I watch a lot of science-fiction movies, and most of the time, I watch them
because they entertain me. However, every once in a while, I like to watch that
rare breed of science-fiction film that is more artistic than entertaining, more
concerned with boundary-pushing than with having a schlocky good time. About
once or twice a decade, a sci-fi film comes along that can legitimately be
called high art, and usually, that film goes wildly underappreciated for many
years before being uncovered by film historians and reevaluated as the
masterpiece that it is. Now this brings me to David Bowie...
Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien. He has come to our planet in disguise in hopes
of finding a way to shuttle precious water back to his drought-ravaged
homeworld, where his wife and children are slowly dying of thirst. By selling
bits of his alien technology, Newton is able to form a multimillion-dollar
corporation called World Enterprises that he uses to fund his space-bound
project. However, other corporate interests, a new love, and the
ever-present temptation of becoming human resist him at every turn.
Before we really get started, if you could hit that like button, it would help me provide
water for my thirsty family. If you really do like what I'm doing, make sure
to subscribe to see more content. Thank you in advance. With that out of the way,
let's get back to the subject at hand.
In 1963, the American author Walter Tevis,
made famous for his debut novel, The Hustler, published his sophomore effort, a
science-fiction novel called The Man Who Fell to Earth. About an alien who has
come to Earth looking for a way to transplant his fellow aliens from their
ruined homeworld, the novel, which Tevis himself considered a veiled
autobiography about alcoholism and existential angst, proved to be a
critical hit, though only a modest commercial one.
After a failed attempt to turn it into a television series,
the film rights were picked up by auteur director Nicolas Roeg.
Roeg, who started his career as a cinematographer, working
with the likes of David Lean, Francois Truffaut, and Richard Lester, made a
splash in the early 70's with his first directorial efforts: Performance and
Walkabout. Much like Tevis, Roeg found his work heaped with effusive praise by
critics but wasn't seeing that translate into much financial success.
Around the time screenwriter Paul Mayersberg began writing an adaptation of The Man
Who Fell to Earth, however, Roeg released the horror classic Don't Look Now, starring
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, a film that was not only beloved by
critics but also did well at the box office.
Therefore, when Roeg took Mayersberg's script to his British distributors for
Don't Look Now, British Lion Films, they were keen to work with him.
There was a brief negotiation period in which British Lion demanded more control
than Roeg was initially willing to offer, but in the end, British Lion, with a 50%
financial guarantee from American distributors at Paramount, agreed to let
Roeg make his film, even giving him almost complete creative control despite
their hardline stance at the negotiating table.
Roeg's friend, Si Litvinoff, who he brought on as an executive producer,
introduced him to actress Candy Clark, whose only notable film credit at the
time was American Graffiti, and the two began a romantic relationship even
though Roeg was technically married. Roeg gave her the script for The Man
Who Fell to Earth, and Clark was subsequently the first person cast, in
her case as the female lead, Mary-Lou. Clark had months to work on her part
before anyone else was cast, and as a result, she gives one of the best
performances of her career. She also plays the alien wife, although she is
altered so much, you can barely tell. There were some hiccups along the way
for her. She wasn't comfortable with the nude scenes--of which there are many--and
she gave herself a few minor injuries throughout. In the scene where the alien
takes off his mask for her, which she wasn't prepared for the first time and
allegedly passed out, she had planned on throwing up in panic, but no matter what
she tried, even ipecac syrup, she just couldn't do it, which forced Roeg to
improvise the following scene in which she pees herself. For the lead role of
the alien, Thomas Jerome Newton, there was talk of Peter O'Toole, Robert Redford,
Mick Jagger, and others, but most of these actors were either unavailable or too
expensive. It became something of a problem, because the financial backers
wanted a big name in order to sell the movie, but they weren't willing to front
enough money to hire any actors famous enough to be a box-office draw.
Roeg himself suggested casting his recent acquaintance, the sci-fi author
Michael Crichton, whose height of 6'11" would help him stand out,
but for whatever reason, that had to be dropped as well. There is some debate as
to who, exactly, first came up with the idea of casting the rising rock star
David Bowie as the titular alien. Whether it was Roeg's producer friend Arlene
Sellers, the famed film agent Maggie Abbott, or the film's screenwriter Paul
Mayersberg, the one thing everybody agrees on is that it was a television
documentary about Bowie's Diamond Dogs tour called Cracked Actor that convinced
Nicolas Roeg that the British rock icon would be a perfect fit.
"It was his own personality, being unable to cope with the circumstances he found
himself in, which is being an almighty, prophet-like, superstar rocker."
Not only had Roeg worked with a British rock star before--with Mick Jagger in
Performance--he also wouldn't have to pay Bowie quite as much as he would a
big-named actor. For his part, Bowie was enthusiastic about the idea, and he and
Roeg formed a magnanimous working relationship.
Bowie was having some difficulties in his personal life at the time and was
also struggling with a pretty nasty cocaine habit, but by all reports, he was
surprisingly professional and humble on set. He may or may not have been doing
drugs during filming. According to Clark, he honored a firm promise to Roeg to
stay away from them, but Bowie himself has claimed he was doing cocaine on a
daily basis. He did have a few minor and bizarre breakdowns during filming--for
example, he became convinced someone had poisoned a glass of milk he drink, and he
complained about having to work over an imagined Native American burial ground--
but his acting style was consistent and agreeable. In later interviews, Bowie
talked about how he didn't really understand the script or what was
happening on any given day, but he memorized his lines and went in every day
determined to give it his all. Though some critics have complained that the
role is one big exercise in non-acting, as they perceive Bowie to be just acting
as himself, Bowie's performance is the unchallenged
highlight of the film. Without Bowie, it's hard to imagine this film having the
cult status it has maintained for four and a half decades.
For the role of the patent-lawyer-turned-business-partner
Oliver Farnsworth, whose name is borrowed from
Philo Farnsworth, one of the primary inventors of the television set,
they originally wanted to cast James Mason,
but once again driven by a need to cut costs, they eventually turned to Buck
Henry, famous for his role in the new Steve Allen Show, his Oscar-winning
screenplay for The Graduate, and for co-creating Get Smart with Mel Brooks.
As Henry was a trained comedian, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg added new
lines of dryly comedic dialogue for him, sometimes only a few days before the
scenes were to be shot. While not exactly comic relief,
Henry's performance adds a lightness to the film that would be sorely missing
had the role gone to the more serious Mason. "My father used to say, 'When you get a
gift horse, force open its jaws and have a damned
good look on its mouth.'" "I'd say that was good advice." "Yes, but my father was
always wrong." For the role of Dr. Bryce, a college professor who quits his job to
join Newton's company and eventually winds up in his inner circle and
betraying him, they had to abandon their first expensive choice of James Coburn
and settle on the character actor Rip Torn, who was well on his way to earning
a big-name reputation. Also noteworthy is the NFL-footballer-turned-actor Bernie
Casey as the greedy tycoon Mr. Peters. The role was originally supposed to be
much bigger, with Peters becoming something of a military leader and
stand-in for the whole military-industrial complex, but during
test screenings, audiences had a hard time accepting a black man having that
much authority in American politics. Lastly, in the scene at the aborted launch,
there are brief cameos from astronaut Jim Lovell and writer Terry Southern.
On a budget of about one and a half million dollars, the film was shot
over the summer of 1975, almost entirely on location in New Mexico, where
right-to-work laws allowed the British crew to be flown in on tourist visas.
With cooperative weather, gorgeous natural scenery, and a lot of veteran
crew members who had worked together before, the shoot was a remarkably smooth
one, even taking Bowie's occasional freakout into account. The producers
showed an early cut of the film to the new head of production at Paramount,
Barry Diller, who didn't like or understand it at all. According to
British Lion's Michael Deeley, Diller refused to honor Paramount's contract,
and so British Lion was denied its promised 50% funding. This put the
production company in potential dire straits, but rather than suing Paramount
outright, which would have been an expensive, time-consuming process with an
uncertain outcome, they had to quickly shop the film around to other American
distributors. I've come across some sources that mention a settlement
between British Lion and Paramount over all this, but I'm not sure what exactly
transpired from a legal standpoint. Regardless, it was a smaller company,
Cinema V, that agreed to buy a few hundred prints for American distribution and
salvage British Lion's finances. Cinema V wasn't able to do nearly as much as
Paramount could have, but without the company's $850,000 assistance, The Man
Who Fell to Earth wouldn't have gotten an American release or possibly even any
release at all. However, despite saving the film and having a reputation for
preserving international films in their original
form, Cinema V wound up producing its own butchered cut of the film that was
borderline incomprehensible. For a couple of decades in the U.S., the only version
of the film available was a pathetic, chopped-up shadow of Roeg's vision. It
was Candy Clark who eventually tracked down the owners of the U.S. distribution
rights and convinced them to put out the full version of the film, which had to be
recovered from the U.K. as all U.S. copies had been destroyed. Now, it is the Cinema V
cut that is almost impossible to find, as every subsequent DVD and Blu-Ray
release has been for the full, 2 hour and 20 minute cut of the film.
In January of 1976, with only a few months left before release, the soundtrack had yet to be
completed. David Bowie had originally been tasked with writing and producing
the score, and he did manage to come up with a few tracks before Roeg rejected
them. Reportedly, these tracks hadn't been synced to the film, they were wildly
bizarre, and even Bowie wasn't particularly happy with them. As a result,
Roeg gave the unenviable task of scoring the entire picture in six weeks
to John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas, who he had met a few years earlier
while working on Performance. Roeg envisioned a new score that would borrow
heavily from an eclectic mix of American music--from pop, jazz, blues, bluegrass, and
rock--along with a scattering of stock music as needed. The stress of the time
crunch made itself known between Phillips and Roeg, who reportedly had a
number of unpleasant confrontations. Thankfully, though, Phillips proved to be
up to the task, as the soundtrack he delivered was so good that there was a
campaign to get it released as an album, something deemed too expensive at the
time. Because of this campaign, Phillips' soundtrack was finally released
three and a half years ago, when Studio Canal and Universal assembled it for the
film's 40th anniversary. The Man Who Fell to Earth released in
March of 1976, and though it garnered a fair bit of critical acclaim and was
eagerly gobbled up by Bowie fans, it was not a box-office success. The American
release was especially terrible, no doubt because of Cinema V's hatchet job and
lack of marketing resources, but even its U.K. release fell well short of
expectations. It garnered controversy for its graphic nudity--a controversy Nicolas
Roeg was familiar with after Don't Look Now--and it was given an X rating by the
British Board of Film Censors, which no doubt hurt its earnings. Nowadays, the
film is considered something of a masterpiece in science-fiction cinema.
Even some of the American critics who dismissed it at the time as a
self-indulgent and confusing bit of David Bowie self-promotion have come
around to appreciating it, probably because the film they saw in the 70's was
the Cinema V version. It is now not uncommon to find the film screened in
college film courses, which is where I first encountered it a couple of decades ago.
Make no mistakes, however: this is not a film for casual audiences. If you were
to tell me you think this film boring and pretentious, I wouldn't hold it
against you, probably because, from a certain point of view,
it is both of those things. It's also a terrible adaptation of the book,
having so little in common with it that you could swap out the names and the
title, and even the writer of the novel wouldn't accuse the film of plagiarism.
That's because Roeg and Mayersberg weren't looking to make a straight
adaptation, even though they both expressed love and admiration for Walter
Tevis' novel. Instead, they wanted to look to the near future, tone down the overt
science-fiction and political thriller elements of the story, and create a
romantic parable about the corporate takeover of America and the rejection of
anything that fails to conform to its interests. On that level, the film
completely succeeds. Watching it nowadays, it might not feel particularly
provocative in how it presents America, because the corporate takeover they
envisioned isn't too far off the reality of the 1980's. Sure, it has a bit of
mustache-twirling villainy in how it represents corporate America, but it's
pretty mild compared to the treatment corporations would get from even
American films in the years that followed.
I like to look at The Man Who Fell to Earth as a compelling demonstration of
how individuality can be swallowed up, both by the overwhelming forces of
society and by the imperfections of individuals. As surely as Thomas Newton
is exploited, abused, and discarded by corporate interests,
he is also betrayed by those closest to him and by himself. In the end, he is
reduced to little more than the babbling alcoholic he encounters when he first
arrives on the planet Earth. He is taken in by vice--especially television, sex, and
alcohol, which are the three major obsessions of the film--and his ultimate
ruination is as much his own fault as it is the fault of the evil Mr. Peters.
Mayersberg, citing Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Richard
Matheson's script for It Came from Outer Space, wanted to make the alien as
sympathetic as the human characters, if not moreso, and he didn't want to write
any of his characters as puppets in a morality play. People behave like people
in his script, full of foibles and imperfections and ultimately neither
seeking nor earning any kind of redemptions for the mistakes they make
or the pain that results. Newton, despite clearly being a tragic figure, is no
exception to that. The best example, I feel, is the secondary character of
Farnsworth, who starts out as a well-to-do but relatively humble lawyer
who is propelled to greatness by managing Newton's financial interests
and running his gargantuan multinational business. Farnsworth is a friendly,
self-deprecating guy who happens to be in a life-long, seemingly healthy
relationship with another man. His sexuality is never explicitly mentioned
or discussed, but when the powers that be come for him, it's hard not to conclude
that he's being tossed aside--quite literally--because he is different in a
way that is unacceptable. While we're on the subject, his bouncing
off the glass because it wouldn't break the first time was a happy accident
during filming. That wasn't scripted. "I'm sorry." Now as I said, this isn't a film
for everyone. It's undeniably artsy and a bit full of itself, but for students of
film and audiences who don't mind exploring the more artistic side of the
medium, it's one of the best science- fiction movies of all time. It's not
quite on the same level as 2001: A Space Odyssey, but that's only because nothing
is. This is a movie with a lot to say-- some of which I still don't even
understand, like the time displacement stuff--and it was made by an auteur who
isn't afraid to be a little obtuse. It also contains David Bowie's best screen
performance, with all due deference given to the Goblin King. Bowie is what makes
this film work on every level, but even his amazing acting would be lost without
the talents of the genuine filmmaking genius of Nicolas Roeg. At times
unpleasant, at times a bit off-putting, and at times eye-rollingly self-indulgent,
The Man Who Fell to Earth is nonetheless a stunning, beautiful work of cinematic
art that remains an essential science-fiction classic.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What do you think:
is The Man Who Fell to Earth really high art, or is it
a pretentious bit of cinematic navel-gazing that's only famous
because of Ziggy Stardust? Let me know in the comments. Be sure to like and
subscribe if you haven't done so already, and if you really like these videos,
consider becoming a Patron to get early access, vote on future topics, and
more. You can also check out my website at emagill.com, where you'll find plenty
more reviews of sci-fi classics in both film and literature. Until next time, when
we'll look at that time Superman was defeated by a penny, this is
The Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love,
as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"What do you do? For a living, I mean." "Oh, I'm just visiting."
"Ooh, a traveler!"