Mars in the Movies: A History : February 2017

Monday, February 27, 2017

Mars Attacks! (1996)

Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! opens with one of the top title sequences in science fiction cinema to date. It is as well thought through and as well executed as 1953’s The War of the Worlds titles. The Mars Attacks! titles are virtually a mini-movie with a beginning middle and end. In a sentence, it shows a vast armada of countless flying saucers taking off from Mars, assembling into formations, and heading for earth. This sequence respects the intent of The Topps Company bubble gum trading cards on which the film is based. The cards do indeed show great numbers of flying saucers attacking the earth. The sequence is also, equally, a vast widescreen, colorful homage to Ray Harryhausen and his Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). The look and movements of Burton’s saucers are clearly modeled on Harryhausen’s concepts. Well, here, see for yourself!

This is the title sequence from Mars Attacks!

To my great delight, a 1997 Cinescape magazine article by Ron Magid goes into detail about the creation of the title sequence, providing five healthy paragraphs on the subject. Migid’s comments include: "The movie’s opening sequence, which depicts the saucers leaving Mars and flying to Earth, measured some 5,000 frames long and was created almost entirely by computer graphics. While the first shot showing a lone reconnaissance ship leaving earth was handled by ILM, the tour de force sequence’s remaining 12 shots were all done by Warner Digital.... On Mars, irises open over the craters dotting the craggy surface, emitting hundreds of thousands of saucers that assume battle formations and head for Earth."

Danny Elfman’s score for the titles brilliantly both choir- and theremin-centric, borrows from 1950s classic movie themes—especially Bernard Herrmann’s trend-setting, spine-tinglingly eerie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Circa 1962, the Topps Mars Attacks bubblegum series of trading cards caused quite a commotion as parents rose up en masse and demanded that the controversial and intensely graphic cards be taken off the shelves. No doubt this is what attracted Tim Burton to the project to begin with. All in all, Mars Attacks! is a faithful adaption of the bubble gum cards as easily seen by perusing the fabulous 2014 225-page book Topps Mars Attacks 50th Anniversary Collection (below) published by Abrams ComicArts.

From YouTube, here are all the original cards presented in an extremely clever manner with music and very special special effects.

Glenn Erickson in his DVD Savant review of Queen of Blood (www.dvdtalk.com/dvd savant/s3512quee.html) noticed something interesting: “What viewers today will immediately realize is that [Florence] Marly’s Alien Queen [in Queen of Blood, just below] is the visual inspiration for the ‘Martian Girl’ played by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! (© Warner Bros. Pictures) (see the poster below).”

I adore the Mars Attacks! title sequence and often will pop in the Blu-ray just to watch the titles, and when the muse strikes me, I’ll even watch it two or three times in a row. Of course, it is best to watch on as big a screen as possible with high fidelity sound. I am so pleased by the fact that the special visual effects crew so carefully paid tribute to Harryhausen's saucers, which you can see in this trailer:

A The Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) trailer.

Mars Attacks! (1996)
USA. Warner Bros, Tim Burton Productions. C. 2.35:1. 106m.

CREW: Director Tim Burton. Script and Story Jonathan Gems. Based on the Topps Trading Card Series Mars Attacks by Len Brown, Woody Gelman, Wally Wood, Bob Powell, Norm Saunders. Producers Tim Burton, Larry Franco. Score Danny Elfman. Director of Photography Peter Suschitzky. Production Designer Wynn Thomas. Editor Chris Lebenzon. Casting Matthew Barry, Jeanne McCarthy, Victoria Thomas. Special Visual Effects Industrial Light & Magic, Warner Digital Studios.

CAST: President James Dale/Art Land Jack Nicholson. First Lady Marsha Dale Glenn Close. Barbara Land Annette Bening. Professor Donald Kessler Pierce Brosnan. Rude Gambler Danny DeVito. Taffy Dale Natalie Portman. Press Secretary Jerry Ross Martin Short. Nathalie Lake Sarah Jessica Parker. Jason Stone Michael J. Fox. General Decker Rod Steiger. Tom Jones Tom Jones. Richie Norris Lukas Haas. General Casey Paul Winfield. Byron Williams Jim Brown. Martian Girl Lisa Marie. Grandma Florence Norris Sylvia Sidney.

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

Orson Welles' End of the World Broadcast (1938) (Part 2 of 2): The Angels of Mons

Welles during his broadcast.

I must apologize to those wanting only Mars and/or science-fiction material in this blog, but the story of the following incident is profound and is related to the Welles’ broadcast. Furthermore, it is included in the book Mars in the Movies: A History.

In an earlier posting, I focused on Orson Welles’ CBS Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast of an updated radio-specific version of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and of all the havoc in America that the broadcast caused. That particular posting quickly became stuffed with a link to the actual one-hour radio show and two links to complete television recreations of the event, along with a comprehensive bibliography of related books and videos for those who wanted to follow up on the subject.

As a result of its jam-packed nature, I wasn’t able to include this section about a hysterical prequel of sorts that happened 24 years earlier on the further side of the Atlantic Ocean and which proved to be far more consequential in the long run. Yes, as amazing as Orson Welles’ night of Martian terror sounds to our multimedia-inured culture, this wasn’t by a long shot the first time that the purist of fantasies swept through an industrialized nation.

In the autumn of 1914, England entered The Great War (the name of World War I before there was World War II) by declaring war on Germany. At the time, there worked for the London Evening News newspaper a journalist named Arthur Machen, who a few of his contemporaries also knew as a writer of controversial and fantastic horror fantasies.

Arthur Machen

Machen, as were so many others, was profoundly affected by the war across the English Channel in Europe. As a writer with a regular column for the Evening News, one day shortly after Britain entered the fray, he was inspired to write in his column a very short story—a sort of a prose poem—about his idealized but totally imaginary outcome for the recent Battle of Mons with Englishmen and Frenchmen pitted against a German phalanx of bullet-spitting guns—a veritable war machine. The story was called “The Bowman,” and it appeared on September 29. This “poor linnet of prose,” as Machen called it—clearly a fantasy of the supernatural, not to be taken seriously by anybody—was about the ghostly archers of medieval Agincourt coming to the aid of the surrounded British and French armies. If anyone at the paper bothered to give it a moment’s thought, they would have assumed that the story had quickly been forgotten as all light items in any newspaper are forgotten. But that’s not what happened.

Matters stood thus for eight months until April/May 1915. During those months, pastors all over the nation were using Machen’s piece as inspiration for their sermons. The story spread rapidly and everywhere touched thousands of ordinary people, who accepted it literally—as gospel truth. By April/May, England and its commonwealth nations were all abuzz about the true miracle “of the Angels of Agincourt” or “the Angels of Mons.”

A contemporary angels illustration typical of the deluge of such figures covering books and articles and postcards of the day. It so happened that millions literally believed in the Angels of Agincourt.

Of course, Machen made brave attempts to set the matter right, but he was dismissed and ignored and accused of any number of terrible things because the population of England needed a miracle just then and they would not have it any other way. Here he describes his predicament in a story:

"I am afraid that many people are wishing by this time that they had never heard my name; again, a considerable number of estimable persons are concerning themselves gloomily enough, from my point of view, with my everlasting welfare. They write me letters, some in kindly remonstrance, begging me not to deprive poor, sick-hearted souls of what little comfort they possess amidst their sorrows. Others send me tracts and pink leaflets with allusions to "the daughter of a well-known canon"; others again are violently and anonymously abusive."

By the time he published a later story, things had gotten much worse: “I know by bitter experience what happens to the man who attempts that task [that which needs correcting]. He is abused in public and vilified in private; every morning for a few months he finds a batch of letters on his desk, some anonymous, some signed, most of them virulent in their indictment. He is accused of theft, of claiming credit that does not belong to him, of forgery, of imposture, of blasphemy. And good little books are written and published to say that he is a very bad man. I have had enough of that I say.” This was the state of affairs for the four long years of the duration of the war.

The quick book version.

Just as the people of England had needed a miracle in 1914 and would not let go of it, in 1938, the U.S. people badly needed a catharsis. No matter that The War of the Worlds radio script and the talented actors effectively destroyed the earth in less than an hour, including the launch and arrival of countless missiles from Mars from some 35 million miles away.

Once again, the scenario was utterly preposterous, clearly a fantasy not to be taken seriously by anybody. In the British instance, the nation was in the midst of a brutal European war, the brunt of which was being waged just a few miles away across the English Channel. In the American equivalent the second European war had not yet begun and indeed was still a year away and was, in any case, across the vast Atlantic ocean, and America’s own entrance into the war was still three years into the future. The major difference was that rather than simmering for months and manifesting itself as hope and joy and a belief in miracles as earnestly proclaimed by pastors and ministers, Welles’ broadcast caused the anxiety in the U.S. public to boil to the surface all in one night in the form of unrelenting fear and panic.

In fact, now that I think about it, this scenario pretty much played out again in November 2016, as an American public, frightened silly by an unending series of Isis terror attacks and school massacres, let their fear rule their decisions in voting booths across the nation. The trouble here is that while in 1938 the next day Americans could laugh at their exaggerated reaction to a mere radio program and then go on with life, the result in 2016 will not nearly be that simple.

Further reading:

The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians by David Clark.

The Strange Case of "The Angels of Mons": Arthur Machen's World War I Story, the Insistent Believers, and His Refutations by Richard J. Bleiler.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

13 Graphics Left Out of the Book

A printed book is a most finite object. It has a beginning, middle, and end not only in terms of it size, content, and page count. It also has strict limitations in time; books have production schedules with merciless restrictions of all sorts, especially deadlines. Another is graphic resolution. I turned in 69 graphics with my manuscript, and 43 were used. Those that “didn’t make the cut” were rejected mainly due to resolution issues. I’m sharing here 13 pieces of art that I am saddened didn’t get into the book.

1. It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) opens with a detailed diorama Mars-scape. The first thing the audience sees is a wide well-crafted black and white model Mars-scape with a destroyed spaceship in the middle foreground. The sky is full of stars, including a spiral galaxy. While it is impossible to see such a sight from Mars, it is still a charming image. Then the title races out from the center of the screen in mock 3D, and the credits roll over this Mars-scape. But as soon as “Directed by Edward L. Cahn” fades from sight, the camera pans right and finally we see a second and brand new spacecraft also in the foreground. So I have snapped images of the opening Mars-scape (before the titles roll) and the closing Mars-scape (after the titles finish) and digitally stitched them together to create a widescreen photo of the whole Mars diorama (bottom) that does not exist in the picture. Frankly, I find the image pretty breathtaking. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

2. In a Fantascene article, Academy Award winning visual special-effects expert Robert Skotak describes this astonishing other-worldly image from Rocketship X-M (1950): “[Jack] Rabin combined a hard-line matte of the foreground pinnacle with live-action scenes of the spacemen filmed at Palm Springs. He blended [Irving] Block’s painting of nuclear blasted buildings with the actual real-life terrain by means of a softline type matte.” Courtesy wade williams distribution.

3. Eagle-Lion’s publicity department did a grand job of promoting 1950’s Destination Moon in general family magazines. Life magazine ran a high-profile multi-page feature article about the making of Destination Moon. Naturally this amped up public awareness and anticipation considerably. It was this successful promotion (which reached numerous other popular, high-profile magazines, such as those shown below, as well) that grabbed Robert Lippert’s attention, prompting him to make the ultra-cheap, 18-day “quickie” Rocketship X-M that beat Destination Moon to the theaters by a month. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.


From the movie trailer, these magazines are slapped down one by one.

4. This is the beautiful song sheet of a tune tremendously popular in 1901; clearly part of the Mars-mania that circled the globe at the time! I could not include it in the book because it is not a movie!

5. In Flight to Mars (1951), Marguerite Chapman plays Martian scientist Alita. When the film was released, many kids were sorely disappointed that the Martians were just humans in Destination Moon spacesuits. Yet, accepting the Martians as humans on faith really does provide rewards that are boundless. Without that notion of humanness firmly in place it would have been impossible to justify the numerous dazzlingly gorgeous young women with perfect posture purposely gliding around the halls of the underground cities in high heels and micro-mini skirts (so short that they make Anne Francis’ skirt in Forbidden Planet seem like an evening gown). But here I must give credit where credit is due. Despite her revealing costume and Jim Barker’s double-take and confusion when meeting his new (female) assistant for the first time, Chapman’s Alita is never condescended to and from the start works as an equal partner with her Martian colleagues and the earth’s male crew members. This is in vast contrast to Virginia Huston’s Carol Stafford who comes across as the poster child for America’s cultural view that women are over-emotional second-class citizens, fit only for cooking meals and serving coffee. Courtesy wade williams distribution.

6. Also from Flight to Mars (1951), this is the damaged earth ship undergoing repairs on Mars. The entire image is a magnificent matte painting by Irving Block, except at the very bottom where there are several live-action people soft-matted into the painting. Courtesy wade williams distribution.

7. Appearing uncredited, Paul Frees, the prolific voice actor of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, plays scientist Dr. Vorhees in The Thing from Another World (1951). It is he who speaks two iconic lines. Top: Vorhees tries to file material from the spacecraft’s airfoil and announces that it is like nothing he has ever seen before. Bottom: When the team spreads out to determine the size and shape of the craft, it is Frees who exclaims “It’s round!” thereby being the first to articulate that the unknown craft was indeed a flying saucer. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

8. Like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), according to screenwriter Edmund H. North, provides a protagonist clearly analogous to Jesus Christ, it may be that one or more of the makers of Devil Girl From Mars (1954), consciously or not, made the Martian woman Nyah the polar opposite of the Virgin Mary. Nearly every image of Mary shows her wearing a scarf covering her head, but Nyah wears a shiny black skullcap. Mary is kind, soft and modest. Nyah is cruel, hard and flamboyant. Where Mary promotes faith, love and compassion, Nyah prefers disintegrating poor specimens, kidnapping, and the destruction of the innocent. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller. Nyah image courtesy wade williams distribution.

9. From the 1918 Danish film A Trip to Mars (Das Himmelskibet), this is the spaceship Excelsior in which adventurer Avanti Planetarios and his crew spend six months cruising to the Red Planet. As far as I can tell, this is the first Mars “rocketship” in the cinema.

10. The Day that Mars Invaded Earth (1963) is amazingly prescient in regard to its concept of a tiny Mars rover. The rover of the movie (left) was filmed and included in the movie in 1962 or 1963. Yet in 1988, the Mars rovers the author saw being tested were the size of Chevy Suburbans. The small rover in the film actually became a reality of a sort with Mars Pathfinder on July 4, 1997, when the small Sojourner rover (right) rolled onto the Martian surface. Special photo juxtaposition by Thomas Kent Miller; copyright © 2016-2017 by Thomas Kent Miller.

11. This German poster for the Soviet Union’s Mechte Navstrechu (1963) (refashioned in the U.S. as Curtis Harrington's Queen of Blood [1966]) focuses on the strength, courage, and selflessness of a Soviet astronaut who is risking his life saving the life of an alien woman. Creative license places the planet Mars behind him when he is in fact steadfastly struggling through a whirling red sandstorm on the surface of Mars.

12. Battle Beyond the Sun (1963) began life as a sophisticated space movie titled Nebo Zovyot (The Heavens Call) (1959) made by the USSR. Legendary B movie producer and director Roger Corman bought U.S. rights to the film for a song, and handed it over to the novice filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola with instructions to reedit it to make it palatable for American audiences. This shot is glimpsed in both versions, and it is for me the single most beautiful and evocative image of the planet Mars in all Mars cinema.

13. The Universal Pictures logo that graces the first few frames of DOOM (2005) is a genuine work of art. Typically, the word “Universal” enters the screen from the right and begins to encircle what the camera pulling back reveals to be the planet earth. In this case, however, the planet revealed is Mars! How cool is that?

Formal Notice: All images, quotations, and video/audio clips used in this blog and in its individual

posts are used either with permissions from the copyright holders or through exercise of the doctrine of Fair Use as described in U.S. copyright law, or are in the public domain. If any true copyright holder (whether person[s] or organization) wishes an image or quotation or clip to be removed from this blog and/or its individual posts, please send a note with a clear request and explanation to eely84232@mypacks.net and your request will be gladly complied with as quickly as practical.

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Orson Welles' End of the World Broadcast (1938) (Part 1 of 2)

Now we highlight not a movie, but an important radio broadcast, one that affected the art of film, especially in the 1940s and 50s. However, below you'll find two complete excellent but rare TV reenactments of this ground-breaking broadcast that launched upon the cinematic world a young man named Orson Welles whose successes and failures are legend.

A RADIO BROADCAST TO END ALL RADIO BROADCASTS

Orson Welles’ CBS Mercury Theater on the Air Radio-Play Adaption of
H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1938)

During an evening in 1938, with the whole world all too aware of German mobilization and just days after Germany occupied the Sudetenland, much of America really believed it was being invaded from Mars. It was a phenomenon of mass delusion that lasted perhaps 90 minutes or two hours at the most, but certainly was not unwarranted under the circumstances. The German War Machine's "occupation" of its neighbors one by one was the preeminent news of the day. The newsreels seen in neighborhood theaters played up the vast German terror that was swallowing Europe. Everyone knew that war was inevitable. This was America's state of mind during the month of October 1938.

One of countless recordings of the program,

available in possibly every format.

This happens to be a LP from 1968.

For more information on this record,

see https://www.discogs.com/Orson-Welles-War-Of-The-Worlds/release/857557

Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater on the Air were performing on CBS radio their re-imagined version of a classic piece of literature just as they did every week. In fact, just the week before they’d presented Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and the week before that Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Immortal Sherlock Holmes. On this night, the night before Halloween 1938, the Mercury Theater performed H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in an updated format that imitated intense news bulletins coming from Grovers Mill, New Jersey.

Many people turned on the Mercury broadcast after it had started and after the disclaimer had been announced. Many had switched over from the boring introductory segment on the vastly more popular program The Chase and Sanborn Hour featuring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.

People heard the cleverly produced pseudo-news announcements combined with the sounds of battle and panic and, already fraught with submerged anxiety as they watched “in real time” Europe collapse, assumed that the invasion from Mars was all too real, frantically warning family and friends. Howard Koch, who wrote The War of the Worlds radio script for the broadcast, says in his book, The Panic Broadcast, that the show “caused the submerged anxieties of tens of thousands of Americans [to] surface ... and coalesce ... in a flood of terror that swept the country.”

Dramatizations and Documentaries of the Radio Broadcast

In 1957, TV’s Westinghouse Studio One live dramatic series presented The Night America Trembled with early performances by James Coburn, Ed Asner, Warren Oates, and Warren Beatty, and narrated by iconic newscaster Edward R. Morrow. This was a docudrama reenactment of the Mercury Theater on the Air production with emphasis on how the actors performed in the studio and how the music and sound effects were created, along with scenes showing the program’s effect on the unexpecting populous.

Here is the actual hour-long early TV drama

The Night America Trembled.

In 1975, an ABC Friday Night Movie, The Night That Panicked America, another docudrama covering the same ground, was broadcast staring Vic Morrow, Meredith Baxter, Tom Bosley, and Will Geer.

This is the 1975 ABC Friday Night Movie,

The Night That Panicked America.

In Addition:
In 2005, Highland Entertainment produced a straight-to DVD documentary of this episode of American history titled The Day That Panicked America: The H.G. Wells War of the Worlds Scandal. The first half recounts the events surrounding the CBS broadcast—but the second half unexpectedly and unnecessarily follows Orson Welles’ career and crises through Citizen Kane and decades beyond.

In 2013, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting/PBS dedicated one of its American Experience episodes to Welles’ notorious CBS broadcast. Titled American Experience: War of the Worlds, this is a documentary with “recreations” and is narrated by Oliver Platt.

Suggested Further Reading:
There are a number of fine books that explore in meticulous detail the panic that erupted that October night, including:

The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic by Hadley Cantril

The Martians Are Coming! The True Story of Orson Welles’ 1938 Panic Broadcast by Allan Gallop

Waging The War of the Worlds: A History of the 1938 Radio Broadcast and Resulting Panic by John Gosling

The Panic Broadcast by Howard Koch

The Complete War of the Worlds: Mars’ Invasion of Earth from H.G. Wells to Orson Welles edited by Brian Holmsten and Alex Lubertozzi.

Radio Play Credits:

USA. CBS Radio, The Mercury Theater on the Air. 60m.

CREW: Director Orson Welles. Script Howard Koch. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Producer John Houseman. Orchestra Bernard Herrmann. Engineer John Dietz. Sound Effects James Rogan, Ray Kremer, Ora Nichol.

CAST: Announcer Dan Seymour. Narrator Orson Welles. Studio Announcer Paul Stewart. Meridian Room Announcer William Alland. Reporter Carl Phillips Frank Readick. Professor Richard Pierson Orson Welles. Second Studio Announcer Carl Frank. Secretary of the Interior Kenny Delmar. The cast also included mainly in multiple roles Ray Collins, Richard Wilson, Stefan Schnabel, Carl Frank, William Herz, Howard Smith.

Essay continues in Part 2.

PRAISE FOR MARS IN THE MOVIES

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“Highly enjoyable look at Martian cinema from the earliest days of film to the more recent past. Miller’s approach is delightfully quirky, and he clearly knows Martian movies inside and out. His passion for his subject infuses every page and, like a benign plague, infects every synapse of the lucky reader’s brain. Perhaps best of all, Miller never patronizes." Mike Bogue, Amazon

"Thomas Miller's densely researched and loving book on Mars-centric films is a joy to read for any fans of the genre."—Joe Pearson, filmmaker, Facebook

“The title says it all. Thomas Miller has compiled, annotated, watched, summarized, and commented on [nearly] every movie (in the English-speaking world and more) that features Mars and some that do not and others that should. He includes cartoons, animations, documentaries, shorts, serials, and features. Did I say comprehensive? Comprehensive. Miller’s telling is personal and there are asides and tangents but they, too, add to the overall impression of our fascination with Mars and the way it is manifested in art and life, including his own life.”—Michael W. Jackson, Dept. of Political Theory and Practice, The University of Sydney, Australia

"[Miller's book] is a real gem for lovers of films about Mars and for those who love SF films in general.”—John Litchen, Dreams of Mars: 130 Years of Stories about Mars

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“For anyone with the least interest in movies and Mars, this is certainly the book with the backgrounds and the answers! … There are many unusual posters and pictures in this fascinating volume. … recommended”—Reviews

"Informative, comprehensive, and engaging. Thomas Kent Miller has a real passion for the material that shines through on every page, and is matched only by the care taken to communicate it. Loving it!"—Vincent C, Amazon

“It comes as a surprise that, until the present day, there hasn’t been published a single specialized book that would be devoted solely to the sub-genre of Mars movies. Now…Thomas Miller…fill[s] this gap…with Mars in the Movies—the encyclopedic volume containing a comprehensive recapitulation of [nearly] all movies that ever featured the ‘Red Planet.’ …a thorough survey…”—SciFi4Ever Magazine

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