Harlan Ellison's Watching (30 page)

Christopher Lambert as the adult Tarzan is splendid. He looks like, and has the same animal charisma, as Belmondo; and no better choice could have been made for the part. Nor could any better choice have been made for the sixth Earl of Greystoke, Tarzan's grandfather, than the late Sir Ralph Richardson, whose warmth and puckishness are memorable.

The only better choice that could have been made, to save this tragic split-personality film, was to have left it in the hands of its creator . . . and not have given it over to a pompous furriner more attuned to Trollope than Tarzan.

And if, perchance, some passing naif senses in you a deep well of humanism, and inquires if you can encapsulate the essence of tragedy, you might suggest that s/he note the screenplay credits on
Greystoke
. The scenarists listed are P. H. Vazak and Michael Austin. "P. H. Vazak" is the registered pseudonym used by a fine artist named Robert Towne. And you might quote to your wide-eyed questioner the words of the poet Antonin Artaud, who said: "Very little is needed to destroy a man. He needs only the conviction that his work is useless."

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ August 1984

Twenty years ago—it seems like just yesterday it burns for me with such clarity—during the 1964–65 television season, I learned a startling truth about working in the visual mediums of film and video. I was writing for a series you'll all recall titled
The Outer Limits
, and it was the most salutary experience I've ever had as a scenarist. It was the second year for that anthology of sf/fantasy stories; and because ABC-TV had decided they were going to cancel the show; and because it was more fiscally responsible for them to let it go one more season than to layout large amounts to replace it with something new; and because everyone involved, from production companies to the network itself, was skimming off the top: the budgets were tiny even for those frontier days of black-and-white. So in a very real way, no one was watching what we did. And we were able to write what we wanted to write, because no one really gave a damn.

As long as we stayed within budget.

So that meant what we had available by way of special effects and expensive location shooting was minimal, and we had to substitute imagination.

The plots were more complex than what is usually doled out on network series, and we used misdirection, like "limbo" sets and suspense in place of Anderson opticals. We leaned heavily on characterization and inventiveness. The shows that came out of that wonderful season continue to be rerun in syndication. Not a year goes by that I don't receive tiny residual checks for my
Outer Limits
segments that continue to draw a viewership here and overseas. In England, several years ago, they were a primetime rage.

The startling truth that has become clear to me since I wrote those shows, having afterward worked on multimillion dollar productions, is that vast sums of money budgeted for science fiction films and television specials are more likely to produce an impediment to serious filmmaking than it is to grease the way to the production of films that we remember with pleasure. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule
—Alien
and
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and
E.T.
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
come immediately to mind—but they are glaring exceptions that seem, to me, only to buttress the rule.

This startling truth intrudes on my perceptions as I view, this month, five films that range from minuscule budgets (by today's acromegalic standards) to bottom lines that would, in times past, have sent dozens of
Titanics
down the nautical ways.

If
Arthur
(1981) gladdened your heart, and if you squirmed with pleasure in the warmth of that feeling, then I do not think you will regret my recommending
Splash
(Touchstone Films). By the time this review sees print, you may have to hunt beyond the first-run theaters for this marvelous minnow; but if you passed it by on the grounds that the basic premise seemed silly, you'll find a reconsideration and the search eminently worthwhile. Because it is fitting and proper that
Splash
was one of the biggest moneymakers of the summer filmgoing season. It is a dear movie in the sense of that adjective as fondly-considered, honorable, heartfelt and scarce. Scarce, as in reasonably-priced.

It only cost eight million dollars (as opposed to $46 million for the unlovable
Greystoke
reviewed here last month); it was directed by a thirty-year-old actor best known for his tv sitcom role as straight-man to The Fonz, whose most outstanding previous directorial outing was the flawed
Night Shift
(1982) (as opposed to
Greystoke's
Oscar-winning Hugh Hudson); its leading man comes to the big screen directly from one of the more embarrassing tv series in recent memory (as opposed to
Greystoke's
internationally-lauded cast); its special effects are so few and so subtle as to seem nonexistent (as opposed to
Greystoke's
$7 million-plus for Rick Baker's ape makeup alone); and it was distributed—and some say partially financed sub-rosa—as an independent production by Disney's Buena Vista (whose track record for fantasy is notable for
The Black Hole
[1979] and
Tron
[1982]); not to mention a basic plot premise so trivial it might have been rejected for one of the tripartite segments of
Fantasy Island
(as opposed to the alleged canonical presentation of Burroughs's classic novel).

Yet despite all those seeming drawbacks and question marks,
Splash
comes out of nowhere, with a minimum of screamhorn ballyhoo, to endear to us its director, Ron Howard, its leading man, Tom Hanks, its lovely female lead, Daryl Hannah, and the fledgling Touchstone Films, as a gentle, uplifting fantasy that puts most other gargantuan projects in the genre to shame. Most particularly
Greystoke
.

Splash
is a love story, the romance between a likeable, average guy who runs a wholesale fruit and vegetable business in New York . . . and a, uh, er, a mermaid. Now hold it! Don't go running the other way. If you need pith and moment, you can salve your lust for cheap entertainment with a perfectly acceptable rationalization that it's a cunning contemporary reworking of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. Which it is, truly. Trust me on this one.

There is no need to explicate the story line further. It is more than strong enough to support the charming, faultless performances of Hanks, Hannah, Howard Morris and those two inspired escapees from
SCTV
, John Candy and Eugene Levy. (Candy, in fact, seems to me to be the worthy inheritor of Belushi's mantle, with a style and charisma that the late comedian never fully developed, for all the mythic revisionism attendant on his death.) Nor need more be said about the plot's twisty turns than to add that it provides a showcase for Ron Howard's abilities as a director: a talent as sure and as correctly self-effacing as that of Sturges or Capra. With this film the lisping Winthrop of
The Music Man
(1962), the freckled Opie of
The Andy Griffith Show
, the straight arrow Steve Bolander of
American Graffiti
(1973) and the incurably naive Richie Cunningham of
Happy Days
outperforms older and more extolled directors whose finest moments are not the blush on a butterfly's wings to what Howard has done here so, well, endearingly.

One final word before I send you off to see
Splash
, a word about internal logic and the use of restrained, intelligent special effects.

A traditional mark of bad sf films has been the need to "explain" specious reasoning of plots and SFX. Long-winded oratorios that throw around gobble-dygook that confuses photons with protons, parsecs with light-years, oxides with oxhides. It is an indication that the makers of the film are ignorant, have perhaps read but not understood an Asimov essay, and hold the audience's intellect in contempt. Too much is said, too much is roundaboutly rationalized, too many flashing lights dominate the screen.

In
Splash—
take note all you parvenu filmmakers—we willingly suspend our disbelief that such a thing as a mermaid can exist, that such a creature could have a tail in the ocean and legs on land (as we never did in
Miranda
[1947] or
Mister Peabody and the Mermaid
[1948] no matter how beguiling Glynis Johns and Ann Blyth were as the sea-nymphs) because the scenarists and the production crew believe it! When you see
Splash
take note of the one brief conversation Eugene Levy has with Howie Morris, in which the rationale is established. It is, they say, because it
is
. Nothing further is needed. But it suffices because in the one special effect scene I can recall, gorgeous Daryl Hannah lies in the bathtub, runs her hand down her thigh . . . and it begins to pucker as with scales.
C'est ça
.

Both the most and the least a responsible film critic can say is that the third
Star Trek
movie is out, and Trek fans will love it. Like a high mass in Latin or the asking of the four questions at a Passover seder, films continuing the television adventures of the familiar crew of the starship
Enterprise
are formalized ritual. Without all that has gone before—the original NBC series (1966–69), a Saturday morning animated version (1973–75), endless novelizations, a cult following that has spawned its own mini-fandom replete with gossipzines, newszines and even a flourishing underground of soft-core Kirk-
shtups
-Spock pornzines—these films would be non-events. (Though I am told that results of a studio-fostered research sample gathered from an audience last March 17th imparted the confusing statistic that 44% of those queried were "unfamiliar with
Star Trek
." I cannot explain this intelligence.)

But it is all True Writ now, and these movies need not be judged as if they were Film, or Story, or even Art. What it is, bro, is a growth industry.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
(Paramount) seems less interesting than
ST II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982) but infinitely better than the first feature-length adventure of them as boldly went where no man had gone before,
Star Trek—The Motion Picture
(1979). I'm not sure that's saying much, except to point out that producer-writer Harve Bennett has had the sense to keep creator Gene Roddenberry in a figurehead mode, thus permitting a savvy commercial recycling of time-tested and much-beloved tropes; and by allowing Leonard Nimoy to direct this film, Bennett has kept Spock in the fold: a canny solution by a minister without portfolio of the thorny problem posed by an indispensable star who wanted out.

And with but minor flaws easily credited to, and excused by, this being Nimoy's first major stint behind the camera, he has done a commendable yeoman job. There is, for instance, a pleasing easiness in the performances by the "regulars"; a result (I am told by several of the actors) of Nimoy's sensitivity in directing them as
actors
and not, as in past films directed by Wise and Meyer, as mere button-pushing background, as foils for the "stars" and the SFX whizbang.

There are a few interesting new moments this time: Christopher Lloyd's Klingon villain (strongest in the earlier stages of his appearance onscreen, before he converts from the guttural alien tongue to English); a 6-track Dolby stereo sound system designed to blast you out of the Cineplex box whereat you'll be screening the film; a nice sense of alien landscape on the Genesis Planet, especially the scenes of snow falling on giant cactus; the Klingon "Bird of Prey" battle cruiser.

Contrariwise, there are the usual problems: no one, not even Nimoy-as-Director, seems able to tone down William Shatner's need to mouth embarrassing and spuriously portentous platitudes as if he were readying himself to play the title role in the life story of Charlton Heston; the fine cast of "regulars" is once again denied extended scenes in which their talents can be displayed, in lieu of Shatner's scene-hogging and the expected flaunting of expensive special effects; Robin Curtis, replacing Kirstie Alley as the Vulcan Lt. Saavik, is as memorable as spaetzle; and the plot makes virtually no sense if examined closely.

But neither the positives nor the negatives of such effete critiques matter as much as a dollop of owl sweat.
Star Trek
has become, obviously, a biennial booster shot for Trekkies, Trekkers, Trekists, and fellow-trekelers. And as such, places itself as far beyond relevant analysis as, say, James Bond or Muppets movies.

The most and the least a responsible film critic can say is that the third
Star Trek
movie is out, and Trek fans will love it. For the rest of us, it's better than a poke in the eye with a flaming stick.

The Ice Pirates
(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is
so
ludicrous it ought to be enshrined in the Academy of Dumb Stuff with such other sterling freaks of nature as the lima bean, poison ivy, the Edsel and the singing of Billy Idol. A space opera that melds (and this is how they're selling it)
Star Wars
(1977) with
Captain Blood
(1935), this poor gooney bird of a movie has all the grace and charm of a heavy object falling downstairs.