Yesterday I lost one of the most important men in my life.
It wasn't a relative, or a boyfriend, or a buddy. It wasn't even someone I'd actually met, and I very much doubt that he'd ever heard of me. The closest I ever got to seeing him in the flesh was the summer night a few years ago when I was driving home from work and saw a good fifty people standing in line on Main Street, waiting for a chance to see a new exhibit and meet the artist.
I nearly stopped. I wanted to stop and take my place in the line. I was so tempted even though I couldn't possibly afford any of the photographs, or probably even the exhibit book -
I was still recovering from surgery a few weeks earlier, though and tired easily. So I drove on, and drove home, and missed my chance to meet someone whose work profoundly changed my life.
I speak of course of Leonard Nimoy.
I first saw him in 1967, when my father I watched the second season premiere of Star Trek. Trek fen will remember that this was "Amok Time," the Theodore Sturgeon-penned episode where Spock quite literally went into rut and either had to marry or die. Perfectly directed and beautifully acted (particularly by William Shatner, Majel Barrett, and of course Leonard Nimoy), it was one of the best Trek installments ever, second only to "City on the Edge of Forever."
It was also terrifying, at least to seven year old me. I had been taking my nightly bath during the first half of the episode and showed up during Spock's disastrous wedding, when he was right in the middle of the plak tow, or blood fever. I sat on Dad's lap, petrified, as the rest of the story spun out: lust, rejection, combat, seeming death, trickery, and ultimate triumph and a happy ending. I don't remember much beyond asking Dad about "the man with the funny ears," but I do know I didn't see another episode of Star Trek until 1973, when I was old enough to understand what was going on.
That was when I fell in love with Mr. Spock.
It was October of 1973, and Star Trek was in the midst of its transformation from "interesting but failed network series" to "syndicated cult phenomenon." I was over at my aunt Betty's house, everyone but my uncle Lou was out, and as Lou settled down in his recliner to watch whatever was on WPXI in the late afternoon, I plopped myself down on the sofa, pulled out whatever book I was reading, and figured I'd join him.
I didn't read the book that afternoon. Instead, I found myself mesmerized by "Operation: Annihilate!," which concerned squishy mutated evil brain cells grafting themselves onto people's nervous systems and killing them. They'd already wiped out most of a Federation colony, including Captain Kirk's brother, and now he had to find a solution to save Kirk's nephew Peter, the remaining colonists, and Mr. Spock.
Spock was not perhaps the beau ideal of thirteen year old girls in the early 1970's. Quiet, saturnine, intelligent, sarcastic, clearly an adult, just as clearly not a "cute boy" with fluffy hair and bell bottoms, Spock was like no other character I'd ever seen on television. He was different - very different - but in a good way, and by the time "Operation: Annihilate!" ended, I had fallen and fallen hard for a green-blooded fictional character as personified by a middle aged actor from Boston.
My love for Star Trek, and for Mr. Spock, have endured ever since. I no longer binge-watch episodes, or write Trek fanfiction, but I can still quote large sections of the dialogue from the classic episodes. My love of sleek, simple clothing and slightly exaggerated eye makeup comes straight from Lieutenant Uhura, my entry into fandom began with a Star Trek convention in New York in 1979, and my first attempt at a novel was a piece of fanfiction that I wrote in secret after Mum was in bed.
Most important of all, my belief in a society that mixed races, ethnic groups, religions, and nationalities in harmony, in diversity as a good thing, began with Star Trek. It was one of the very first TV series to have a multiracial cast playing non-stereotyped roles, and as corny as the scripts and dialogue may seem today, seeing an African woman, an Asian man, a Scotsman, a Southern gentleman, and a Russian as colleagues - nay, as friends - was a revelation to a girl from a white upper middle class background.
This is why Leonard Nimoy's death hit me so hard yesterday. He was my favorite, my first true crush, and I have never ceased to admire him and his body of work. Actor, writer, director, photographer - he did excellent work in all these fields, and was opening new gallery shows as recently as 2010. Even his singing and poetry, neither outstanding, were firmly in the "so bad they're good" tradition I love so much. Losing Leonard Nimoy, losing Spock - it hurt, and it still does, and I'm not ashamed to say that I almost broke down at my desk when I saw the news.
I couldn't find it in myself to be funny last night, or even marginally clever. Next week I should be fine, which means you'll get to read about humans with very, very special relationships with their animals. Tonight, though - tonight you'll get a Mourning Rewind as I think about the actor, and the character, that exerted more influence on my life than anything except possibly The Lord of the Rings.
Return with me, then, to the early days of these diaries...to the fall of 2011, when I wrote about those bland little novelizations of movie scripts that used to show up a few weeks or months ahead of a major motion picture. One of the novelizations was anything but bland, while the other was a hugely disappointing adaptation of - you guessed it - the latest Star Trek film....
I almost didn’t see Star Wars when it first came out in 1977.
That wasn’t for lack of desire. I’d read the Time cover story, seen all the rapturous reviews, and hummed along with the disco version of the cantina theme, just like what seemed to be every other person in America that summer. The problem was that I was 16, didn’t have a car, and was dependent on my relatives if I wished to go to the movies.
This may not sound like much of an obstacle until one takes my family situation into account. My father had died a couple of years earlier, dealing my mother a blow from which she never entirely recovered; she kept our house thanks to the skin of her teeth and the generosity of her elder brother, but said elder brother, plus another bachelor brother and her only sister lived less than two miles away, and it was tough for her to resist their warnings about the dangers of life for a young widow and a teenage girl. We socialized mainly with her siblings and rarely went out with others, especially in the evenings, and since Betty wasn’t much for that whacky scifi stuff it looked as if I’d have to wait a year or two until Star Wars premiered on television to see it at all.
Fortunately Mum seemed to realize just badly I wanted to see this movie – remember, she was the one who had pretended for years not to see the collection of Star Trek novels and the battered notebooks full of extraordinary bad fanfiction. I’m not sure just how she did it, but she managed to talk Betty into seeing Star Wars while it was still in the theaters, and my uncle Oscar, patient as ever, agreed to drop us off at the theater while he went to the office for a couple of hours.
And so I finally got to see Luke, Leia, Obi-Wan, R2D2, Chewbacca, and the Death Star about two months after the rest of the country.
I loved it, of course. Who didn’t? The special effects were stunningly realistic, especially for that pre-computer age, and if Mark Hamill wasn’t precisely an Oscar contender, Alec Guinness was. Add in John Williams’ legendary score, Harrison Ford’s break out turn as Han Solo, and more swashbuckling than one could shake a lightsaber at, and it would have been hard not to enjoy the result. Even Betty liked C3PO, quite possibly because he complained more than she did.
I didn’t become a Star Wars junkie - Star Trek will always have first place in my heart, even if I wanted to stick crochet hooks in my ears at the “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” scene in the fifth movie – but I did acquire the soundtrack when I went off to college, and my otherwise very ordinary dorm room soon sported a Star Wars poster over my desk. And when Alan Dean Foster, author of the Star Trek Log adaptations of the animated Trek episodes, was announced as the author of the first stand alone Star Wars novel, of course I bought a copy.
It was called The Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, and it should have been a fun, frothy romp. Originally intended as the basis for a low-budget sequel to Star Wars if the film had tanked at the box office, it sends Luke and Leia to a new planet to try to bring it into the Rebel Alliance. They undergo various adventures and meet new friends in their effort to acquire a Force-amplifying crystal before Darth Vader can, and if most of the action takes place on a misty, vaguely described planet, well, that would have saved a lot of money if it had been filmed. There were even hints of the romance that was still permissible in those pre-“Luke and Leia are twins” days, when one could legitimately hope that the farm boy and the princess would eventually be more than good friends.
It’s too bad that the book just wasn’t all that good. Oh, it wasn’t terrible; the plot worked well enough, and Foster was a competent enough writer that the book held my interest well enough that I did finish it. Where it fell down was in the characterization, especially Leia, who went from a tough, spirited fighter to a snippy brat who freaked out because she couldn’t swim instead of simply telling Luke the truth.
It was enough of a disappointment that it made me cautious of most movie tie-ins, even for films that I greatly enjoyed. There have been some exceptions, most notably Vonda McIntyre’s wonderful Star Trek adaptations and John Gardner’s novelization of License to Kill, but by and large I ignore anything based directly on a movie or television script.
Some novelizations, however, are so bad they cannot be ignored. Just as a truly good film like When Harry Met Sally or Goldfinger makes everything else in its genre look like very small beer indeed, a truly lousy novelization makes similar productions look like Pulitzer Prize winners.
In short, even in a field of forgettable, throwaway paperbacks, there are Movie Tie-Ins So Bad They’re Good.
%%%%%
As I said, I haven’t bothered with many movie tie-ins. But there are two that have bestrode their narrow field like very Colossi of Crap, so terribly written that they are forever burned into my synapses. One is a masterpiece of bad taste that rivals the film that inspired it, while the second had everything going for it and still fell flat on its warp core:
Gore Vidal's Caligula, by William Howard, based on the screenplay by Gore Vidal. Franco Rossellini wanted to make a mini-series. Gore Vidal wanted to see his script produced. Bob Guccione wanted to make a movie. The three decided to collaborate, and after hiring (and firing) some of the best creative minds in Hollywood and Europe, they dropped one of the greatest cinematic bombs of all time on the public.
That film was Caligula, and it should have been far, far better than it was. Vidal was a brilliant novelist and scriptwriter who had worked on I Accuse!, Suddenly, Last Summer, and Ben-Hur. Franco Rossellini was the son of the legendary Italian director Roberto Rossellini and had worked as a producer for the previous ten years. And Bob Guiccione, founder of Penthouse, was wealthy, flamboyant, and more than ready to expand his media empire to include film as well as magazines.
And at first the collaboration seemed poised to make something entirely new: a lavish, classy, high-toned movie with explicit sex. Fellini's production director, double Oscar winner Danilo Donati, was hired to build the elaborate, historically accurate sets to serve as a backdrop for a cast that included luminaries such as Sir John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell, and Helen Mirren. Legendary directors John Huston and Lina Wertmuller were approached to direct Vidal's script, which promised to combine history with pornography. The production would be filmed in Rome itself, at the same studio that had seen the filming of Cleopatra over a decade earlier.
Unfortunately for Caligula, the problems started almost immediately. Huston, who likely had had his fill of sex romps and Gore Vidal after his infamous turn in Myra Breckenbridge, declined to direct. Ditto Lina Wertmuller, who was still dealing with feminist backlash from her infamous "Communist beats a rich woman until she loves him" film Swept Away by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. Guccione and Rossellini had to turn to little known director Tinto Brass, best known for something called Salon Kitty, about a Nazi brothel. The production schedule was much too short for such an ambitious film, and the horrified Donati had to scrap many of his sets in favor of elaborate fabric backgrounds, surreal matte paintings, mirrors, and similar tricks that could be set up and torn down quickly. Several of the actors, including original female lead Maria Schneider, were uncomfortable with the explicit sex, and Schneider quickly was replaced with newcomer Teresa Ann Savoy.
Worst of all, Brass hated Vidal's script. Claiming that it was written by "an aging arteriosclerotic," he insisted on five rewrites, none of which met his high standards. Eventually he threw Vidal off the set after Vidal called directors "parasites" in an interview with Time, then rewrote the script himself in collaboration with lead Malcolm McDowell. Alas, this draft didn't work any better than Vidal's attempts, and Brass himself was fired during post-production due to huge cost overruns, the inexplicable choice of Roman criminals to play Roman senators, and the casting of what Guccione called "fat, ugly, and wrinkled old women" instead of Guccione's luscious Penthouse Pets for the sex scenes.
The final cut, prepared by Guccione's friend Giancarlo Lui from Vidal's original script, was a choppy, poorly shot, pornographic mess. McDowell played Caligula as if he'd taken massive quantities of drugs which is understandable given the quality of the film, Gielgud and O'Toole were utterly wasted, and poor Helen Mirren, in the thankless role of Caligula's wife, was reduced to taking a part in Peter Sellars' awful Fu Manchu movie for her next role. Poor Anneka Di Lorenzo, who played Messalina, sued Guiccione for using hardcore footage of her and ultimately only worked in one other movie, her promising career derailed.
As for Gore Vidal, he was so horrified at the finished product that he agreed to accept a kill fee in lieu of his contractually guaranteed (and ultimately non-existent) percentages to have his name removed from the film. The public stayed away in droves, as did the critics (Roger Ebert walked out after two hours), and the movie, which Newsweek characterized as "a two-and-one-half-hour cavalcade of depravity that seems to have been photographed through a tub of Vaseline," was one of the biggest duds of the 1970s. The producers, desperate to salvage something, cut, and recut, and recut again to suit the alleged tastes of varying audiences, ultimately producing no fewer than fourteen versions of Caligula with varying degrees of sexual content and coherence, and if you're really curious about the results, a handful of non-explicit clips are on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
In short, Caligula the movie was a disaster.
And then there's the novelization.
Written by one William Howard, who seems to have specialized primarily in non-fiction (quite possibly thanks to this book), the novel is replete with sex (much of it incredibly unerotic), politics (much of it based on Suetonius), violence (almost all of it horrendous), and madness (much of it Caligula's, but the rest of the characters aren't precisely models of sanity, either). My college roommate owned a copy of this horror, God knows why, and I still remember thinking "this is really, really gross" during the orgy scenes, which is not what one should be thinking about explicit sex produced under the aegis of a pornographic magazine like Penthouse.
The novelization was supposedly based on Vidal's original draft, and if the claim is even partially true, it's no surprised that Tinto Brass once said, ""If I ever really get mad at Gore Vidal, I'll publish his script." Rape, castration, incest, rape of an innocent young couple on their wedding night by the demented Emperor, murder, suicide, more incest, orgies, torture, did I say rape?, the gruesome deaths of Caligula and his family - it's all there, until the reader either shoves the book into a deep dark closet where no one but the groaning spiders of the workhouse will ever find it, laughs hysterically at how bad it is, or has to read Winnie the Pooh in a frantic (and fruitless) effort to scour the memory of this alleged entertainment from the brain.
Fortunately Gore Vidal's Caligula is long out of print, although copies do pop up on Ebay from time to time. They're collector's items now, selling for around $30, and usually are seen in connection with novels actually written by Gore Vidal, like Burr, Lincoln, or Kalki. Vidal himself refuses to discuss Caligula (and probably wishes his name were off the book as well as the film), but thanks to the magic of IMDB, Wikipedia, and the long memories of bad film fanatics, it will forever be be a huge bloodstain on the family eschutcheon despite his best efforts to live it down.
Star Trek, by Alan Dean Foster, based on the screenplay by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
This should have been wonderful.
After all, it was based on J.J. Abrams' thrilling 2009 reboot of Star Trek. That alone is no guarantee of quality - look at all the mediocre "as based on the movie" paperbacks that get remaindered every year - but the bones of a worthwhile adaptation were certainly there. Even better, the studio had chosen Alan Foster, author of dozens of popular SF and fantasy novels in his own right, to adapt the film to book form. In addition to his own work, and significant contributions to the Star Wars franchise above and beyond Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Foster is also known as a reliable producer of movie adaptations. Most of these have been science fiction or fantasy, but he also wrote the novelization of Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider. He's prolific, steady, and if not exactly a stylist, the reader can usually count on him producing a readable, entertaining book, whether original work or a souvenir of a favorite film.
More than that, Alan Dean Foster has a long and important association with Star Trek itself. His novelizations of the animated series, the Star Trek Log books, were popular enough that Gene Roddenberry was able to point to them as proof of the continued viability of the franchise when Paramount decided to revive Star Trek in the late 1970s. He was so closely associated with Star Trek that his story "In Thy Image" was the original inspiration for what became Star Trek: The Motionless Picture, and if that movie wasn't a cinematic masterpiece, it paved the way for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which is one of the best SF films of its day.
In short, Alan Dean Foster knows Star Trek as well as anybody alive, the characters and the universe and the planets and the hardware and the Enterprise herself. Short of pulling out a Ouija board and hiring the ghosts of Gene and Majel Roddenberry, it's hard to imagine anyone better qualified to write the novelization of the newest incarnation of the beloved franchise. Foster was even shown a rough cut of the film before starting work on the novelization, which is all but unheard of, and though he was on a tight deadline and was simultaneously writing the novelization of Terminator Salvation, this is a man who's written over 100 books and presumably is used to juggling multiple deadlines. Trek fen young and old could rest easy, knowing that someone who actually understood Star Trek was writing the permanent record of the Abrams film.
It should have been wonderful.
It wasn't.
The book starts with what is presumably a deleted scene, of a star that goes supernova at the same time that Spock is born billions and billions and billions of light years away. "Such is the balance of existence," says the authorial voice, and there follows a long, wordy paragraph about how the birth of a human/Vulcan hybrid was just as remarkable as a star going nova. There's a sentimental but still rather nice scene of Sarek and Amanda bonding over the birth of their son, where every Trekker's hope that Sarek does indeed love his wife is finally fulfilled.
And then the book shifts to the actual opening of the film, Kirk's birth on the Kelvin as the Romulan ship Narada attacks, and the wordy but acceptable prose suddenly develops the same dull, leaden clunk of a saucer separating from a warp nacelle.
Here are just as few examples:
Captain Robau of the Kelvin musing about the inadequacies of twenty-third century technology, where evidently they still haven't perfected voice recognition technology despite breaking the light barrier:
One day, Robau told himself, we'll be able to do away completely with the primitive inputting of information via repeated digital impression and just talk to a ship's central data processing system about everything. But not yet. Voice recognition technology was fine for handling basic ship operations, but not for handling the immense complexities involved in directing the more intricate activities of a starship. A command wrongly interpreted by a toaster might result in burnt toast. A command wrongly interpreted by a starship as powerful as the Kelvin might result in consequences rather more serious. Starfleet was working on the problem, he knew, and such technology was improving by the day. For example, there was a new ship under construction that...
Young James Kirk's first meeting with Dr. McCoy, who doesn't even get the proper lead-in to his nickname:
Smiling, the younger man extended a man. "Jim Kirk.
The exasperated physician eyed him warily, then nodded and took the proferred hand. "Leonard McCoy."
"Took everything?"
McCoy nodded again. "Yean - everything of mine, including in the planet. All I got left is the skeleton, and I wouldn't be surprised if she put a lien out on that."
Cadet Jim Kirk making love to Gaila, Cadet Uhura's roommate:
Though the multiple kisses Kirk was deploying along the length of the body beneath him were going off like very tiny photon torpedoes, neither they nor the effect they were having were simulated. The exquisite feminine shape bucked and twisted beneath his hands and his lips. Moaning, she forced herself to push his head away as she raised her head to look down at him. Her eyes were bright, her lips red, and her skin as green as the fabled city of Oz.
The whole book is like this: dialogue that utterly fails to sound like it was spoken by any one, anywhere, of any species, ever; descriptions with all the internal rhythm and grace of
Swan Lake danced in quicksand; metaphors that sound like they came from the keyboard of a 15 year old fanfic writer, not a seasoned professional with four decades' experience. Even the best passages aren't easy to read, and the worst are agonizing.
Worse are the mistakes and inconsistencies, like Kirk getting up from his chair and then getting up again without sitting down a few paragraphs later, or being described as having brown eyes, despite being played by an actor with startlingly blue eyes in this movie. It's as if Foster has forgotten that this time around someone other than William Shatner is playing the gallant galactic hero. And surely a working writer since the early 1970s would know that a character who says "Captain" on one page wouldn't address the very same person as "Keptin" two pages later.
Some of this is almost certainly due to lack of time; Foster was on a very tight deadline trying to finish this novelization and Terminator Salvation, plus whatever original writing was in the queue. But that doesn't explain why Captain Pike's first encounter with Nero, the insane captain of the Narada, goes from this:
“Hello.”
“I am Captain Christopher Pike. To whom am I speaking?”
“I am called Nero.”
in the movie to this:
“To whom am I speaking?”
“My formal designation is Oh’ren, with an accent and syllabic stress that is difficult for the human larynx to deal with. As it is not uncommon, reversing and softening the entire process yields a name you can pronounce. Address me as Nero.”
in the novelization. Remember, Foster had actually seen a rough cut of
Star Trek, not just the script, and presumably had heard the actual dialogue. He knew that Chris Pine has blue eyes, and that Captain Robau's first name on screen is "Richard," not "Pierre."
That's not to say that the book didn't make money (it did), or that the general public didn't like it (a lot of people did, especially the audio version read by Zachary Quinto). It's better than the average production line novelization, but compared to the tautly directed, vastly entertaining film, the book is a huge disappointment.
It should have been wonderful. It wasn't. And that's why I'm writing about it tonight.