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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