Another Sort of Contagion that’s not COVID: “The Thing”

Once upon a time, John Carpenter was not well known. As a grad student studying at the USC school of cinematic arts, circa 1974, he was working on a 16mm thesis film with an outer-space setting. Most of the action took place in the cockpit of a deteriorating starship searching the cosmos for unstable planets. The bargain-basement budget (about $6000) of the original Dark Star was part of its charm. It was funny enough, and appealing enough, to catch the eye of Hollywood’s money men. That’s why the student film, following some major edits, was turned into a commercial feature, and Carpenter’s professional career was born.

 I focus on Dark Star because the guy to whom I’m married still bears a small grudge. As a young engineer who liked to tinker, he was persuaded to build the console of the movie’s command center out of craft-store plastics and electrical switches.  His efforts were much appreciated by Carpenter, who promised him a screen credit for his efforts. He also lent the production $50. You guessed it: once Carpenter went Hollywood, the promises didn’t get kept. This despite the fact that once he launched a little movie called Halloween in 1978, Carpenter was the hottest thing going in the horror genre.

 But Carpenter’s well-documented stinginess shouldn’t detract from his talent. Horror is hardly my favorite genre, but—with Halloween approaching—I couldn’t resist checking out one of his creepier efforts, 1982’s The Thing. This film, as I discovered, was hardly an instant hit. Critics were harsh (the Los Angeles Times called it "bereft, despairing, and nihilistic,” while Newsweek said it lost drama by "sacrificing everything at the altar of gore”). Audiences were no more kind. Though Carpenter’s career suffered, the film eventually found hordes of new fans on video. I agree that it’s grim, but also highly creative, with eerie visuals that won’t let go of your imagination.

 The origin of The Thing was a novella called Who Goes There? that first made it to the screen in 1951 as The Thing from Another World. Seeing it as a boy, Carpenter was fascinated.  Then he read the original version, which posits that an extraterrestrial life-form has come to earth to assimilate, then imitate, other organisms, including dogs and people. As a result of this otherworldly invasion, men who encounter “the thing” are turned into horrible globs of protoplasm who still bear the remains of human characteristics. Part of what fascinated Carpenter, obviously, is the technical challenge of replicating these weirdly evolving and very deadly creatures. The film gives special effects pros like Rob Bottin (a Roger Corman veteran, natch!) the chance to combine chemicals, food products, rubber, and mechanical parts into gelatinous monsters that sometimes replicate the features of the characters whose bodies they’ve invaded. A full $1.5 million of the film’s $15 million budget went into Bottin’s creature effects.

 The other attraction of this story is the chance it offers to play out an Agatha Christie-type thriller, with a cast of characters diminishing one by one. The story is set entirely in Antarctica (portrayed here by Alaskan and Canadian snowscapes), among an assorted group of American researchers—a  physician, a meteorologist, a biologist, and so on—who live together in a remote waystation. Played by reliable character actors like Richard Dysart, Donald Moffat, Wilford Brimley, and Keith David, they are vividly delineated . . . but it’s never clear who’ll be the next to turn into a monster. We do suspect that star Kurt Russell will endure, but the film’s bleak ending is sure to take us by surprise.

Happy Halloween! I can’t help mentioning that a new Criterion Shelf blogpost saluting Roger Corman’s creepy Poe films mentions my Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers as a “highly recommended” look at the world of Corman.

 

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Filmmaking That’s Fast, Cheap and Under Control

When I first saw a primer on indie filmmaking called Fast, Cheap and Under Control: Lessons Learned from the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Times, I was eager to find out where Roger Corman fit into the narrative. And when I discovered that the opening section was devoted to Roger and his protégés (soon-to-be famous directors like Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Demme). I was keen to know whether author John Gaspard had consulted my Corman biography. Turns out he had—and credited me as the source of a key Corman-related quote from indie writer/director John Sayles. So I can give Gaspard credit as a guy who does his homework. He reads what’s out there to be read, and has also spent countless hours personally interviewing indie filmmakers, along with those who’ve gone on to bigger and possibly better things. Like Steven Soderbergh, whose major Hollywood career was sparked by the dramatic Sundance success of his indie chamber piece, sex, lies, and videotape.

 True to the nature of its subject, this is a low-rent book. Let’s put it this way: the book is so cheap that my copy lacks page numbers. And, though Gaspard gives thanks to a copy editor, there’s an egregious grammatical error on the very first line of the very first page. So English majors like me might feel some dismay. Still, there’s a very good education to be had within these covers, both for those who want to make low-budget films and those curious about the kind of wildly inventive cinema that doesn’t require millions. Happily, Gaspard has a great appreciation for small films, whether they are classy stylistic experiments (John Cassavetes’ Shadows) or gruesome horror flicks (The Night of the Living Dead) or outrageous comedies that make a virtue out of cheapness (e.g. the clopping coconut shells that simulate horse hooves in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). One section is devoted to science fiction on a budget, another to mock-documentaries like The Blair Witch Project, a third to the growing field of digital “filmmaking.”

 I particularly enjoyed the tips from ambitious upstarts like Kevin Smith (Clerks) and Jon Favreau (Swingers), who explain in detail the writing and directing choices they needed to make in order to stay on schedule and within budget. For instance, Smith’s one-set film takes place in daylight hours in a rather seedy convenience store. But early on, a leading character who plays the counter man gripes that the store’s blinds are stuck shut, which means that, along with other workday annoyances, he has to do his job in semi-darkness. There’s a reason for this: Smith was actually shooting after the store closed for the night, and didn’t want to give away the fact that there was no sunlight outside the windows. In Swingers, Favreau (directing himself) looks longingly through a batch of photos of a lost love, instead of the usual Hollywood flashback to happier times. Such necessary measures often breed creativity. Longtime indie director Henry Jaglom (Someone to Love) quotes to Gaspard a lesson he learned from the great Orson Welles: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

 I was pleased at the inclusion of Dark Star, a USC student film that gave John Carpenter a start as a Hollywood director of sci-fi and horror by using such inventive tricks as making an ordinary beachball into a space alien. My future husband worked on that film, creating a good-looking space console out of plastic junk. Carpenter borrowed $50 from Bernie and promised screen credit. Eventually he got neither. That’s another way to save money.