In 1969, the surgeon Robin Cook was drafted to work with the U.S. Navy on their SEALAB
program. He served on Navy submarines, and one day, while stationed at San Diego, he
met a fellow doctor doing post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies
by the name of Michael Crichton. Crichton was becoming disenchanted with the field of
medicine and planned to leave it behind to pursue a career as a writer following the
enormous success of his novel The Andromeda Strain. The two doctors formed an immediate
friendship, and perhaps inspired by Crichton, Robin Cook began to write a novel while serving
on the USS Kamehameha called The Year of the Intern.
Dealing with the stress and strain of medical internships, the novel was a critical and
commercial failure when it was published in 1973. Cook never stopped practicing medicine,
but he was determined not to let the book's failure deter him from a side career as a
novelist. He spent some time studying the formulas of various best-sellers--including
Jaws, Seven Days in May, and the spy thrillers of Eric Ambler--and he came up with a series
of index cards containing techniques used by successful writers to manipulate an audience.
Then, in 1975, Cook used each and every one of these index cards to create his second
novel, Coma, published in 1977. This would become a massive hit, and is often credited
with popularizing--if not outright inventing--the entire subgenre of the medical thriller.
Hollywood took notice before the book was even published, and it was then up to none
other than Cook's friend, Michael Crichton, to figure out how to put Robin Cook's seminal
novel on the silver screen.
Something is not quite right at the Boston Memorial Hospital. A handful of patients have
gone in for routine surgical procedures only to come out brain-dead and comatose. When
one of these unfortunate souls happens to be the friend of one of the hospital's surgical
residents, Dr. Susan Wheeler starts digging into the records in search of answers. Following
a sparse trail of breadcrumbs and dissuaded by both her boyfriend and her superiors, she
finds a mysterious organization called the Jefferson Institute, where a terrible secret
waits to be discovered.
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this conspiracy once and for all. If you really do like this video, make sure to hit that
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the subject at hand.
After the success of 1973's Westworld, MGM was eager to give Michael Crichton another
chance in the director's chair. However, Crichton was mentally exhausted from his filmmaking
experience and took a year off to recouperate. He did eventually go back to MGM and tried
to get another project or two off the ground, but they never quite came together. That was,
until Coma came along.
Though he had never worked on anything he didn't write himself, Coma was similar in
style to his own work and dealt with the practice of medicine, which he had been trained in.
He therefore found it relatively easy to adapt his friend's novel into a screenplay, with
his biggest hurdle being an argument with the studio over the main character. The novel
has a female protagonist, but the studio wanted to swap the gender and have it be a male,
perhaps a role suited for someone like Paul Newman. Crichton balked at this, noting not
only that the story's tone draws heavily from the character's gender but also that modern
cinema has a poor track record of telling stories about female accomplishments. He did
compromise by toning down the feminist overtones of Cook's story--in the novel, the main character
is a feminist activist--but the subtext is still absolutely apparent in the final script.
"Honey, I'm going to take a shower. Can you grab me a beer before you start dinner?"
"Hey, Mark, get your own beer."
Aside from that fight--which Crichton thankfully won--his other big concern in adapting the
novel was that he didn't want to scare people away from hospitals and surgeons, much as
Steven Spielberg's Jaws had scared people away from the beach. He knew that nearly all
of us need surgery at some point in our lives, and he didn't want to exaggerate the fears
that most people naturally have about it. The producer, Marty Erlichman, on the other
hand, knew that the story's reliance on medical anxiety was a potential selling point that
would ensure a good box office performance.
To play the lead, the young surgical resident Dr. Susan Wheeler, Crichton wanted Geneviève
Bujold, a French-Canadian actress known for Earthquake, Obsession, and above all her award-winning
turn as Anne Boleyne in Anne of the Thousand Days. Beating out the likes of Farrah Fawcett
and Julie Christie, Bujold was initially hesitant to take the part, but Crichton was able to
cajole her after she read the script.
Her character's love interest, the fellow resident Dr. Mark Bellows, is played by Michael
Douglas, who was already a hot commodity in Hollywood after his run on the television
show The Streets of San Francisco and his production of the critical smash hit One Flew
over the Cuckoo's Nest. Though he'd been nominated for a Golden Globe nearly a decade earlier
for his performance in Hail, Hero!, Coma would be his first major success as an actor, launching
an impressive career that is still going strong over forty years later.
The main antagonist of the film, Dr. Harris, is played by veteran actor Richard Widmark,
who'd been in dozens of great films like Kiss of Death, No Way Out, and 1974's Murder on
the Orient Express.
Also worth noting are Elizabeth Astley as the even slimier Nurse Emerson, Rip Torn as
Dr. George, the chief of anesthesiology, future Bond girl Lois Chiles as the ill-fated Nancy
Greenly, a young Ed Harris in his feature film debut as this creepy pathology resident,
and Tom Selleck as another ill-fated surgery patient. Selleck reportedly only got the role
because of his appearances on billboards for Salem cigarettes.
Filming on Coma began in late June of 1977 on a budget of four and a half million dollars.
A little over a week of location shooting was done in and around Boston, Massachusetts,
in places like Boston City Hospital and Crane Beach. A key location was the exterior of
the Xerox regional headquarters in Lexington--now the head office of Stride Rite--which doubled
for the fictional Jefferson Institute. More location shooting was done back in Southern
California at the USC Medical School and an air-conditioning plant in Century City.
For the iconic Jefferson Institute interior involving the coma patients suspended by wires--which
was filmed on a soundstage at the MGM lot that Crichton kept under strict security--extras
were hired to hold a rigid pose in what proved to be a physically demanding job that could
only be performed in six-minute intervals. Two versions of each scene were filmed, one
with the actors partially nude for the film release and one in which they were covered
up to be safe for television.
The music was put together by Jerry Goldsmith, who had worked with Crichton before on the
TV movie Pursuit and would work with him again on The Great Train Robbery and Runaway, not
to mention the scores he would make for other movies based on Crichton's novels. Goldsmith's
score for Coma is tense but understated, relying on frantic string arrangements, low woodwinds,
and discordant piano cues to convey anxiety without blaring over the film with brass and
percussion. It's also important to note that the film has no score whatsoever until the
forty-five minute mark. I find myself talking about Goldsmith a lot on this channel, but
he is truly excellent at matching his music to the style of the film, and while the score
for Coma doesn't have too much in the way of recognizable themes or motifs, it goes
a long way to carrying the movie.
Coma released in January of 1978 to relatively good reviews and even better box office success.
It grossed somewhere between thirty and fifty million dollars and would prove to be Michael
Crichton's biggest hit as a director. While it hasn't had the enormous pop culture footprint
of Westworld, the image of half-naked comatose bodies hanging on wires has remained in the
zietgeist.
For me, I have to say I love this movie and feel like it doesn't get enough credit. Sure,
from a filmmaking standpoint, it's a pretty standard thriller with a few sequences of
late seventies cheese that you'd expect to find in a made-for-TV movie, but I don't think
it was anybody's intention to reinvent the wheel here. I can understand why it was Crichton's
best performing directorial effort, because it is a far better match for his stylistic
choices than Westworld, which hasn't aged nearly as well.
The film does a remarkable job grounding itself in reality, allowing the doctors and nurses
to speak in authentic medical jargon without dumbing it down too much for audiences. It
also perfectly captures the mundanity of real-life operating rooms, the way doctors and nurses
idly chat away while prepping a patient for surgery.
And that's what this film is really about: the depersonalization of the patient, the
way modern medicine seems to treat people as meat rather than human beings. Both Robin
Cook and Michael Crichton were critics of this aspect of their chosen profession, but
Coma goes out of its way to demonstrate how that happens without getting carried away
by political speechifying or overly-sensationalized melodrama.
Instead, it's all very prosaic. The camera doesn't linger on the grisly business of people
dissecting human bodies for parts, but it does hang on people making phone calls to
adjust the price indexes of organs or a nurse talking about her kid while putting an anesthetized
woman's legs in stirrups for a therapeutic abortion. This is where the true horror of
the story lies, and Crichton was wise to keep his focus on it rather than the more macabre
visual details.
When Dr. Wheeler begins to unravel the conspiracy, the story is told in such a way that it would
be really easy to believe she is simply unraveling her own sanity, that she is finding a way
to rationalize the apparently meaningless and random death of a friend while trying
to cope with the stress of a strained romantic relationship. Indeed, if you put yourself
in the shoes of her boyfriend, you might find yourself realizing you would probably treat
her that way. Bujold's performance is thus absolutely mesmerizing, with her determination,
fragility, and uncertainty all coming across brilliantly, often all at the same time.
Perhaps this is why Coma has aged so well. Its core ideas are perhaps even more relevant
today, and most of us, I daresay, have an underlying paranoia about modern medicine
and its corporate/bureaucratic incentives, especially in the United States. Even at the
film's most ridiculous moments--and even though some of the medical details are inaccurate
by modern scientific understanding--it is still frighteningly believable, every step
of the way.
What's worse is that, when Dr. Harris gives his villain's monologue to a drugged Dr. Wheeler,
explaining the moral ambiguity of his perspective, you can almost see his point. Almost.
"No decision is easy, Sue. It only looks that way when you're young."
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What's your favorite medical thriller? Let
me know in the comments, and while you're there, don't forget to like and subscribe
if you haven't already. If you'd like to support what I do even more, consider joining my Patreon
to get access to bonus content, vote on future video topics, and more. You can also check
out my website at emagill.com, where you'll find written reviews of plenty more sci-fi
classics in both film and literature. Until next time, though, when we'll find out if
there's something artificial underneath the perfect suburban housewife, this is the Unapologetic
Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love, as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"I guess I have an overactive imagination."
"You should be like me. Everybody says I have no imagination at all." "Oh!"