The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks And the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 by Chris Nashawaty (2024)
If you're a movie buff who couldn't wait to plant themselves in theater seats during during this one incredible summer, you'll want to read this book.....like yesterday.
For the rest of you young 'uns, who maybe wondered how the multiplexes ended up engorged each summer with mega-budgeted sci-fi-fantasy tentpoles......gather round and author Chris Nashawaty will tell you how the floodgates opened.....
......with lots of juicy, behind-the-scenes details too. Artistic clashes, huge creative gambles, big boxoffice bonanzas and humiliating, disastrous flops.
Quick flashback to 1977: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas upend the cinema universe with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". Unheard of money rolls into Hollywood. A vast, previously untapped audience is discovered.
And Hollywood, which has always relegated sci-fi and fantasy films to low-budget, low class, double feature landfill, has seen the light. Suddenly, in the eyes of greedy studio execs, spaceships, aliens, ghosts, robots and monsters are bringing in the big bucks. So it's time to spend some big bucks to make them......
By the time the summer of 1982 rolled around, no less than five high profile movies were ready to unleash themselves on the world....."Blade Runner", "Tron", "Conan The Barbarian", "Poltergeist", "E.T." and "The Thing".
Never before had moviegoers faced such an overwhelming bounty of sci-fi, fantasy and horror, all in one unforgettable summer.
But they picked and chose what they liked and disliked about the films.....which ones moved them, which ones scared them silly, which ones bored them out of their minds, which ones they cheered, which ones they ignored.
When the dust finally settled, two of the films (both Spielberg's),"E.T." and "Poltergeist" were massive hits, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" left people perplexed and confused. Disney's groundbreaking, computerized "Tron" struggled to justify its enormous cost.....and sadly, John Carpenter's remake (and radical re-invention) of "The Thing" repulsed both audiences and critics with its state-of-the-art graphic, live-on-set effects.
As if anyone needed a reminder of how the passage of time changes how we contemplate movies of their era........ We now celebrate "The Thing" and "Blade Runner" as immortal classics of sci-fi cinema.
"The Future Was Now" delves fully into the impossibly convoluted, crazy backstories of how each of these films somehow came together. Author Nashawaty doesn't miss a thing..... the clashes between producers, directors, actors and screenwriters, the sometimes angst-filled perilous journeys each film took on its long road to completion.
(This includes the full, awkward tale of how 'Poltergeist's officially credited director Tobe Hooper, ended up as an embarrassed figurehead while Spielberg obviously put his own unique stamp on the film. And horror-sci-fi fans who cherish and adore "The Thing" will cringe at John Carpenter's becoming an instant Hollywood pariah after the film's crushing initial failure....)
Need we go on? For everyone who's watched all the covered films multiple times and would've loved to be a fly on the wall during their creation, here's the book for you.
5 stars (*****) A fast. fun read.
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