SUB-SPACECOM

 NEWS & GOSSIPS

 Walt Disney Studios was in an identity crisis when it entered the space movie race with the ambitious live-action production The Black Hole in 1979. Disney's family features were losing ground and producer (and soon to be Walt Disney Company CEO) Ron Miller was trying to make the studio relevant in the contemporary filmmaking culture of blockbuster hits. In the wake of the success of Star Wars (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Miller turned to a project that had been in development at Disney for years, a science-fiction adventure titled Space Probe-One. After numerous rewrites and conceptual overhauls from a parade of writers, the renamed The Black Hole went before the cameras in late 1978 under the direction of Gary Nelson, a TV veteran with a handful of feature film credits to his name, among them Disney's Freaky Friday (1976). It was a bold experiment for the studio: a budget that ultimately climbed to $20 million, a cast of name actors (if not quite major stars), and (most radically) the first PG-rated release in Disney history.

A space probe captained by the quietly authoritative Robert Forster (Jackie Brown, 1997) stumbles across the black hole and finds a seemingly derelict ship floating on the fringes of the gravitational well. The massive haunted house of a spaceship suddenly lights up into a stunning vision of glass and latticework, glowing like an ember in the night. The crew finds the long-lost Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell in a wild-man beard), a quite literally mad scientist who has created an army of robots to run the otherwise abandoned craft and now plans to ride it into the black hole. Anything for science.

The impressive production is hampered by a clumsy story, a murky metaphysical ending, and some of the most stilted dialogue ever to emerge from a film screen. The script suggests a space-age 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, with Schell (Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961) as an interstellar Captain Nemo with a Hitler complex. In keeping with the Disney references, his robot bodyguard, Maximilian, a satanic-looking behemoth in crimson and black, was modeled after the devil in the final segment of the animated classic Fantasia (1940).

Anthony Perkins has the designated Spock role as Dr. Alex Durant, an emotionally closed-off intellectual fascinated by Reinhardt's maverick ideas and impressed by his achievements. The rest of the probe's crew –Yvette Mimieux's telepathic scientist and empathetic balance to Perkins' prickly logical character, Joseph Bottoms' junior pilot and impulsive young crewman, Ernest Borgnine's crusty reporter, and the roly-poly floating robot Vincent, resembling a Fisher-Price toy take on R2-D2 and voiced in decidedly C-3PO tones by Roddy McDowall – is more suspicious, and rightly so. The rest of the film delves into the secret of the silent robot drones - viewed by Forster conducting a funeral in space in one haunting scene - and the real story behind the mutiny of Reinhardt's "abandoned" ship.

The science of this fiction is as hokey as the drama, but the imaginative art design and excellent special effects are magnificent. Peter Ellenshaw, the acclaimed matte artist and Disney effects veteran who won an Oscar® for his work on Mary Poppins (1964), was lured out of retirement to oversee the production. (His son and heir apparent, Harrison Ellenshaw, painted the amazing spacescapes and richly detailed mattes for the production). After failing to come to terms with Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic to use the Dykstraflex camera system used in Star Wars, Disney engineers created an even more technologically advanced computer controlled system, A.C.E.S. The film's crew rose to the challenge with special effects even more elaborate and richly complex (if not as visually dynamic) than the pioneering effects work of Star Wars. The science is pure fantasy but the scale and intensity of the imagery is breathtaking, from the ominous first sighting of the ghost ship eerily floating in space to the stunning image of a fiery meteor rolling through the ship's enormous hull while the human occupants flee to safety.

John Barry's gorgeous score, with the bass ominously carrying much of the melody, provides a lyricism missing from so many bombastic sci-fi scores and sets a tone of unease that the drama never manages to match. The cast loses the battle with the stilted dialogue and Nelson's direction is more successful in showing off the elaborate and lovingly detailed sets than in creating dramatic tension. Critics were not kind to The Black Hole and audiences failed to respond, giving Disney its most expensive commercial failure to date. Yet the imaginative production design and layered special effects have given the film a minor cult status among sci-fi movie fans. For all the advances in digital effects in the succeeding decades, the craft and care and creative ingenuity of the deep-space spectacle is still impressive.

Producer: Ron Miller
Director: Gary Nelson
Screenplay: Jeb Rosebrook, Bob Barbash, Richard Landau, Gerry Day
Cinematography: Frank Phillips
Film Editing: Gregg McLaughlin
Art Direction: John B. Mansbridge, Robert T. McCall, Al Roelofs
Music: John Barry
Cast: Maximilian Schell (Dr. Hans Reinhardt), Anthony Perkins (Dr. Alex Durant), Robert Forster (Capt. Dan Holland), Joseph Bottoms (Lt. Charles Pizer), Yvette Mimieux (Dr. Kate McCrae), Ernest Borgnine (Harry Booth).
C-98m.

by Sean Axmaker

 Set in the Victorian era, George Pal's production of The Time Machine (1960) is a faithful adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel in most respects except one - it omits the author's cynical observations about the British class system. Yet it's the main premise that has captivated audiences for years: A scientist (Rod Taylor) creates a time-traveling machine that carries him forward into the year 802,701 where he finds a strange new world populated by the Elois, a passive, peace-loving race, and their predators, the Morlocks, a cannibalistic tribe that lives underground and is light sensitive.

H. G. Wells always thought The Time Machine would make a compelling film but he never lived to see it become a motion picture; he died in 1946. However, his son, Frank, saw The War of the Worlds, a film version of his father's novel which was directed by George Pal in 1953. That convinced him that Pal was the man to bring The Time Machine to the screen. Unfortunately, Paramount Studios, which had produced The War of the Worlds, had no interest in the project. Undaunted, Pal and science fiction writer David Duncan shopped their screenplay around to various Hollywood studios without success until Pal journeyed to England to film tom thumb in 1958. It was there that he forged a friendship with Matthew Raymond, the head of the British MGM studio, who helped Pal put together a budget for The Time Machine.

The project was soon given the green light by producer Sol Siegel; he had screened a rough cut of tom thumb and realized Pal's unique talent for creating film fantasies. Nevertheless, Pal still faced the challenge of working with a modest budget, which meant changing his casting plans. Originally, the director had envisioned Paul Scofield or Michael Rennie or James Mason as the Time Traveler, but he eventually settled on a relatively unknown actor from Australia - Rod Taylor. For the key role of Weena, the Eloi girl who becomes the Traveler's link to the future, Pal chose MGM contract player Yvette Mimieux, whose option had just been dropped by the studio. The success of The Time Machine soon changed all that, and Mimieux went on to become one of MGM's most popular ingenues of the early sixties (Where the Boys Are, 1960; The Light in the Piazza, 1962; Joy in the Morning, 1965).

Besides the casting, the biggest challenges facing Pal on The Time Machine were the art direction and the special effects. For example, what would the time machine look like? In The Films of George Pal by Gail Morgan Hickman, the director said, "The design all started with a barber chair. Bill Ferrari, the art director, thought that was a good way to begin. A turn-of-the-century barber chair. Then he came up with the idea of the sled-like design. He sketched that out, and I liked it. And then he put the controls on the front. I thought it was a good idea....And then Bill said we needed something behind it to indicate movement. So he came up with the big, radarlike wheel." Cinematographer Paul Vogel worked out a lighting scheme to indicate the advance of time as Rod Taylor travels into the future on his "barber's chair"; a clear gel was used for daylight scenes, a pink one for dawn, an amber one for dusk, and a blue one for night. These were synchronized on a seven-foot circular shutter rotating at varying speeds to simulate the movement of the sun through the roof of the Time Traveler's greenhouse as the machine advances into the future. Other time changes were represented by blue-backed traveling mattes (the sequence where Taylor is entombed in rock) and the use of numerous background sets which were double-printed with scenes of the traveler in the stationary time machine.

Other special effects tricks included the destruction of London by a volcanic eruption (the lava was made out of oatmeal dyed red) and the hideous appearance of the Morlocks (green latex skin and grotesque masks fitted with electrical eyes, courtesy of makeup artist William Tuttle). In the end, all of the hard work paid off because The Time Machine won the Oscar® for Best Special Effects. Pal later admitted that he "would have loved to make a sequel having the Time Traveler go back in time, or - there was a great sequence which (was cut), it just didn't fit into our plot - to go back to the same place and then go further into the future when the crabs took over. It was very beautiful - I can just see Rod Taylor and Yvette Mimieux, just the two of them...go in there where the crabs are and the ocean is flat and doesn't move anymore and the sun is hot all the time. I think we could have developed a very interesting story of the loneliness of these two people."

Producer/Director: George Pal
Screenplay: David Duncan
Art Direction: George W. Davis, William Ferrari
Cinematography: Nicolas Vogel, Paul Vogel
Makeup: Sydney Guilaroff, William Tuttle
Film Editing: George Tomasini
Special Effects: Wah Chang, Gene Warren
Visual Effects: Howard A. Anderson, Bill Brace
Original Music: Russell Garcia
Principal Cast: Rod Taylor (George, H.G. Wells), Alan Young (David Filby/James Filby), Yvette Mimieux (Weena), Sebastian Cabot (Dr. Phillip Hillyer), Tom Helmore (Anthony Bridewell), Whit Bissell (Walter Kemp).
C-103m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning. Descriptive video.

by Jeff Stafford

Star Trek ® Star Trek: The Next Generation ® Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ® Star Trek: Voyager ® and Star Trek: Enterprise ® are registered trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office. No Infringement Intended.