Featured Article

NonFiction articles

Gods and Monsters in Hollywood

Written by Gregory Benford

Illustrated by Christoff Koelzer

So there I was in fabled Hollywood, having lunch at the Fox Studios. The food was tasty and I was with a movie producer who was interested in a story idea I had pitched. While a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, I had published several novels, mostly science fiction. Hollywood, just an hour up the freeway, was a constant temptation. I succumbed to it after three decades of doing intense physics.

We had gone over the whole plot structure, the breakdown into three acts (a Hollywood commandment, Act I ending at 30 minutes and II at 90 minutes in a two hour film)—plus character, logic, setting, the works.

Everything seemed set. Everybody agreed. They thought that the female lead character seemed particularly right, a match of motivation and plot.

Then the producer, a woman in her thirties, leaned across the lunch table and said, "She's just about right, now. Only . . . how about, halfway through, she turns out to be a robot?"

I looked around the dining room, at the murals depicting famous scenes from old movies, at stars in shades dining on their slimming salads in all their Armani finery, at the sweeping view of little purple dots that danced before my eyes because I had neglected breathing after she spoke. "Robot . . . ?"

"Just to keep them guessing," the producer added helpfully. "I want to really suck the juice out of this moment."

"But that makes no sense in this movie."

"It's science fiction, though—"

"So it doesn't have to make sense," I finished for her.

****

The vast bulk of Hollywood science fiction films brazenly feature flat characters moving through Tinkertoy plots to the regular drumbeat of gaudy spectacles. Horn-rimmed techno-nerds get an occasional smirking nod in passing, on the way to the dazzling special effects payoffs.

This sleep of reason fruitfully births monsters on demand, though—fears of technology, of scientists, and of the future itself. Machines come alive and reflect basic human evils, from Terminators to HAL. Those who sup from the cup of knowledge turn bad—the Invisible Man, Dr. Strangelove, bladerunners galore. Hubris is the drink of choice. In Bride of Frankenstein, mad scientists drink to the toast, "To a new world of gods and monsters!" Nobody hesitates.

The few films in which science fiction sings peer beyond current received wisdom, playing music for the dance between us and our technologies. Machines both help and block our personal relationships, robots come off as terribly human rather than as Gothic horrors, and startling ideas condense into concrete drama.

The big questions before us can often be phrased as If this goes on . . . and What if . . . To get the tone of the issue right, films like Kubrick's 2001 give us crisp, convincing space travel, not the comic book zoom and swirl of a Star Wars. Rather than play upon the easy keys of unease about change, they pull out the stops and embrace it with a realist's love.

As a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, I felt the tug of Hollywood brimming at the horizon. I had written some fiction, so my agent began to get calls inquiring whether I could come in, pitch some ideas, schmooze. When the sirens call, who hangs up?

****

So there I was a few weeks later, talking to a story editor. His development company was interested in making a TV miniseries from my novel, The Martian Race. The whole point of the approach was to portray Mars the way it would really be, hard and gritty and unforgiving. The story editor liked this a "whole lot" and thought it was a "breakthrough concept" and all, but he had his own creative input, too.

"I want a magic moment right here, at the end of the first hour," he said. "Really suck that ol' juice out!"

One of the signatures of H'wood is the incessant use of cliché phrases, the rule of advanced, glance-over-the-shoulder hipitude.

"Magic?" I asked guardedly.

"Something to bring out the wonder of Mars, yeah."

"Like . . ."

"See, when the astronaut is inside this cave—"

"Thermal vent. From an old volcano—"

"Okay, okay, vent it is. In this vent, he's trapped, right?"

"Well, not actually—"

"So he's banged up and he thinks he's going to die and he thinks, what the hell."

"What the hell."

"Right, you get it. He says what the hell, he might as well take his helmet off."

"Helmet. Off."

"Right, you got it. Big moment. Cracks the seal. He smiles and takes a big breath, and says, 'Oxygen! There's oxygen here. Let's take off these helmets!' Whaddaya think?"

"I like the robot better."

****

That moment expressed Hollywood's basic rule, the Law of Thermodramatics. To get more audience, turn up the gain.

If you absolutely must use scientists as characters, make them odd, nerdy, obsessed, self-important or, even better, quite mad. The Law overwhelms the niceties that scientists would like in movie depictions of them, especially logic or truth.

Pitching a movie or TV project is humbling. Everybody in the room is passing judgment, lounging back on sofas in their H'wood casuals, wearing the baseball caps and jeans Stephen Spielberg made into a uniform. Each got his turn at bat. In my world of scientists, the rule is Everybody has a right to their own opinion, but they don't have a right to their own facts. In Hollywood, I learned, the part after the comma does not apply.

After a few dozen pitch sessions in fashionable '40s-style bungalows, I began to notice that nearly all of these Exec.Prods. and Production Managers and Personal Assistants were under 30,. Most of them came from backgrounds in Film Studies or Journalism, and seemed the types who sit at the very back of their science classes. Some hid behind dark glasses, style victims of hipitude.

I had sold the production team of producer Jon Debont on my novel, Cosm, by bringing along pictures of particle accelerators. High tech, the bigger the better, helps visual people see the movie. They even liked the idea of shooting the film at UC Irvine, where the novel is set. Shooting in the larger LA area keeps costs down. Within a radius that barely included UC Irvine, actors and crew must get themselves to the site every day on their own. Except for the stars, of course.

For Cosm Debont lined up preliminary agreements to star from Dustin Hoffman and Angela Bassett; Time magazine carried this news, to my amazement. I like Hoffman as an actor, and he would play the Einstein-like figure of Max from the novel. The core of the novel was the vexed black woman lead, and I thought Bassett seemed right. Of course, I had no say in any of this, being a mere writer, though I had volunteered those two names in the pitch session.

But then Debont's big project, a film combining sf and westerns titled Ghost Riders in the Sky got axed by Fox because it ran a prelim $115,000,000 shooting budget. They cancelled it mere weeks before the cameras rolled on special effects. Debont had to earn his keep by shooting a horror film based on The Haunting of Hill House, a remake. It did not fare well in critical opinion, though it made some money.

This set him down a notch in the Fame Ladder of H'wood, so even though he had made Twister and Speed he could not get the $90 million needed to go with Cosm. And anyway, the first script, written for a cheapo $150,000, was clearly inadequate. I offered to do one that actually used dialog from the novel, instead of lame technospeak, as the H'wood writer had done, but no, that was impossible—novelists seldom get a shot at the craft of screenwriting. "I'm afraid that puppy's dead, for now," my manager said.

So Cosm is stalled, awaiting cash to finance another screenplay. So is a TV closed-end series I proposed to the SciFi Channel, which took characters clear to the end of the universe and then saved them—too big a budget, some said at several networks. They had a point; showing all of space and time does run up those costs.

****

I got a good agreement with Mandalay Productions to do The Martian Race as a miniseries, after only one pitch to the CEO. We had tried it on several other companies with various aborted starts, but this looked real. I pitched it with Michael Cassutt, an old TV hand who knows sf and has written a fair amount for magazines and even novels. We based our outline on a story I had written with the biologist Elisabeth Malartre, who was to be the technical advisor.

Then Mandalay started stalling, over and over, going through three drafts of the contracts—wasting nine