nor should anyone doubt the massive affection he felt for his country. When, in the tabloid aftermath of his car accident in 1999, Australia turned on him, it is hard to underestimate the anguish he suffered in private.
Choire Sicha remembers David Rakoff:
The work he leaves behind — both recorded and in the collections Fraud, from 2001, Don't Get Too Comfortable, from 2005, Half Empty, from 2010 — are all ahead-of-their-time documentations of the way we actually do live now. There was no better correspondent from New York City of his time.
At the Shanghai Literary Festival a fellow author leaned across the table and asked me the sort of low voice normally reserved for selling drugs: 'Chad, Do you like... science fiction?' Why yes, I said. And so over the clatter of plates at M on the Bund we yammered on to each other about Firefly. Here is the very emotional Firefly reunion at Comic Con 2012.

Words and pictures


Jonathan King and I have a new comic out, City Lights II: Planet of Fear. I wrote it, he drew it. You can read it online along with its predecessor, City Lights at Jonathan's comic blog The Brighter Future.

This project is becoming a fun little series to do. It's cheaper than making films and a break from writing prose: write the characters, action and dialogue, and ping that off / against the images. It would have cost a small fortune to print this in the old days and the night scenes would have gone to black. Now we can play with the whole digital paintbox, for next to nothing.

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.

Those about to die


The Hunger Games is a book or something. I don't need to know what it is because I've seen it before. Death sport on the big screen is at least as old as Ben Hur. My favourite examples are from the 1970s. Punishment Park (1971), a cinema verité showdown between military and the counter-culture that looks disturbingly real from the next century; Roger Corman's Death Race 2000 (1975), as unwatchable and unforgettable as the best Corman fare; and Rollerball (1975), the sine qua non in any discussion of sci-fi futures.

Set in a dull grey Euro-America, Rollerball follows a professional deathsport player as he goes round and round, spiralling upward instead of down. The game is a substitute for war and no man can be greater than the game: the premise is simple. But the resonance of the images and performances is a feast. I love this film for its jump cuts, its soundtrack looping and dropouts, the grainy Medium Cool camera style, and its lack of finish. It's a ballsy, six-cylinder blat, violent and empty, the screenplay relying almost entirely on the mise en scène. For instance, the decadent party in which stoned footballers' wives laser a pine forest at dawn: that's everything you need to know about this world, right there.

Rollerball began -- as is so often the case with good movies -- as prose fiction. William Harrison's short story 'Roller Ball Murder' was published in Esquire magazine in 1973. Harrison adapted it for the screen (those were the days) for director Norman Jewison.

Jewison talked about the movie at The Hollywood Interview:
Rollerball was my first, and only, film about the future, the not too distant future. I tried not to get caught up in the technology too much. I wanted to isolate the areas in which I would work. I found the BMW building in Munich, which was perfect, as our main location. Its design was very ahead of its time. We were the first ones to use identity cards to get into places and all that sort of thing which is quite commonplace today. It was an interesting film to do from a political aspect, because it was a film about a world where political systems had failed and multinational corporations had taken over. It deals with violence used as entertainment for the masses, which goes back to the Circus Maximus. I think when you use violence for entertainment, you're getting pretty low on the human scale. (laughs) I think it turned out to be a pretty interesting film, very stylized, packed a wallop. In Europe it became a cult film, whereas in America a lot of the critics went after it as being exploitative, of just being about a violent game.
Rollerball is contrastingly enigmatic and action-packed. Philip Strick observed that it loses steam when its protagonist, Jonathan, is not playing, but that was part of the point: life without the death sport is boring. The players are prisoners of an existential world. There is no THX 1138 sunscape to run off to and no Logan's Run leafy wilderness. And there is no Soylent Green twist that explains it all, either. When James Caan finally gets to question the computer that runs the city the machine blows bubbles at him and remains silent. Even the Alpha 60 in Alphaville rasped back.

Young viewers should also be warned that the movie contains scenes with John Houseman.

In 1978 Jewison said of the film:
Rollerball looked into the future in which all-powerful corporations provide a murderous sport to let people work off their aggressions. I worry about how much direction we have over our own lives.
This week New York magazine's culture column Vulture ran the numbers on The Hunger Games publicity machine:
Size of production budget: $80 million
Size of marketing budget: $45 million
Soon newspapers and blogs will be trumpeting the box office take, and how the studio income is trending, and thus people like me who know nothing about the movie shall be entertained. Thumbs up or thumbs down? Will the franchise survive or be killed off? Today the death sport is money.