The early summer of 1982 was a very spacey time on America’s movie screens.
Six major studios released a whopping eight science fiction and fantasy films between May 16 and July 9, with hundreds of millions of dollars riding on the line — from “E.T.” to “The Thing,” from “career-grounding flops to career-making triumphs,” writes former Entertainment Weekly film critic Chris Nashawaty, in his new book, “The Future Was Now, Madmen, Mavericks, and the Summer Sci-Fi Abducted Hollywood (Flatiron).”
The films were about to “brawl and jockey for the attention of the same audience. The only problem was there would only be so much attention – and allowance money – to go around,” observes Nashawaty in his deep-dive account of the making and unmaking of “E.T. 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 “E.T.” would reign supreme, with audiences responding to it like “wide-eyed children,” as “E.T.” instantly became America’s #1 blockbuster, and with a prescient prediction that Spielberg was on his way to become “the most effective popular artist of all time.”
Not everyone agreed.
Early on Frank Price, the head of Columbia Pictures, who had put close to $1 million into the film’s development saw the screenplay and thought of it as a “wimpy Walt Disney movie,” writes the author, and he put Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial baby in the “black hole of turnaround.”
A “crestfallen” Spielberg contacted Universal boss Sidney Sheinberg, his longtime mentor and backer on Spielberg’s monster 1975 hit “Jaws,” and Sheinberg was instantly on board, the author writes. For “E.T.,” the rest was box office and critical acclaim history.
Spielberg made “E.T.” and the supernatural horror film “Poltergeist,” simultaneously producing the latter. He chose as director Tobe Hooper of the gruesome “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
According to the author, Hooper would have “little actual involvement” in the story’s development, and rumors would spread across Hollywood that he wasn’t actually directing the film, that Spielberg was “calling all the shots.”
Spielberg received “a rare public black eye” in Hollywood, after being long treated like “the world’s most decorated Boy Scout,” writes the author.
In the monster box office race that was summer of 1982, “The Thing” would come in last.
A remake of the frightening 1951 classic, it was director John Carpenter’s dream project and faced a major problem at Universal: how to make it any better than the original about a creature that is discovered frozen in the ice near an Antarctic research station, and comes to harrowing life.
The screenplay — Carpenter’s first big-budget, big-studio assignment with a $15 million bankroll and with Kurt Russell as the leading man — was “bloodcurdling,” writes Nashawaty, who notes that a tenth of the budget was spent on “gross-out” prosthetics and other effects.
Filmed near the Canada-Alaska border, temperatures dipped to 20 degrees below zero in the daytime, making filming arduous for cast and crew. But Carpenter was thrilled with the film’s progress; down the road, however, his contract with the studio would be “ripped into shreds” and he would be “booted off the studio lot” due to the 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, “pinching pennies like a miser,” and bringing the film in “at a fraction of the price of its successful-but-unloved predecessor,” observes Nashawaty.
The studio was spooked, however, when the big Spock death scene was leaked by Johnny Carson during his late-night TV monologue.
Meanwhile, Nimoy was “almost looking for an excuse not to do” the death scene. He was so overcome with emotion “that he nearly walked off the lot,” Nimoy later stated.
Studio executives decided Spock’s death was “too final,” and that the film “needed a resurrection”; the director disagreed “but there was little he could do about it besides kick and scream, which he did.”
A new ending was filmed and Spock remained 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.
Waiting for filming to start, Schwarzenegger spent his days “punishing himself” at Gold’s Gym, and his nights “carousing and gratifying his insatiable sexual appetite,” writes Nashawaty.
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 because of another commitment, the hot, young screenwriter Oliver Stone was signed. But there was a problem: “he was using drugs fairly liberally, including cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms.”
As the author observes, “lines of coke were as ubiquitous as canapes and crackers at parties in the Hollywood Hills during the era.” Stone’s drug-fueled writing was easily spotted in his “insane 140-page original script for Conan,” writes Nashawaty. “It reads like the work of someone who’s been up for two weeks straight.”
Meanwhile there were financial problems, mainly based on Stone’s over-the-top script, according to the author.
“Paramount had estimated that Conan would end up costing closer to $70 million than Pressman’s estimated $15 million. Spooked, the studio pulled out” of the deal. As luck would have it, the producer Dino De Laurentis had been on a “personal quest” for the rights to Conan. Moreover, De Laurentis had Milius already under contract for his next picture. De Laurentis also convinced Pressman to sell him 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 screenplay, Milius cut it in half, tailoring it to keep Schwarzenegger’s difficult to understand dialogue at a minimum.” Despite their creative differences, however, Milius and Stone shared the film’s writing credits.
With the new script and De Laurentis on board, Universal green-lit the picture with a $17 million budget, and everything appeared copacetic.
Of the eight sci-fi and fantasy films that hit the big screen in the summer of 1982, writes Nashawaty, “Conan” placed fourth, with $39.6 million by the end of its initial run, far behind first place “E.T.,” with a whopping $359.2 million in box office receipts; “Star Trek II” placed second, with $79.6 million, followed by “Poltergeist” at a close $76.6 million. “Tron” was in fifth place, with $33 million followed by “Blade Runner” at $27.6 million and “The Road Warrior” at $23.7 million. John Carpenters’ “The Thing” brought in just $19.6 million.
The author maintains the barrage of sci-fi and fantasy films that summer “would broaden the boundaries of what a genre that was once considered on the fringes of popular entertainment was truly capable of…For better, and for worse, they would each in their own unique ways end up showing the movie business a new path forward.”
