The early summer of 1982 was a very busy time on America’s movie screens.
Six major studios released eight sci-fi and fantasy films between May 16 and July 9, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line — from “ET” to “The Thing,” from “career-founding failures to career-making triumphs,” writes former Entertainment Weekly film critic Chris Nashawaty in his new book, “The Future Was Now, Mad Men, Mavericks, and the Hollywood of hijacked by summer sci-fi (Flatiron).
Movies were ready to “fight and jockey for the attention of the same audience. The only problem was that there would only be so much attention — and extra money — to go around,” notes Nashawaty in his insightful account of the making and unmaking of ET the Extra Terrestrial (Universal); “Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan”, (Paramount); “Poltergeist”, (MGM); “Conan the Barbarian”, (Universal); “Tron”, (Disney); “Blade Runner”, (Warner Bros.); “The Road Warrior,” (Warner Bros.) and “The Thing,” (Universal).
Of the pack, Steven Spielberg’s “ET” would reign supreme, with audiences responding like “wide-eyed kids,” as “ET” It immediately became America’s #1 blockbuster and with a prescient prediction that Spielberg was on his way to becoming “the most effective folk artist of all time.”
Not everyone agreed.
Early on, Frank Price, the head of Columbia Pictures, which had invested roughly $1 million in the film’s development, saw the script and thought it was a “weird Walt Disney movie,” the author writes, and set the extraterrestrial child of Spielberg. in the “twist black hole”.
A “thrilled” Spielberg reached out to Universal boss Sidney Sheinberg, his longtime mentor and backer on Spielberg’s 1975 monster hit “Jaws,” and Sheinberg was immediately on board, the author writes. Off “ET”, the rest was box office and critical acclaim history.
Spielberg made ET and the supernatural horror film Poltergeist, while also producing the latter. He chose Tobe Hooper of the horror film “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” as the director.
According to the author, Hooper would have “little actual involvement” in the development of the story, and rumors would spread throughout Hollywood that he was not actually directing the film, that Spielberg was “doing all the shooting.”
Spielberg received “a rare public black eye” in Hollywood, having long been treated as “the world’s most decorated Boy Scout,” the author writes.
In the monster box office race that was the summer of 1982, The Thing would come in last.
A remake of the 1951 horror classic, it was director John Carpenter’s dream project and faced a big problem at Universal: how to make it better than the original about a creature that was discovered frozen in ice near a research station in the Antarctic and comes for the bitter life.
The script—Carpenter’s first big-budget, major-studio assignment with a $15 million financing and Kurt Russell as the leading man—was “bloody,” writes Nashawaty, who notes that a tenth of budget was spent on “gross products”. ” prosthetics and other effects.
Filmed near the Canada-Alaska border, temperatures dipped to minus 20 degrees during the day, making filming difficult for the cast and crew. But Carpenter was thrilled with the film’s progress; Down the road, however, his contract with the studio would be “torn to shreds” and he would be “taken off the studio’s game” due to poor box office performance, the book details.
IN “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” Leonard Nimoy’s Spock was brought back to Paramount by director Nicholas Meyer, “grabbing pennies like a miser” and bringing the film “at a fraction of its blockbuster-but- the unwitting ancestor,” notes Nashawaty.
However, the studio was shocked when Spock’s big death scene was revealed by Johnny Carson during his late-night TV monologue.
Meanwhile, Nimoy “was almost looking for an excuse note to do” the death scene. He was so overcome with emotion “he almost walked off the lot,” Nimoy later said.
Studio executives decided that Spock’s death was “too final” and that the film “needed a revival”; the principal disagreed “but there was little he could do about it except kick and scream, which he did.”
A new ending was filmed and Spock stayed with us, making more sequels possible.
Conan the Barbarian,” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a warrior, first appeared in pulp-fiction magazine stories in the 1930s. By the time the Austrian muscleman was signed by independent producer Ed Pressman, a whopping four million Conan comic books were being snapped up by fans.
While waiting for filming to begin, Schwarzenegger spent his days “punishing himself” at Gold’s Gym and his nights “stimulating and satisfying his insatiable sexual appetite,” Nashawaty writes.
Pressman’s first choice for screenwriter was John Milius, a real-life “macho” guy who would often claim that his three goals in life “were girls, gold and guns.”
When Milius initially turned down Pressman’s writing offer due to another commitment, hot new screenwriter Oliver Stone signed on. But there was one problem: “he used drugs quite freely, including cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms.”
As the author notes, “coke lines were as common as canapés and crackers at parties in the Hollywood Hills during the era.” Stone’s drug-fueled writing was easily discernible in his “crazy 140-page original script for Conan,” Nashawaty writes. “It reads like the work of someone who has been up for two weeks straight.”
Meanwhile, there have been financial problems, mostly based on Stone’s over-the-top script, according to the author.
“Paramount had estimated that Conan would end up costing more than $70 million rather than Pressman’s estimated $15 million. Frightened, the studio backed out” of the deal. As luck would have it, producer Dino De Laurentiis had been on a “personal quest” for the rights to Conan. Furthermore, De Laurentis had Milius already under contract for his next picture. De Laurentiis also convinced Pressman to sell the rights to Conan, and he became the new executive producer.
Milius wasted no time complaining that Stone’s script read like “a dream on acid” and was unusable, while Stone thought of Milius as a “likable egomaniac”.
As for Stone’s script, Milius cut it in half, tailoring it to keep Schwarzenegger’s hard-to-understand dialogue to a minimum. Despite their creative differences, however, Milius and Stone shared writing credits for the film.
With the new script and De Laurentiis on board, Universal greenlit the picture with a budget of $17 million, and everything looked great.
Of the eight science fiction and fantasy films that hit the big screen in the summer of 1982, Nashawaty writes, “Conan” ranked fourth, with $39.6 million by the end of its initial run, well behind first place. “ET,” with a whopping $359.2 million at the box office; “Star Trek II” was second, with $79.6 million, followed by “Poltergeist” with $76.6 million. “Tron” was fifth, with $33 million followed by “Blade Runner” with $27.6 million and “The Road Warrior” with $23.7 million. John Carpenters “The Thing” only brought in $19.6 million.
The author maintains the barrage of sci-fi and fantasy films that summer “would push the boundaries of what a genre once considered on the fringes of popular entertainment was really capable of…For better or worse, they would in ways their uniqueness ends up showing the movie business a new way forward.”
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