‘The Future Was Now’ Remembers the Summer When Movies Mattered

In his well-written, engaging new book The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, entertainment journalist Chris Nashawaty revisits a time when a handful of would-be auteurs shook things up and made films that captivated audiences around the world and spawned imitators without number.

If you take a look at a list of the highest-grossing movies of recent months, you will note that nearly all the films in the top 20 are either sequels or feature icons like Garfield or Godzilla that have been around forever. Among the few exceptions are a disaster movie about tornadoes, itself a sequel, and a deeply stupid film envisioning civil conflict in the United States.

This merely confirms what most people already know. The tendency to make sequel after sequel, milking bankable creative concepts in pursuit of every last cent, is a byword of the times. The derivative, disposable nature of what plays in multiplexes makes some of us pine for the days when filmmakers had the bravery to put their reputations and prospects in Hollywood on the line and commit to projects that did not rely on clichés and decades-old intellectual property. Nashawaty evokes a more vivid time in Hollywood, both for the filmmakers who made the movies, and for those of us who were fortunate to experience the “Sci-Fi Summer” in theaters.

In the space of a few weeks in that long-ago summer, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, George Miller’s The Road Warrior, Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Steven Lisberger’s Tron, John Carpenter’s The Thing, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, Steven Spielberg’s E.T., and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist all hit screens.

Sooner or later—in the case of The Thing, considerably later—these flicks gained recognition as classics of their genres and became part of a shared pop-culture vocabulary.

A Question of Courage

It’s no slight to the screenwriters and directors to say that trying to frame 2024 and 1982 as derivativeness versus bold originality would be simplistic. The Road Warrior and Star Trek II were, of course, sequels, and The Thing was a remake of a 1951 classic. Blade Runner derived from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while Conan the Barbarian had its roots in the pulp yarns of the erratic Robert E. Howard.

But Nashawaty brings out the fierce artistic commitment of these creators and their willingness to court the disfavor of the Hollywood elite that held their futures in its hands. The writers, directors, and producers made no secret of their urge to make movies that would entertain and inspire, even or especially when that meant ditching time-tested formulae.

For us in 2024, it can be hard to imagine a time when Spielberg had trouble getting a studio to greenlight a project, but in the early 1980s he had his share of fights. Nashawaty relates the director’s struggles with Columbia Pictures over what then went by the title E.T. and Me.

Spielberg was wild about the script that Melissa Mathison, a talented writer and the then-girlfriend of Harrison Ford, had turned out. But Frank Price, the head of Columbia, felt blindsided. He had expected a dark, ominous narrative where the aliens were a source of escalating dread, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What he got instead was a warmhearted, funny tale with a kid protagonist, no doubt tailored for viewers of the same age. Possibilities for interspecies harmony ran through Mathison’s script, whose influence on recent films like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival is hard to miss.

The disgruntled Spielberg took his project to Universal, where his friend Sid Sheinberg, who had seen the potential in Jaws, was far more receptive. Sadly, the sneaky Price had ensured that a clause in Spielberg’s contract would grant Columbia five percent of E.T.’s net profits regardless of what studio launched the picture.

It still did not reflect badly on Spielberg, or hurt his future in Hollywood, when E.T. went on to make nearly $800 million on a budget of $10.5 million. As Nashawaty reminds us, Columbia got bigger returns from a project it had spurned than from any of those it said yes to in 1982. The moral of the story: stick to your guns and always have lawyers review contracts for any Faustian clauses.

All Technologies Were Dreams Once

When Steven Lisberger, a Boston-area guy in his 20s with a background as a director of TV commercials, got the idea for Tron, he may not have known just how unreceptive studio execs would be. Imagine trying to explain, in 1980, to hidebound studio heads that you wanted to make a sci-fi flick whose visual hallmark would be the use of digitalized pixels. Nashawaty details the confusion that Lisberger met with time after time when pitching what he called “backlist animation.”

Disney came close to dismissing Tron as coldly as the other studios had, but agreed to let Harrison Ellenshaw, a visionary in the studio’s engineering division, have a look at the project and let the higher-ups know what he thought. Ellenshaw, Nashawaty tells us, subjected the idea to a test—“What would Walt do?”—and came to the conclusion that the legendary animation pioneer Walter Disney would have seen merit in a project that pushed the bounds of existing technologies to make something jaw-dropping. The studio gave Lisberger $50,000 to make test footage and the rest is history.

Other directors and producers in The Future Was Now showed similar resolve. One of the most telling anecdotes here is about a day in 1980 when Harve Bennett, who had joined Paramount as a producer just two weeks before, got a call to come to studio boss Barry Diller’s office. Besides Diller, studio president Michael Eisner and Gulf + Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn were present. The latter bluntly asked Bennett what he thought of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. After a tense moment when Bennett wondered whether he should err on the side of politeness or the truth, he answered: “I thought it was boring.”

This candor drew a smile from Bluhdorn, who wanted to know whether Bennett thought he could do better. When he answered in the affirmative, Star Trek II got a $12 million budget. Director Meyer did not make a great film by any stretch of the imagination–though it is certainly the best of the Star Trek movies and a vast improvement over the dreary 1979 outing.

Rob Bottin’s Moment

One of the merits of Nashawaty’s book is that it relates how the greenlighting of audacious films gave opportunities not just to directors and producers bent on reinventing forms, but to writers, actors, and staff charged with crafting visuals never before put on screen. One of the latter was Rob Bottin, the 22-year-old makeup effects artist who gave us the morphing alien awakened from its slumber in the ice in John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Nashawaty describes the respect that Carpenter developed for his young effects guy. The author could have gone further in illuminating how the impetus to break ground played out not just between filmmakers and the studio execs who signed their paychecks, but within projects.

The Thing is a case in point. If we are to believe the account presented in Ellen Carlomango’s article “Rob Bottin and The Thing” in Fangoria magazine’s 21^st issue, it took time for Carpenter to warm to the ideas that Botton brought to the table. In Carlomango’s telling, some of the effects that Bottin pitched, like the character Norris’s head sliding off an operating table, sprouting legs, and skittering across the floor like an arachnid, initially seemed too far out for even the director of the ultraviolent Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. But Bottin, in the spirit of the creatives who are the subject of Nashawaty’s book, stuck to his guns and sold an idea that departed radically from precedent.

Carpenter even gave Bottin the latitude to bring Stan Winston on board to engineer some of the sequences that made use of mechanical dogs. The scene where the alien absorbs a few canines in a cage inside the Antarctic camp, prompting the humans to turn a flamethrower on it and them, is one of the most gruesome. According to Carlomango, these scenes in The Thing were so convincing that Bottin later recalled a couple of teen boys who had just come out of a theater exchanging conflicting views on the morality of filmmakers sacrificing live animals for their art. The boys were wrong in their assumption—of course those were not real dogs—and their mistaken belief is a testament to the verisimilitude that Bottin and Winston achieved.

Rolling With the Punches

In charting the frenzied efforts of this tiny group of dreamers whose ambitions so often exceeded their means, Nashawaty’s book presents a catalogue of mishaps that cropped up before, during, and after production. In the case of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, controversy swirled around the question of who leaked the fact that Spock dies before it was even out in theaters. Some thought (and think) it was Gene Rodenberry, who had voiced his outrage to the studio about the idea of knocking off this beloved character. If Rodenberry didn’t like it, just imagine the reactions of some of the less stable Trekkies out there, which prefigured today’s online feeding frenzies, complete with abuse and death threats. One of them fired off a letter to Paramount stating, “If Spock dies, you die.”

Dan O’Bannon and John Carpenter, close friends during their USC days, fell out over who had contributed what to Dark Star, the gonzo sci-fi low budgeter that opened doors for both. Controversy has also raged for years over the extent of Spielberg’s role in the making of Poltergeist and whether he, not Tobe Hooper, deserves credit as the director.

Getting the elusive Philip K. Dick to cooperate with a company that wanted to adapt his work proved no mean feat. Studios had been trying for years to get in touch with him about film rights, Nashawaty relates. No less a director than Martin Scorsese had shown interest in adapting Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but this went nowhere. In Nashawaty’s telling, screenwriter Hampton Fancher was able to get in touch with Dick only after Ray Bradbury took the liberty of giving him Dick’s unlisted phone number. This too led to a dead end.

“I had the feeling that Phil thought I was some sort of Hollywood hustler,” Fancher said. Hollywood is mercenary and cynical? What a strange idea. Nashawaty does not find it surprising that Total Recall and Minority Report did not get made until many years after Dick’s death of a stroke in March 1982 at the age of 53.

But the really astonishing passages in The Future Is Now are those devoted to the making of The Road Warrior in the Australian Outback. The differences between then and now could not be starker.

“Australian filmmaking was hardly Hollywood. The country didn’t produce enough movies to employ a regular stable of on-call professional stuntmen. It was largely a freelance profession with few or no safety protocols,” Nashawaty writes.

We learn how the director, George Miller, ended up enlisting locals with little or no training, just a lot of balls. A 21-year-old stuntman, Guy Norris, drove his motorcycle down a highway and deliberately ran into an overturned buggy. Instead of flying through the air and landing on a pile of cardboard boxes as planned, he went over the handlebars, nearly missed the boxes, and ended up with a busted femur. Before shooting the scene at the climax where the rig that Max is driving keels over on its side and slides down a slope, Nashawaty relates, local trucker Dennis Williams boasted to the director that he could easily flip the vehicle: “Piece of cake, mate!” He managed to flip it and climb out of the wreck, but then quickly collapsed.

Yet no one died or suffered long-term injury. In retrospect this is all the more incredible. On the frontiers of Australia all those decades ago, a bunch of skilled and determined amateurs pulled off some of the most breathtaking stunts ever captured on film. Compare their safety record to those of crews that have suffered fatal mishaps in the unionized, heavily regulated settings of more recent times. If only we could recapture the summer of 1982.