"Jim Wynorski - They Came From Outer Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wynorski Jim)

THETURKEY THAT ATTACKEDNEW YORK

an introduction by RAY BRADBURY

EVERYONE KNOWS how you make a pearl: feed a grain of sand to an oyster and hope the oyster
gets wondrously ill.

Everyone thinks they know how to make a motion picture: feed the right story into aHollywood dream
factory and hope for similar, oyster results.
 Easier said than done, as can be witnessed by reading the stories in this collection, then sitting in a dark
theater for days, viewing the calamitiesтАФand sometimes the beautiesтАФthat came from ingesting ideas
and cranking them through a camera. A few pearls here and there, but, more often than not, as in the
case of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the camera swallowed the dinosaur and birthed a titmouse.

More of my very personal reactions later.

Why am I up front here writing about these stories and the films that arose from same? In many cases I
read these stories years ago when they were first published. I knew some of the authors well. I have seen
most of the films, many of them a half dozen times. I have been at the premiere performance of at least
four of the films included here.

But long before that my cinema training began with a maniac mother who had to be dragged from silent
movie theaters, after late matinees, by a hungry husband or a son sent to fetch mama home. More often
than not the son forgot why he had come and stayed with mom for one more rerun.

During those hideaway hours I fell in love with the hideous beauties created by Lon Chaney and the
brontosaurs in The Lost World who fell off cliffs and landed on me. When NemoтАЩs submarine, run by
Lionel Barrymore, surfaced in MGMтАЩs The Mysterious Island, I surfaced with it and read Jules Verne
the next day. When the futuristic dirigible in Fox Films Just Imagine sailed overManhattan , I was up there
in it. In 1935, when Cabal in Things to Come told me to head for the stars, I listened, I flew.

Why is it important to put together a collection like this one? First off, to show how material from one
medium can cross-pollinate another.

Then, quite often there is the shock when one discovers that the original story was better than the film
that grew from it. Finally you realize that in many instances you could remake the story as a new film,
base it more closely on the original story, and wind up with a motion picture that would hardly resemble
the first cinema version.

тАЬWho Goes There?тАЭ by John W. Campbell, Jr., is a fine case in point.

Someone really ought to reread this story and then go make a proper film based onCampbell тАЩs
evocative concept. The Thing, popular as it was, finally wasnтАЩt quite good enough, was it?

Similarly, there are rumors that Twentieth Century-Fox may make a sequel to The Day the Earth Stood
Still. If they do, they would be wise to reread Harry BatesтАЩs тАЬFarewell to the MasterтАЭ before doing so.

They might well decide to stuff his pages directly into the camera.