INSTALLMENT 1:
In Which We Begin Our Journey

It was well-met for Charles Foster Kane, and no less salutary for me; and so I begin this initial installment of these monthly ruminations-on-movies with a Declaration of Principles.

I will, first and always, try to entertain. I will judge film both as Art and as Craft. I will never praise a bad film simply because it has spectacular special effects. I will never allow my own film work to impede the honest discussion, favorable or otherwise, of films made by my friends or employers, current or potential. I will not excuse dishonest filmmaking just because it is good sf; I will not excuse good filmmaking if it is bad sf. I will not review sf films as if they were exempt from the highest standards of any art-form . . . to do so would be to apologize for them as if I believed—as many condescending critics do—that they are lame, or trash, and so do not have to measure up to the rigors of High Art. I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior "public service."

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Warner Bros.) is, conceptually, not only a disaster, but a shameful example of directorial auteurism. It is a film that sells itself as the first authentic rendition of Burroughs's classic high-trash adventure novel of 1914, and is, in truth, as skewed a vision as the horrendous Bo-John Derek version.

What we have been given—and there is a story behind the story that could serve as the classic paradigm for the way the film industry treats its writers—is more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than the Lord of the Apes. It is Chimps of Fire by Hugh Hudson, director of that movie about running on the beach to Vangelis music. It is not the Greystoke on which scenarist Robert Towne lavished years and miles of visceral material to shepherd toward production, only to have it taken from his control and given over to another with a Visigoth's respect for the primacy of interest of the creator.

It is Jekyll and Hyde. It is a schizophrenic film. It is half fowl and half foul.

That it has drawn enthusiastic comment from such film critics as Jay Cocks in Newsweek and Vincent Canby (who fair wets himself with naive enthusiasm) in the New York Times is more saddening than anomalous. They seem to have swallowed whole the hype that this is the variorum Tarzan text. It is not. When Robert Towne (of whom more in a moment) began transferring his admiration and affection for the book to screenplay form, he understood with a fine writer's clarity of vision that the reason Tarzan has become one of the few universal literary icons is that old Edgar Rice knew precisely what he was doing. Canby seems startled to find resonances of the "wild child" fable as previously best-interpreted in the François Truffaut film of 1970. Of course! It's there; in the book; Burroughs drew on the familiar trope to provide a subtextual archetype. He was—in the best sense of the word—a consummate hack. (It is not by chance that there are only five literary creations known throughout the world. Children in Zaire who have never heard of Hamlet or Jay Gatsby or Emma Bovary or Raskolnikov know these five: Tarzan, Superman, Mickey Mouse, Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes. They know them because they are free-floating universal images.)

And were parvenus like Canby and Cocks not above familiarizing themselves with the original novel, they would not be trumpeting this hermaphroditic poseur as True Writ.

True Writ was the original screenplay by Robert Towne. He tried for twelve years to get Greystoke produced. Chances were good. Towne is one of the very few scenarists in Hollywood whose storytelling sense is the equal of a good novelist's. And the only parts of Greystoke that are worth the candle are those that Hudson shot scene-for-scene from the screenplay. How does one know that? Because Greystoke was a legend in Hollywood for more than a decade. Copies of the script were available. Many of us read it and marveled. We waited expectantly, hoping someone would have the sense to give Towne the seed money to begin preparations. More about that in a moment.

You may not know this story about Robert Towne: the screenplay for Chinatown (1974) was based on the historical case of the theft of the Owens Valley water and development of California's San Fernando Valley by machinations so scuzzy that they paralleled for infamous wheeling/dealing the Teapot Dome Scandal. The great Southern California robber barons—after whom streets and highways have been named—Mulholland, May, Doheny, to name a few—fleeced hundreds of thousands of people to effect their scheme. It is rumored that one of the men ruined in this skullduggery was Robert Towne's grandfather. So he wrote Chinatown to get even, to make some small gesture toward justice in the name of his family. The film was, of course, taken over by director Roman Polanski, who—like Hugh Hudson—had his own "vision" of what the film should be. And what went up on the screen bore only minimal resemblance to that which Towne had broken his butt to create.

Ten years later: Towne is a gentleman, and continues to resist the temptation to vilify Polanski. He will not speak of the perfidy, but the grinding of his teeth, even today, is like the settling of tectonic plates.

More sinned against than sinning, Towne has had to swallow the bitter vetch of another labor of love being wrenched from his sure hands and given over to an improbable replacement.

The problem for the studios, when they considered his script, was the actualizing of the chimp suits for the jungle sequences. Remember that only in the last ten years have we seen such a quantum leap in technical expertise where such special effects are concerned. The key phrase during those hustling years for Towne was, "The chimps have to age as the child grows up; that means they have to be better costumes than the apes in 2001." For a long time such a thing was impossible. Finally, Warner Bros. gave Towne five hundred thousand dollars and told him they'd make the film if he could find some SFX guy who could solve the problem.

Towne went to all the best people and eventually everyone said, "The only hope you've got is Rick Baker." Remember: this was before Baker's rise to prominence. Towne gave the script to Baker, who read it and came back to say yes, he could lick the problem, but it would take two years. Towne asked him, if he had unlimited financing, how long would it take? Baker said, "Two years."

So the studio—with the predictable parvenu thinking of bottom-line boobs—went to that season's hot ticket, Carlo Rambaldi, who had just hit it big with his creation of the alien in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. He read the script and said, "I can do it in eight months; four hundred thousand dollars."

Towne had reservations. He liked what Baker had said; he felt Baker was the answer. But the studio overrode his qualms. They gave Rambaldi the assignment. More than a year and six hundred thousand dollars later: not one suit. And that was the exit for Towne, because the jamook at the studio could not admit it had been his miscalculation.

The film was Warner's property at that point, and they decided to repeat their sophomoric mistakes by handing the Towne project to that season's hot ticket, Hugh Hudson, whose Chariots of Fire, while not actually making much money, had won the Oscar. He was the fairhaired item, and so it didn't matter that they were turning over what is, essentially, for all its English trappings, an American boys' pulp adventure story to a director known for one film of the Old School Tie, King & Country idiom.

And Hudson, surfeited with hubris, has taken the Towne screenplay, a thing of unity and brilliance, and given it to his writer buddy Michael Austin. And they have looked down their snouts at old ERB's magnum opus, and they have said, "Well, yes, there is rawther a crude vigah to this stuff, but mostly it's muck. Let's have done with the messy parts as quickly as we can, and get back to Old Blighty."

If you recall Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the good doctor Henry Jekyll is something of a bore. A bit more than a bit of a goody-two-shoes, stiff upper-lipped and a model of rectitude. England's answer to the late George Apley. It is not until the appearance of the bestial Hyde that the story comes to life, that the film leaps off the screen, that the excitement begins to crackle. It is our inherent fascination with the Beast. And Stevenson (like Burroughs) knew that about us. So the best parts of ERB and RLS and Little Caesar and Public Enemy and all the rest are the parts in which the Beast is running loose. Yes, of course, morality almost always insists they get theirs (most notably in the hypocritical ethical code of motion picture and television guidelines which, though loosened these last few years, is still intended to disarm Falwell and his ilk). But what we enjoy most is not the Jekyll goody-goodness, but the Beast.

And that is what is sensational in Greystoke: One-third of the film takes place in the jungle as Tarzan is raised by Kala and the chimps. Two-thirds, however, is the Edwardian humdrummery of Henry Jekyll's world: a larger section of scenes we've seen again and again: in Four Feathers and Beau Geste and every L. P. Hartley yawner in which the tatters of the Empire try to convince the rest of the world that the sun never sets on dieu et mon droit.

The story of how Hugh Hudson ruined Rick Baker's Kala costume (oh, did I neglect to mention that the most stunning aspect of that Towne-inspired valid section is the special chimp suits built—in two years—by, er, uh, Rick Baker?) by scheduling as the first scene to be shot the segment in which Tarzan's adoptive mother is riddled by pygmy's arrows—so that Baker had to keep patching it for all the chronologically earlier shootings that came after—is now legend in the industry. (It has been reported that Baker, who had been forbidden by Hudson even to see dailies of the film for which he was in large part responsible, had to be restrained by studio guards from going for Milord Hudson's throat. Up the Colonies!) But Hudson got in all the dull, vapid manor-house clichés his "vision" demanded. And the studio execs, no doubt snowed by Hudson's British accent, nodded and said, swell.

There is very little of the Burroughs novel left. Towne wrote a savage screenplay, in which Tarzan (a name never spoken in the film for some moronic reason) was a savage, sometimes noble, sometimes not. Then Hugh Hudson and his buddy Michael Austin savaged it by removing the savagery. If you are looking for a Tarzan who, as in the novel, is an active entity, you will be disappointed. They have made him constantly and consistently reactive. He is led this way and that way, even by weak English stereotypes. And in the one scene back in England when Jane's suitor James Fox seems about to use a riding crop or somesuch on a mentally-retarded servant, and Lord John Clayton leaps from the parapet to stop him, and we think we will now see the dichotomous savage in reaction to civilization, all he does is pull the riding crop from Fox's hand and look petulant.

Christopher Lambert as the adult Tarzan is splendid. He looks like, and has the same animal charisma, as Belmondo; and no better choice could have been made for the part. Nor could any better choice have been made for the sixth Earl of Greystoke, Tarzan's grandfather, than the late Sir Ralph Richardson, whose warmth and puckishness are memorable.

The only better choice that could have been made, to save this tragic split-personality film, was to have left it in the hands of its creator . . . and not have given it over to a pompous furriner more attuned to Trollope than Tarzan.

And if, perchance, some passing naif senses in you a deep well of humanism, and inquires if you can encapsulate the essence of tragedy, you might suggest that s/he note the screenplay credits on Greystoke. The scenarists listed are P. H. Vazak and Michael Austin. "P. H. Vazak" is the registered pseudonym used by a fine artist named Robert Towne. And you might quote to your wide-eyed questioner the words of the poet Antonin Artaud, who said: "Very little is needed to destroy a man. He needs only the conviction that his work is useless."

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1984