PROLOGUE
Film critics get it wrong all the time. But even so, it’s hard to imagine that the profession has ever had a worse day on the job than on June 25, 1982. If you’re a fan of science fiction movies—or a fan of movies at all—that date marks an indelible turning point. A before-and-after snapshot of an industry in the midst of an almost-existential identity crisis that was long overdue for both an upheaval and an infusion of new blood.
It was on that day that two indisputable modern sci-fi classics were simultaneously released in theaters only to be met by critical venom and confounding indifference from moviegoers: Ridley Scott’s dystopian brainteaser, Blade Runner, and John Carpenter’s master class in subzero paranoia, The Thing. One had been adapted from an intellectually dense novel written by one of the most prolific and celebrated minds the genre ever produced; the other a reinterpretation of one of the most chillingly metaphorical movies of the black-and-white era. Both would end up being box office disappointments. Both would lead to almost paralyzing crises of confidence for the filmmakers who made them. And both would eventually be embraced as cinema masterpieces only years after the fact.
That doom-drenched day in late June would end up playing a significant, but only partial role in the larger story of the summer of 1982. During the eight weeks between May 16 and July 9, Hollywood’s major studios would release eight sci-fi/fantasy films that would not only go on to become cornerstones in the pop-culture canon four-plus decades on, they would also radically transform the way that the movie industry did—and continues to do—business, paving the way for our current all-blockbusters-all-the-time era. These eight films would look to brave new worlds and harrowingly unsettling ones. They would broaden the boundaries of what a genre that was once considered on the fringes of popular entertainment was truly capable of. And they would attempt to finally speak to and serve an audience that had been neglected and underserved for far too long. In short, these eight films would become a bridge that connected the European-influenced Hollywood New Wave of the late ’60s and ’70s with the shock-and-awe tentpole era of the ’90s and beyond. For better, and for worse, they would each in their own unique ways end up showing the movie business a new path forward.
…
It all started a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
When George Lucas’s Star Wars first stormed theaters on May 25, 1977, Hollywood had been caught napping, including that film’s own studio, 20th Century Fox. Although Fox had bankrolled the strange but relatively inexpensive (and therefore small-risk) space epic from the painfully shy director of American Graffiti, the studio didn’t truly know what it had on its hands. At least until ecstatic packs of teenagers and college students began camping out in lines across the country, hungry to get their retinas dazzled and their minds blown. And when it was over, two hours later, those very same teenagers would line up again. And again. They’d want to recapture that childlike magic, sharing it with their best friends, brothers, sisters, and even parents, who would then go on to do the same.
Soon, Star Wars would snowball into a phenomenon that it’s safe to say no one saw coming. Unlike Jaws two summers earlier, the only other blockbuster of the era that had managed to capture the public’s imagination in the same way, Lucas’s film wasn’t based on a buzzy, bestselling book. It didn’t come with a built-in, presold audience. No one knew what Jedis and Wookiees were. It was something utterly fresh and new. And its massive success was even more surprising because it belonged squarely to a genre that had always been dismissed by Hollywood as either box office poison or corny kids’ stuff. Seemingly overnight, it felt as if the conventional wisdom of the industry had never been more out of step and off base. Science fiction had all of a sudden become the new New Thing.
By the tail end of the ’70s, Hollywood would look very different from how it does today. Almost all the major studios’ corner offices were still occupied by graying executives, a generation that was still clinging to outdated traditions and operating on obsolete business models. These men—and they were all men—were decades older than Lucas and downright geriatric compared to the director’s legions of evangelical young fans. But even if these suits didn’t get Star Wars or what it meant in the grand scheme of things, they certainly understood that its success meant something. But what exactly? They would soon discover something that none of their audience studies and market research had told them: that there were millions of teenage sci-fi zealots around the world who now represented a giant untapped demographic of potential ticket buyers. A demographic that, it turned out, had been assembling at under-the-radar fan conventions like religious pilgrims to buy, sell, trade, and talk about comic books, the latest sci-fi and fantasy novels, and the minutiae of episode 13 of the second season of Star Trek.
One such annual meetup, which had begun in San Diego in 1970, would eventually become known as Comic-Con. And, in time, that gathering would explode into a mandatory, make-or-break station of the cross for every Hollywood publicity team itching to roll out their studio’s latest big-budget wares before rabid crowds that would initially measure in the hundreds, and then the hundreds of thousands. But before geek would go lucratively chic, the simmering sci-fi revolution was still an underground phenomenon. And the studios were still obliviously hitting the Snooze button unaware that they were leaving money—a lot of money—on the table by ignoring it.
This would all change with the hand-over-fist success of Star Wars. Initially, Lucas’s film was considered a fluke, a one-off curiosity. Over the years, there had always been science fiction movies that managed to cross over to the mainstream and strike a temporary nerve with the public—the Flash Gordon serials of the ’30s and ’40s, the atomic age monster cheapies of the ’50s, and the cosmic Planet of the Apes and Kubrickian head trips of the ’60s. But Star Wars signaled something on a different scale of magnitude. It wasn’t a fluke at all. It heralded nothing short of the arrival of a new kind of movie culture—fan culture. This audience seemed to possess a new and obsessive sense of passion and ownership about the films they lined up to embrace. They were smart and selective sensation seekers who wanted to be swept away to strange new worlds and be dazzled by sights and stories they’d never dreamed of before.
As luck would have it, a handful of visionary filmmakers were ready to give them more of exactly what they wanted. Writers and directors like Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone, John Milius, Melissa Mathison, John Carpenter, and George Miller knew that Star Wars was more than just a quirky accident because they had all grown up as science fiction and fantasy fans, too. They didn’t need anyone to tell them that Star Wars had tapped into a new audience because they were part of that audience. They remembered what it was like to have dismissive adults refusing to take the things they cared about seriously.
Terrified of letting this new zeitgeist pass them by, the studios would soon be forced to radically adapt in ways that made the Easy Rider New Hollywood revolution look as quaint as a Victorian tea party. Overnight, the anxious, trend-chasing gatekeepers of Hollywood’s dream factories would throw exorbitant sums of money at anything that looked like it might even remotely have the potential to be the next Star Wars. Sometimes these wagers would work (1978’s Superman); more often they didn’t (1979’s cornball Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and 1980’s joyless Flash Gordon reboot).
However, after two or three desperate, flailing years of trial and error, in the summer of 1982, Hollywood would finally get it right—and all at once. The studios were no longer holding their noses when they decided to finance big, ambitious sci-fi epics. They now had no choice but to embrace them. And suddenly, a genre that was once all-too-quickly dismissed as kids’ stuff began to actually wrestle with serious themes, intellectual nuance, directorial vision, and complex characters, all wrapped in the eye-candy packaging of the most dazzling special effects money could buy. In other words, it became art. This would, of course, be the case with Blade Runner and The Thing, but the summer of 1982 would also witness the release of such groundbreaking statements as The Road Warrior and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, and Tron, all of which had been given the go-ahead in the same post–Star Wars frenzy of fear and flop sweat.
Just five short years after Lucas warped audiences to light speed, these eight films would find themselves on the verge of pushing a genre that had once been considered marginal fully into the mainstream. The only problem was that all the studios had seemed to learn the exact same lesson at the exact same time. The marketplace was about to be flooded with daring sci-fi pictures that wouldn’t even have been given consideration five years earlier. And now, in the summer of 1982, all these films, filmmakers, and studios were about to find themselves on a collision course with one another, about to slug it out during the same brief two-month window. What should have been an embarrassment of riches was about to become a massive and messy eight-car pileup.
The eight fateful weekends chronicled in this book—and the colorful backstories that would lead up to them—mark a once-in-a-generation turning point in the history of movies. It was a narrow but magical window of time when a handful of audacious movies made by rule-breaking artists would redraw the Hollywood map. It didn’t always come with a happy ending, and this seismic period hasn’t been as mythologized as the height of the studio years in the early 1940s or the American New Wave of the 1970s, but the result was undeniable: a whole new formula had been created that would have ripple effects long into the next century and rewrite the cinematic rule book for decades to come.
There was a little bit of magic in that early clutch of post–Star Wars sci-fi films in 1982. Despite the apparent hunger for fantastical epics by the moviegoing public, these films were still huge creative and financial gambles for the studios. For every Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott—young directors riding high after the successes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien, respectively—there were plenty of risks taken on unknown and unproven up-and-comers. George Miller came out of the Australian independent scene to make his sequel to Mad Max; Arnold Schwarzenegger was a physically freakish bodybuilding star before he got the lead role in Conan the Barbarian; and so on. There was a freshness and a palpable energy as these filmmakers moved from the ragged edges of genre filmmaking to the thousand-watt spotlight of mainstream Hollywood.
Indeed, within a few years, movies would be green-lit or banished into turnaround based solely on their potential to become giant blockbusters. By the decade’s end, the bets would grow bigger and bigger until they grew so big that the investments poured into them no longer seemed to make sense. Movie budgets skyrocketed, becoming so astronomical that the films themselves, almost by necessity, became safer and more conservative, missing the whole point of what made the sci-fi revolution of 1982 so heady and thrilling in the first place.
By the dawn of the ’90s (continuing right up till the time this book is being written), what should have been a new golden age of sci-fi and fantasy cinema became a pop-culture beast that would devour itself to death and infantilize its audience in the process. Four-plus decades ago, we were entertained, enthralled, and enlightened. Today, we’re merely cudgeled into numb submission over and over again and treated like children being spoon-fed the same sound-and-fury pap. We are left to ask: What happens when a niche genre on the fringes of mass entertainment becomes the most dominant force in mass entertainment? The answer isn’t a sunny one. There becomes less and less room at the multiplex for diversity, choice, or anything that doesn’t come with the imprimatur of preexisting intellectual property cribbed from the pages of comic books, the sugar-shock world of video games, or the teeming shelves of toy stores. Somewhere along the way, profitability became confused with creativity. The movie calendar became one long endless summer—one giant popcorn cinematic universe where the popcorn has turned flavorless and stale. (Pg.7)
“The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982” by Chris Nashawaty.
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