The Drink Tank 279 (2011).pdf

So, I moved.

Well, I’m in the middle of moving, but I’m no lon-

ger living in my old place. It’s been a few weeks of rough,

including several days of sleeping in my car. I have to

admit, it was my own dumb fault, I could have accepted

two free weeks in a motel that my Landlord offered, but

after that, I’d be on my own, and that was rough. because

like the last time I tried to move, I was declined by far

more places than I was accepted by.

That’s the real problem. I was declined by 8 of

the 9 apartments I put in for. That’s 88 percent of them

turning me down. There was also a place that said I

should save the 40 bucks for the credit check and not

put in my application because unless my credit score

was in the 800s, I wouldn’t be getting the apartment. It

was nice to save that money. The worst part was that

I have no idea why 7 of the 8 others didn’t take me.

One speciﬁcally said that I didn’t meet the management

company’s minimum for Credit Score. It’s not that bad,

623, but still, places don’t want me as a tenant. I managed

to get this place because they take the ﬁrst person who

applies who meets the minimums for the speciﬁc apart-

ment, which I apparently did, so good on me.

So, I’m living in the city of my birth, only a block or so away from my Elementary School. If you’d like to

send me physical mail, it’s 2392 Sutter Ave. #8, Santa Clara, CA 95050. Let that serve as my ofﬁcial CoA for

y’all six people who read this rag!

OK, so what else is happenin’? I’m out of the place with the mould, which is good, and I’ve found all the

stuff that I was missing from my old place, including a couple of Netﬂix I thought I’d sent back. These things

happen.

It’s also National Script Writing Month, which I’m doing a comic for. It’s called One Last Big Score and

it’s about a group of college ﬁlm students who pull off small-time heists of liquor stores to fund their ﬁlms and

who are about to graduate and decide to go for One Last Big Score before they leave school. It’s a fun concept,

but I’ve got a lot to learn about the whole comic writing thing.

We did the SF Outreach Project at WonderCon a couple of weekends ago and it was a blast. We gave

away tons of books, had a great time chatting with young folks and watching the costumes come and go. It was

great to get to work with James, and Helen Montgomery, Spike, Tom Becker, Johanna, Miko, Dave Gallaher, Dave

Clark, JohnO and ChrisO, Leann and various others. It was just so much fun! I’m hoping we can do it again next

year at WonderCon, though I know that they’re trying ot do it with C2E2 in Chicago next year since it’s close

to WorldCon.

Also, I got some very good news about two things, which I’ll be talking about more in the coming issues.

So, what’s this issue then? The ﬁlm, as the Mo Starkey cover would indicate, is The Day The Earth Stood

Still! It’s a classic and one of the greatest SF ﬁlms. This is the ﬁrst of the 52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film

Literacy entries without Dr. Frank Wu, though it does bring us Mr. Warren Buff and Cynthia Corral to go along

with my bit and the art from Brad W. Foster!!! Can’t argue how awesome it is to have so many great folks mak-

ing art for me!

Next issue will be Gojira/Godzilla., or it might be Handicapping the Hugos. Depends on how things go!

I’ve got a couple of obvious calls for the Hugos (James Bacon for Best Fan Writer, Best Graphic Story to The

Foglios) and the issue should be a fun one!

OK< let’s get this thing rolling, shall we?

52 Weeks To Science Fiction Film Literacy: The Day The Earth Stood Still

There are three ﬁlms of the 1950s that are most frequently analyzed in the world of science ﬁction. The

ﬁrst of them is The Day The Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise’s absolute masterpiece. Wise is probably the most in-

teresting ﬁlmmaker who ever lived, was an incredibly nice guy who encouraged me to make movies, who enjoyed

peanut butter out of the jar and who was the last person alive who saw the complete Magniﬁcent Ambersons. I

met him a couple of times, once at Cinequest, and we talked about ﬁlms. His works include The Sound of Music,

West Side Story, Run Silent, Run Deep, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the hugely underrated The Set-Up. He

was also an editor, he edited Citizen Kane for example, and an effects dude.

Sadly, the one we didn’t talk about was The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is an important part of the path to science ﬁction ﬁlm literacy not only

because it is one of the ﬁnest pieces of science ﬁction ever to be put to ﬁlm, but because it took a newish stab

at style. It is fairly safe to say that it is the direct forefather of Cloverleaf. It is a science ﬁction ﬁlm that was shot

somewhat in the style of a 1950s documentary. It’s sparse, that is to say simple, and it doesn’t use the montage

and tackle formula that so many science ﬁction ﬁlms were using at the time. Wise wanted to make a realistic

science ﬁction ﬁlm, and for the time, he managed. Destination Moon was realistic at points, and then it goes a

lot further and it blows away the reality of it all. You have to remember that this was the time that the ﬁrst SF

B-Movies were hitting the screen. After a 1948 court ruling stated that the major studios couldn’t keep out the

indies and that led to a ﬂood of B-Flicks. They weren’t rampant yet, but they were showing up by 1951. You can

see that television was one of the big reasons that there was such a rise in the number and the quality of the

top-rank ﬁlms. Science Fiction is something that television couldn’t hit at the top level. Watch the science ﬁction

television of the 1950s and you’ll see what I mean. Film had higher budgets and could give audiences more of

what they wanted: bigger thrills and more explosions!

The style was very smart, simple and clean and right. You can contrast it with Destination Moon and see

that the style of the Pal production was far heavier than the hand that Robert Wise and co. used in The Day The

Earth Stood Still. It’s a sly hand that they use and it’s brilliant. While you could say that 2001 and Close Encounters

came out of the Destination Moon tradition, it’s clear that ﬁlms like Starman, Gattaca, Solaris and Cloverﬁeld all

belong to the Day The Earth Stood Still school. There is a lot of conversation, a lot of talking, not a lot of action

until it’s really needed. It draws you in with thought, with powerful acting... well, except from that kid who keeps

saying ‘Gee, Mr. Carpenter.’ and the like. This is a ﬁlm not so much of subtlety, but of appropriate response to

the material. It knows where it needs to be outwardly scientiﬁctional, and it knows when it simply needs to be

a drama about a man with a purpose bigger than himself.

One thing that was so brilliant was the way that the casting so so dead on. Lock Martin, who played Gort

the Robot, was a giant guy who was an usher at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre as I understand it. He’s impres-

sive, though honestly it’s the outﬁt that makes the impression. Again, it’s simple, not a robot with a running saw

or guns poking out all over. It’s a sleek-looking robot that allows you to hang all of your fears upon it. What can

it do? They don’t really tell you for a while. They do show that he can ﬁre beams that can destroy guns from his

eyeslit, but you have the feeling that this is only a part of his power. He is a blank slate on which we can write our

own terrors. Those are always the best monsters. I think I’ve said that before in this series... and I’ll say it again!

Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, was perfectly cast. He’s tall, thin, at once completely unremarkable and

with perhaps a slight camera tilt, totally foreign. Rennie has a sense of peace around him in his performance. He

is sly, exudes intelligence and a kind of calm that is perhaps the scariest part of it all. Anyone with the amount

of power that Klaatu obviously wields should not be so placid. His performane reminds me of Jeff Bridges in

TRON::Legacy. Flynn is stoic and has the kind of power that no one can imagine. It’s obvious that he took much

of his performance from Klaatu. The casting was

perfect, especially since the other guy they wanted

for the role, Spencer Tracy, would not have been

able to give the role that sort of serenity. The way

they shot Rennie was also amazing, since they used

his frame perfectly. When he ﬁrst shows up at the

boarding house, he’s shown in shadows. He’s every

bit as imposing a ﬁgure as Gort without the beneﬁt

of his human features. It’s a brilliant bit of cinema-

tography, one that establishes Klaatu as another

kind of being without going overboard.

There’s not a lot said about the connec-

tion of this ﬁlm the literary SF world. The producer,

Julian Blaustein, was looking for something to do

with science ﬁction to talk about the growing fears

of the early Cold War and all the terror that peo-

ple were feeling about the Nuclear aspects coming

to the front. Almost certainly he was also driven by

the various saucer ﬂaps that had been happening

over the previous few years. daryl Zanuck, the leg-

endary producer, gave the greenlight to the project

in late 1950. The script was largely based on the

story Farewell to the Master by Harry Bates, but

really, it’s not altogether there if you ask me. The

story goes that Blaustein looked at more than 200

science ﬁction stories before settling on Farewell

to the Master, and I think that shows. The inﬂuences on the ﬁlm weren’t from the mainstream of SF either. The

sets were consulted on by Frank Lloyd Wright, who supposedly had a strong inﬂuence on the spaceship design.

The music, written by legendary composer Bernard Herrman, is one of the most inﬂuential of all 1950s ﬁlms.

Consider the fact that it used two Theremin along with electric instruments to accompany the other regular

instruments. It’s a very effective score, one that I used to have on CD.

The key to The Day The Earth Stood Still is its directness. It doesn’t pussyfoot around, it ﬂat-out tells you

what’s what. Humans are at a crossroads and we have to choose the path that will lead us away from war and

hatred. The power of the story is that Wise very smartly covered nothing any deeper than a single layer. That’s

not to say that it’s a shallow ﬁlm, not at all, but they direction, the writing and especially the cinematography rec-

ognizes that a simple, well-executed path was what this tale required.

Let me say a few things about the re-make. It sucked

The reason it sucked wasn’t because it missed the the point of the original ﬁlm, which is undoubtedly true,

but because it didn’t have the sure hand of Robert Wise guiding it nor the intelligence of the script of the original.

With the exception of Kathy Bates and John Cleese, the acting is uniformly wooden. Changing it to a message of

environmental destruction was actually smart, but the way it was shot was just another SF movie. I think I agree

with Mo Starkey on one matter: GORT. GORT in the 2008 ﬁlm is terrifying, actually scary with scary abilities that

we see played out for us. It was the one area where I think the ﬁlmmakers got it right. If you’re going to make

a character scary for today’s audiences, you need to show more than hint, and here that worked and worked

well.

What else can I say about The Day The Earth Stood Still? It’s on the National Film Registry, Arthur C.

Clarke said it was the 6th Best Science Fiction Film ever made, and you can point to at least a dozen ﬁlmmakers

who were seriously inspired by it over the last sixty years. It’s one of the most important ﬁlms, not just SF ﬁlms

but FILMS, ever made, and one of the most perfectly produced. It is possibly Robert Wise’s magnum opus, and

that’s a guy who made some masterpieces. It’s on Netﬂix as an Instant View and I suggest you get out there and

see it.

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