There’s an apocryphal story about the frustrations of writing in Hollywood that Harlan Ellison tells about pitching a story to Gene Roddenberry. It was a time travel story, and Ellison himself was pitching it, not some nobody writer. Ellison’s idea involved travelling back in time to the time of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. He was in mid-pitch, rolling right along, when Roddenberry or one of his associates said, “I really like the whole dinosaur thing, but I think it would be even better if you could throw in some Mayans.”
Ellison: Mayans?
Roddenberry associate: Yeah, I read a book about them once, they’re really interesting.
Ellison: But the dinosaurs died out 65 million years before the Mayans were around.
Roddenberry associate: Yeah, but …
I forget how the rest of it goes, but I think nobody actually got stabbed by Ellison, though it was a near thing. Project didn’t go, needless to say.
All this is by way of introducing the title of tonight’s big SciFi original premiere movie:
I didn’t see the Aztec thing but I did have the pterodactyl movie on in the background for awhile and that was pretty awful. Kinda cool how everybody kept getting beheaded or chopped in half though.
I actually saw the interview with Ellison on the Tomorrow Show where Ellison said this. It was Roddenberry and Ellison talking to some suit at Paramount. The suit, into New Age, brought up the Mayans, and Ellison said that he and Gene just looked at each other. This was somewhere around 1975.
BTW, Roddenberry said at the talk I heard him gave that the suits wanted Charlton Heston as Captain Kirk in the movie.
(Peters is the exec who wanted the new Superman movie to have ninja polar bears guarding the Fortress of Solitude, and I swear to God I am not making that up.)
Or … maybe the typical studio exec really is that stupid?
They’re that stupid. How else would you explain Uwe Boll and Kevin Costner still getting work?
(Harlan’s account of trying to get the I, Robot movie made is hysterical. He called the exec at WB an “artichoke” and the exec later told the press about it, to which Harlan says, “Only someone as dumb as an artichoke would admit to such a thing, don’t you think?”)
The Sci-Fi “Originals” are great for one thing though, MSTing/Rifftrax-ing
Watching the tail end of “Sabretooth” (no pun intended) I came up with two pretty good riffs if I do say so myself…
scene one, the female scientist who cloned the Sabretooth tiger has just been attacked and gored by the cat, the cat is dragging her behind a boulder, she cries out a desperate “Help MEEEE!”
to which I couldn’t resist responding…
“It’s going to lay it’s eggs in me!!!”
moments later, the surviving Saber-Chow, errr, campers are running from the kitty, “Lets get out of here!!!”
<MT>“They’re about to nuke this place from orbit!”