Lost Transmissions

by Desirina Boskovich

  In an odd twist, Frank Pavich’s documentary—the best look we’ve ever gotten at Jodorowsky’s Dune—was a hit at Cannes and a classic for fans, winning acclaim and awards.

  Now, another adaptation is (hopefully) headed for the big screen. In 2017, Legendary Films hired director Denis Villeneuve to take a shot at it. Villeneuve directed Arrival (2016), a gorgeous, heartrending masterpiece of a film based on a brilliant short story by Ted Chiang. Arrival wowed genre and mainstream audiences alike, winning the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and receiving Oscar nominations for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay (among others). Perhaps Villeneuve is the director to finally conquer this seemingly unconquerable story. *

  “The Tourist”: The Alien Sex Film Noir We Deserve

  Imagine this: Men in Black, but darker, stranger, sexier. Star Wars’ Mos Eisley Cantina, but designed by H. R. Giger of Alien fame. A New Wave noir starring an enigmatic bombshell blonde, authored by a female screenwriter. That was “The Tourist”: a 1980 screenplay by Clair Noto that never made it to the screen. If it had been made, it would have been the first film noir science fiction movie, groundbreaking for the innovation that Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner claimed instead. Some have termed “The Tourist” a masterpiece, and it frequently makes appearances on lists of the greatest sci-fi movies never made. But will it ever be more than a dream?

  HR Giger: The Tourist II, Biomechanic Bird Robot in His Room, 1982, 70 × 100 cm, acrylic on paper. Courtesy of the HR Giger Museum, Gruyeres, Switzerland.

  HR Giger: The Tourist VI, Alien Heads, 1982, 70×100 cm, acrylic on paper, Courtesy of the HR Giger Museum, Gruyeres, Switzerland.

  Noto’s previous writing credits included a stint working on Marvel Comics’ Red Sonja. One of her inspirations was the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien walks among us disguised as a human. Another inspiration was the work of H. R. Giger, whose darkly erotic illustrations she followed in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine—making the artist the perfect candidate to render concept art for “The Tourist.”

  The script follows Grace Ripley, a gorgeous blonde, a corporate executive, and a secret alien exiled on Planet Earth. An encounter with another disguised alien draws Grace into Manhattan’s seedy underbelly, where alien refugees congregate in a hidden place called The Corridor. The Corridor is home to a variety of extraterrestrials from many worlds; those who aren’t disguised must spend their lives hiding away in this cramped underground slum. The Corridor is part internment camp, part sex club, where aliens get up to the type of kinky shenanigans you’d expect from higher beings stranded on a really boring planet a zillion light years from home. Noto said, “I wanted to portray sexual agony and ecstasy in a way I’d never seen before, and science fiction seemed like the arena.”

  Grace navigates this weird secret world in search of a person who is rumored to have a way to leave Earth. The journey brings her face to face with her alien nemesis in a no-holds-barred confrontation.

  Influenced by directors Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, and inspired by the aesthetic of the New Wave, Noto’s screenplay used an unconventional structure. It was a uniquely compelling and highly original work, which immediately captured the attention of directors and producers. In 1980 it was optioned by Universal. Director Brian Gibson, who would soon go on to direct Poltergeist II (1986) oversaw the script development. H. R. Giger, who had just played a major role in the creative design of the highly successful film Alien (1979), began envisioning the alien denizens of the Corridor.

  In an interview with film critic David Hughes, Gibson said of “The Tourist,” “What struck me as being totally original was the idea of a rather gloomy, existentialist film noir, with the premise of Earth being a dumping ground for monsters from various galaxies, which was very resonant with a depressed view of the human condition. It made it a movie with art-house appeal, but with a premise that had a much wider potential audience.”

  Unfortunately, it was the potential for a bigger audience that sunk the project. The studio wanted to revise Noto’s unconventional script structure into something more appealing to mainstream audiences, as the large special effects budget for this visually lush movie would demand a big investment—in need of a big return. Script doctors struggled to mesh their edits with Noto’s idiosyncratic voice. Creative differences and personality clashes stalled the project.

  The screenwriter herself was candid about the script’s structural challenges. “There are certain projects that have a form and a structure to them that any good writer can really come in and deal with,” she told Fred Szebin for Cinefantastique. “This doesn’t have that. It’s all over the place; definitely a can of worms.” But she was content with that approach, drawing as she had on New Wave influences. On this particular script I didn’t give a damn to try to make a mainstream script,” she added. Her characters were also inspired by figures from her own life, a source of creative fodder that future script doctors would not understand.

  Noto regained the rights and took the script to Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope. With the wild success of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, Coppola was already legendary. But Zoetrope was a financial failure. The studio shut down in 1984, and Noto’s script went back to Universal Studios. It spent the following years bouncing back and forth between creative teams, stranded in development purgatory.

  Today, almost forty years since Noto first wrote the script, “The Tourist” still has its enthusiastic fans, many of whom would still love to see the screenplay become the film it deserves . . . or even a TV show. With its weird and unsettling atmosphere; its story about xenophobia and alienation, desire and isolation; and its strong female lead, perhaps the time for “The Tourist” has finally come. In the age of all-you-can-watch streaming originals, “The Tourist” might even be the making of Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon’s next big hit. *

  MEG ELISON

  The Unicorn-Like Creations of Moebius, Concept Artist

  From the Alien quadrilogy to TRON to 1980s Marvel, the direct and indirect influence of French artist and illustrator Moebius/Jean Giraud (1938–2012) is widespread and unmistakable. After getting his start in Western-themed comic books as a young artist, Moebius developed a gritty, dark style of realism that caught the eye of film directors who were looking to capture the Spaghetti Western aesthetic, including surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky for his doomed adaptation of Dune (see this page). Despite that grand film never getting made, the collaboration between Jodorowsky and Moebius led to the creation of a dark surrealist graphic novel (Les yeux du chat) that brought Moebius further into the worlds of science fiction and fantasy. Later, the two would collaborate on another—and better-known—French graphic novel series, The Incal, first published from 1980 to 1988 in the French science fiction/horror comics magazine Métal Hurlant. Written by Jodorowsky and illustrated by Giraud, The Incal is a baroque and expansive space opera that centers on the adventures of an archetypal “everyman” character named John DiFool. After a move to California, Moebius made art for well-known DC and Marvel titles, including Batman, Iron Man, Static, and a Silver Surfer miniseries written by Stan Lee that won the Eisner Award for limited series in 1989. Moebius’s style had a subtle influence at both houses, incorporating a grittier, more heavily textured technique than most of the illustrators of the decade.

  Jean Giraud in conversation with journalists at the 26th Edition of the International Comic Show in Barcelona, April 2008. Photo credit: Alberto Estevez/EPA/Shutterstock.

  The artist enjoyed a long run of successful projects in Hollywood after having made a name for himself in the United States. Moebius contributed character design and storyboard art for such blockbusters as Alien, TRON, The Abyss, and The Fifth Element. His style is as visible and as commonly imitated in 1990s science fiction as his contemporary H. R. Giger, though the latter is more commonly cited as the visionary artist responsible for the terror of facehuggers and chest-bursters. Moebi
us’s work did not emphasize body horror, but it was just as instrumental in visual worldbuilding.

  Not only a visual artist, Moebius wrote the story and created the conceptual art for Yutaka Fujioka’s 1989 animated film Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland, and wrote a graphic novel series for the same story five years later with artist Bruno Marchand.

  The artists and directors who claim Moebius as a major influence on their work reads like a who’s who of the twentieth century. George Lucas tried to get Moebius to work with him on Willow, only to lose him to other projects and regret the loss for years afterward. He has been cited as an inspiration by Neil Gaiman, Federico Fellini, Paulo Coelho, Mike Mignola, and Hayao Miyazaki. Ridley Scott counted himself lucky for having had Moebius’s input on the Alien franchise, and continued to cite his importance through Blade Runner and the whole genre of science fiction in film.

  Moebius was eulogized by the French minister of culture at his 2012 funeral, described as a double loss to the French arts: both as Giraud and as Moebius. The artist is interred at Paris’s elite Montparnasse Cemetery, where many of the greatest figures in the country’s history are laid to rest.

  But an artist never truly dies, so long as their work and the works that they touched live on. In his own words, Moebius admitted that he had become something legendary and uncatchable in a much-quoted moment of self-description acknowledging the effect he has had on the many different worlds in the art realm:

  “They said that I changed their life. ‘You changed my life. Your work is why I became an artist.’ Oh, it makes me happy. But you know, at same time I have an internal broom to clean it all up. It can be dangerous to believe it. Someone wrote, ‘Moebius is a legendary artist.’ That puts a frame around me. A legend—now I am like a unicorn.”

  Moebius is a unicorn. You may not know what you saw, but you know you saw it. You never forget. *

  How WarGames Changed American Military Policy

  Remember WarGames?

  In this 1983 movie, a computer-savvy teen, played by the always lovably dopey Matthew Broderick, accidentally hacks into a computer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) while searching for fun new games to play. The computer challenges him to a game of “Global Thermonuclear War.” Enthusiastically, Broderick agrees, and unintentionally sets off a nuclear crisis that could launch World War III.

  WarGames got a 21st century follow-up with the 2009 sequel, WarGames: The Dead Code. The movie went straight to DVD and, with a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was not a hit.

  “As a premise for a thriller, this is a masterstroke,” the late, great film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review. Even today the film is a fun watch, even if such a thing could certainly never have happened. The very premise is patently ridiculous . . .

  Or is it?

  President Ronald Reagan wondered the same thing. And the terrifying answer changed the future of cybersecurity.

  As a former film star himself, Reagan loved watching movies. He saw the film soon after it came out during some relaxation at Camp David. When he returned to the White House, he was scheduled to meet with national security advisors and senior members of Congress. The meeting agenda focused on forthcoming nuclear arms talks with Russia.

  But Reagan was still thinking about WarGames. He interrupted the talk of Russia to ask his assembled national security advisors what they thought of the film. No one else had seen it yet, so he gave them the play-by-play, describing the film in detail while his audience listened in confusion.

  In a retelling of the event, cybersecurity expert Fred Kaplan writes, “Some of the lawmakers looked around the room with suppressed smiles or raised eyebrows. Three months earlier, Reagan had delivered his ‘Star Wars’ speech, imploring scientists to build laser weapons that could shoot down Soviet missiles in outer space. The idea was widely dismissed as nutty. What was the old man up to now?”

  Undeterred, Reagan asked his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General John W. Vessey Jr. to investigate a key question: “Could something like this really happen?”

  Vessey did. And his findings were . . . concerning. “Mr. President,” he’s reported as saying, “The problem is much worse than you think.”

  As it happens, the movie’s shocking premise didn’t just emerge from the fevered mind of a screenwriter. When Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes were writing the screenplay, they interviewed one of the world’s foremost experts on computer security—an engineer named Willis Ware.

  Ware had actually helped design the NORAD computer’s software (so he knew exactly what Broderick was getting into). He’d written a paper on the system’s vulnerabilities way back in 1967. Like Cassandra, he’d been warning fruitlessly about a life-and-death hacking scenario for decades. But when the story was brought to life by WarGames, the threat finally captured America’s attention . . . as well the president’s.

  Fifteen months later Reagan signed a classified national security decision directive, the “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security.” And cybersecurity was born.

  WarGames did pretty well, too, earning $80 million at the box office, not bad for a film that only cost $12 million to make. It even got three Oscar nominations, including one for Lasker and Parkes’s original screenplay.

  WarGames’ concluding line, “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play,” tapped into America’s Cold War–weary zeitgeist. But the film’s lasting legacy is intimately connected with the cybersecurity concerns of today. *

  The Alien III(s) That Might Have Been

  In James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), Sigourney Weaver reprised her role as Ellen Ripley, reliving her greatest trauma as she joins a mission to the planet where the aliens were discovered—and now, it seems, are wreaking havoc. There, she discovers a small, terrified girl, the settlement’s last survivor. Like Ripley, Newt has suffered unimaginable horrors through her encounters with the aliens; like Ripley at the end of Alien (1979), she’s the only one left. Their relationship offers a powerful narrative thread as Ripley, the marines, and an android named Bishop take on one nasty beast after another.

  The movie was a smashing success, receiving accolades from viewers and critics alike. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won two. (And Sigourney Weaver was nominated as best actress for her role, rare recognition for a science fiction film.) Despite the fact that it was made for only $18 million, it brought in $180 million worldwide, an impressive return on investment.

  Unfortunately, Alien 3, the second follow-up from 1992, did not garner such praise. Though it wasn’t a complete flop, reviews were mixed, and it did not enjoy the same commercial success. Its director, David Fincher, has since disowned it.

  But, as journalist Abraham Riesman phrases it mournfully in Vulture, “there’s an alternate universe where the series’ propulsive momentum only increased . . . the alternate universe where legendary science-fiction writer William Gibson’s Alien III (that’s “III,” not “3”) screenplay was realized. It is, perhaps, a better world than ours.”

  When Aliens came to theaters in 1986, novelist William Gibson was a hot young talent and rising star; his first novel, Neuromancer, had been published in 1984 to wide appreciation. Unknown to the makers of Alien, the “dirty spaceship aesthetic” of the first movie had already found its way into his fiction, shaping the gritty world of Neuromancer’s Sprawl. In 1992, speaking of the original Alien movie, Gibson told Cinefantastique, “I thought there were germs of stories implicit in the art direction. I always wanted to know more about those guys. Why were they wearing dirty sneakers in this funky spaceship? I think it influenced my prose SF writing because it was the first funked up, dirty kitchen-sink space ship and it made a big impression on me.”

  This latent influence spawned an ironic but charming loop. As Douglas Perry described it in Cinescape in 1995, “[David] Giler had read Gibson’s award-winning novel Neuromancer and realized with a jolt that the futuristic Earth the no
velist envisioned jibed perfectly with the exhausted techno-society represented by the Nostromo and its crew in Dan O’Bannon’s original story.” Giler and his fellow producer Walter Hill offered Gibson a chance to write the screenplay, and he accepted.

  There was a catch, however. Sigourney Weaver would not be able to appear in this film; contractual disputes may have played a role, as she did eventually return as Ripley in the real-world version of Alien 3. Ripley was such a powerful protagonist in the first two films, and it would be a challenge to reinvent the narrative without her. Instead, Gibson chose to focus on his second-favorite character from Aliens; the android, Bishop. Giler and Hill gave Gibson a basic treatment for the story and sent him off to work.

  In a way, Gibson seems an odd choice for a screenwriter. What is most brilliant and striking about his body of work is his talent for evoking a world through language. He has a talent for description that cascades in glittering onslaughts of synesthesia that cut like a diamond. You see and feel and taste his worlds, even the indefinable and ambiguous space of virtual reality (or as it’s termed in his Sprawl trilogy, “the matrix”). The opening sentence to Neuromancer is one of the most famous in science fiction: “The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel.” For a virtuoso of description like Gibson, the screenplay format seems like a waste of his talents.

  Nevertheless, Alien III is a very solid story. Though his script was never translated to the big screen, the visual moments it evokes come through powerfully enough that your imagination fills in the gaps; there are scenes that one can picture so completely that it’s as if you really watched them. The description that follows is based on Gibson’s first draft, which can be read in its entirety online, offering it a kind of lasting narrative life of its own.