Dark Star - A Carpenter Classic
mcss...@dct.ac.uk
far...@aol.com (Farf626) writes -
> This space comedy was written and produced by John Carpenter and Dan
> O'Bannon ("Alien"). It's a riot. It was obviously shot with a miniscule
> budget, but you can see the early talent of these filmakers.
Along with Romero's original "Night Of The Living Dead", I think this
is the greatest no-budget feature of all time. Anyone who thinks "Star
Trek" is the be-all-and-end-all of science-fiction should be forced to
watch this movie. No gleaming instrumentation panels here, or mile-
long beautifully-graceful corporate star cruisers, or competent and
efficient trained crew-members; just a bunch of deadheads skulking
about in a rotten old wreck that keeps breaking down. This is my kind
of sf cinema. Can you imagine Captain James Toupee Kirk despondently
saying a line like, 'I remember the last asteroid storm we hit. I was
downstairs getting a sandwich when I heard the damn sleeping quarters
blow up.'. Or if in-flight musak on the Enterprise was announced by
the computer as, 'For your listening enjoyment, we now present The
Moonlight Melodies of Martin Segundo and the Scintilla Strings. Our
opening selection is the perennial favourite, When Twilight Falls On
NGC 891.'. I thought not.
The movie's great strength is the way it debunks the myth of space
travel as glamorous and exciting, whilst at the same time is obviously
heavily influenced by Kubrick's "2001" (and also "Dr Strangelove").
There are so many great scenes - Doolittle (Brian Narelle) teaching
Bomb #20 phenomenology, Pinback (Dan O'Bannon) dangling from the
elevator to the strains of Rossini's "The Barber Of Seville", Talby,
the first of Carpenter's totally-isolated hero figures, gazing off
endless into the heavens of the Vale Nebula, and my very favourite
scene of all, Pinback's diary, which kills me so much that I gotta
try and replicate it in full here.
- I just want to say that I am not Sergeant Pinback. My real name
is Bill Froug, and I am a fuel maintenance technician. I have
been on this mission now for a year and two months. Pinback's
uniforms do not fit me. The underwear is too loose. I do not
belong here and I want to return to Earth.
- I went up to Doolittle in the hall today and I said (deleted)
Doolittle. And he said (deleted). Then I said (deleted) (gesture
deleted). And he didn't get it !!
- Commander Powell died today. We were coming out of a bomb-run
and something went wrong with his seat, and it blew up and he
was dead.
- Doolittle says he's assuming command and I say that's (deleted).
I'm the only one left with any objectivity on this ship, so I
should be the one to take command. I say he's (deleted).
- I do not appreciate the men on this ship. They are uncouth and
fail to appreciate my better qualities. Today, at mealtime, I
tried to improve morale and build a sense of camraderie among
the men by holding a humorous round-robin discussion of the
early days of the mission. My overtures were brutally rejected.
These men do not want a happy ship. They are deeply sick, and
try to compensate by making me feel miserable. Last week was my
birthday. No-one even said happy birthday. Some day this tape
will be played, and then they'll be sorry.
One last thing. The original poster mentioned "Alien", and it's
often been remarked upon that the twenty-minute slapstick scene
in "Dark Star" in which Pinback chases the beach-ball alien around
the ship, formed the genesis for O'Bannon's "Alien" script. In
other words, he simply removed the jokes, fleshed it out a bit
and presented it as a horror story. An interesting idea.
---
/ | \ BORN
/ | \ Harry Roat Jr,
| | | TO
\ /|\ / from Scarsdale
\/ | \/ KILL
---
Bomb #20: In the beginning, there was darkness, and the darkness was
without form, and void. And in addition to the darkness, there
was also Me. And I looked upon the face of the darkness, and I
saw that I was alone.
Pinback: Uh ... snap out of it, bomb.
Bomb #20: Let there be light.
Douglas Nonast
wrote two classic books, "Big Secrets" and "Bigger Secrets" which I
highly recommend everybody run out and buy. Anyway, "Big" has an entry
for subliminal shots in movies, and has the following entry for Dark Star:
Dark Star
[released by] Jack H. Harris, 1974
Dark Star, John Carpenter's first film, has a cult following on late
night television. It is a science fiction comedy shot for sixty thousand
dollars with a group of Carpenter's fellow University of Southern
California students. The script is bright, the special effects cheesy:
one "space suit" was reportedly made from a cookie tin, a vacuum-cleaner
hose, and styrofoam packing material from a typewriter case. The Dark
Star is a spaceship that locates "unstable" worlds and destroys them. The
lately psychotic crew is captained by a dead but still concious commander
in the ships deep freeze. One of the ship's cache of introspective bombs
must be talked out of prematurely explosion. The film's brief hidden
message is flashed momentarily on a computer panel: "FUCK YOU HARRIS."
Who is Harris? He is Jack H. Harris, the film's producer and distributor.
Best known for The Blob and The Eyes Of Laura Mars, Harris backed Dark
Star after Carpenter and friends' self-funding (some six thousand
dollars) ran out. In its first celluloid incarnation, Dark Star ran for
fourty five minutes on sixteen millimeter stock. Harris' money bankrolled
another thirty eight minute's worth of footage and the transfer to thirty
five millimeter stock necessary for commercial release. Be that as it
may, a rift developed between Carpenter and Harris. Carpenter and
cowriter Dan O'Bannon were perfectionists; Harris was a corner-cutter. At
one point Carpenter and O'Bannon allegedly sabotaged the sound track so
that Harris would have to move the work from a discount film-dubber to
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Dark Star had limited distribution in its 1974 release. It was rereleased
after Star Wars and has been popular in revival since. Local TV stations
are presumably not aware of the fleeting obscenity, but the film is often
heavily edited for television.
-DG