4 and 6 years after? Both were based on reasonably well known sf books, and both were set solidly on earth and so needed relatively low budgets.
2001 was an important movie by an important director, which got a roadshow opening with showings (not common back then) and Program books. it was not the type of movie people jumped on to copy. A good similar example is Lawrence of Arabia. Definitely a success, without a lot of imitation desert war movies made afterwards.
Well, three and five years. And low budgets were what they got!
Lawrence of Arabia opened the door to Dr. Zhivago and The Greatest Story Ever Told, as David Lean demonstrated a flair for profitable, sweeping epics. 2001 was notable for being a science fiction film that was atypical of a certain schlocky sci-fi ghetto of low budgets and low expectations, but it didn’t embolden Hollywood to make more big-budget classy productions in the same mold. (It certainly helped to get A Clockwork Orange made, but I don’t really consider that science fiction. Feel free to argue otherwise, though. Solaris was made as a reaction to 2001, but not by Hollywood studios.) Star Wars opened the door to many seriously-made, big budget SF films that got okayed by major studios as a result of the demonstrated profitability of Lucas’s breakthrough movie. Can you imagine Lifeforce or Android getting greenlit on the basis of any SF movie prior to Star Wars?
Cheap and schlocky was the norm for science fiction movies from the Flash Gordon serials until Star Wars. There were a few exceptions, but that was what studios were willing to pay for. After Star Wars, there was still the occasional Star Crash or Galaxina, but for the most part, they were willing to put big money into SF epics–because they had a precedent in Star Wars for such movies making money.
Hang on … there were no profitable sweeping epics until Lawrence of Arabia? You mean profitable sweeping epics like Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Spartacus…? :dubious:
ALL genres of film have have produced cheap and shlocky movies over the years. The B films churned out by Hollywood during its golden age were seldom as great as nostalgia makes them out to be.
Just like good detective/war/western/whatever flicks, the good science fiction movies like Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still had production qualities (I include writing and acting here) of the highest order.
I was around in 1968, BTW. I seem to remember Planet of the Apes being something of a blockbuster, right up there with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, You Only Live Twice, and Where Eagles Dare, to name a few of the other films that came out around the same time.
(my bolding)
The same as any other industry. You turn up to work on a well paid, short-term project (which is better than waiting tables) in another city/country, and you find out the project manager - once highly credited - has had a run of ‘bad luck’ on his last few assignments, one star of the team is a strung-out, narcissistic coke head, another is totally miscast in their role, half of the team don’t get on, some of the back room staff are incompetent, the materials you’ve been given could do with some work, the weather turns on you, halfway through all of you get food poisoning, the locals make John Paul Gotti look like Mother Teresa and another, much better, team is working on a similar project which will make yours look like shit.
A few of the above and you may have a suspicion you’re working on a turkey.
I have a copy of The Hollywood Hall of Shame by the Medved brothers, which came out in 1984. The material within is actually timeless because it gives testament to Hollywood egos that blow out of control and contribute millions to the cost of a movie.
They have one chapter called “The Elizabeth Taylor Wing.” She was apparently such a fragile creature who had to be coddled with expensive jewelry whenever she had a temper tantrum, or she’d come down with an illness that would delay production for weeks.
Sometimes the director and producers think the key to a successful movie is lavish sets and grandeur, which are costly in both dollars and the health of those involved. The book has an article for The Conqueror, which starred John Wayne as Genghis Khan. They filmed the movie in the Utah desert, which was 137 miles from a nuclear test site. Nearly all associated with the film eventually died of cancer.
Sometimes bad luck can cripple filming, such as the case with Doctor Doolittle. Certain locations for filming required sunny days but they wound up with weeks of rain and had to wait it out. There was even one point where they couldn’t even film a simple scene of ducks swimming across a pond. They shipped in ducks that had previously lost feathers during moulting season that were required to stay afloat . The ducks sank like rocks, and techies had to dive in to rescue them.
66 posts and no one points out the obvious?
[QUOTE=Ethel Merman]
…Even in a turkey that you know will fold
And leave you stranded out in the cold,
Still I wouldn’t trade it for a pot of gold,
Let’s go on with the show!
[/QUOTE]
Of course the people involved know it’s dreck. But, there’s no business like show business…
My brother is a set dresser who has worked on many movies. His experience is that you just can’t tell how well a movie is going. Everything went absolutely perfectly during the shooting of Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead,” and yet the finished product was a snoozer. By contrast, John Singleton’s shoots tend to go horribly, with lots of shouting matches and fights on the set… and yet some of his movies have turned out well.
Soylent Green was a reasonable adaptation of Make Room, Make Room with good acting talent. I’m not sure a bunch more money would have made it any better. More eye candy perhaps, but not better. The Omega Man is a monster movie, pure and simple. I can’t imagine 2001 having any effect on it. I’ve seen it and read I Am Legend and my recollection is that it isn’t a really good adaptation, throwing out the stuff that made the book interesting. I’ve never seen the first adaptation. The Will Smith version is a bit more interesting but not all that faithful either.
Star Wars did have a bigger impact. First, it was a much bigger hit. Second, it introduced technology that other movies could use. Third, it had a storyline that other not as clever filmmakers thought they could mimic, without really understanding what made it work.
An even better copy of it than the movies was the original Rattletrap Galactica, which had an evil empire^h^h^h enemy and hot fighter pilots flying space fighters.
I see that others have noted that Lawrence was hardly the first successful epic, so I won’t go into that. I suspect 2001 was considered far more like Lawrence of Arabia than it was like Forbidden Planet (a good but unrespected movie.) Read the critics. Lots of them didn’t understand it, but none of them called it sci schlock.
Except maybe Ray Bradbury.
Clarke joked that the reason that Planet of the Apes got the best costume Oscar, not 2001, was that the Academy thought 2001 was using real apes.
Just saying great book, as was its predecessor, the 50 Worst Movies of All Time.
BTW, some of the bonus tracks on MST3K DVDs are interviews with the directors of the movies. They mostly were aware that they had budget constraints, but don’t seem to have realized that they were making schlock. Mike in an intro described one director who had a party when MST3K did his movie - and was shocked and offended at his masterpiece being torn apart.
I believe that’s the people who made Time Chasers. I never really understood that story, since supposedly the folks who made it were fans of MST3K, and knew what the show was all about. What did they think? That this was going to be the one time that Mike and the 'bots said, “Gosh, this movie is really good! The filmmakers did a fabulous job!”
2001 isn’t really comparable to anything. It was certainly more of a mindfuck than Planet was.
I was around in 1968 too, and even if I weren’t, the bulk of relevant evidence is widely and easily available for examination. Planet of the Apes has cinematic merit if you’re comparing it to other science fiction movies made after WWII up to that point, but not if you’re comparing it to cinema in general from the same time period. It isn’t the film that made SciFi stop being the embarrassing redheaded stepchild of the motion picture industry. Star Wars did that by itself.
According to the Wikipedia entry for Time Chasers, it’s not the director who was upset about the movie getting the MST3K treatment:
Harrington presumably had no say in the movie being featured on MST3K, and may not have been familiar with the show. IIRC this is also the episode in which the town where the movie was shot was thanked in the closing credits and Tom Servo has a rant where he tells everyone in the town to go to hell. I wouldn’t be surprised if that offended some of the locals.
You’re absolutely right, Lawrence wasn’t even the first David Lean epic. Depending on where you draw the line between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood, it was either the last of the old epics or the first of the new ones (Spartacus was another contender; so was Ben Hur).
Where do others divide Old and New Hollywood? I pick 1960 because of the fading influence of stars from the WWII generation (John Wayne, Cary Grant) and the waxing influence of Baby Boom icons (Bruce Dern, Jane Fonda, Redford, Eastwood), the growing influence of Actor’s Studio and the prevalence of color stock.
I was a kid when Star Wars and then Battlestar Galactica were released and it was obvious even to me and my peers that Battlestar Galactica was a shameless attempt at appealing to Star Wars fans. (And Battlestar Galactica was such a dumb show, I think we recognized that despite our age.)
An anecdote related over on Jabootu about The Giant Claw
http://www.jabootu.com/acolytes/brandiweed/GiantClaw.htm
Interesting question. Spartacus is a good case because it was made by a new director (you wouldn’t want to call Kubrick Hollywood anything) but got taken over by an Old Hollywood star.
Not an epic, but lots of people consider Bonnie and Clyde the movie that made everyone take notice. But Corman was way ahead of everyone long before this, and some of the new stars came from his work.
We liked Bringing Out the Dead.