Whale-watching: Forthcoming Moby Dicks

[The image above (like the one at the bottom of this post) is from a design by Paul Lasaine for an abandoned version of Moby Dick developed by Dreamworks, directed by the Brizzi brothers. You can see several more images at his blog. The plan was to tell the story from the whale's point of view; a fascinating idea that the studio didn't want to follow up.]

I’m planning to post updates here on Spectacular Attractions about the two forthcoming adaptations of Moby Dick , along with notes about earlier versions. It’s something I’m distracted by at the moment, so this is an outlet. If anyone has further information than I can gather from the Web, please add comments below.

Here’s some of what we know so far. Timur Bekmambetov, director of Wanted is signed to direct a massive-budget version for Universal Pictures, which will begin shooting once he’s finished making Wanted II. From what I can tell, it sounds like they’re inspired by the graphic-novel aesthetic of 300, which preserved the pictorialism of Frank Miller’s original text but, for my money, made it too pristine and over-designed to be emotionally engaging. The script has been written by Adam Cooper and Bill Collage. You may find Cooper’s statement enticing: I find it kind of ominous:

Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick’. This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.

To that end, they’ve removed Ishmael’s first-person narration. This means that we can see lots more scenes of Moby Dick trashing other ships, without being limited to one character’s perspective. But Ishmael’s narration is always subjective, questionable – part of the drama of reading Moby Dick is feeling the distance between literature and experience. You can feel the narrator’s urge to communicate every detail of what he sees, but you can also feel the mystique of folklore, the tingle of secondhand reports of a sea monster. Seeing more of Moby Dick undermines some of the mythic structure of the novel, in the same way that remaking Jaws with lots of close-up views of a CGI shark would throw away what made it frightening in the first place. But obviously, it’s too early to judge. Certainly, Melville’s book provides plenty of opportunity for awesome spectacle, but it would be a shame if that came at the expense of its ability to create a detailed picture of life on a whaling ship, or the complex psychology of its narrator.

First up, though, Mike Barker is directing another adaptation for TV (produced by Germany’s Tele Munchen Group) with a budget of over $25,000,000, with William Hurt as Ahab, Charlie Cox as Ishmael, Gillian Anderson as Elizabeth, Ethan Hawke as Starbuck, Apocalypto’s Raoul Trujillo as Queequeg, plus Eddie Marsan and Donald Sutherland.  It’s written by Nigel Williams, who scribbled a damn fine script for HBO’s Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren, and used to write episodes for Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: let’s hope he’s still got some of that knack for tale-spinning. There’s quite a bit of teasing info, and lots of photos from the set, at the website of  Shelburne County, Nova Scotia, where the film finished shooting last month: it was dressed to look like 19th-century Nantucket. I’m afraid you’ve already missed it, but there was an auction of props used in the film: see here for pictures.

On her blog, Gillian Anderson hints at a harmonious set with good relations amongst the cast, but also that it was “cursed”:

Anyhoo so here is LAX and on my way to the welcome drizzle of London before the welcome sunshine of somewhere else and time just flies and flies and I wish I could tell you what I’m doing next but I can’t and Oh there was Moby Dick which was so much fun and such a great group of people not least of which was the director Michael Barker who is an angel of a man and Ethan (Hawke) and Charlie (Cox) and then William (Hurt) and oh my Donald Sutherland who I would give my left anything to properly work with again. It was blessed. Well, and cursed but I won’t go into that.

I think we would want an adaptation of one of the most monumental literary expressions of reckless obsession to require similar levels of anguish to recreate. That’s probably a silly superstitious belief, but there’s a strong mythos that surrounds the big productions that run into difficulties. It would seem cheeky to remake Moby Dick with too much ease, when it took Melville so much effort to drag out of his mind, condensing his arduous seafaring experiences into a gargantuan statement of the awe and danger of nature. It is scheduled for completion early in 2010.

How odd that we’ll get two adaptations in such a short space of time. The differences between them will, I hope, prove interesting and illuminating on the topic of transitions from literary to screen media.

Picture of the week #5

I have this poster on the wall in my office, and occasionally people ask me about it. Babaouo is the name of a Salvador Dali film that was never finished. Actually, aside from some designs, a screenplay and this poster, it was barely started. Dali’s script was intended as a completion of a trilogy of surrealist works started with Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age d’Or (1930). It was eventually filmed by Manuel Cussó-Ferrer in 1998, and tells the story of Babaouo, who sets out to rescue his lover, who has been imprisoned in a castle. The plot sounds like an excuse for a journey that incorporates plenty of surrealist imagery, but it’s difficult to say how closely the poster relates to the film itself – it has plenty of his trademarks, such as the ants crawling on skin, and the melting clock, which has been cut and pasted from The Persistence of Memory (1931). Is this Dali’s sly commentary on the marketing of the celebrity artist, pre-empting the film’s production with recognisable but irrelevant iconography? Or did he do it to try and raise some money for the production? It’s interesting that he began with the publicity long before the shooting had begun, relishing the chance to pre-visualise it as a finished property.

Destination Moon: It’s Rocket Science.

[This is a revised extract from my book, Performing Illusions, mixed with fragments and notes not included in the book. The broader context of this section, which looks at Destination Moon, is a discussion of science fiction cinema in the 1950s, drawing a distinction between the subversive excesses of low-budget exploitation, which treated the military-industrial agenda of "big science" with some disdain, and the big budget tales of space exploration that aligned science with spectacular imagery and limitless potential for human gain in the form of national pride and military advantage.]

While tales of alien invasion were finding their place as a staple of the science fiction B-movie circuit, a few major productions were entertaining the possibility of a future lunar mission, and in the process espousing the value of the technologies denigrated by their low-budget imitators. In the 1950s, inspired by genuine rocket research and concerted efforts to reach and explore outer space, a few films offered predictions of what the space race might achieve, sometimes smuggling in militaristic propaganda. This visualisation of capital-intensive science stands in sharp contrast to the half-hearted attempts at astronautical engineering shown in the B-movies of the time, and show up even more starkly the divisions between the high and low budget cinema of the time, the one aggrandising the military and scientific establishment with meticulously constructed effects held up for spectatorial contemplation, and the other besmirching the worth of multi-billion dollar space program with depictions of the cosmos as a site of plastic toys wobbling through a worthless void.

Underpinning both discussions of the future of space exploration was the knowledge that, as rocket science progressed, one consequence would be the parallel development of missile systems, so that space exploration was tied technologically and iconographically to military power. Crucial to creditable renderings of spacecraft are the miniature models used to represent them, and the compositing techniques used to create the impression of flight. The skills required for such effects would have been honed at studio facilities with particular interest in war films during the 1940s, such as Ships with Wings (Sergei Nolbandov, 1941), Mrs. Miniver (William Wyler, 1942), Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (Mervyn LeRoy, 1944), all of which rely on miniature models to represent ships and aircraft. In this way, depictions of spacecraft can be seen as connotatively linked to depictions of military machines, and the appropriate attention to detail in respecting the integrity of such vehicles can be read as either subversion or sustenance of their iconic power as a physical threat and a patriotic symbol.

Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950) was based loosely on Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Rocketship Galileo (1947), and Heinlein, along with Transylvanian rocket expert Hermann Oberth, acted as technical adviser on the film. Oberth (1894-1989) had, along with Willy Ley (1906-1969), acted in a similar capacity on Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond/The Woman in the Moon (1929, released in the U.S. in 1931 as By Rocket to the Moon). Lang wanted the film to have a kind of documentary realism to support the story of an industrially-sponsored lunar mission. The film was famously withdrawn from distribution by the Nazis, who feared that it might reveal secrets about the ongoing development of the V1 and V2 rockets. The spaceship model used in the film was also destroyed by the Gestapo.

Willy Ley had been a friend of Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, and was the respected author of Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt/The Possibility of Space Travel (1928) and founding member of the Society for Space Travel in Germany. Ley introduced Lang to Oberth, who had been a designer of rocket artillery for the Austrian army in WWI and was author of the highly influential Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen/By Rocket to Interplanetary Space (1923).  He would later perform scientific research for the Nazis, while Willy Ley fled to the U.S.A. One of the film’s many accurate predictions was the countdown as part of launch protocol, something which is communicated by title cards (the film was silent), and which Lang invented for dramatic effect in the film. Mechanical effects were provided by Lee Zavitz (who won an Academy Award for his contribution) with background scenery and sets created by Chesley Bonestell (credited as ‘technical adviser of astronomical art’: see some of his work here, and a superb picture series from Coronet magazine in 1950 here) and Ernst Fegté. Another film, Rocketship X-M (Kurt Neumann, 1950) was actually the first Hollywood movie centred on a lunar expedition to be released theatrically, rushed into production to capitalise on the pre-publicity for Destination Moon. While Destination Moon cost $586,000, Rocketship X-M was budgeted at just $94,000.  As such, it lacks the benefit of extended scientific research, and is more closely associated with space opera stories such as Flash Gordon. In Neumann’s film, the moon rocket is diverted from its course and eventually lands on Mars (the change in atmosphere signalled by Neumann’s decision to tint the film red for all sequences set on the surface of Mars, which were actually shot in Red Rock Canyon, Nevada), where the crew discover a race of beings who have survived an atomic holocaust which once decimated the planet’s super-intelligent inhabitants.

Destination Moon is intended as an educational rallying cry for the importance of lunar missions, at a time when they might have seemed a distant fantasy, and barely a constructive geo-political strategy in the aftermath of WWII. In seeking to assert the plausibility, as well as the military advantage, of space travel, the film aims at a realistic approach. It does this via appeals to scientific realism which are encoded in its diligent approach to design and special effects; the esteemed scientists named in the credits offer validation of its accuracy. Aside from a few inserts visible on a monitor inside the rocket, we never see the ship launched from Earth in Destination Moon – instead the camera focuses on the contorted faces of the astronauts, who become nauseous and disorientated by the first sensations of weightlessness. An attempt is being made at heightened realism by showing the unpleasant realities to be expected in the future of space flight – I don’t recall Flash Gordon ever suffering the after-effects of G-force or motion sickness. The illusion of weightlessness is created by suspending the actors from wires or positioning them on moving platforms with their feet out of shot. The design of the control room of the rocketship ‘Luna’ is a compromise between the requirements of authenticity and the necessity of photographic and aesthetic conditions; the panels in the consoles could be removed to allow the insertion of a camera or lighting rig (Heinlein quoted in Johnson 1972: 52-65).

When a Woody Woodpecker cartoon is shown to potential investors to persuade them of the viability of space travel, it fills the screen, addressing you, the viewer, as well as the bankers, thus nearly drawing a comparison between the two audiences who need to be educated and primed for a future space mission. It also handily explains how a rocket mission works so that the film’s later spectacular sequences can be measured against the scientific facts. It’s not all that rare to have these didactic set-ups in a spectacular cinema: see for example the explanatory film that plays early in a Jurassic Park, with some cartoon DNA telling you how it all works, or the rudimentary CG simulation that pre-visualises the ship sinking near the start of Titanic (1997). Le Voyage dans la Lune (I was trying to get through a whole blog post without mentioning it) begins with a scene of the planning of a moon mission, sketching a diagram on a blackboard – come to think of it, Destination Moon follows Georges Melies’ film quite closely, going through the same stages of planning, building, launching, exploration, danger, escape and return to Earth. Science fiction films are not averse to having a boffin step in and give a quick presentation to point how the physics works, and thus manage expectations and build anticipation. I like to call it the “flowchart” scene. Maybe you, dear reader, can think of some other examples. (Rocketship X-M’s equivalent expository scene can only muster some chalkboard sketches) The Woody Woodpecker scene doubles as a promotional short for one of the studio’s other entertainment franchises while making a sharp comment on the need to popularise scientific innovation to maintain uncritical public support and comprehension. When one private investor questions why the mission is necessary, General Feyer delivers the following speech:

We are not the only ones who know the moon can be reached. We are not the only ones who are planning to go there. The race is on, and we’d better win it, because there is absolutely no way to stop an attack from outer space. The first country that can use the moon for the launching of missiles will control the Earth.

Thus is forged a bond between big business and big (military) science, resulting in the reactionary, paranoid representation of technology that has traditionally been attributed to the alien invasion film, and all of it mediated by a chuckling cartoon bird. There’s another point of access for spectators who might be baffled by the science, in the form of Joe Sweeney, a blue-collar techie played by mini-Bogart Dick Wesson. Ignorant of how stuff works, and disbelieving of the possibilities, he provides an excuse for the scientists to explain what’s happening as they go along.

The space exploration film shows technology as a way of claiming territories outside the Earth in order to present a display of might to other nations, and by inviting the contemplation of expertly rendered sequences of space travel, it tacitly accepts the value of militarily-enforced scientific research. While planning to test a nuclear engine for the rocket, the mission team receive a letter from their governing body, declining the proposal to test on American soil, since: ‘While it is admitted that no real danger of atomic explosion exists, belief in such danger does exist in the public mind.’ This is probably the film’s most insidious act – to blame public scepticism about the value and safety of rocket research for hindering its unchecked development. Such stubborn faith in the nuclear project stands in stark contradistinction to the torrent of irradiated mutant mayhem that was to be unleashed in low-budget exploitation films such as Bride of the Atom (Ed Wood, 1955), The Amazing Colossal Man (Burt I. Gordon, 1957), Attack of the Crab Monsters (Roger Corman, 1957), The Creature With the Atom Brain (Edward L. Cahn, 1955), and The Cyclops (Burt I. Gordon, 1957).

Conquest of Space (Byron Haskin, 1954), inspired by the speculatively scientific 1949 book of the same name written by German émigré rocket scientist Willy Ley and illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, is a self-professed ‘story of tomorrow’, and a pseudo-sequel to Destination Moon, set in a future where space travel is more commonplace and straightforward. Rather than being a story of heroic pioneers, more drama is gleaned from details of the emotional effects of such excursions on the temperaments of the men who do so (there are still no women in space at this point). A planned Moon mission is revealed to be an expedition to Mars in search of natural resources to solve Earth’s energy needs. An attempt to sabotage the mission is made by its leader, General Merritt (Walter Brooke, an amazingly hard-working film and TV actor, perhaps best remembered as the family friend who only has one word, “Plastics” for Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate), ranting that exploring worlds beyond those provided by God must be a blasphemous transgression of some Edenic pact. In other words, the film’s only stated objections to the destructive, colonialist thrust of the military industrial complex are put into the mouth of an unhinged fanatic, safeguarding the patriotic ideals of the expedition as admirable goals.

More than any other film of the period about space exploration, Destination Moon is encoded with a sub-narrative about the connections between a lunar mission, national pride, commerce and the military-industrial complex. Less interested in the romance of space and more busily focused on its pragmatics, it even plays down human heroics in order to emphasise the spectacle of engineering. It’s too earnest in its intention to incorporate proper rocket science to be real thrill ride, but it’s a real timepiece, and some beautiful moments where the diligent design and adventurous spirit come together to produce a beautiful shot. It may just be me, but I love the bits where actors are substituted with little stop-motion puppets by George Pal. Nothing emphasises the vulnerability of the astronauts like their reduction to miniature models, a visual index of their subordination to the adventures of engineering and the loitering interest of military giants.

[See more of my frame grabs from Destination Moon in the slideshow below, or visit my Flickr page to view them full size and download them:]

Things Fall Apart: Deluge (1933)

Deluge was the debut feature film by a 23 year-old with the enviable name of Felix E. Feist. Sounds like a Marx Brothers pseudonym, but it’s the real name of the son of an MGM sales manager, who had an almost-there career in movies until he switched to TV production in the 50s. Deluge was believed to have been lost, until a print surfaced in Rome – accordingly, the suriving version of the film is dubbed into Italian. It is noteworthy mostly because of its spectacular scenes of tidal waves destroying Manhattan, proof that Roland Emmerich didn’t invent the wheel: he just enlarged and nuked it.

The film clips along at an alarming rate. Before the main characters have even been introduced, we’re into a montage of baffled scientists, international news reports of earthquakes, military aircraft being returned to base, preachers predicting the end of the world; this all establishes the communication networks, the babble of opinions that tells us this is global catastrophe affecting even the biggest structures of nation states.

The onscreen declaration at the start really dates this film:

Deluge is a tale of fantasy, an adventure in speculation, a vivid epic pictorialisation of an author’s imaginative flight. We the producers present it now purely for your entertainment, remembering full well God’s covenant with Noah.

Yeah, because nothing kicks off a bit of pure entertainment like a Bible reference.

Note to Roland Emmerich: in Deluge, the buildings start falling seven minutes in – within thirty seconds, millions are dead and the entire Western coast of North America has crumbled into the sea. The radio announces: “Indescribable disaster is causing havoc everywhere. There’s no cause for panic. Shut off all gas items.” Now that’s efficient.

There then follows a remarkable sequence in which all of New York is washed away by the sea. This footage was never lost with the rest of the movie (I wonder if it was a flood which washed all the prints away), because it was reused in the Dick Tracy serial, and in King of the Rocket Men. YouTube helpfully has a clip, though the quality is not stellar:

I wonder if the miniature sets were built especially for the film, or whether RKO had some leftovers from the same year’s King Kong that needed knocking down. It looks like an expensive miniature set, and presumably was destroyed all in one go. The earth trembles, buildings explode into chalky oblivion, and the sea rushes in to wipe out any last traces of life. After this rather definitive destruction, the film follows the plight of survivors. Although a couple of months has passed, within a couple of minutes of screentime, they’re fighting to the death over Claire (Peggy Shannon), who has taken the trouble to wash ashore wearing only her undies.

Shannon has an unhappy biography – a former Ziegfeld girl, she was signed up by Paramount in 1931 as a new “It” girl to replace Clara Bow (who had suffered a nervous breakdown), she drank herself to death in 1941. A couple of weeks later husband shot himself dead on the spot where he’d found her. Incidentally, Feist’s ex-wife Lisa Howard, an actress who became a hugely successful journalist and newscaster, also killed herself in tragic circumstances after suffering a miscarriage. Feist died of cancer a couple of weeks later. Wow, so much death. Back to happier business. In Deluge, Shannon gives a fine account of a self-reliant and feisty (see what I did there?) woman lumbered with the tiresome burden of being the last woman in sight. She sets up temporary home with Martin, who has been separated from his wife and children in the chaos, believing them to be dead.

Elsewhere, life is picking up again, in a sequence of vigenettes from small town life in places where banks, barbers and families are trying to reinstate their old communities. The Italian dub might even allow today’s viewers the fantasies that this is some apocalyptic neo-realist drama. But only briefly. Martin’s wife Helen (Lois Wilson) is still alive and hoping to be reunited with him, but Tom, yet another survivor, informs her that a new law (how quickly people take the chance to pass new laws in the wake of catastrophe!) commands that women of marrying age must marry. Ah, romance.

Tom has other things to take care of, too, leading a mob against the cruel Bellamy gang, who’ve been raping and looting like only a post-apocalyptic all-male crowd of burly guys can. Thus is dramatised the struggle between the opposing factions of society’s remnants – women get the raw deal: stuck between forced marriage and random attacks by randy thugs, they become the fetish objects through which the male survivors differentiate themselves from one another. There’s some nicely ambiguous drama when Helen and Martin are reunited at the end. Claire refuses to give him up just because his wife turns out to be alive – it’s not as if there’s still a church around to give a crap (I’m paraphrasing her words), and for a while it looks as though they’re about to find accommodation as a threeway family, but it all ends with Claire swimming off to sea. An earlier comment that, unable to become an aviator, she became a professional swimmer tells us that Claire is not necessarily swimming to her death, but it looks for all the world like a suicidal martyrdom, as if her brand of trouser-wearing femininity can’t be assimilated with the newest world order. She did earlier escape from one unsatisfactory settlement to another by stripping off and swimming to the next port of call, so I like to think she’s going to keep going until she finds a refashioned society that can incorporate her desires. In any event, God’s covenant with Noah isn’t helping much.

[See more images from Deluge in my slideshow below:]

2012’s Disaster Porn

When I find the time, I might post a response to uber-disaster movie, 2012. It might require me to confront head-on my unhealthy fascination with Roland Emmerich. I understand he’s making daft popcorn movies, but there’s something about his commitment to remaking the same film again and again, like he’s gradually honing his visions of the apocalypse into something bigger, makes him a lot more interesting than Michael Bay’s witless approach to blowing stuff up. If you remember the shot of Americans trying to scale the fences to escape into Mexico, you’ll know that Emmerich has a mischievous streak, which is present and correct in 2012 (except for an ending that is astonishingly nonchalant about the death of six billion people), but the trailer above, which came from Garrison Dean and io9, captures the tone of the film rather nicely. Not all amateur reworkings of movies are golden, but this funky 70s-style gem might say more than any 2000-word review I could come up with at this point. Enjoy….