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Review by Michael Sims
There is at least one line from Michael Crichton's novel that Jeff Goldblum won't be speaking in the new film version of The Lost World. Goldblum, the only cast member to return in this sequel to Jurassic Park -- which opens nationwide on Memorial Day weekend -- shares center stage with the dinosaurs. Again he plays Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and alleged expert on chaos theory (a "chaotician," he calls himself). The sentence Goldblum won't be uttering is attributed to Malcolm on the epigraph page of the novel: "Sequelae are inherently unpredictable."
The joke is too coy for the movie, and the Latin plural too highfalutin. And besides, it isn't true. By definition, sequels must be somewhat predictable. As Crichton himself has remarked, "If you're really fresh, it's not a sequel." The Lost World adds some new loops, including complexity theory and the family values of dinosaurs, but much of the roller-coaster ride will seem familiar.
Even more predictable is the film's inevitable popularity. Used to receiving record-breaking advances, this time out Crichton is said to have traded his share up front for a percentage of the gross. Unlike most writers, he is in a position to make such decisions for himself. Michael Crichton is the supreme example of the new position of writers in the world of motion pictures.
Writers have long complained that they are at the bottom of the food chain in Hollywood. Legendary film mogul Jack Warner summed up the traditional attitude: "What is a writer but a schmuck with an Underwood?" Until recently it seemed that that question was carved on the hillside just below the HOLLYWOOD sign.
Nowadays the schmuck has a laptop, and -- for the moment at least -- some hard-won respect. This week's trend on the West Coast is to pay attention to writers. Not that film studios are courting High Art. The new Proust is no more likely to sell film rights than was the old Proust. But the new Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle are cashing in. "When you run out of gimmicky ideas," as one literary agent put it, "you have to go back to the original: the storyteller."
Books and movies are strange bedfellows. Nothing is more solitary than writing a book, and no task more team-oriented than making a film. Yet adapting a popular novel has obvious advantages over purchasing an original screenplay. The audience already exists, and the advertising of each incarnation will help promote the other. ("You loved the book! Now see the movie!") The union has produced some impressive offspring over the years, from The Wizard of Oz to Schindler's List.
Not only are New York and Hollywood frequently caught in flagrante, but with publishers and studios owned by the same companies the relationship begins to seem downright incestuous. Once upon a time, a studio executive told Newsweek last December, producers "could read a manuscript and have time to think about it. Now, because of faxes and e-mail, we're lucky if we have twenty minutes." Of course, Hollywood dealmakers don't always read the books they covet. Following the success of Little Women, rumors of a previously unpublished Louisa May Alcott novel had producers panting. One is on record as asking, "By the way, is it a period piece?"
Frequently nowadays the film rights to books are sold before the books are even written. Armed with only two pages of description, Michael Chabon received $1.2 million for the film rights to his unwritten novel The Golden Age. Studios are already vying for Tom Wolfe's unpublished Chocolate City. Of course, such gambling can be risky. Before John Grisham ever wrote The Chamber, Imagine Entertainment put up $3.5 million for the film rights, with Ron Howard signing on to direct. When Howard saw the first draft, he backed out of the deal.
Just as any talk about dinosaurs involves millions of years, so any story about Michael Crichton must throw around millions of dollars. Touchstone Pictures paid a record-breaking $10 million for the privilege of filming the admirable Crichton's latest brainchild, Airframe. (For the money they also got him as producer and first-draft screenwriter.) The first printing of The Lost World was an astonishing two million copies. Airframe matched that figure.
Some reviewers fault Crichton for see-through characters and bland prose -- criticisms leveled at many authors on the bestseller list. Nonetheless, like his fellow household names, Crichton knows how to make readers keep turning pages. He once traced his writing style to his medical days. "I still think it's true that any sense of narrative pacing on my part comes out of the emergency room. We don't get to know anybody well, and it's time to move on." That could serve as the motto of today's breakneck pacing in many books and movies.
Surprisingly, Crichton says that he begins writing a new novel or screenplay with no idea of where the plot will go. Then, after perhaps 100 pages of the book -- or half that, if it's a screenplay -- he feels he has some idea of what he wants to do. "In some sense," he once told an interviewer, "I write to find out what happens." Millions of people read his books and watch his movies for the same reason. That eminent literary critic, Mickey Spillane, once summed up the appeal of popular fiction, and its relationship to movies: "Those big-shot writers . . . could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar."
For all the sequel fervor, and the nothing-succeeds-like-success rush to copy other movies, the field still manages to surprise now and then. Frequently even the surprises are made from books. Consider The English Patient. And who would have predicted that in the mid-1990s one of the hot properties in Hollywood would be the novels of an Englishwoman who died in 1817? Jane Austen never even had an agent.
Michael Sims writes about Jurassic Park and many other topics in his new book Darwin's Orchestra.
The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Anything by John Grisham
Emma by Jane Austen
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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