|
|
Hollywood Spin
|
|
Before Tomorrow
The global disaster movie genre has come a long way since H.G. Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898 and Orson Welles broadcast it in 1938. Or has it?
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
By Richard Horgan
|
In End of the World, the 1931 French film that launched the global disaster movie genre, citizens of the earth try to live out their wildest dreams after learning the planet would be pulverized within 10 days by a giant asteroid. On the other hand, Hollywood was more generous a few decades later with its first full-fledged lights out offering, The Night the World Exploded, giving William Leslie and the rest of the cast of this Columbia Pictures production 28 days before facing a series of cataclysmic worldwide earthquakes.
And so, right off the bat, the first big difference between The Day After Tomorrow and some of its global disaster movie predecessors is that the new Memorial Day weekend blowout from German-born filmmaker Roland Emmerich shrinks its global warming chaos into a mere two nights and three fright-filled days. This has as much to do with an interest in catering to the shortened attention spans of today’s movie audiences as it does with Emmerich’s predilection for calendar day driven plots and marketing hooks.
Irwin Allen, the late producer and director dubbed ‘The Master of Disaster’ in the 1970s because of his twin hits The Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno, once remarked in an interview with Photoplay Magazine that, “As long as there are human beings on this planet there's going to be tragedy in real life. People call them disaster films, but they're really high adventure with elements of crisis and tragedy in them."
Although Allen never made a global disaster epic, he perfected – in the wake of Airport in 1970 - a formula of claustrophobic settings, clever casting (remember O.J. Simpson and Fred Astaire in The Towering Inferno?) and real-time plots that matched the era’s relatively limited reach when it came to special effects. As more recent entrants such as Deep Impact, Armageddon and The Core have shown, the scope of convincing big screen disaster can now embrace far more than burning skyscrapers or swarming bees.
In fact, somewhat ironically, Hollywood has decided it is time to revisit the realm of Emmerich’s first mayhem movie, Independence Day, with plans in 2006 for a Steven Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise and Wolfgang Petersen’s alien attack saga Ender’s Game. There is also a project floating around based on The Forge of God, a Greg Bear global alien destruction novel that was initially adapted for the screen by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down).
Getting back to Allen, it’s fascinating to think that a man who majored at Columbia University in journalism and marketing, was a literary agent and wrote a syndicated column about the movie industry entitled ‘Hollywood Merry-Go-Round,’ would have such a low-key approach to publicizing his own movies. Even though he clearly predated the era of HBO First Look specials and Ain’t It Cool News script reviews, it begs the question – Why did Allen prefer to let the movies do the talking?
On the Internet fan site The Irwin Allen News Network, Allen’s costume designer Paul Zastupnevich answers with: “Irwin never liked to reveal any of the secrets. He always said that if they [the audience] know how it's being done, then the magic is gone. He always felt that the illusion was more important than the overall effect."
Another apparent difference between Allen and Emmerich is that the former was a much harder person to work with on set. His reputation for being difficult falls into that domain of perfectionists driving others to fulfill a very specific creative vision. Says Zastupnevich: “Irwin was always breathing down the director's neck! He had his finger on everything."
After The Poseidon Adventure, changes were made to U.S. maritime safety regulations and Allen was given honorary sea captain status in 20 countries. In the wake of The Towering Inferno, the filmmaker was similarly made an honorary fire chief in 73 American cities for shining a light on the dangers of using elevators during a high rise fire. The only thing Emmerich has to show for his disaster trilogy of Independence Day, Godzilla and The Day After Tomorrow is a sh**storm of piggy backing scientists, climatologists and web sites such as GetTheRealScoop.org.
Remember last year, when former Vice President Al Gore addressed a global warming conference in New York City on what turned out to be the coldest day of the 2002-2003 winter? Well, that’s right up there in terms of timing with the current chorus of complaints against The Day After Tomorrow for condensing all that we know about the threat of global warming into a few melodramatic days.
To wit, all anyone will remember about the dreadful NBC earthquake May sweeps miniseries 10.5 is that it hooked in around 20 million viewers for both nights, the most for a teleplay on that network since its 1999 offering Noah’s Ark. Left behind are the critics who held their noses and the scientist who claimed that an earthquake of the magnitude depicted on the program could only happen on a planet with a circum~ference one and a half times greater than the earth’s.
Were academics protesting back in 1965 when Crack of the World suggested the earth could be split in half by a scientist’s ill-conceived experiment? No. Did astronomers question the veracity of the planet Zydra, the penultimate destination of a chosen few in the 1951 meteorite flick When Worlds Collide? No.
As the effects, budgets and buckets of popcorn have gotten bigger, so has the perceived camp value of disaster movies. What was once a cautionary tale about deluxe ocean liners became, a few years ago in Chicago, the musical spoof POSEIDON!, a Hell in a Handbag Productions concoction featuring songs such as “In the Water (I’m a Very Skinny Lady)” and “Panties (What Else Do I Need?).” Even Will Smith had that mano-a-mano stare down with an opposing alien in Independence Day before pulverizing the mother ship.
The audience has moved from a sensibility of ‘What if?’ to ‘How will they show that?’ Emmerich can get away with casting Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal in The Day After Tomorrow - certainly good actors but not necessarily marquee leads - because they are not the film’s main attraction. Rather, they are supporting players in service of expertly rendered frost, tidal waves and collapsing glaciers.
Missing from Emmerich’s latest epic is a sentimental song on the scale of Maureen McGovern, who won Oscars for “(There’s Got to Be a) Morning After,” the love theme to The Poseidon Adventure, and “We May Never Love this Way Again,” her equally intimate song for The Towering Inferno. Emmerich has never gone for the hit single approach and so we must do without, say, Sarah McLaughlin counterpunching the effects work with “The Warming of our Hearts,” or some other such ditty.
And considering Fred Astaire has appeared in two of the very best disaster movies - On The Beach and the aforementioned The Towering Inferno - perhaps Emmerich has also erred in terms of his casting of government leaders. Although Bill Pullman (President, Independence Day), Michael Lerner (Mayor Ebert (!), Godzilla) and Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh (scheming VP, The Day After Tomorrow) are all solid actors, they lack the Mount Rushmore quality that a Hollywood icon could have injected into Emmerich’s formula. We’re talking here about actors of the ilk of Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas or John Forsythe.
Finally, despite their enduring and relatively critic-proof popularity, disaster movies have yet to receive a proper chronicle of record. A few years ago, British author Stephen Keane came out with Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe, which is about as definitive as the ending of Miracle Mile.
Still, Keane does put forth an interesting theory that Bruce Willis has made far more disaster movies than Armageddon. The author argues that Die Hard and its sequels are direct replications of Irwin Allen’s 1970’s moviemaking principles, meaning that the upcoming Die Hard 4: Die Hardest, due out in 2005, is an ironic echo of the maestro of the genre.
| For Allen, who died of a heart attack in 1991, was always adamantly opposed to sequels or remakes of his successful films. However, things continue to come full circle in that regard. A new Lost in Space TV series involving John Woo is in the works and, just a few months ago, it was announced that Troy’s Wolfgang Petersen and reality TV guru Mike Fleiss (The Bachelor) plan to produce a big screen remake of The Poseidon Adventure.
|
No word yet on whether the protagonist will get to vote off his or her least favorite passengers.
[Every Wednesday, Hollywood Spin takes an opinionated look at Hollywood media, PR and marketing related events. To reach the author, please email rhorgan@filmstew.com. To comment on this week’s topic, please go to our Hollywood Spin Discussion Board.]
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|