War of the Worlds (2005) Steven Spielberg

[This essay was written in 2015.]

I hate this movie. Yes, it is an adequate take on the Wells’ story modernized (though Mars is never mentioned); certainly the effects are often astonishing, as well as the sound design. 

 

An early one-sheet poster

But there are three aspects that repel me:

•         For reasons I cannot fathom, Steven Spielberg’s soul mate since Schindler’s List has been Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski. Kaminski was perfect to photograph Schindler’s List because that film was driven by a grey, dark depressing story and Kaminski’s cinematic inclinations were also grey, dark and depressing. However, Kaminski has photographed probably every Spielberg movie since, perhaps a dozen. My problem is that all Kaminski seems to be able to do is grey, dark and depressing. And, frankly, his choices depress me. This version of War of the Worlds suffers due to the lack of any meaningful color. It could have been so much better if it had been colorful, but Spielberg himself clearly prefers all his films to feel grey, dark, and depressing these days. I long for the colorful days of Close Encounters, ET, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

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•          Ray Ferrier is as about an unsympathetic lead as one can imagine. We meet him as he’s getting off his dock-worker job and we very quickly learn that he is an irresponsible narcissist slob. Tom Cruise’s performance may be on the money from Spielberg’s point of view, but it overwhelms any humanity that Ray could have shown. A warmer Ray would have been my preference, especially since he has his children... 

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•          Most importantly, any scene that included Ray’s two children, Rachel and Robby, was for me literally like the proverbial fingernails on a chalk board. From minute one, Robby’s teenage angst was nothing less than an onslaught on my sensibilities. As for Rachel, her continual, ceaseless whining seemed endless. Ray may not be the most sympathetic father, but from the start of the invasion his instincts and choices were invariably correct, saving all their lives time and time again. Despite their being perhaps ten and sixteen years old, and despite their being instantly thrust into a nightmare out of proportion with any horror they could ever have imagined, very quickly it should have dawned on them that against all probability, their father was keeping them alive. Everywhere they could see countless people dissolving and dying within inches of their car, yet at no point did they stop whining and complaining. Rachael had one speed: screaming at her father. Robby’s insolence and ignorant bravado wore me down. 

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These days, I’ll sometimes watch this movie to enjoy the Martian tripods, but I always have to fast forward through any scene with the kids. Now and again, acquaintances say that I shouldn’t be so hard on the kids; after all aren’t they behaving just like typical American kids at their ages? My feeling at those times is that somehow I doubt it. Perhaps these folks are correct about the kids’ behavior at the outset of this drama, but, excuse me, it oughtn’t take a prodigy or a rocket scientist for them to quickly figure out that their best bet was to shut up and help their dad. 

 

An early appearance of a tripod war machine.

That said, I did enjoy the several homages to the 1953 George Pal film, for example, the periscope affair that seeks them out in the ruined house, the three-fingered arm that slips out of a downed war machine, the cameos of Gene Barry and Ann Robinson, the protagonists of Pal’s film, and more.

A final note: I’ve spent a few minutes scrolling through the popular critical web site www.rottentomatoes.com looking for quotes to use in my Naysayers and Enthusiasts above and found 253 reviews from newspapers, magazines, and blog critics. I was astonished to learn that all but a handful positively loved the movie. Unbelievably, from my point of view, nearly all reported some variation of what Ken Tucker of New York Magazine/Vulture said: “Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds is huge and scary, moving and funny—another capper to a career that seems like an unending succession of captivations.” I say “unbelievably” because it’s hard for me to understand how so many critics (who are, after all, people) could not see and feel uncomfortable by the children’s ceaseless reprehensible behavior. The fact that they are frightened is not nearly sufficient excuse or justification; I cannot imagine why any normal person would so easily endure such an onslaught of negative energy and then praise the film as high entertainment. 

 

An early one-sheet teaser poster for Steven Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds (top right). The artist chose to use the powerful 3D block lettering that graced the posters of so many spectacular epics of the 1950s and 60s, chief among them Ben-Hur, King of Kings, and Genghis Khan. Though I don’t think much of this War of the Worlds film, I adore this style of poster art.

Apparently I am one of the very few who was so effected. All and all, this film was a huge disappointment to me.

USA. Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks SKG, Amblin Entertainment, Cruise/Wagner Productions. C. 1.85:1. 116m.

CREW: Director Steven Spielberg. Script Josh Friedman, David Koepp. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, Executive Producers Paula Wagner. Producers Kathleen Kennedy, Colin Wilson. Score John Williams. Director of Photography Janusz Kaminski. Editor Michael Kahn. Casting Terri Taylor, Debra Zane. Production Designer Rick Carter. Special Visual Effects Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).

CAST: Narrator Morgan Freeman. Ray Ferrier Tom Cruise. Rachel Ferrier Dakota Fanning. Rob- bie Ferrier Tim Robbins. Mary Ann Miranda Otto. Harlan Ogilvy Justin Chatwin. Grandmother Ann Robinson. Grandfather Gene Barry.

 Naysayer.

“It doesn’t work as a science fiction epic, it doesn’t work as a tale of families bonding in the face of tragedy, and it certainly doesn’t work as a mingling of the two.”—Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Goatdog’s Movies 

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Enthusiast.

“Steven Spielberg has delivered the blockbuster of the summer, a stunning sci-fi spectacular that’ll blow you away. Yes, I know I’m gushing, but War of the Worlds really is that good.—David Edwards, Daily Mirror [UK]

 
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.

 

Planning — "Writing Thomas Kent Miller's Mars in the Movies: A History", Part One of Three

"Writing Thomas Kent Miller's  

Mars in the Movies: A History,"

An Essay in Three Parts by the Author
Copyright © 2014-2019 

 

 

 

Planning

Part One of Three

I’ve been asked why I wrote Mars in the Movies: A History (the full cover is pictured at the right) and, BTW, how did I write the book anyway?  At the urging of a Facebook friend who happens to be a talented filmmaker, artist, and very nice person, I wrote this essay about how the book came into being. It’s not the whole story, of course; how do you describe 2.5 years of continual work, mostly with over-lapping tasks?

Introduction

A scene of destruction from The War of the Worlds (1953)

Many years ago in the ‘70s, the miniseries Roots aired on ABC. (I’ve often heard that it was the first American miniseries.) The whole notion of investigating one’s background and heritage to find one’s “roots” exploded into popular culture at the time. For a couple of years, genealogy became a fad and long exhaustive researches into one’s ancestors were not uncommon. Living in the middle of this unusual but energized trend, naturally I began to wonder about my own roots. Over the years I’d corner my parents on the subject. My mother seemed clear; my father seemed fuzzy. Nevertheless, all things considered, it seemed that my ethnicity was a mixture of European genes.

I lived then and now in California; nationality and ethnicity were never much of a subject during family discussions; unspoken volatile passions were never part of any aspect of our lives; we just minded our own business—which, I imagine, constituted a family existing in a state of perpetual vanilla. Thus, the idea of tracking my roots didn’t have much meaning to me. Nevertheless, the times being what they were, I felt the necessity to uncover something about my life that was absolutely fundamental, from which the rest of me flowed. In time I settled on a clear and absolute candidate:

My roots lay in Science Fiction Movies, for example, 
check out all these from the 1950s and 1960s; good or bad, they are like the building blocks of my soul, as are so many others:

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This may sound odd, but it is nonetheless true. Through most of the 1950s, of all things that I treasured the one thing that I treasured most of all was viewing science-fiction movies at my local theater. Many of these showings were at the Saturday “Kiddie Matinees,” where I saw Invaders from Mars (1953), Conquest of Space, When Worlds Collide, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and many more. I became a lifelong science-fiction movie buff, but I developed a particular fondness for Mars movies—voyages to and attacks from. The reasons are simple enough: red and orange are my favorite colors; for three-quarters of a century, the potential of Mars still held much sway, a remnant from the era of Percival Lowell at the turn of century; I very much like the desert; Mars just seemed exotic to explore.

During the 70s, as a reaction to Star Wars, science-fiction publishing of all kinds took off—both fiction and nonfiction! For me, I relished the huge boom in sf film magazines, and for 15+ years, I bought every issue I could find of Starlog, Future World, Fantastic Films, Cinefantastique, FilmFax, Cinemagic, Fantascene, Photon, and so many others. 
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But in 1991, I had finally assembled a Home Theater, which, in 1991, was still a relatively new concept.  I could not afford the luxury of spending my discretionary income on both magazines and Laserdiscs (which were $50.00 a pop). Thus, I went cold-turkey off the magazines. I'd rather SEE the films instead of reading ABOUT them.
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The Dynamic Duo of !953. Left: the Martian Intelligence from Invaders from Mars (1953),
Right: the Martian scout from The War of the Worlds (1953)

Nevertheless, I continued to buy much of the out-pouring of both nostalgic and historical books, as opposed to magazines. During that same time frame, a wave of science-fiction nostalgia swept through the publishing world consisting of any number of memoirs and historical publications written by science fiction writers and/or genre scholars. There was The Futurians (1977) by Damon Knight, The Way The Future Was: A Memoir (1979) by Frederik Pohl, The Universe Makers (1971) by Donald A. Wollheim and Before the Golden Age (1974) by Isaac Asimov, and there were many more by other sf luminaries. 

But as it turned out, that was also the era when the science-fiction film overview book was born likely in the form of John Baxter’s Science Fiction in the Cinema (1970). Then came many more, including  Ed Naha’s From Screen to Scream (1975), Peter Nicholls’ The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1993), and John Stanley’s The Creature Features Movie Guide (1981). Naturally I acquired as many as I could.

In 1980, I married and we hoped to start a family; but I needed to finish

school and get settled into a career. There were challenges on top of challenges. In 1985, we started our family, but there were times at the office when I’d daydream about a Mars movie overview book, and I began to make photocopies of everything I could find in both magazines and books about Mars and Mars movie-related items to use for research, thinking that I might try my hand at such a book, since nobody else seemed to be doing it. However, life intervened and all I could do for the next 30 years was hope for such a book, because my career in technical publishing left me exhausted with less than optimal time and energy to write a book.

Well, fast-forward through those 30 years.  Still no Mars movie book had been published. In the meantime, though, publishers had brought out specialty overview books about dinosaurs movies, Godzilla movies, Spaghetti Westerns, Japanese giant creature (Kaiju) movies, H.P Lovecraft movies, Hammer horror movies, and all manner of finely laser-focused sub-subgenre movie overview books—yet still no Mars book.

A few of the sub-genre movie overview books available these days.

Finally, in May 2014, I retired from a 34-year publishing career, the last twenty as a magazine editor-in-chief of a top trade journal, and the first thing I did was query McFarland publishers of North Carolina to see if they were interested in a Mars-focused movie book. I decided to contact McFarland particularly because they were the publishers of Bill Warren’s Keep Watching the Skies! : American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, David Calat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla® Series (1st and 2nd editions), Mark F. Berry’s Dinosaur Filmography, and Thomas Weisser’s Spaghetti Westerns—the Good, the Bad and the Violent: 558 Eurowesterns, and so many other wonderful ultra-narrowly-focused, super-specific sub-sub-genre movie overview books.

My research paid off and McFarland jumped at the chance to add my Mars book to its wide and growing catalog of sub-genre film overview books, and they sent me a contract.

The eight boxes of Mars movie materials I located two years after publication.

Once I had a contract, I needed to seriously organize. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[An aside: Once the book was 100% complete around mid-2016, I packed up all my Mars materials (magazines, movies, magazines) in storage boxes, which I moved into my "hoarder"-style garage. During the more than two years between putting those boxes in the garage and my deciding to write this essay, many of those boxes had been opened for any number of reasons, with both the boxes themselves and their contents scattered around, the end result being that when I sought all that material to help illustrate this essay, I spent days in the garage trying to locate those scattered research materials. Finally I had filled eight boxes with the items you see...BUT I knew I had a lot more that was buried too deeply and it would have taken up too much time to locate all of it.  So the better part of valor was to use what I had already found. Be that as it may, the photo shows the eight boxes of pure Mars movie research material that I looked for to specifically illustrate this essay.]

 

I Write Mainly Essays

It is important at this point for me to identify my writing style to better explain the necessity of organizing. Nearly all my writing (even much of my fiction), even the piece you are reading right this second is some variation of the form of writing called the “essay.”  There are four main types of essays: Narrative, Descriptive, Expository, and Persuasive essays. While my writing incorporates all these at one time or another, I am particularly good at writing “Persuasive Essays.” The web site Time4Writing® describes persuasive essays as: “The goal of the persuasive essay is to convince the reader to accept the writer’s point of view or recommendation. The writer must build a case using facts and logic, as well as examples, expert opinion, and sound reasoning. The writer should present all sides of the argument, but must be able to communicate clearly and without equivocation why a certain position is correct.”

A God-given gift, the writing of essays comes naturally to me. Always has. It’s like breathing. Insofar as the key to writing persuasive essays is to use, “…examples, expert opinion, and sound reasoning,” my first order of business was to assemble lots of examples and expert opinion. After all, nobody really cares what I think, unless I can back up my thoughts with comments from experts and professionals. Let’s face it, a Persuasive Essay without expert opinions would have little persuasiveness.

Tim Burton and crew created a perfect title sequence for Mars Attacks!

As an example, (in the event that the writing of essays is not some readers' forte), I'll explain, using some real "examples and expert opinion," that I in fact used in the book.  First, having to do with the spine-tingling title sequence of Tim Burton's 1996 Mars Attacks, on page 186 of my book, there is this passage quoted exactly from Cinescape magazine and written by Ron Magid a filmmaker and Hollywood insider. The sad fact is that I can talk about title sequences till my lips turn blue, and generally speaking, people could care less. Therefore, since this particular title sequence lights up my life, I felt it would be useful to bolster my thoughts on the subject by providing Magid's expert examination of these titles:

"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." 

I am able to quote the above passage from Magid and Cinescape magazine without having to get permission because of the "fair use" rule, which is described by Wikipedia as: "Fair use is a doctrine in the law of the United States that permits limited use of copyrighted material without having to first acquire permission from the copyright holder." In other words, fair use allows for the quoting of short passages. Similarly, when writing about Ridley Scott's The Martian, I felt that it was both colorful and prudent to use a quote from The Hollywood Reporter that describes the desert of Wadi Rum in Jordan that substituted for the sands of Mars for much of the movie.

But, the fly in the buttermilk is, in order to use these kinds of colorful views from authorities, I have to first find them!

 

 Go to Part Two, Organizing

[For those interested in purchasing Mars in the Movies: A History, I recommend doing so from the publisher's site. It seems that far too many online book sellers, including Amazon, are having a hard time keeping it in stock. The link to McFarland publishers is https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/mars-in-the-movies/ ]

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.

Organizing — "Writing Thomas Kent Miller's Mars in the Movies: A History", Part Two of Three

"Writing Thomas Kent Miller's  

Mars in the Movies: A History,"

An Essay in Three Parts by the Author
Copyright © 2014-2019 

 

 

 

Organizing

Part Two of Three

Now recall that I had collected science-fiction film magazines and books for years, and consequently out in the garage I had dozens of storage boxes filled with magazines and books pertinent to my research on various projects. Admittedly, most of the magazines were 40 to 25 years old; the same can be said of many of the overview books. Thinking that I might be criticized for relying on older materials, I purchased many new contemporary sci-fi film books so that any hypothetical up-tight critic could see that my research was indeed balanced.

Because we had moved several times through the years, most of my older materials were in total disarray out in the garage, so for a couple of weeks I was out there searching through lots and lots of those storage boxes looking for the materials I could work with. Over the years hundreds, if not thousands of magazines became mixed up with videos, books, posters and virtually anything else I might need, so I could never be sure what was in a box when I opened it.  

I literally picked up and riffled through every magazine I could lay my hands on, carefully paid attention to the thicket of cover lines on every issue, and studied the table of contents. This way, I was able to spot pretty quickly the magazines that contained any Mars movie content, regardless of what that content was: features, photo layouts, editorials, some neutral, some biased in one direction or another. This took a couple of weeks. I also had other materials to locate, such as newspaper clippings, comic books, articles from general interest magazines, and so forth. These, as well as anything else I could use, were packed into boxes and hauled into my office.

When I say thousands of magazines, I mean it. For me a science or science fiction movie magazine of any kind is precious and there is no way in hell that I’m going to toss these magazines or give them away as most people do with magazines they’re finished reading.

The retrieval of books was a little bit easier. Many years before, I had worked on a lengthy project that used mainly Mars books (both nonfiction and fiction) for research. At project’s end I neatly stacked the books into boxes and put the boxes on some utility shelves in the garage. These were not ever subject to the sort of rough and tumble mishaps of packing, repacking, hauling, rearrangement, and the general Rubik's cube jostling that the magazines suffered.  Once I decided I needed to bring the books into my office, I went to Office Depot and bought a small inexpensive bookshelf onto which I transferred the books (see figure below).

Some of my Mars book collection/library.

 Remember I had all those yellowing photocopies from the 1980s, too!

Once I had several piles of magazines and books that dealt in some way with Mars movies, I took them into my office and sorted them according to film titles. When I had lots of smaller stacks, one for each movie I wanted to cover, such as Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Total Recall, and Rocketship X-M, I put all the items for a given movie into individual manila file folders, labeled the folders and wrapped rubber bands around each to hold the contents in place (see figures below). 

In the years since I sent the Mars movie manuscript to the publisher, many magazines have separated from their folders, and a number of the folders are empty, or mainly misplaced in my black hole of a garage. Nevertheless, the two photos just below illustrate how I sorted and organized the film magazines  at the time I was writing the book (click on the photos to get a better view of the materials).

A sampling of the folders I used to organize my Mars magazines, a method consistent for nearly every movie I covered.

Some of the folders were very thick.  For example, Total Recall (seen here) was an important event film in 1990 and received more news and feature coverage than usual. Here is one of my manila folders, typical except for the quantity of its contents. (And as the weeks and months wore on, I’d find buried somewhere individual issues of miscellaneous magazines that never made it into the folders because I was onto other things, but which magazines, of course, I consulted nonetheless): 

Some of my research materials for Total Recall (2000)

There were a variety of methods of organizing my essays within the book, and I was tempted by various styles of organization. In the end, I decided that the best layout for my book was to put the movies chronologically into hard categories, “Voyages to Mars,” “Invasions from Mars,” “Inhabited Mars,” etc., though, I wasn’t so strict about including movies in any hard and fast category.From the very start, I rejected the idea of simply putting the movies in alphabetical order as so many of these sorts of books do. No doubt alphabetical order would simplify the writing of the book as well as make easy the finding of specific movies, but it would also deprive the book of vital context. These movies were made relative to one another; often they evolved as a consequence of what came before; for example, the success of Rocketship X-M significantly influenced the making of Flight to Mars, and Invaders from Mars (1953), and so on all the way to the present, like falling dominoes, with each successive domino designed a bit differently and perhaps a bit better than its predecessor. In my mind, therefore, it became imperative that I arrange the films in strict chronological order (within their separate sections).

One of my goals was to reflect on the evolution of special effects and show how the craft and its purpose, while full-on miraculous throughout the history of filmmaking, changed significantly with the advent of CGI, with the new post-Star Wars techniques and energy proliferating throughout the film industry. There were improvements in production design, editing technology, photographic equipment and processes, sound design, practical effects, special visual effects, and audience expectations, and way more, all of which significantly affected how a movie could be written, or for that matter, how a movie could be imagined. Thus, writing my book chronologically was only logical, and I often had the chance to dwell on this idea. 

The next step was to prepare binders with tabbed sections for each movie, and in each section I inserted a color printout of each movie’s principal one-sheet poster that I grabbed from Google searches. I love posters. When I was a boy, I would ride the Greyhound bus for miles for the sole purpose of seeing the new posters in the front of local theaters announcing future movies. Therefore, having binders with posters organized in the same chronological order as I expected the book to be published helped inspire me. Even now, just looking at a movie poster sends a thrill through me. Film posters are an under-appreciated art form. Also, I hoped that the book itself would include a poster for each movie, as does Sci-Fi Savant: Classic Sci-Fi Review Reader (2011) by Glenn Erickson and Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies (2011) by Gary Gerani. In point of fact, all 100 of Gerani’s posters are all in glorious color (but, for my book, I knew that that could only be wishful thinking.) At this early stage I was thinking of about 75 movies.

 

Binders with tabbed sections for each movie, with each movie’s main one-sheet poster.

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Once I had the binders organized with tabbed sections, one section for each movie, and all the color poster printouts in their rightful places, then, at my wife’s suggestion, I went online to grab lists of cast and crew information for each movie from various web sites. This was to save vast amounts of time typing. There are numerous sites that provide these kind of lists. No need to type up what was already available as a digital list. But immediately, there was a big problem. I saw instantly that often the online lists didn’t match what I knew to be in the films’ actual credits. Thus, I wound up watching every movie’s credits carefully and compared the names and titles and collaborations that I actually saw in the title sequences on the screen with the lists from the Internet. In fact, I needed to make many corrections. My rule was that the film’s actual credits were inviolate and all other information had to conform to the credits physically on the movie itself.

Also, I needed to limit the amount of cast and crew info that I would use in the book. The book was not to be about the making of each movie, but more about how the movies affected me and about my reactions to them. I had to draw a line somewhere. Plus, as I indicated above and often in the book, other books, such as Bill Warren’s readily-available Keep Watching the Skies!, and many others already provide immensely detailed cast and crew information, as do numerous web sites.

So I kept this cast and crew info to a minimum in my book to avoid being unnecessarily redundant and wasting my time. Cast would be limited to the half dozen or so leads. Craftpersons, who indeed crafted the movie, needed to be given credit where credit was due. With some exceptions, crew data in my book would be limited to director, writers, producers, composer, editor, production designer, cinematographer, casting director, and special visual effects companies. Sound design also should have been included, but I drew my line in front of that skill, rather than behind it, because if I let in sound design, what about costume design, makeup, art direction, ad infinitum? Here is an example of a typical set of credits I created for the films; note that the special effects were sub-contracted to a lot of companies.
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When all was said and done, the process that my wife suggested saved me the onerous task of weeks of unnecessary one-finger typing.  Thus, one by one, pages of cast and crew were added to their appropriate  sections in the binders. This was a grand help. To have gotten this housekeeping drudge work out of the way, now I could focus on writing about the movies, without having to spend too much time on housekeeping.

About then I mentioned to the publisher my plan to have a poster for every movie in the book and was told that was not a good idea. Reluctantly, I abandoned that idea. But, of course, I kept my binders for reference and inspiration. The photo below shows some of the "one-sheet posters" I'd added to my binders and which I wanted for the book (click on the image for detail).

 

Visit Part Three:  Writing 

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. 

 

Writing — "Writing Thomas Kent Miller's Mars in the Movies: A History", Part Three of Three

 "Writing Thomas Kent Miller's   

Mars in the Movies: A History,"

An Essay in Three Parts by the Author
Copyright © 2014-2019 

 

 

 

Writing

Part Three of Three

 

The Writing Begins

These small reproductions of one-sheet posters represent
a sort of graveyard for lost posters!

 Then—finally— I began writing. A book such as I was writing for an academic press required a preface and a separate introduction, so I started with those. Since I had been immersed in this stuff for 60+ years, writing this front matter was easy. I just typed my heart and soul into my Mac computer, focusing on generalities.             

After all that preparation, I needed to stop with the preliminaries and start writing about each movie! Which entailed watching them. The good news was that I had most of them. But the bad news was that I didn’t have the rest of them. So, the ones that were on VHS, videotape, and DVD, that I didn’t already own, I bought and added to my collection. Some of the oldest were in public domain and I was able to watch them on YouTube.

                                                                                                                                                                                          

I began watching the movies according to the sections I’d developed and then in chronological order within each section, and began typing up my comments and first impressions, sometimes during the movie, but always immediately afterwards. But before I got too heavily into writing, I’d take my folder full of magazines that contained articles about each movie and read all the articles. And I did the same with chapters and entries from my fairly large collection of genre film overview books. This was so I had a strong base of film experts, noted critics, and respected opinion I could draw on. As I said above, after all, nobody really cares what I think, unless I can back up my thoughts with comments from experts and professionals.

This whole project existed to write about Mars movies. The next four photos show most of the films I watched as I wrote my book

Boxes of Mars movies that I watched for the book, many of which films haunt this author. I watched them all in mid-2016.

After watching each film, then I read as many articles and book entries as I could about a particular movie, then I would finally begin writing seriously, often combining and/or comparing my own ideas, experiences, thoughts, and memories with what the experts had to say. Often I would argue that the experts were wrong and explain why. I purposely avoided reading web critics and reviews at this very embryonic stage of writing. Being an old-fashioned kind of guy, I wanted to rely on my magazines and books, and my own better judgment.

For 2.5 years, these general movie reference books were in front of me on my desk, so I could grab what I needed instantly.

Details of the books in my overview collection.

And that is just what I did as weeks turned into months. I was about one-third through watching and writing about the movies when a problem surfaced. I stumbled upon the fact that Ridley Scott’s film to follow his wonderful Exodus: Gods and Kings was something called The Martian based on a bestselling novel by one Andy Weir. It’s embarrassing to admit that despite my interest in Mars, and despite my past employment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I had not been in the Andy Weir loop. The book’s history, I learned, was remarkable and it had fired up the NASA community and then took off and became a mega successful best seller. Yet I knew none of this. Partly because the word-of-mouth that pushed the book forward was a function of social media, and at the time I had zero social media experience. I didn’t even have a cell phone let alone a smart phone! And the experience of Facebook was still years in the future for me.

Naturally I was somewhat confused. I didn’t know how this would affect my book, if at all. The last important studio-based Mars movies were in 2000. That was 15 years before I learned of the new movie. Well, at first there was nothing to do but alert my editor and keep on keeping on. Of course, I was excited, too. Wow! A big-budget studio Mars movie with a top director and all the credentials in the world. Without ever saying so, as I recall, eventually my editor and I seemed to develop the unspoken understanding, or so I supposed, that my book should be finished close to the time The Martian was released.  In other words, I had more pressure on me! But by and large, the movie’s existence didn’t change anything in the short term because I still had a ton of viewing and writing to do, and I pointed my nose forward and did the best that I could.

Eventually, as I was closing in on two years of all this preparation and writing, still another circumstance raised its head and needed to be dealt with. This was the development of and appearance of many knock-offs of Ridley Scott’s film, and also of other new Mars-themed films and TV projects. They began to pop up like mushrooms. We had to decide if I should ignore them, as they were not part of the original proposal. Eventually we decided that the better part of valor was to try to include as many as we could into the book. Towards the end I was constantly adding chapters and changing things dramatically even after the proof stage, all this resulting from the new movies, some not even released yet.  

I was so dedicated to this work and this project that, without realizing it, I short-changed my family, and my wife and son began to resent the book and all the energy I was putting into it. (I only learned of this a few weeks before the book was finished.) Nevertheless, after two years, I had a 117,000-word, 528-page manuscript that I mailed off to McFarland, along with a selection of TIFF photos. Some of the photos and images were rejected due to resolution problems. 

A few months later, I received the proofs (the stage just a couple of steps before sending the book to the printer) and was delighted with how it looked, that is how it was designed, which fonts were used, how everything was presented relative to everything else, like
margins, headers, bold and italic, and, of course, which graphics were chosen in the final analysis, and how the captions were treated, and the rest of the endless decisions that had to be made so a reference book like mine could be presented clearly and logically.

This is part of my The War of the Worlds collection of reference media.

The first proof of a designed book is a long way from a typed manuscript! During my 30-year career in publications, this moment, my seeing the proofs, was always my favorite moment, the point where I got to see what the final product would look like. Everything from this point on would be tweaks. 

And yes, it needed LOTS of tweaks! As I began checking, I found all sorts of little typos and formatting problems that needed fixing, even errors of fact, and sentence construction that didn’t make sense, on and on. While normal at this stage, it is terribly time-consuming. The production staff at McFarland and I were sending corrected pages back and forth for at least a couple of months. (And truth be told, just between you and me, we never did catch all the problems, but not for lack of trying!)

And when the book was close to final, then I needed to prepare an Index. I’d never done this before; look at any good index and see how complex it is. In the end, after a few weeks, I taught myself how to do it, and I generated a 3,000-entry Index, which is considered excellent in the trade.

Furthermore, the nonstop parade of The Martian clones and knock-offs kept coming, even as I was checking the proofs. They began to appear on TV, DVD and Blu ray, cable, streaming services, and theaters. This was frustrating and it became necessary to constantly add materials and sections, and reorganize the placement of articles—even after I received the corrected proofs. Which all had to be done at the same time the more ordinary problems outlined above were being resolved. Talk about a “moving target!”

The tip of the iceberg; imagine three to five times more paper than this from writing the book.

Eventually we all did the best we could and the book was published. Though it was impossible to cover every Mars movie, the book does discuss about 100 of them, certainly all the important ones, plus I included some biographical information about six film industry giants who created the best sci-fi films of the 1950s.

Mars in the Movies: A History, no matter what anybody thinks of it, is an excellent reference book. It is the first book about a vital sub-genre of the movie industry that slipped under the radar (however, already there is a second Mars movie book on the market). Is the book objective enough? Of course—reading this essay ought to have clearly shown the fundamental objectivity of the book. Nevertheless, the subject is something I've been wildly passionate about since 1953—yes, 1953! Therefore, it is evident that some of that passion would have seeped through, helping making the book the sort of book I set out to make, a fact that is stated clearly and often throughout the book. I hope this essay will resolve any further misunderstandings.

[For those interested in purchasing Mars in the Movies: A History, I recommend doing so from the publisher's site. It seems that far too many online book sellers, including Amazon, are having a hard time keeping it in stock. The link to McFarland publishers is https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/mars-in-the-movies/ ]

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