Jurassic Park – Blood and Porridge

Roger Corman, who passed away on May 9^th at the venerable age of 98, wasn’t so much a filmmaker as a movie factory. IMDb credits him with 491 producing credits, and that’s not counting the two movies being produced by him and categorised as ‘upcoming’ at the time of his death: the generic-sounding Crime City and the definitely Cormanesque-sounding Little Shop of Halloween Horrors.

Even during lockdown in 2020, when most folk his age were lying low because they knew contracting Covid-19 was likely a death sentence for them, Corman was so desperate for something celluloid-related to do that, according to the Hollywood Reporter, he “launched a self-named Quarantine Film Festival to judge short films made while filmmakers shelter in their homes.”

Corman was famous for things besides his work ethic and prolificness. Firstly, there was the legendary thrift and speed with which he made his films. For instance, in his 1955 Western Apache Woman, actor Dick Miller – at the start of a long association with Corman – played two characters in the same scene, an Apache and the settler who shoots him. While figuring out how to film the fiery – and potentially costly – finale of 1960’s House of Usher, Corman heard there was a barn about to be demolished in Orange County. He got permission to do the demolition himself, burned it to the ground, had cameramen film it and used the burning-barn footage to represent the burning mansion at the movie’s climax. And the original 1960 Little Shop of Horrors, long before it became an Alan Menken musical and was remade by Hollywood in 1986, was shot in two days. Supposedly, Corman did it in response to a bet that he couldn’t make a film in two days.

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

Secondly, as a producer, he gave a lot of aspiring, up-and-coming talent a chance to get behind or in front of the camera and show the world what they could do, whilst learning the mechanics of filmmaking on the job. The young filmmakers who graduated from the Corman School of Moviemaking make a pretty awesome list: Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, Curtis Hanson, Monte Hellman, Ron Howard, Gale Anne Hurd, Jonathan Kaplan, John Sayles and Robert Towne. A few others, like Paul Bartel and Jack Hill, never quite escaped the ‘exploitation filmmaker’ tag, but made some fascinating movies nonetheless, while Allan Arkush became a prestigious, Emmy-nominated TV director. Meanwhile actors whose careers received invaluable leg-ups from Corman included Charles Bronson, Bruce Dern, David Carradine, Peter Fonda, Pam Grier, Robert De Niro, Dennis Hopper, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Nicholson, Talia Shire and, yup, Sylvester Stallone. Even Sandra Bullock was aided on her way to fame by a role in the 1993 Corman-produced jungle-epic Fire on the Amazon.

I’m sure this was due to economics as much as altruism. He could pay his young, unknown and inexperienced directors, writers, actors and technicians less. When Ron Howard worked for him, and they had a row about Corman’s stinginess, Howard was assured: “Ron, if you do a good job for me on this picture, you’ll never have to work for me again.” (And no doubt he’d have a chance of being remembered not just for playing Richie Cunningham in the 1974-84 sitcom Happy Days.) But the lessons Corman’s alumni learned about making films on tight budgets and schedules were invaluable for their later, more prestigious careers and they’ve generally been grateful for the breaks he gave them. Scorsese, for example, has spoken about how Corman taught him the importance of preparation when you’re shooting on a budget and the wisdom of getting the most difficult scenes filmed at the start of the schedule – which in Scorsese’s case, with the 1972 Corman-produced gangster movie Boxcar Bertha, were the ones involving a train.

© American International Pictures

The fuss made over Corman’s many protegees obscures an important fact, that as a director himself – he had 56 directing credits – he could be pretty good. The movies he directed can be divided into three phases. First came the ultra-low-budget ones, mostly Westerns and science-fiction flicks, that he churned out in the late 1950s. If you’re to believe IMDb, he managed to make nine of these in 1957 alone. Many you’d struggle to appraise as ‘good’… But when you compare them with the cheap schlock being made by other exploitation filmmakers at the time, they definitely have a spark that elevates them above the herd. One thing about late-1950s, micro-budget, black-and-white sci-fi movies that strikes you now when you view them on YouTube is how dreary most of them seem – but dreariness isn’t a charge you could level at, say, Corman’s It Conquered the World (1956), though you could level a lot else at it.

At the beginning of the 1960s, he convinced his regular studio, American International Pictures, to tackle something different: a series of films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, made in colour and with larger budgets than usual (which doesn’t mean their budgets were large by anyone else’s standards). These kicked off in 1960 with House of Usher and continued with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1963) – actually based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, with the title borrowed from a Poe poem – The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and Tomb of Ligeia (1964). All but one feature the impeccable horror-icon Vincent Price as their leading man and they’re enlivened too by appearances from an older generation of horror-film actors: Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr, Peter Lorre and Basil Rathbone. And let’s not forget Barbara Steele, the queen of 1960s Italian horror cinema, who pops up in Pit. Corman’s Poe films are atmospheric, brooding – several of them have Price mourning a dead (but actually not-so-dead) wife – at times gorgeous and generally a lot of fun. They had a big impact on peculiar children like me, who caught them on late-night TV in the 1970s.

© Alta Vista Productions / American International Pictures

Finally, in the late 1960s, Corman became involved in movies about the youth cultures of time – Hells Angels in The Wild Angels (1966) and hippiedom in 1967’s The Trip – and gangster films like The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) and Bloody Mama (1970), possibly inspired by the success of a wee film called Bonnie and Clyde (1967) around the same time. Worn out by directing, Corman concentrated on producing from the early 1970s onwards. Apart from some uncredited directing on 1978’s Deathsport and 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars, he returned to the director’s chair only once, in 1990, for an adaptation of Brian Aldiss’s novel Frankenstein Unbound (1973). Aldiss also wrote the short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (1969) which was developed into Steven Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), making him perhaps the only writer who could boast of having his work filmed by both the famously low-budget Corman and the famously high-budget Spielberg.

Thereafter, Corman formed a series of movie production and distribution companies – New World Productions, Millennium (which was quickly renamed New Horizons Pictures) and Concorde Pictures. Going through all the movies that came off their conveyor belts, and had Corman’s name in their ‘producer’ credits, would be an exhausting and probably impossible task. But there are certain ones I’m fond of.

© New World Pictures

Firstly, I like Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), about a futuristic car race where the goal is not to finish first but to rack up as many points as possible by running down as many pedestrians as possible. A young Sylvester Stallone plays the villain, a driver so evil he mows down his own road crew for some extra points. Bartel followed this with another movie about car chases and car crashes, the more family-friendly Carquake (1976). I loved this as a kid – the fact that I saw it on a double bill with The Giant Spider Invasion (1976) probably made it seem, comparatively, so good. Among its oddball pleasures are cameos by Stallone and Martin Scorsese playing a pair of KFC-chomping Mafiosi.

I’m also a fan of Joe Dante’s Piranha (1978) and Rock n’ Roll High School (1979) directed by Allan Arkush with some contributions from Dante. The latter film starred the excellent P.J. Soles, shortly after she’d appeared in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and the legendary punk-rock band the Ramones. Apparently, Corman had wanted the movie to be about disco music, until Arkush and Dante persuaded him that having the Ramones in it was more likely to piss off the teenaged audience’s parents.

© New World Pictures

I enjoyed Corman’s 1980 rip-off of Star Wars (1978), the aforementioned Battle Beyond the Stars, ostensibly directed by Jimmy T. Murakami (and co-written by John Sayles). Its crew included a young James Cameron, working as a modelmaker, special effects technician and art director. Supposedly, Cameron impressed Corman by designing for the film a spaceship called Nell (controlled by a female-voiced computer) whose twin engines were, frankly, shaped like breasts. Cameron also worked on Bruce D. Clark’s Galaxy of Terror (1981), a cash-in on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), which I like simply for its eclectic cast – Ray Walston; Sid Haig; Zalman King, future director of ‘erotic’ movies like Wild Orchid (1990) and Delta of Venus (1994); Grace Zabriskie, who played Sarah Palmer in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017); Erin Moran, who played Ron Howard’s little sister in Happy Days; and Freddy Kreuger himself, Robert Englund.

And I’m somewhat fascinated – I don’t know why – by Adam Simon’s Carnosaur (1993), which was based on Harry Adam Knight’s 1984 novel of the same name. Knight’s Carnosaur had featured the idea of cloned dinosaurs running amok in the modern world years before Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990). When it was announced that Steven Spielberg would turn Crichton’s book into a film, Corman cannily adapted Knight’s book to the screen and released it the same year as Spielberg’s blockbuster. I imagine Knight found it galling that while Spielberg filmed Crichton’s novel with state-of-the-art animatronic and computer-generated effects, Corman’s low-budget effects for Carnosaur involved a man wearing a dinosaur-suit. Also, cheekily, Corman cast Diane Ladd (who’d been in The Wild Angels) in Carnosaur while her daughter Laura Dern was starring in Jurassic Park.

Later, more giant monsters would feature in Corman’s association with the Syfy channel. He supplied it with a succession of less-than-epic, self-explanatorily titled monster movies like Dinocroc (2004), Supergator (2007), the inevitable Dinocroc vs Supergator (2010), Dinoshark (2010), Sharktopus (2010) and Piranhaconda (2012). Actually, as Wikipedia notes, “Supergator was turned down by the Syfy channel, but Corman made it anyway.” I’ve watched a couple of these on Britain’s Horror Channel and, well, what can I say? There are probably worse ways to reduce your brain to an inert, insentient pulp. But not many.

However, my favourite films among Corman’s output are definitely ones that he directed himself. I’ll talk about them in my next blog post. Stay tuned…

© American International Pictures

June 14, 2023July 18, 2023

Jurassic snark

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

As yet another grim reminder that time stops for no man or woman, and that I’m gradually de-evolving into a doddery, senile old git, I’ve just read in a newspaper that it is now, exactly, thirty years since the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), the epic monster movie about dinosaurs being cloned from ancient bits of DNA to be put on display in a lavish theme park. It was based on a novel, published three years earlier, by Michael Crichton, and of course it led to a franchise of sequels and reboots that, despite being increasingly lame, generated billions of box-office dollars.

Wow! Thirty years? Was the original Jurassic Park movie really that long ago?

Anyway, readers, brace yourselves for a big shock. I thought the 1993 movie was pretty lame itself. Although a lot of people nowadays view the original Jurassic Park as a classic – here’s a hot-off-the-presses feature at the BBC website’s ‘Culture’ section praising it for how it ‘made scary movies accessible for young children’; and here’s another feature at the Guardian praising it for its prescient warnings about ‘self-styled geniuses’ who exploit new technology for their aggrandisement without thinking through the potential consequences – I found it a big let-down.

This was because I made the mistake of reading Crichton’s Jurassic Park-the-book before I went to see Spielberg’s Jurassic–Park-the-movie, and I felt miffed when what’d I’d visualised in my head during the book failed to materialise on the cinema screen. And before you read further, here’s a spoiler alert. This entry will give away a lot about the plots of both the book and the film.

Three decades ago, I certainly had high hopes for the film. Firstly, with Spielberg at the helm and a ton of Hollywood money behind it, Jurassic Park looked like being a very rare beast, a dinosaur movie with proper dinosaurs in it. I’ve always loved the idea of dinosaur movies, but apart from those ones where the prehistoric beasties were powered by stop-motion animation – like the silent-movie version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925) and the original King Kong (1933), whose dinosaurs were animated by Willis O’Brien, and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million Years BC (1966) and The Valley of Gwangi (1969), whose special effects were the work of the late, great Ray Harryhausen – dinosaur movies before 1993 had contained dinosaurs that looked, frankly, rubbish.

© Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

I’m thinking of ones where the dinosaurs were plainly stuntmen lumbering about in rubbery dinosaur suits, like The Land Unknown (1957). Or magnified glove puppets, like The Land that Time Forgot (1974). Or unfortunate modern-day lizards who’d also been magnified and had had fake spikes, horns and fins glued onto them to make them look big and fierce. The worst offender in that last category is surely Irwin Allen’s terrible 1960 remake of The Lost World, during which Claude Rains exclaimed at the sight of one supposed sauropod: “It’s a mighty brontosaurus!” While I was watching the film on TV, at the age of ten, I yelled back: “No, it’s not! It’s just a stupid iguana!”

The big-budget Jurassic Park was going to employ all the latest advances in animatronics and computer-generated imagery to get its dinosaurs right, so I wouldn’t have to worry about having my intelligence insulted by the spectacle of men in monster suits and overblown puppets and lizards.

Secondly, there was a buzz about Jurassic Park because it was rumoured that, for the first time in yonks, Spielberg was going to do something dark. He’d spent the past dozen years making movies with unbearably-high schmaltz levels: movies about cute aliens phoning home (1982’s ET), and ghostly pilots moping about their still-alive girlfriends (1989’s Always), and Robin Williams turning out to be Peter Pan (1991’s Hook). Once upon a time, though, he’d directed punchy, at times nightmarish films like Duel (1972) and Jaws (1975). Prior to Jurassic Park’s release, I was told by more than one film magazine to expect Spielberg to be back to his old schmaltz-free best. Supposedly, Jurassic Park was going to be like Jaws on dry land.

As for Michael Crichton’s original novel – well, it would never be mistaken for great literature but, reading it, I did think that with cutting-edge special effects and a skilful director it could make a hell of a movie. Many of its scenes seemed intensely cinematic. Actually, this wasn’t a surprise because Crichton himself had made films. Most notably, he’d wrote and directed 1973’s Westworld, which is about a futuristic theme park that allows its visitors to enact their most homicidal fantasies in mock-ups of the American Wild West, medieval Europe and Roman-era Pompeii. These are populated by scores of human-like robots whom it’s okay to shoot or hack or stab to death because they can’t actually die. Of course, a glitch in the system eventually compels the robots to start fighting back and then it’s the holiday-makers who get slaughtered. Westworld, in fact, is a prototype for Jurassic Park, with the same theme-park setting but with robots instead of dinosaurs as the exhibits-that-turn-nasty.

I knew Crichton’s novel would get trimmed as it was turned into a film, but I was dismayed at how much of it was trimmed. While Jaws shed a few gratuitous sub-plots that’d made its source novel, the 1974 bestseller by Peter Benchley, seem flabby, and it was a lean, muscular movie as a result, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park was pared to the bone. In its final reel the park’s pack of deadly velociraptors have escaped from their compound, the surviving humans are running around trying to avoid being eaten by them, and that’s about it. The velociraptors rampage through the book’s final chapters too, but there are other matters adding to the suspense. It becomes clear that some velociraptors have managed to board the supply-ship that services the island where the park is located, and there’s a real danger that they’ll reach the American mainland and become an ultra-lethal invasive species. The humans are also on a desperate quest to count the hatched eggs in the velociraptors’ nests, so that they can calculate just how many of the scaly killers are on the loose.

Also simplified are the fates of the characters. The main characters, palaeontologists Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and the billionaire mastermind behind the park, John Hammond, don’t all make it to the end of the book. Malcolm expires from injuries sustained from a dinosaur attack while Hammond dies after he hears the roar of a tyrannosaurus rex, panics and falls down a hillside. (Ironically, the roar comes from the park’s PA system – Hammond’s two young grandchildren have been mucking around in a control room with some dinosaur recordings.) Meanwhile, certain secondary characters, like the park’s lawyer Gennaro and its game warden Muldoon, survive the dino-carnage. Gennaro is even allowed to show a degree of courage, which is unusual for a fictional corporate lawyer.

In the movie, though, Grant, Sattler, Malcolm and Hammond are played by big-name stars – Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and veteran British actor / director Sir Richard Attenborough – who clearly had it in their contracts that none of them would suffer the indignity of being eaten by a dinosaur. So, they all survive. But because this is a monster movie, which demands that monsters eat people at regular intervals, the supporting characters are gradually bumped off, including Gennaro and Muldoon. This makes the plot very predictable. Interestingly, one supporting character who got killed in the book but made it out of the movie alive is the geneticist Henry Wu. Played by B.D. Wong, he’s ironically become the character with the most appearances in the Jurassic Park franchise – Wu’s now turned up in four of the movies.

Meanwhile, the casting of Attenborough symptomizes one of the film’s worst features. The cuddly, twinkly Attenborough, who one year later would play Santa Claus in a remake of Miracle on 34^th Street, is way nicer than the John Hammond of the book, who’s a callous, conniving and delusional arsehole. He should have been played by Christopher Lee or Donald Pleasence.

Spielberg couldn’t bring himself to be nasty to Hammond, whom he probably regarded as a kindred spirit. Hammond at his dinosaur theme park, like Spielberg in Hollywood, is merely trying to wow the masses by giving them spectacles they haven’t seen before. How could he be bad? Thus, we get a maudlin scene where Hammond explains his motives to Dern’s character by reminiscing about his first venture in the entertainment business – a flea circus. (Attenborough also gives Hammond the worst Scottish accent in movie history, so he tells Dern how he brought his wee flea circus “doon sooth frae Scotland” to London.) Look how big the fleas are in his circus now, Spielberg seems to tell us. What a visionary!

The softening of Hammond’s character infects the rest of the film. Though some of the velociraptor and tyrannosaurus-rex scenes are scary, it’s all a bit too feel-good. Spielberg wants us to be awed by the dinosaurs, not shit ourselves at them. John Williams’ musical score adds to the problem – his Jurassic Park theme, according to Billboard magazine, oozes with ‘astonishment, joy and wonder’; but since this is supposedly a sci-fi horror movie, shouldn’t it be oozing with some old-fashioned fear too?

But my biggest frustration about the film was that while Spielberg portrays Hammond as being like Walt Disney, the park isn’t like Disneyland – and it ought to be. In the novel Crichton wonderfully juxtaposes the primeval and the high-tech. There might be hordes of monstrous reptiles from earth’s distant past stumping around the wilds of Hammond’s island, but at the same time the place bristles with state-of-the-art sensors and cameras and is honeycombed with service tunnels crammed full of power-cables. At its centre is Hammond’s console-packed control room where he squats like a space-age spider in a technological web. The joy of the book is watching all this technology slowly, gradually start to malfunction and break down – until finally it’s useless. And meanwhile, the prehistoric stars of the show are clawing at the scenery, hungry to get at the humans who’ve been pulling the levers behind it.

You don’t really get this impression in the film. Attenborough’s control room looks a bit dingy, like he’s set it up in his garden shed. And the dinosaurs just seem to be out in big fields with big fences around them – nothing in the background but foliage, nothing underneath but soil. This Jurassic Park is more like Jurassic Farm.

No, while I sat through Jurassic Park in a cinema 22 years ago, I didn’t feel like I was watching a classic. The main thing I felt was a huge sense of disappointment – crushing me as effectively as if one of the behemoths onscreen had suddenly stepped out into the auditorium and trod on me. For the authentic Jurassic Park thrill-ride, check out Crichton’s book.

Tag: Jurassic Park

The jolly films of Roger (Part 1)

Jurassic snark