The men who sold the movies

Yesterday, I noted that although Isaac Asimov achieved worldwide fame as a science fiction writer, his stories have inspired surprisingly few cinematic adaptations, despite the endless attempts to do something with the Foundation series. But there’s a more general point to be made here, which is the relative dearth of movies based on the works of the four writers whom I discuss in Astounding. Asimov has a cheap version of Nightfall, Bicentennial Man, and I, Robot. John W. Campbell has three versions of The Thing and nothing else. L. Ron Hubbard, who admittedly is a special case, just has Battlefield Earth, while Robert A. Heinlein has The Puppet Masters, Starship Troopers and its sequels, and the recent Predestination. Obviously, this isn’t bad, and most writers, even successful ones, never see their work onscreen at all. But when you look at someone like Philip K. Dick, whose stories have been adapted into something like three television series and ten feature films, this scarcity starts to seem odd, even when you account for other factors. Hubbard is presumably off the table, and the value of Campbell’s estate, to be honest, consists entirely of “Who Goes There?” It’s also possible that much of Asimov’s work just isn’t very cinematic. But if you’re a Heinlein fan, it’s easy to imagine an alternate reality in which we can watch adaptations of “If This Goes On—,” “The Roads Must Roll,” “Universe,” “Gulf,” Tunnel in the Sky, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Glory Road, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and three different versions of Stranger in a Strange Land—the corny one from the seventies, the slick but empty remake from the late nineties, and the prestige television adaptation that at least looked great on Netflix.

That isn’t how it turned out, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Various works by Heinlein and Asimov have been continuously under option for decades, and three out of these four authors made repeated efforts to break into movies or television. Hubbard, notably, was the first, with a sale to Columbia Pictures of a unpublished story that he adapted into the serial The Secret of Treasure Island in 1938. He spent ten weeks on the studio lot, doing uncredited rewrites on the likes of The Adventures of the Mysterious Pilot and The Great Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, and he would later claim, without any evidence, that he had worked on the scripts for Stagecoach, Dive Bomber, and The Plainsman. Decades later, Hubbard actively shopped around the screenplay for Revolt in the Stars, an obvious Star Wars knockoff, and among his last works were the scripts Ai! Pedrito! and A Very Strange Trip. Campbell, in turn, hosted the radio series Exploring Tomorrow; corresponded with the producer Clement Fuller about the television series The Unknown, with an eye to adapting his own stories or writing originals; and worked briefly as a freelance story editor for the syndicated radio series The Planet Man. Heinlein had by far the most success—he wrote Rocket Ship Galileo with one eye toward the movies, and he developed a related project with Fritz Lang before partnering with George Pal on Destination Moon. As I mentioned last week, he worked on the film Project Moon Base and an unproduced teleplay for a television show called Century XXII, and he even had the dubious privilege of suing Roger Corman for plagiarism over The Brain Eaters. And Asimov seethed with jealousy:

[Destination Moon] was the first motion picture involving one of us, and while I said not a word, I was secretly unhappy. Bob had left our group and become famous in the land of the infidels…I don’t know whether I simply mourned his loss, because I thought that now he would never come back to us; or whether I was simply and greenly envious. All I knew was that I felt more and more uncomfortable. It was like having a stomachache in the mind, and it seemed to spoil all my fun in being a science fiction writer.

But Asimov remained outwardly uninterested in the movies, writing of one mildly unpleasant experience: “It showed me again what Hollywood was like and how fortunate I was to steer as clear of it as possible.” It’s also hard to imagine him moving to Los Angeles. Yet he was at least open to the possibility of writing a story for Paul McCartney, and his work was often in development. In Nat Segaloff’s recent biography A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison, we learn that the television producer John Mantley had held an option on I, Robot “for some twenty years” when Ellison was brought on board in 1978. (This isn’t exactly right—Asimov states in his memoirs that Mantley first contacted him on August 11, 1967, and it took a while for a contract to be signed. But it was still a long time.) Asimov expressed hope that the adaptation would be “the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made,” which incidentally sheds light on his opinion of 2001, but it wasn’t meant to be. As Segaloff writes:

For a year from December 1977 Ellison was, as he has put it, “consumed with the project.” He used Asimov’s framework of a reporter, Robert Bratenahl, doing a story about Susan Calvin’s former lover, Stephen Byerly, and presented four of Calvin’s stories as flashbacks, making her the central figure, even in events that she could not have witnessed. It was a bold and admittedly expensive adaptation…When no response was forthcoming, Ellison arranged an in-person meeting with [Warner executive Bob] Shapiro on October 25, 1978, during which he realized that the executive had not read the script.

Ellison allegedly told Shapiro: “You’ve got the intellectual capacity of an artichoke.” He was fired from the project a few months later.

And the case of I, Robot hints at why these authors have had only limited success in Hollywood. As Segaloff notes, the burst of interest in such properties was due mostly to the success of Star Wars, and after Ellison left, a few familiar names showed up:

Around June 1980, director Irvin Kershner, who had made a success with The Empire Strikes Back, expressed interest, but when he was told that Ellison would not be rehired to make changes, according to Ellison his interest vanished…In 1985, Gary Kurtz, who produced the Star Wars films, made inquiries but was told that the project would cost too much to shoot, both because of its actual budget and the past expenses that had been charged against it.

At various points, in other words, many of the same pieces were lined up for I, Robot that had been there just a few years earlier for Star Wars. (It’s worth noting that less time separates Star Wars from these abortive attempts than lies between us and Inception, which testifies to how vivid its impact still was.) But it didn’t happen a second time, and I can think of at least one good reason. In conceiving his masterpiece, George Lucas effectively skipped the golden age entirely to go back to an earlier pulp era, which spoke more urgently to him and his contemporaries—which may be why we had a television show called Amazing Stories and not Astounding. Science fiction in the movies often comes down to an attempt to recreate Star Wars, and if that’s your objective, these writers might as well not exist.