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 

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