WHY, HOLLYWOOD, WHY?

The subject for this post is the title question. More specifically, why do Hollywood directors, producers and screenwriters seem to think that they can (or need to) piss all over some well-established, honored and skilled author's work when it comes to putting science fiction stories up on the big screen?

I understand the mechanism. When I worked in a corporate environment, I used to refer to it as the wolf-piss theory. Dogs and wolves mark their territory and demonstrate their dominance by pissing on things they think they own. In Big Business, this expresses itself when your boss takes your (completed) work and insists on some minor, unecessary (and usually thoughtless) detail changes (double space the report, put it in a ring binder, stick the date in the center, not the upper left corner...) before accepting it and pass it on to higher level review.

They do this because they can and because they need to be able to smell their own piss on it as opposed to yours. If they can cover up your smell, it means they own it, they own you and can self-justify their higher pay scale and title.

Once I figured this out it no longer really bothered me (except in circumstances where the changes led to idiotic consequences; strongly protesting those is one of the reasons I'm no longer with corporate America) and I learned the art of adding things that I knew my bosses would piss on and could do so without affecting the overall outcome. It was like sticking a fire hydrant in the middle of the block - you could count on them lifting a leg over it.

However, this practice when applied to creative works - especially stories that I know and love in their original format - has driven me almost entirely out of the movie theater.

I suppose that in order to really appreciate the scope of this horror you have to have read the stories yourself; if you haven't and have already seen the movieization (and worse, if you actually liked the movie version) the remainder of this piece is going to be pretty meaningless to you.

Of particular note in the recent hall of horrors are two highly hyped so-called blockbusters of relatively recent vintage. I've chosen these examples because to anyone who is familiar with the original, the "creative" changes are blatant and nauseating.

Dune, by Frank Herbert, was originally published in Analog Science Fiction Science Fact mgazine in the late 60's. It won Hugo and a Nebula awards in 1966 (respectively the reader's or fan's best of award and the Science Fiction Writers of America best of award) and has been continuously in print since its first publication (not to mention numerous sequels).

Dune presented an uncommon look at the far future that blended space travel, feudalism, religion, court intrigue, messianic visions, rites-of-passage and the ways in which ecology and human societies are inextricably linked.

I read it in one sitting on a 16 hour flight to Israel at the tender age of 16. I had picked it up not because it had been recommended, but simply because it was in the SF section of the local bookstore and it looked thick enough to last the flight.

I'll not go into a huge literary critique of the work at this point (I'm a bit rusty in that regard with some 20+ years having elapsed since the last time I invoked Freud) but it is important to understand that one of the central themes of the book is the acquisition and wielding of real power, and how that power is to be found residing in the natural world. As the main character, Paul Atriedes says in one passage - ' The ability to destroy a thing is ultimate power over that thing.'

In this particular case the thing is the drug 'Spice', found and cultivated only on his fiefdom planet Arrakis, the desert world. The Spacers Guild relies on spice to invoke faster than light travel; the Emporer relies on spice to hold his economic empire together. Various religions rely on spice to prophecy and see into the future. Spice is the underlying structure that holds the entirety of the human dominated galaxy together.

The ecological conditions on Arrakis are responsible for the evolution and sustenance of the giant sandworms who's reproductive cycle results in the creation of spice. Water, the one resource lacking on Arrakis, is poison to the sandworms and intoducing it in large quantities (ne ssary for turning the world from a desert into a garden) would destroy the sandworms and ultimately all of space-going humanity.

It was therefore something of a shock to watch the ending of Dino DeLaurentis's 'Dune' offering where Paul's actions lead to rain falling on Arrakis for the first time in living memory. With one scene (gathering storm clouds, faces raised to the sky, cheering), DeLaurentis utterly eviscerated every single one of the central themes of the original story. It was only somewhat shocking since Delaurentis and company are well known for butchering the propertys they option for what some loosely refer to as movies.

I'll not even get into the idiocy of the 'voice weapons' that they substituted for the 'Weirding Way' of fighting. After all, technological means of fighting always have far more impact and meaning than psychological/mystical ones, right? Its certainly much more impressive to create a gun you have to shout into than it is to discover hidden strengths within yourself and to be able to harness and direct the abilities of a tribe of fanatics willing to give their lives to an abstract cause, right?

That's just one example, a fairly dated one at that.

Now let's look at Verhoven's Starship Troopers. A more recent example of classic SF novel turned into cinematic dog vomit.

Heinlein's classic (interesting enough slated to be introduced as 'juvenile' SF but rejected because of its violence and strong themes that ultimately ended up as an 'adult' SF novel) follows Johnny Rico through a classic coming of age tale.

In the far future, human society on earth has settled on a democratic form of government in which only those who accept service to society are given the franchise.

There have been many critical tomes written about this book with claims being made that Heinlein was obviously in favor of a society run by a neo-Nazis like military elite - and just as many claims to the contrary. Its most likely, however, that Heinlein was playing with an idea and seeing where it led him. The basic question seems to have been - is there a better system for getting people to take responsibility for their own actions and, therefore, for the society they lived in?

Heinlein often advocated the concept that an armed, responsible individual was society's best hope - people who were both willing and able to enforce rules of good behavior and to take responsibility for doing so. The sub-text was that after a couple of decades of such a system in place, the mere possibility of armed intervention would be enough to get most people to behave in an acceptable manner.

This theme is echoed throughout many of his stories (for example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, it is mentioned that despite the fact that lunar society (the moon is a penal colony) is very male dominated, women have little to fear from unwanted attention. Every man's desire to have a woman and their own self-interest in acting in a manner that gives them the best chance of a relationship insures that personally protecting women is a number one priority. (Heinlien pays scant regard to the idiocy of human beings however. Perhaps he assumes that with such mechansims in place, evolutionary principals will once again come into their own.)

During his non-mandatory course in citizenship (for which there is no grade), Rico learns that power and responsibility go hand in hand; the only real check on unbridled abuse of power is personal regard for how it affects others. This is why only those who have volunteered to place their lives on the line for the society are given the franchise. On the cutting edge, those who serve are witness to and suffer the consequences of the weilding of raw power and, therefore, are the only ones who can be trusted to understand those consequences.

Young Rico goes against his family background and history (his parents are non-citizens) and joins the Mobile Infantry, the advanced 'space marines' of the future. Heinlein ups the ante by placing each trooper into a powered-armor fighting suit, chock full of hellish weaponry (pocket nukes being a favorite) and states that each trooper carries firepower equivalent to a 20th century army division. (Assuming he was referring to a mechanized division, this means approximately ten thousand men, several hundred armored vehicles of various type, several hundred artillery pieces of varying ranges, attached aircraft and all kinds of support equipment.)

As they say in Spiderman, the Movie "With great power comes great responsibility." No society can afford to place the means of its own destruction into the hands of a single individual, unless there is some way to insure that it won't be abused. Heinlein's solution is to make that individual take personal ownership of society; offending against it would therefore be an act of suicide.

Once again, the movie-makers hone right in on the core themes of the story and excise them with idiocy. The world Federation is presented as an over-bearing, 1984-ish propoganda machine. Johnny is nothing more than an air-headed high school football player who dreams of going on his graduation vacation. Rather than being engaged by the civics class (as he is in the novel), he gets reprimanded for passing electronic notes and not paying attention.

The Mobile Infantry (once we get to see them) have been stripped of their powered suits (in the novel, during an incident in training with the suits, Johnny has one of the primary experiences which leads him to an understanding of responsibility) and reduced, almost literally, to apes with over-sized automatic weapons. Battle scenes depict hordes of troopers engaged in foolish, if not criminal tactics. There is no contrast between human robots that the soldiers have become and the insect robots of their arch enemies, the bugs. The need for personal responsibility has been eliminated from the story.

Verhoven may have wanted to make a movie dealing with the idiocy of war, and he's welcome to do so, but the novel he paid to base that story on does not make that statement. It deals with other issues that use warfare as a mechansim of exploration.

Starship Troopers and Dune both tell interesting, compelling stories that explore worthwhile themes in manners that can only be addressed through science fiction. They could have been turned into decent, if not excellent, movies by following the script that had already been provided.

To say that I was disappointed by the preceding efforts is an understatement. To say that I've been disappointed by just about every SF movie ever made is probably going a bit far; some I have enjoyed, but when you consider that most of the movies that fall into this category were watched by a juvenile, its not saying much.

Of those that did not disappoint, I include the following: Invasion of the Saucermen (50's B flick, monster-movie more than SF, watched by a prepubescent Steve), The Day The Earth Stood Still (based on Farewell to the Master with an excellent cast, limited reliance on special effects and with little or no evidence of wolf-piss), Forbidden Planet (has its flaws, but again, watched for the first time by adolescent Steve and, of course, the story line is drawn from Shakespeare) The First Men in the Moon (I think I was 6 or 7 when I saw it) The Omega Man, based on Matheson's I Am Legend: had I read the story first, I would have been disappointed. As it was, I was going through a phase of being enamored of post-apocolyptic Earth), 2001 A Space Odyssey (based on an original Clarke-Kubrick script, loosely inspired by a Clarke short story. This team got it write - the original myth-maker wrote the story in close collaboration with a director who got it), a few others and Star Wars.

Now, I'll admit that liking Star Wars presents a bit of a problem to my overall argument except for this caveat: S.W. was the first science fiction film that actually managed to show me the future without stepping on any of the pictures in my head.

Sure, Lucas is not a myth-maker - every single one of his plot elements is drawn from someone else's works (and it ain't Homer) - many of the plot devices are hackneyed sideways tributes to 50's B schlock and, if one were to be unkind, the original movie is the greatest example of successful plagarism since the Hebrews stole the story of Gilgamesh.

In its defense and by way of supporting my argument, you can't say that Lucas destroyed any particular single SF work - he merely dropped a shitload of them into a blender and waited until the mixture was a nice shade of pea green. The wow factor is to be had in the accuracy with which he reproduced that soup in living color.

Of course, I'm critical of that as well. Ever since Star Wars, its become necessary to visually depict every damned single part of a story up there in living color. Nothing is left to the imagination, or, rather, everything is left to the imagination of one person - the director. There's no room for the audience any more. (No surprise there. The ethereal societal forces that shape the world have found great success in mindlessness, so why should entertianment be any different.)

Essentially, Star Wars enjoys the special position of any 'first' and is therefore a special case which can safely be ignored.

So now we come to The Last Mimzy, based on Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (writing as Lewis Padgett).

To begin with, I suppose that the reasons for the title change are either - shortness for billboard/idiocy's sake, a desire to keep the Christian Right from thinking that it was some kind of sequel to C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - they can't keep keep their Lewis' apart anymore than I can (far too much was made of that series as thinly-veiled Christian parable), the marketing department's finding that the letter 'z' somewhere in the title would bring in the generation XXY crowd or the fact that a title containing two unfamiliar words was a dead killer at the box office. Regardless, the title change is one flavor of wolf piss or another.

Then we find that its 'inspired by' the short story, rather than a simple media change. I Robot was 'Inspired' by Asimov's shorts and novels. Tell me, why isn't inspired a curse word?

(Talk about crass idiocy: Will Smith's character in that movie hates robots because he has a robotic artificial arm. Huh?)

Mimsy (excuse me, Mimzy) commits the ultimate sin of plot disembowlment. In the short story, Scott and Emma, two relatively normal children, discover a box of what they think are toys. In reality, they are educational toys sent by a time travel experimentor of the far future. For lack of anything better to use as a test subject, he gathers up his son's discarded teaching toys and makes them disappear. not once, but twice.

Under the influence of the toys, Scott and Emma begin to think differently from their parents. Their minds have not yet been cast in Euclidean geometric stone and are, therefore, able to adopt the different geometry of the far future. Their parents become alarmed, but too late. Their father resolves to take the toys away once and for all and arrives at their bedroom door to hear Scott say "That's it. Come on Emma, let's go." When Dad enters the room, the children are gone.

The twist in the story is that the first set of educational toys ended up in 19th Century England and must have been found by Alice (she of Through the Looking Glass) who's 'education' by the toys led her to recite various nonsense rhymes to Dodgson.

Padgett's story was far more about illustrating that children are not necessarily "human" than it was about time travel. It also explored the idea that different mental frames of reference can give rise to such radically different world views that even the laws of physics become seemingly mutable. Time travel was merely a device to put other-worldy technologies into the chioldren's hands. Probably more than anything, the story was a way to provide sensibility to the non-sensible frumious bandersnatch.

The movie presents the toy chest as a highly sophisticated computerized communications device for obtaining the aid of people from the past. It seems that humans in the far future have become genetically corrupt and that only a genetic sample from the far past can save them.

This highly sophisticated future society (one must presume it to be such, after all, they have time travel) can't send a living emmisary to the past because living organisms can't survive time travel. (Ummm, then how do genes get to the future in any kind of shape to be useful?) and it seems that they've become so sophisticated that they can't send a simple note saying - please deposit semen and ova into the receptacle provided in order to save the future - they have to manipulate a little girl into crying on a stuffed bunny in order to obtain their sample.

The link to Alice in Wonderland is preserved however - a picture of Alice holding the same Bunny is shown in a copy of that story. Alice, however, was apparently too callous to cry when her bunny was taken away by the nasty, uncaring people of the future - or maybe she submlimated her despair in nonsense rhymes.

Putting Mimsy (note the 's') on the screen would have been relatively simple and straight-forward. A short piece, either as flashback or a story-telling session would have sufficed to introduce Alice and the Borogoves. Titling at the beginning would easily have explained the 1950s setting. Movie watchers (at least of my generation) would have accepted that at face value, so long as there weren't apple computers in the living room and the television was a black and white vacuum tube set. From there, a scripted version of events could have unfolded along the original story's lines.

So, once again, disappointment reigns. It seems that its true that SF movies get destroyed in the translation, probably because the auteurs behind the effort don't understand it and I doubt they ever will.