Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes and other SciFi Classics

[Christopher]

I watched some of Star Trek The Motion Picture last week. No matter how many times I watch it, I can't help but feel disappointed in the end. The movie looks great and was the only one of the original films done on an epic scale. The score is great and it's the only one where the crew is still portrayed as young-ish. But the story itself is dull and devoid of action. It always feels like such a missed opportunity to me.

Well, it wasn't trying for action. It was trying to be a "think piece" more along the lines of 2001. But in the wake of Star Wars, everyone was expecting action, so audiences and critics alike went in with the wrong mindset. (Although, admittedly, opening with the lively Klingon attack sequence may have created false expectations for the rest of the film. It is a bit of a structural problem that the Klingons figure in only one scene.)

I just regret that they overcompensated with the next movie. It was valid to think that the sequel needed more emotion and somewhat more action, but TWOK went so far in that direction that it ended up sacrificing all of the intelligence, elegance, and philosophical focus of TMP. I wish they'd given the TMP filmmakers a chance to refine their approach rather than handing it over to a whole new team. The makers of TMP had so many things stacked against them -- the difficulty of reworking a TV-pilot script into a feature, the failure of Robert Abel & Associates to produce usable effects, the rush necessitated by the studio's poor decision to lock down the release date -- and yet they still managed to make a film that, while flawed, is gorgeous, highly memorable and was much more successful at the box office than is now generally realized. Just imagine what they could've done if they'd been able to start from scratch with a new story, and with the experience they'd gained tackling the problems with the first film.

 

[Timewalker]

As for LOGAN'S RUN being dark and dirty and morbid . . . I don't remember it that way. The City is quite clean and bright and cheerful-looking. It actually seems like a nice place to live as long you don't mind dying at thirty.

Nice... but what's the actual point of living?

In the novel, Logan and Jessica meet in the New You shop, and Jessica is on Lastday. She's just had her face changed. A little later she and Logan talk about parents and family (Logan's fine with not knowing anything about his mother; Jessica thinks children should know their mothers). And then this:

"Where did you work before you ran?" he asked her.

"I was a fashion tech at Lifeleather Trim. Three hours a day, three days a week. I hated it."

"Then why did you stay there?"

"Because it was a job. What can anyone really work at? You can paint or write poetry or go on pairup. You can glassdance or firewalk in the Arcades." Her voice was scornful. "You can breed roses or collect stones or compose for the Tri-Dims. But there's no meaning to any of it."

Source: Logan's Run, p. 41, Bantam ed. 1976

Keep in mind that this is a 21-year-old woman saying this to a 21-year-old man, and both are on Lastday. It sounds pretty bleak, once you get past the drugs, sex, and audio/visual/sensual distractions.

BTW, "glassdancing" is that world's version of stripping/poledancing. A "glasshouse" is a brothel. There's a scene in the novel that definitely would have been inappropriate for the movie, as Logan visits a glasshouse, and one of the prostitutes there is only 13. However, Logan prefers adult women, and chooses one a little older (adulthood begins at 14 in the novel).

Logan's Run left the viewer with an arguably better world than the one encountered at the film's start. The only trade-off is the controlled, pleasure environment for the natural world.

The movie completely glosses over the baby Logan in the Nursery, though. We're led to believe that's Logan's biological son, and when Francis asks if Logan knew his "seed mother" Logan treats that as an obscenity.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

The novel, if I recall, dealt with the shallow obsession with youth at the time (which hasn't changed)

One of sci-fi literature's best predictions. The indifference, soullessness and hedonism in the book are mirrored well in among many of today's youth culture.

and the age at which people would be killed was 21, not 30.

Yeah, that age change was to accommodate the actors, all far older than 21. At the time, I cannot imagine any young actors of that time being able to carry such a film.

There wasn't a domed city, either. It was set in a sprawling metropolis that occupied the entire U.S.

That would have been something to see.

Another point from the book that did not make it to the film was the sequence where the characters ride the high powered, broom-like "devil sticks", which seemed to be an inspiration to the Speeder Bikes seen in Return of the Jedi.

Since we are talking about the effects, if I recall the matte paintings used for DC overgrown with plants were pretty good!

They were excellent pieces by Matthew Yuricich, which earned him a well deserved Academy Special Achievement Award for visual effects.

 

[Timewalker]

Actually, it wasn't just the U.S. - it was the entire world that was living under the control of the Thinker.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I gotta go with @Timewalker on this: the world of Logan's Run might seem pleasurable at first, but I think it would very quickly grow so boring as to be unbearable. Jessica was right: if you can't actually work, then what's the point? Just sit around and vegetate? It's not even like the Trek reality, where people still DO have actual jobs.

Logan's Run is like that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place to Visit".

(About Logan's son, though: There's got to be dozens of babies in that nursery, so why does he think THAT one is his? Logan says "It's not every day they authorize a new Sandman" - I wonder what that means...)

 

[Richard Baker]

IIRC the screenplay of Logan's Run was done very quickly and I think that shows in the film. Lots of partial ideas, visual set pieces and actions scenes but they almost do not interconnect well. For me the idea of him simply reporting back the central computer that there was no sanctuary and having the entire system suffer a cascading failure was rushed and illogical.

'Colossus, the Forbin Project' was a great film for me- basically Skynet's ancestor in technology but much more personal in the execution. The scene where the computer announces it will not only be obeyed, but eventually loved is chilling. I have read all three of the novels, I wish they had also been made into a film series.

Watched the old film 'Crack in the World' this past weekend- I can just imagine what they could have done with the SFX available today.

 

[Greg Cox]

Connecting the dots . . .

Let it be noted that Dr. Forbin in Colossus is played by Eric Braeden, who also played Dr. Hasslein in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

He also played a werewolf on the Night Stalker tv series, but I digress . . ..

 

[Kilana2]

As I don't know the LR book yet, I still stick with the movie. I remember the love shop scene in slowmo as quite dim, I couldn't really perceive anything. Was censorship at work?



Telling people of a possible renewal and killing them instead was always a fascinating idea for me. As was the idea of getting a new face. You can do it already nowadays – going under the knife, if you don’t like your visage. You’ll be sorry if the face lifting goes awry.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

As I don't know the LR book yet, I still stick with the movie. I remember the love shop scene in slowmo as quite dim, I couldn't really perceive anything. Was censorship at work?

Probably. The whole Love Shop scene is very blurry and indistinct. I could hardly tell what was going on at all. There are a lot of people who might, conceivably, in certain lighting conditions, be naked, but it's hard to tell.

 

[Kilana2]

As I don't know the LR book yet, I still stick with the movie. I remember the love shop scene in slowmo as quite dim, I couldn't really perceive anything. Was censorship at work?

Probably. The whole Love Shop scene is very blurry and indistinct. I could hardly tell what was going on at all. There are a lot of people who might, conceivably, in certain lighting conditions, be naked, but it's hard to tell.

There are definitely more nude people to be found at Eastern German beaches or on British TV (rumor has it, that Britain has shows on TV involving nude people.... I would change the channel or switch my TV off .

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

IIRC the screenplay of Logan's Run was done very quickly and I think that shows in the film. Lots of partial ideas, visual set pieces and actions scenes but they almost do not interconnect well.

Speaking of the screenplay, LR producer Saul David revealed the process of adapting the novel, and the changes he needed to make.

The following is from "Logan's Run - And How it Was Filmed," from the June, 1976 issue of American Cinematographer:

As for the origins of the project, my involvement with the material goes back vary many years, because it was first brought to me as a publishing venture. At that time, I didn't think all that much of it and I suggested to the authors that they make a lot of changes---which they didn't make. Instead, they sold it to somebody else.

Coincidentally, I was later serving at MGM as Executive Story Editor when first George Pal and then Irwin Allen wanted to make the picture, and I tried to assist them in getting it made. In the course of trying to do that, I wrote several of the essays executives write (saying: "Here's the way you should do it"), and which are greeted without enthusiasm by picture magnates. But when the other deals came apart, Dan Melnick said to me: "Well, why don't you make it the way you keep saying it should be made?" And that's really what happened.

What I did was apply to the novel those criticisms and judgements i had made all those years ago. all this has a surprisingly happy ending, because Bill Nolan, who is one of the authors of the novel, has read the script and approves the changes. That's not what you usually hear from a novelist, and it's very gratifying.

In any case, because I has thought about the project for a number of years, I had a kind of structure for it in mind. The novel is extremely episodic, very linear, and people just go from thing to another without any particular reference to where they came from. most pictures can't work that way--so the design of the picture is much more compact. It has a real three-act structure--which is the major transformation I made in it. That meant discarding a number of things in the novel and substituting other concepts--

That was the heart of David's statements on the script and novel. It is interesting that LR co-author William Nolan was satisfied with the changes.

Earlier, you posted:

Lots of partial ideas, visual set pieces and actions scenes but they almost do not interconnect well.

David seems to think he added a tighter structure to the film, which--in the finished production--lent itself to the basic chase story, with set piece adventures (Box, D.C., Francis in denial) pushing the idea of Sanctuary being a pipe dream along the way. Since that was the point of the film, and probably the only direction the script could take if avoiding what Saul David referred to as an episodic source, which does not work all that well in the language of a single, big screen film.

For me the idea of him simply reporting back the central computer that there was no sanctuary and having the entire system suffer a cascading failure was rushed and illogical.

What would have been your resolution?

 

[Greg Cox]

What's interesting about the sequel novel, Logan's World, is that, within the space of a few pages, the authors shrewdly brought the novels in line with the ending of the movie, presumably with an eye to new readers who only knew the movie and expected to find the City destroyed, etc.

Kinda like the way, decades later, Michael Crichton wrote a sequel to movie Jurassic Park rather his own original novel (in which the Jeff Goldblum character was killed).

 

[wulfio]

I watched some of Star Trek The Motion Picture last week. No matter how many times I watch it, I can't help but feel disappointed in the end. The movie looks great and was the only one of the original films done on an epic scale. The score is great and it's the only one where the crew is still portrayed as young-ish. But the story itself is dull and devoid of action. It always feels like such a missed opportunity to me.

But at the same time I greatly enjoy the original script it was based on "In Thy Image." It's in the Star Trek The Lost Series book that came out in the 90s and I like to read it once or twice a year.

The directors cut is better. You get some improved FX shots and more character development. Ultimately, if you're not looking to watch a 2001esque film, you won't enjoy it. It is the most sci-fi that Star Trek has ever been.

 

[arch101]

It's pretty amazing for an old timer like me to remember pre-SW when there was only 2001, Apes, Logan, 1999, TOS and the sixties shows, and a few other films and that was IT. Today you could never watch all the sci-fi on Netflix or Hulu. If you're from that generation, you have a special place in your heart for all those films and can probably quote all the lines from the repeated viewings. As much as I also appreciate Flash Gordon and late '70's genre films, I think there's Pre-SW and Post-SW. They really are two different eras of sic-fi.
What I think sets the '68 Apes and LR apart was that both were treated as serious, major big-budget studio films instead of "spacey" sideshows. 2001 was different because MGM knew it was a landmark before they even released it. By comparison, the excellent Silent Running was hardly marketed, like most SF before 1976.

 

[Timewalker]

I gotta go with Timewalker on this: the world of Logan's Run might seem pleasurable at first, but I think it would very quickly grow so boring as to be unbearable. Jessica was right: if you can't actually work, then what's the point? Just sit around and vegetate? It's not even like the Trek reality, where people still DO have actual jobs.

Logan's Run is like that one Twilight Zone episode "A Nice Place to Visit".

(About Logan's son, though: There's got to be dozens of babies in that nursery, so why does he think THAT one is his? Logan says "It's not every day they authorize a new Sandman" - I wonder what that means...)

In the Nursery scene, the baby is identified as "Logan 6." Logan's number is 5. The obvious conclusion is that this is Logan's biological son, and he will be raised and trained to be a Sandman. Logan points to several women attending Carousel and saying the baby's "seed mother" could have been any one of them (although obviously the woman wouldn't have carried the baby herself; the implication is that artificial wombs would have been used).

IIRC the screenplay of Logan's Run was done very quickly and I think that shows in the film. Lots of partial ideas, visual set pieces and actions scenes but they almost do not interconnect well. For me the idea of him simply reporting back the central computer that there was no sanctuary and having the entire system suffer a cascading failure was rushed and illogical.

Well, if Kirk can kill a planet-controlling computer with illogic, why can't Logan 5?

Actually, didn't some of the shots fired in that scene take out some of the computer banks?

Connecting the dots . . .

Let it be noted that Dr. Forbin in Colossus is played by Eric Braeden, who also played Dr. Hasslein in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.

He also played a werewolf on the Night Stalker tv series, but I digress . . ..

Not to mention Victor Newman on The Young and the Restless. In Escape From the Planet of the Apes, though, he was still going by his original name: Hans Gudegast (sp?).

As I don't know the LR book yet, I still stick with the movie. I remember the love shop scene in slowmo as quite dim, I couldn't really perceive anything. Was censorship at work?

Probably. The whole Love Shop scene is very blurry and indistinct. I could hardly tell what was going on at all. There are a lot of people who might, conceivably, in certain lighting conditions, be naked, but it's hard to tell.

There are definitely more nude people to be found at Eastern German beaches or on British TV (rumor has it, that Britain has shows on TV involving nude people.... I would change the channel or switch my TV off .

The idea behind the Love Shop scenes was that there were hallucinogenic drugs in the air, so everything looked blurry and indistinct. But yeah, you can definitely see that some of the people in the scene are naked, or almost naked.

As for British shows with naked people, there are several scenes in the Tenko series, and a couple in I, Claudius (not sure if the Palace orgy scene had completely naked people in it, but Drusilla and Messalina were definitely not wearing anything).

 

[Christopher]

What's interesting about the sequel novel, Logan's World, is that, within the space of a few pages, the authors shrewdly brought the novels in line with the ending of the movie, presumably with an eye to new readers who only knew the movie and expected to find the City destroyed, etc.

Kinda like the way, decades later, Michael Crichton wrote a sequel to movie Jurassic Park rather his own original novel (in which the Jeff Goldblum character was killed).

And Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2010: Odyssey Two as a sequel to the film version of 2001 (with the monolith at Jupiter) rather than the novel version (with the monolith at Saturn). But then, Clarke never in his life wrote two books set in the same reality. Even his other 2001 sequels were in variant continuities, and all the other sequels on which he's credited as co-author (like the terrible Rama sequels) were mostly written by someone else.

It's pretty amazing for an old timer like me to remember pre-SW when there was only 2001, Apes, Logan, 1999, TOS and the sixties shows, and a few other films and that was IT.

Well, there were also the bionic and other superhero shows in the '70s, which sometimes got into more overt sci-fi territory (aliens, robots, and the like).

As much as I also appreciate Flash Gordon and late '70's genre films, I think there's Pre-SW and Post-SW. They really are two different eras of sic-fi.

For better or worse. The downside of Star Wars's success is that it created the idea that SF movies are supposed to be flashy, FX-driven popcorn flicks. There's still some room for classier fare like Blade Runner or Gattaca, but the blockbuster mentality still dominates.

 

[Greg Cox]

For better or worse. The downside of Star Wars's success is that it created the idea that SF movies are supposed to be flashy, FX-driven popcorn flicks. There's still some room for classier fare like Blade Runner or Gattaca, but the blockbuster mentality still dominates.

I don't know. I think that popcorn sci-fi flicks always outnumbered the more highbrow fare. For every Shape of Thing to Come, you had Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, The Purple Monster Strikes, or The Blob. For every Forbidden Planet, you had Cat Women of the Moon or The Green Slime.

The only difference these days is that that that comic-book adventures and B-movie fare have much bigger budgets.

Buck Rogers has always co-existed with Heinlein or Bradbury. This is nothing new.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

@Timewalker - the baby is only referred to as Logan 6 by Logan 5 himself. He just points at the baby and says "Logan 6...I'm telling you, Francis, that's him." He is not told this by the computer (and neither are we, the viewers), he just assumes it's true. I always wondered why he did that.

As far as we know, Logan has no actual reason to suspect the baby is his son. The computer never says who the baby is. If there is any kind of identification attached to the babies, we're not aware of it. Logan probably figures that he will, one day, have a son, so maybe he just likes to hang around the nursery and speculate as to which baby is his. But we are never given any actual reason why we, or Logan, should think the baby is Logan 6.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

What's interesting about the sequel novel, Logan's World, is that, within the space of a few pages, the authors shrewdly brought the novels in line with the ending of the movie, presumably with an eye to new readers who only knew the movie and expected to find the City destroyed, etc.

That was odd, since (if memory serves) Logan's World still had a distinct connection to events of the original novel, which is truly an alternate universe with certain similarities.

It's been so long since reading it...do you recall any references to the movie Old Man?

Actually, didn't some of the shots fired in that scene take out some of the computer banks?

Yes, if you can call the life clock-colored structures part of the bank. The Sandman gun did wreck the overhead beams, contributing the the internal destruction of Sandman headquarters.

In Escape From the Planet of the Apes, though, he was still going by his original name: Hans Gudegast (sp?).

Actually, in Escape, he was credited as Eric Braeden, which he started using around the time of Colossus.

@Timewalker - the baby is only referred to as Logan 6 by Logan 5 himself. He just points at the baby and says "Logan 6...I'm telling you, Francis, that's him." He is not told this by the computer (and neither are we, the viewers), he just assumes it's true. I always wondered why he did that.

Probably an attempt to humanize Logan, and draw an out of the gates sharp contrast between this sensitive Sandman, and his best friend (Francis), who considers anyone hanging around Nursery to be one of "the crazies." In other words, Francis could not care less about babies, or the idea if he's the father of any.

 

[Christopher]

I don't know. I think that popcorn sci-fi flicks always outnumbered the more highbrow fare. For every Shape of Thing to Come, you had Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe or The Blob. For every Forbidden Planet, you had Cat Women of the Moon or whatever.

The only difference these days is that that that comic-book adventures and B-movie fare have much bigger budgets.

Which is exactly the point. The lowbrow fare has always existed, but it used to be kind of a low-level background noise. The big, high-profile genre pictures that we did get tended, proportionally, to be more intelligent and ambitious, like 2001, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain, and the like. But post-Star Wars, a much higher percentage of the big, high-profile genre pictures became lowbrow action/FX flicks, and the more thoughtful films were more likely to be lower-budget indie pictures.

Although I think there's a recent trend toward smarter genre pictures, things more in the vein of Inception and Interstellar. Heck, you can kind of plot out the evolution of intelligence in genre films just in Planet of the Apes alone -- compare the quality and intelligence of the original series to the Tim Burton reboot to the current incarnation.