shadowplay

So, a few weeks ago I contemplated buying, but in the end did not buy, Peter George’s novelisation of DR. STRANGELOVE. I hadn’t realised such a thing existed. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001 as a novel while Kubrick was making it as a film, so there’s a relationship between Kubrick and the novelisation form, generally dismissed as a bastard form and generally correctly.

(Incidentally, does anybody know who wrote the novelisation of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS that was credited to Spielberg? Because obviously it wasn’t Spielberg. Maybe he did the photonovel though.)

STRANGELOVE’s other credited writer, Terry Southern, got mad at Kubrick after a snotty interview where a journalist for some reason pressed Kubrick to say that he only gave Southern a credit out of kindness (note: directors do not do this — when writers are gifted unearned writing credits by directors, it’s done to piss off the real writers, as Roger Spottiswode said in Bologna re PAT GARRETT. De Sica does seem to have handed out writing credits like party favours, but my personal theory is this may have had something to do with gambling debts). Southern remarked that although Kubrick and George had a complete draft of the script when he joined the team, “it wasn’t funny.”

Which seems to be true — the project started as a straight drama, based on George’s co-written serious novel, Red Alert.

Question: is the Doctor Strangelove novelisation just Red Alert repackaged as movie tie-in? I got the impression it was its own thing, a separate book, because it seems to be funny.

(Designer Ken Adam would say that he featured circles and ellipses in his designs just because he liked them — but is this slight resembland between the war room table and lighting and the corona of an A-bomb blast, perhaps intentional? I say — you betcha.)

It begins with a description of alien archaeologists exploring the ruined remains of Earth, a good conceit for a novel, which is almost inevitably written in the past tense, whereas films seem to unfold in the present tense despite our knowledge that somebody has to have shot, edited, scored, them, etc.

George’s book begins thus:

The story opens during the latter half of Earth’s twentieth century. We do not know quite why this dating system was used, since we have evidence of life on Earth long before this. But we assume that after some unprecedented disaster it was agreed by the survivors to start a fresh count on time. This has mainly been our experience in other worlds.

That’s a pretty good joke! Kind of unfair to Jesus, but jokes seem to work by surprise, so being unfair to Jesus is one way of producing that effect if you’re sufficiently unscrupulous.

Weirdly, the idea of the alien visitors to Earth’s ruins then turned up for a second time. Charles Barr’s very good book on Laurel & Hardy, entitled Laurel & Hardy, starts thus:

Arthur C. Clarke has a short story called Expedition To Earth in which beings from Venus discover, on a long-dead Earth, a single can of film. Their scientists devise a machine to project it; historians and psychologists study the film and inaugurate a programme of research into this relic of a civilisation of
which they have hitherto known nothing. ‘For the rest of time it would symbolise the human race. . . . Thousands of books would be written about it. Millions of times in the ages to come those last few words would flash across the screen:

“A Walt Disney Production”

Barr clarifies for his readers that at the time of Clarke’s writing in 1954, Disney meant one thing, cartoons. The joke is slightly spoiled if you’re imagining POLLYANNA.

(I seem to recall that Jim McBride’s postnuclear idyll GLEN AND RANDA does something similar with a superhero comic.)

Because of the Clarke-Kubrick connection, it is just possible that Peter George, via Kubrick or else off his own bat, was aware of ETA when writing the Strangelove novel.

But then I found, within a couple of weeks of the Strangelove and Expedition to Earth discoveries, a collection of science fictional humour, or humorous science fiction, called Laughing Space, edited by Isaac Asimov and J.D. Jeppson. The story Report on “Grand Central Terminal” deals with the same idea yet again, and begins thus:

YOU CAN IMAGINE how shocked we were when we landed in this city and found it deserted. For ten years we were travelling through space, getting more and more impatient and irritable because of our enforced idleness; and then, when we finally land on Earth, it turns out — as you have undoubtedly heard — that all life is extinct on this planet.

This story was written in 1948 so it has a good chance of being the first to use this trope, or at least the first to use it after atomic weapons were invented and tried out on human populations. There’s a reasonably good chance that someone wrote about visitors to Earth finding it in ruins before we even developed an invention capable of wiping ourselves out. Wells’ The Time Machine plays with a very similar notion.

The story is quite funny, with the alien visitors checking out a deserted art gallery and deciding that human beings must have fallen into three main types, light, dark, and —

This strain has, in addition to a pair of hands and legs, a pair of wings, and apparently all of them belonged to the less pigmented variety. None of the numerous skeletons so far examined seems to have belonged to this winged strain, and I concluded therefore that we have to deal here with images of an extinct species, since we have determined that the winged forms are much more frequently found among the older paintings than among the more recent paintings.

Most of the story, however, concerns the aliens’ attempts to figure out both why mankind destroyed itself, and why there are coin-operated toiled cubicles in Grand Central. A theory is devised which seems to account for both facts, but the narrator cannot bring himself to accept it.

The author of the story is one Leo Szilard. If you don’t know who he was, maybe you recall Máté Haumann playing him in OPPENHEIMER or Saul Rubinek playing him in Spottiswoode & Kurakara’s Hiroshima or Michael Tucker in Joseph Sargent’s Day One or Gerald Hiken in FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY. Szilard is the man who persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt to get the atom bomb programme started.

So that was interesting, I thought. Having brought about the events that led humanity to stand on the brink of self-destruction, he wrote a five-page exercise in toilet humour on the subject. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to laugh.

You can read it here.

In addition, Ehsan Khoshbakht polled a bunch of us about our Cinema Ritrovato favourites.

This entry was posted on July 9, 2024 at 1:07 pm and is filed under FILM with tags 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C Clarke, Charles Barr, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Day One, Doctor Strangelove, Fat Man and Little Boy, Glen and Randa, HG Wells, Hiroshima, JD Jeppson, Jim McBride, Laughing Space, Laurel and hardy, Leo Szilard, Oppenheimer, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Peter George, Red Alert, Report on 'Grand Central Terminus', Roger Spottiswode, Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Terry Southern, The Time Machine, Vittorio De Sica, Walt Disney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.