1982 and the Fate of Filmgoing

A trail of Reese’s Pieces. The decapitation of a giant snake. The noble face of Mr. Spock, his skin peeling off like bark from a tree. Police cars that hover above the streets. Skeletons in a swimming pool. Blood in a petri dish, which squeaks and leaps if you touch it with a hot wire. One guy who is sent into virtual existence by the zap of a laser. Another guy who eats dog food from a can. These foolish things remind me of 1982.

Other people, with higher minds, will recall the hefty happenings of that year. Israel invaded Lebanon. Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. Yuri Andropov succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. One barrel of laughs after another. Unaccountably, events of such magnitude hold no appeal for the author Chris Nashawaty, despite the fact that his new book, “The Future Was Now” (Flatiron), is devoted to 1982. He doesn’t even mention that the Man of the Year, as decreed by Time, was “The Computer,” although that shift of emphasis is germane to his task. His focus is on movies—specifically, on eight movies that came out in the summer of 1982, and the stuff of which they were made. And what stuff it was! The “five-gallon buckets of K-Y jelly” that were, Nashawaty informs us, required to lubricate the special effects in John Carpenter’s “The Thing.” Or the pink silk pants that were sported by the actor Rutger Hauer, together with “a fox fur draped over his shoulder,” when he went to meet Ridley Scott, the director of “Blade Runner.” History isn’t all power grabs. It can be a bundle of details that you stroke.

“Blade Runner” and “The Thing,” both of which came out on June 25, 1982, tripped and stumbled at the box office, yet they are two of the more enduring films in Nashawaty’s octet. The others are “Conan the Barbarian,” directed by John Milius, co-written by Milius and Oliver Stone, and bestridden by Arnold Schwarzenegger; Steven Lisberger’s “Tron,” which laid down a glowing path for Disney; George Miller’s “The Road Warrior,” otherwise known as “Mad Max 2”; Nicholas Meyer’s “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” the mission of which was to redeem the low-energy impact of the first “Star Trek” movie; “Poltergeist,” notionally directed by Tobe Hooper, although the hand of Steven Spielberg, credited as a producer and a co-writer, was firmly discernible on the tiller; and a nice little flick called “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” which raked in almost eight hundred million dollars around the planet. That was directed by Spielberg, in a big way.

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So, what is it with this fateful eight? Well, Nashawaty has a solemn case to make. He writes:

During the eight weeks spanning between May 16 and July 9, Hollywood’s major studios would release eight sci-fi/fantasy films that would not only go on to become cornerstones in the pop culture canon four-plus decades on, they would also radically transform the way that the movie industry did—and continues to do—business, paving the way for our current all-blockbusters-all-the-time era.

That is quite a claim. Nashawaty is by no means sure that he likes the result—“what should have been a new golden age of sci-fi and fantasy cinema became a pop-culture beast that would devour itself to death and infantilize its audience”—but he proposes that, for most of us, going to the cinema is now “one endless summer,” which is much less sunny than it sounds. Like it or not, we live in a Conanistic world.

Whether or not you buy into this notion of 1982 as a red-letter year, it’s worth asking when the redness first began to dawn. Does Nashawaty, in his soothsaying capacity, even have the right decade? Note the elaborate tribute that he pays not only to Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars”—the first released in May, 1975, the second in June, 1977—but also to another summer hit, Scott’s “Alien,” from 1979, which seemed like a suppurating antidote to the antisepsis of “Star Wars.” (I still don’t comprehend how you can love both of those movies equally. You make your choice, and you stick to it.) Clamp the three together, top them with “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), which bore the imprint of Lucas and Spielberg, and there, I suggest, you have the precursor of 1982, and a more compelling template for so much that has blazed and crawled across our screens ever since.

Viewed from that perspective, what the filmmakers were doing, when they created the eight works that are covered in “The Future Was Now,” was not crunching through barriers or setting fresh trends. They were cashing in. This is not a lowly skill, or an easy one; indeed, in some respects, it is the raison d’être of the movie trade. But let’s not pretend that Hooper, Lisberger, Meyer, and the rest of the guys were a movement, conjoined by a common iconoclastic purpose. The club of 1982 has nothing on the gang of a decade earlier, or more: Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Warren Beatty, Bob Rafelson, Peter Bogdanovich, and the others cited by Peter Biskind in his headlong study of the period, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.” Similarly, I doubt that the director of “Tron” reached out to the director of “The Wrath of Khan” in the way that, say, Monet reached out to Pissarro in April, 1873, explaining that “everyone finds this good, only Manet is against.” By “everyone,” he meant Renoir, Cézanne, Sisley, Degas, and Morisot, and by “this” he meant the inaugural show of what would come to be known, initially with disdain, as Impressionism. The future really was now, for those painters, and they could spy it and catch it, en plein air.

Much of “The Future Was Now” is strewn with nuts and bolts—with the amusing practical agonies of arriving at a workable screenplay, and the no less arduous grind of bringing the damn thing to life. The evolution of movie titles, for example, is an object lesson in near-misses. Scott went through “Android,” “Mechanismo,” and the blunted dullness of “Dangerous Days” before landing on the lethal edge of “Blade Runner.” I knew that “E.T.” was known as “E.T. and Me,” and before that as “Night Skies,” and before that as “Watch the Skies,” which had also been mooted as a title for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977). What I didn’t realize, until I read “The Future Was Now,” is that the earliest script for “E.T.,” written by John Sayles, featured five alien visitors, one of whom, Scar, mutilated cattle. According to Nashawaty, Scar “could kill animals with one touch of his long, bony finger.” Guided by Spielberg, the same digit would reach out, light up, and touch the brow of Elliott, the young human hero, in a climactic blessing.

Likewise, the rigmarole of casting, recounted in hindsight, becomes a fusillade of dodged bullets. As often as not, the right actor hits the right role through a mixture of availability, affordability, and luck, but we can still be aghast at what might have gone wrong. Take Deckard (Harrison Ford), the protagonist of “Blade Runner,” whose job is to hunt down replicants: synthetic people, barely distinguishable from the rest of us. Nashawaty reports that not only were Tommy Lee Jones, Nick Nolte, Martin Sheen, and Peter Falk—all of whom might, I guess, have rivalled Ford in the requisite dogged gruffness—considered for the part but so were Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, and, wait for it, Dustin Hoffman. For more than forty years, a debate has rumbled over whether Deckard himself is a replicant; with Hoffman, there would have been no doubt. (Imagine the audition: “I make the best replicant. Nobody does humanoid like I do.”) To be fair, it’s hard to picture Ford in a full-length sequinned scarlet dress, as worn by Hoffman in “Tootsie,” released in time for Christmas that same year.

“Tootsie” matters because it feels like a farewell—Hollywood saying goodbye, with a satisfying snap, to a finely tooled comic style that had flourished, pretty much, from the maturing of the talkies to the early nineteen-sixties. Today’s audiences are offered no such treats, and we suffer from that gloomy deficit. Even though “Tootsie” wound up earning almost a hundred and eighty million dollars, more than any other 1982 movie aside from “E.T.,” it warrants only two fleeting nods in “The Future Was Now,” because of the fondness with which the film glances back to the past. It therefore has no place in the thesis that sustains the book. One could, studying the financial returns for the year, point out that “Porky’s” (infinitely coarser fare than “Tootsie,” but nonetheless built for laughs) made more money than both “The Wrath of Khan” and “Poltergeist,” but Nashawaty ignores the farcical for the sake of the fantastical. This is not because he lacks a sense of humor—he previously wrote a whole book, if you please, on “Caddyshack,” the goofball golfing film, from 1980—but because his antennas are tuned to the prophetic.

That is why he concentrates on Spielberg, who comes across as Hollywood’s prime fortune-teller, and also as the one person who could arrange those fortunes to his liking. He dreamed up what we wanted to watch. It’s amazing to observe the wit and the sheer industry with which one project was hurled onto the heels of another. In Nashawaty’s account, much of “E.T.” was hatched by Spielberg “on his downtime on the set of ‘Raiders.’ ” (What downtime?) It was there that he handed over writing duties on “E.T.” to Melissa Mathison. For his next trick, he doubled up. “Even though Spielberg was also working on ‘E.T.’ at the time,” Nashawaty writes, “he would be present on the set of ‘Poltergeist’ all but three days of the film’s twelve-week shoot.” The blend of the two movies would answer to his emotional constitution. “ ‘Poltergeist’ is what I fear and ‘E.T.’ is what I love,” Spielberg said. “One is about suburban evil, and the other is about suburban good.”

But which is which? The answer seems obvious, but look closely at the early scenes of both films and you find that “E.T.” smarts with the misery of divorce, whereas “Poltergeist” is about a happy family. There’s a relaxing scene in the bedroom of the main couple, where the mother rolls a joint, giggling, and the father reads a copy of “Reagan the Man, the President.” Is there a more precise snapshot of the nineteen-eighties? Like “E.T.,” in short, “Poltergeist” is formidably well rooted in the grounds of the ordinary; unseen spirits enter the property via a TV screen (the umbilical cord of America) and, in puckish jest, stack chairs atop the kitchen table. A haunted book flies around and flaps its covers like a butterfly’s wings. Does all of this count as sci-fi and fantasy, the genres to which Nashawaty attends? “Poltergeist” lurches into horror, whereas “E.T.” blooms into a fairy tale; neither shares more than an inch of territory with “The Wrath of Khan” or “Tron.” Spielberg is a terrestrial, through and through, nowhere more so than in his fantasies. Think of Elliott, introducing his friends to the alien, who needs to go home. “Can’t he just beam up?” one of them asks. Elliott’s reply is not correct, in any empirical sense, but it’s true to the pulsing heart of the story: “This is reality, Greg.”