Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [56]
This hearing provided a rare peek at the standards applied by the secretive ratings board to distinguish benign violence from the more dangerous kind. Heffner’s stated goal was to reflect the prejudices of parents of the day, but in drawing the line between harmless violence and the more dangerous kind, he was also reflecting attitudes about horror among directors and fans of the time.
Since 1968, the most effective horror movies were injecting terror into stories about ordinary people. Romero put zombies in Pittsburgh. Polanski brought the Devil into a Manhattan high-rise. Wes Craven made your parents the monster. For Friedkin and Blatty, it was their kids. These artists may have disagreed with Heffner about the dangers horror posed to children, but most of them shared the sense that the most disturbing monsters were those that seemed absolutely real.
CHAPTER SIX
THE MONSTER PROBLEM
Things only seem to be magic. There is no magic. There’s no real magic ever.
Martin Madahas, Martin
JACK HARRIS didn’t think much of the unkempt filmmakers sitting in his office on Sunset Boulevard. John Carpenter was quiet and needed a haircut, and Dan O’Bannon talked too much. At one point, O’Bannon took out an illustration he drew of a flying saucer. Harris wasn’t interested.
Harris was a vaudeville promoter who worked his way up to the status of a B-movie producer. His great success was The Blob, a science-fiction story from the 1950s about a pile of goo that destroyed a town. He specialized in picking up student films for next to nothing and releasing them theatrically for a tidy profit. John Landis, whose movie Schlock was produced by Harris, took him to see a screening of an unfinished version of Dark Star.
The Philosophy 101 dialogue bored him and he thought there were slow spots, but Harris saw something to exploit. As the buzz around The Exorcist grew louder, Carpenter and O’Bannon were having no luck selling Dark Star. It particularly aggravated O’Bannon, who marveled at the fuss made over The Exorcist. It was a nice movie, sure, but it didn’t quicken his pulse. “It didn’t seem scary to me,” he says. “It was just about a little girl peeing and cursing. So what?” John Carpenter was impressed by the music. And they both were in awe of its impact on audiences. People clearly wanted to see it. You couldn’t say the same thing about Dark Star. Big studios turned them down as quickly as the little ones.
As young directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were making gritty dramas about the real world, movies about the future seemed like the distant past. Exploitation houses were pumping out crime films set in the urban jungle and Hollywood was celebrating The Godfather. Nobody wanted an absurdist comedy in space. Carpenter and O’Bannon thought they might have invested their money and energy in the wrong project. They were hungry, desperate, and willing to do anything to get their careers off the ground—just the kind of people Jack Harris liked to do business with.
The first scene, Harris barked, was too long and boring. “For seven minutes, you hear snoring and farting,” he said. “Get rid of that.” He also wanted more sex appeal. “How about adding some women in bikinis on a beach?” he said, peering down his nose. Carpenter sat quietly. O’Bannon stewed. If it seemed that Harris was talking down to them, that’s because he was. In his office, the guests sat on small chairs dwarfed by what looked to O’Bannon like a huge throne. Dealing with this man was not something they learned about in film school. O’Bannon mounted a defense of the parts of the movie that Harris didn’t like before getting abruptly cut off. “I’m not trying to win an argument about originality,” he said in a gravelly bellow meant to intimidate. “This is my deal.”
He offered O’Bannon and Carpenter the money to finish