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/ ]

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