Yet Dune proffers unusual, some might say greater, treasures. For a generation of kids who've grown up with word processers and space shuttles and Isaac Asimov on the bestseller lists, an sf film with a brain. For moviegoers treated to the moral and ethical bankruptcy of slasher films and Porky's, a film that deals with concepts of home and courage, loyalty and love of family, nationalism and the wonders of the universe.
If the adults who have reviewed this film with confusion are wrong, and more than fifty years of the popularity of serious science fiction has created an audience capable of the joys of the intellectual mind-leap, then Dune will reach and uplift its intended viewers. But if the audience has been too far debased with simplistic twaddle, then like 2001, this film will have to wait for the judgment of time.
The first week Dune made $6 million.
Beverly Hills Cop, which premiered December 3rd, in its three-day opening pulled in $15,214,805. The five-day total: ever so close to $20 million.
In five weeks, by which time it had nearly vanished from the movie screens of America, Dune amassed a total of $27.4 million. In five weeks Beverly Hills Cop did more than $122 million in box-office revenues.
As I write this, Dune still cost $40–41 million to produce, with (an estimate) of between $7–10 million for prints and advertising. In its first 110 days of release Beverly Hills Cop has made one hundred and ninety-one million, eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and fifteen dollars. And change.
It is safe to say Dune was a disaster. Because not one of you was satisfied.
And I submit that you were dissatisfied before you ever got to your theater seat, because the priests of the Black Tower, from Frank Price and Frank Wright on down, quaffed deeply from the cup of derangement that is the brew of choice at Universal. They threw the film community into panic, the stock market into flux, the waiting millions who had hungered for Dune for a decade and a half into confusion. And they destroyed what I view as a film of considerable worth. Hell, you read my review; I'm on record.
Apparently, only two of the many critics writing for national publications derived sufficient joy from Dune to overcome the bad vibes to give the film a positive review. One was David Ansen in Newsweek. The other one has just said he's on the record. And nothing could more ironically keynote the symbiotic relationship I described earlier than that Universal, in the person of Frank Wright, after doing everything in his power to scare me off and tilt me toward negativity, exploited my review in major newspaper advertising. With a rueful shake of my head I perceive this to be a demonstration of the kind of chutzpah one associates with embezzlers running for public office.
And Frank Herbert suggests that the phrase "Dune was a disaster" be amended by one word. Dune was a created disaster. Of the five hours of Dune committed to film, only two hours and seventeen minutes made it to the screen. Exhibitors like a flick that runs two hours seventeen, rather than five: they can show it more often in a day. They can empty the theater more often, they can pour in a fresh audience more often, they can sell more Coke and popcorn and tooth-rot. Maybe De Laurentiis dad&daughter can cut together a tv miniseries with the outtakes. Maybe they can do a theatrical "special edition" à la Close Encounters. But it won't be done for the videocassettes (say, in two versions, such as was effected by Warner Home Video when they recently released both the emasculated theatrical version and the full director's cut of Sergio Leone's wonderful Once Upon a Time in America). It won't happen—at least not in the foreseeable future—because they've already announced an early release for Dune sometime this summer: two hours seventeen. So Frank Herbert's suggested revision tastes in no way of sour grapes. It was a created disaster. Slash out nearly three-fifths of a film for the convenience of cineplex operators trying to push Mounds Bars, and what you offer to the public is a quadriplegic commanded to dance the gavotte.
Overseas, where Frank Price's writ don't run, Dune is breaking box-office records in West Germany, Italy, Austria, South Africa and France. In England, in its third week, Dune's take was up by 39%, the sort of increase in attendance generally credited to word-of-mouth promotion. Opening night in Paris saw queues of more than 40,000 filmgoers.
Dune will no doubt earn out in foreign revenues, cable and cassette sales, and may already have turned a profit just from merchandising. One never knows. But in the logbook of film history, Dune is a major disaster. Heaven's Gate, Cleopatra, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Ryan's Daughter, Dr. Doolittle, Sorcerer . . . and Dune.
And here is a grace note for you. Something I got from Frank Herbert for use in the review, for which there was no room, so it was put aside. I reveal it here (Frank assures me) for the first time: the precise moment in which Frank Herbert conceived the grand scheme that became Dune:
"I had long been fascinated by the messianic impulse in human society; our need to follow a charismatic leader, from Jesus to John Kennedy. Men who ought to have a warning sign on their forehead reminding us that they, like us, are subject to human frailties. I wanted to write a meaningful book on the subject, but though I had the theme, I couldn't find just the right setting. Then, early in the 1950s, I was doing a piece on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's project controlling dunes on the Oregon coast, near Florence. I was in a Cessna 150 looking down on that rolling expanse of sand, and suddenly I made the connection between deserts and the rise of Messiahs in such barren lands, and in an instant I had my canvas, the planet Arrakis, called Dune."
Herbert was the god-emperor of Dune, and De Laurentiis was the great sandworm he rode to the big screen. But in that game of gods and businessmen the rules change at the whim of the players; and not even the god-emperor of Dune could triumph over the derangement of the priests of the fabled Black Tower.
This has been a true story.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1985
INSTALLMENT 11:
In Which Nothing Terribly Profound Occurs
Let's see, now. Didn't I promise to say a few words about 2010 (MGM)? That was a while ago. Put on the side-counter warmer till I'd wrung myself dry in re Dune, by the way of explanation. Seems somehow moot now. But, as I said I'd say, I'll say so now.
2010 is a great deal smarter and more high-minded than the first reviews would have had you believe. For instance, a critic named Michael Ventura appraised the film in the L.A. Weekly under the headline 2010: A COMIC BOOK IS NOT A POEM. He didn't consign the movie to hell, but he said it wasn't the lyric icon Kubrick gave us; said he had trouble remembering the sequence of scenes; said it was devoid of that quality we might call "divine." Well, that's true.
And granted that once you get beyond the mystical trappings the plot is considerably thinner than 2001 (with which 2010 has been, and perhaps should be, inevitably compared), and the "philosophy" is homespun, it nonetheless seems to me that the most salient praise one can direct toward 2010 is that the film has a brain. It is about something.
In a year redolent with smarm—the clone grotesqueries of the sexually corrupt Hardbodies and Risky Business's ethically bankrupt popularity with filmgoers of all ages—a movie that attempts to say the universe does still contain wonders and intellectual uplift must be treasured. That ain't, as we say in the world of comestibles, chopped liver (a food of my people).
As one who has gone on record at obnoxious length about the inadequacies of director Peter Hyams, I hear the glinkety of your eyebrows lifting when I report that if there be substantive inadequacies in 2010, they cannot be levied against Hyams. He has directed with cool composure and high craft. And as one who has been friend to Arthur Clarke for more than thirty years, again I perceive furgling at my belief that the things-wrong with this film stem directly from Arthur's novel, a book I suggest never should have been written.
Ask Budrys to deal with that aspect of the matter. He's the book evaluator; I'm just the joe who goes blind sitting in dark rooms on your behalf.
For me, a sequel to something as remarkable as 2001 must not only answer the c
osmic questions joyously left unanswered in the original, it must take me into equally as extrapolative places. 2010 attempts the former, and I'd rather have been left with my own suppositions. What was proffered as solution to the puzzle seemed rinkytink, commonplace, unmemorable.
Yet feeling the oppression of the sequel's inadequacies is very likely because one has the unrelenting drive to believe that all this massive machinery—$27 million in production and another $24 million for prints and advertising? that's what I think it was—must have been set in motion for some Deep Purpose; and when the payoff comes, the flashing lights and terraforming scintillate not in the glare of the memory of that star child floating toward Earth at the conclusion of A Space Odyssey.
There are nice, subtle, futuristic touches that the alert viewer remembers—one player's tie, collar and watch—Arthur feeding the pigeons from a park bench—but one comes away from 2010 with two impressions:
First, that it is a peculiarly earthbound film, returning from the wonder and mystery of that ebon slab floating in space to the mundane (by comparison) concerns of loved ones left behind, and terrestrial political squabbles. Literally, a bringdown.
Second, that Peter Hyams pulled off something of a small miracle. Given the book as basis, a story at best mildly innervating; and given the necessity to make the movie based solely on the Everest Principle ("because it's there"); and given that MGM's then-chief operating officer Frank Yablans needed a major vehicle to save his ass at the studio so the film was rushed into production; and given that Hyams at his top-point efficiency isn't Kubrick after a sleepless week; and given that the expectations of those who deify 2001 can never be fulfilled; it is something of a small miracle that 2010 is as intelligent, as inventive, as handsome as it is.
That it makes sense at all, given the above, is much to the director's credit. It earns him respect and a stay on the note of foreclosure that has haunted his previous films.
As of March 10th, 2010 had earned $40,700,000 in domestic box-office, with foreign and ancillary monies yet to come. It was a coup for Hyams. But it didn't save Yablans. Moneyman Kirk Kerkorian was "impatient" with the results and, as of March 13th, Frank Yablans (and later his entire cadre) was fired from MGM/UA Entertainment as President and Chief Operating Of ficer of MGM Films. And we just might lament that there ain't no justice; but with that slash of the scimitar of retribution heard by the drunk driver who doesn't get nabbed the first fifty times he runs a stop sign and takes a fall on the single occasion he's innocent of wrongdoing, the ever-watchful universe caught up with Frank Yablans for such offenses to the tender sensibilities of filmgoers as Monsignor.
Justice: swift and sure.
But 2010 is left to us as merely another movie that didn't quite make it.
ANCILLARY MATTER: Though my mandate in these essays is serviceable only when dealing with motion pictures (though one TV column will soon manifest itself for good and sufficient), I risk your wrath with advisement of an item usually beyond my purview, by use of the specious logic that it is visual in nature, and thus can be fudged into this space.
It is the latest book to be illustrated by the man his publisher calls "one of the foremost wood engravers in the United States." This is disingenuousness on the part of The University of California Press, because Barry Moser is to wood engravers as Lenny Bruce was to comedians, as Brother Theodore is to monologists, as Poe was to writers. If you have not seen his Pennyroyal Editions of Moby-Dick (1981), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1982 & 1983) or Huckleberry Finn (1984), yours is an empty life, devoid of beauty or meaning.
Barry Moser's illustrations are exquisite beyond the telling. He soars at an altitude where only such wondrous birds of passage as Lynd Ward and Rockwell Kent have tasted the wind. The passion, craft and imagination of Moser's work have an impact that leaves the viewer speechless.
Thus, it is a visual event of considerable importance when Barry Moser illustrates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein. Again in a Pennyroyal Edition designed by the artist, this 255 page large-size (8 ½? × 12?) interpretation of the 1818 text is the best $29.50 you will spend this year. Fifty-two chilling and unforgettable illustrations in black and white and duotone. A book you must not deny yourself. Such art as this is surely the reason we were given eyes.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/September 1985
INSTALLMENT 12:
In Which Several Things Are Held Up To The Light . . . Not A Brain In Sight
I don't know about you, but as a film critic I view the onset of summertime with an almost Kierkegaardian fear and trembling, a sickness unto death. While you stretch with yearning toward rubicund visions of two weeks in the Poconos or sipping a Pimm's Cup on the veranda of the Hotel Aswan Oberoi, overlooking Elephantine Island in the middle of the Nile, I contemplate being dragged twitching and foaming into screening theaters where I must, perforce, view this year's pukeload of "vacation films." Films, that is, conceived and executed to a warped perception of that demographic wedge of American humanity known as "the teenage audience."
As through a glans dorkly, the demented entrepreneurs who piss down summer plagues of Porkys, Friday the 13ths and Stayin' Alives, see that wedge of the wad as follows:
From out of the shadows of the parking lot shamble a boy and a girl, mid-teens, savaging gobbets of Bubblicious like brachiosauri masticating palmetto fronds, their hirsute knuckles brushing the tarmac as they shuffle, blank-eyed, toward the lights of the Cineplex. Hanging from the boy's belt is a skin-pouch of goodies to be consumed during the film: Jujubes, chicken heads, balls formed of the soft center of slices of Wonder Bread soaked in caramelized sugar and suet, blood sausage and M&M peanut chocolate candies. The girl's bare left breast bears a tattoo portrait of Tom Cruise in his Jockey shorts. They pause for a moment before entering the theater to drool and smack their paws together at the sight of a ratpack of vatos locos stomping and disemboweling a 76-year-old Gold Star mother in a wheelchair, beset while trundling home from the supermarket with her dinner cans of Alpo, purchased in exchange for the entirety of her Social Security check and a quart of plasma. They steal her bedroom slippers as the pachucos run off, and they enter the theater. To be enriched intellectually. The film is Rambo: First Blood Part II.
No sooner does the bell ring through the halls and classrooms of Charles Manson High School, signaling the disengorgement of post-pubescent fans of John Landis and Joe Dante films, than the film industry unleashes its locust swarm of summertime idiocies. Each film kissed on its flaccid lips by studio shamans, and sent aloft bearing the multimillion-dollar box-office dreams of execs before whose eyes dance the revenue figures of Beverly Hills Cop.
But hark!
What is this we see? Only into June (as I write this), the ticket sales for the big summer films are off, way off, terrifyingly off. In the first week of the Summer Push, revenues fell off by 13% from last year's bonanza; second week, the drop was by 27%; and this week the bottom made bye-bye . . . a 35% drop.
What in the world can this mean?
Is it possible that the malformed image of the youth audience heretofore nuzzled by the industry is a chimera? Has it dawned on (what Robert Blake calls) The Suits that there is strong evidence to support the belief that not all kids are slope-browed, prognathic vermin lusting after cheap thrills and rivers of blood? Have we a hope that The Suits noticed huge teen audiences patronizing WarGames year before last, and Amadeus last year (neither of which, by any stretch, is a monkey-movie)? Is this heart-stopping statistic the clarion call of a small revolution? Can The Suits extrapolate the success with kids of these two exemplary and intelligent motion pictures—albeit containing youth-resonant elements—into commercial realms where the movies serve the dual purpose of entertaining and uplifting the dear little tots?
One can only hope. Two can only hope. That's you and me, kid. But if either of us expects the barricades to be manned this year, color us premature. For, like the brachiosaurus, the
industry has its brain located somewhere down at the root of its tail . . . and is slow slow slow to react. Maybe next year.
But this year, as summer lazes toward us, I would fain regale you with views of four films created to honor the conceit that the youth audience has a limitless appetite for gore, counterfeit emotion, macho patriotism, repetition of formulaic plots and, on sum, movies best identified as emptyheaded.
Rambo: First Blood Part II (Tri-Star) and A View to a Kill (MGM/UA) may seem peculiar choices for consideration in a critique supposedly dealing with fantasy and science fiction films; at first they may seem so. Nor will I dodge the issue with an imperious wave of my hand and the magisterial utterance that I'll review what I damned well please and if you don't like it you can go squat on a taco. No, I will treat you as equals (though I'd hope you want better for yourselves) by pointing out that both of these films defy even the most minimal judgment of what is "reality" by offering us stories and characters who are clearly fantasy constructs. These are films of purest phantasm, no matter how they're marketed; and thus become fair game for our scrutiny in the context of this essay.
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 31