Situated between the northern and southern peninsulas of Michigan, in Lake
Huron, is a little island where time seems to have been brought to a
standstill, where cars are forbidden and much of the native landscape remains
meticulously preserved as a National Park. One of the biggest draws of
Mackinac Island is the Grand Hotel, where every fall, a group of people come
together while wearing the clothes of the early 1900's to celebrate a romantic
portrait of the past, a film about time travel that was made on this island 40 years ago.
It is June 27, 1912. Your mind accepts this completely. It is June 27, 1912, and
you are in your room at the Grand Hotel. At this very moment,
the actress Elise McKenna is staying at the hotel, waiting to meet you though she
doesn't know it yet. It is June 27, 1912, and you have just traveled from the
future to find the woman of your dreams, to have a love affair across time itself.
It is June 27, 1912. It is June 27, 1912.
Before we really get started, if you could please hit that like button, it
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you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
In the early 70's, the author Richard Matheson, famous for writing
The Shrinking Man and Hell House--as well as several episodes of The Twilight Zone--
was inspired by a portrait of actress Maude Adams to write Bid Time Return, a
novel about a screenwriter dying of an inoperable brain tumor who falls in love
with a portrait of a young actress named Elise McKenna and then pushes his
consciousness backwards through time in order to be with her. When it was
published in 1975, the novel wasn't much of a commercial success, but it did find
its way into the hands of producer Stephen Deutsch, who absolutely loved it
and was convinced it could make a good movie. Deutsch worked tirelessly with
Richard Matheson to get the movie made, and though Universal bought the rights,
the studio was lukewarm on it, and Deutsch had a hard time finding a
director who was interested. Some time later, the French-American director
Jeannot Szwarc, known primarily for his television work, had just finished Jaws 2
and was eager to direct another Hollywood film for Universal. However, he
didn't want to make another big-budget action movie, so when he went to producer
Ray Stark looking for his next project, he said he wanted something smaller,
something quiet and romantic. Stark put him in touch with Deutsch, and after
reading Bid Time Return that night, Szwarc agreed to direct to the film
adaptation the next day. Mathieson himself wrote the screenplay,
and during pre-production, the title was changed to Somewhere in Time, largely
because the original title, Bid Time Return, taken from Shakespeare's Richard II,
was too archaic and ungainly for a Hollywood film. Matheson also made
a few changes to the story in order for it to work as a movie. For example, both
Matheson and Szwarc agreed that terminal illnesses rarely work on film, so
Matheson cut the brain tumor out of the plot and instead had the hero die of
grief, which is more medically plausible than you might assume. Most of the other
changes aren't all that significant, but if you want to know more, I break it all
down in my written reviews on my website at emagill.com. With Matheson plugging
away, Szwarc was enthusiastic to get started,
but the production met resistance from the studio, which still wasn't sold on
the film and didn't really want to make it. Szwarc, who had to remind the studio of
the incredible box-office performance of his previous film, Jaws 2, was only able
to move forward after agreeing to have the budget cut in half to a measly four
million dollars, which was unthinkably small for a period drama of the time.
To save money, Szarc was determined to film almost entirely on location, but when he
went to scout out the setting of the novel, the Hotel del Coronado outside of
San Diego, he knew it wouldn't work. The hotel had too much modernization--things
like visible powerlines, aerials, aluminum windows, a high-rise convention center,
and an overflowing parking lot--so he and the crew immediately began looking for
other historic waterfront hotels throughout America. It didn't take them
long to find the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, a place where modernization is
frowned upon. With the first draft of the script completed and the location agreed
upon, next came casting. For the male lead, Richard Collier, Christopher Reeve was
immediately put at the top of the list. However, fresh off the heels of
Superman, Reeve's agent refused to even give the script to his client, laughing
off the paltry sum on offer. Stephen Deutsch then surreptitiously
slipped the script to Reeve in a hotel room, and after Reeve read it and liked
it, Deutsch and Szwarc convinced him to take
the part, even though they couldn't pay him as much as he was worth.
Reeve was being offered dozens of jobs at the time, but they were all physical,
action-heavy roles designed to take advantage of his performance as Superman.
Reeve, not wanting to be typecast, was thrilled when something different came
his way, and he signed on to Somewhere in Time because it would require more range
and less physicality. Ironically, though, a major factor in his being offered the
role was a physical one: at six foot four, he towers over other people the way
Collier does in the novel. The female lead, Elise McKenna, was even more
difficult to cast. Dozens of serious young actresses auditioned, but Szwarc was
very particular about what he wanted. He wanted someone with classical beauty,
grace, an air of mystery, and most importantly, good chemistry with
Christopher Reeve. When Jane Seymour--best known at the time for her role as
Solitaire in the James Bond film Live and Let Die--read the script in
preparation for her audition, she fell in love with it and became determined to
fight aggressively for the part. Her audition went relatively well, but Szwarc
wasn't convinced to hire her until he saw her chatting casually with Reeve
outside of the audition, inadvertently demonstrating that she had the chemistry
he was looking for. Though it wasn't a determining factor in getting the part,
Szwarc did ask every actress who auditioned if they'd ever been in love.
Jane Seymour was the only woman who said no. If you ask me, Seymour has the most
work to do as an actress in this film, as her character is the most dynamic. Over
the course of just a day and a half within the story, the film sees Elise
McKenna slowly opened herself up, begin to stand up for herself, and then let her
hair down, literally, to allow Richard Collier into her heart, even though we
the audience know it is destined to end in tragedy.
As such, Seymour is, for me, the standout star of the movie, and this is hands-down
my favorite thing she's ever done. Of course, I may be biased since Jane
Seymour was the celebrity crush of my father, who passed on his appreciation of
Somewhere in Time and its leading lady to me as well as anyone else who would
listen. The last major role was that of McKenna's autocratic manager, William
Fawcett Robinson. Christopher Plummer was one of the first to audition, and though
several other actors were considered-- including Max von Sydow--Plummer was
always the top choice. The only problem Szwarc had was the fact that his two
principal male actors were named Christopher, and both would turn to him
when he called their name, so he took to calling them Mr. Plummer and Bigfoot
instead. Other notable actors include Teresa Wright,
who came out of semi-retirement because she loved the script and wanted
to work with Superman, Susan French, who had worked with Szwarc
on Jaws 2 and was coincidentally born in the year 1912, George Voskovec,
whose character Dr. Finney is named after Jack Finney, the author of Time and Again,
and Bill Erwin, who took a picture of himself at five years old to the
audition, which was subsequently used to cast his character's younger self. There's
also blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearances by Meg Ryan and William H. Macy.
The opening sequence was also supposed to feature the film debut of
George Wendt, who got credit despite only performing on the cutting room floor, and
finally, there's a memorable cameo from Richard Matheson as the "astonished gentleman."
"Astonishing!"
When filming, which happened throughout the summer of 1979, Szwarc
wanted to delineate the present day from the past in a visual way, so he and his
cinematographer, Isidore Mankofsky, came up with a method whereby different
film stocks were used. For the present, a standard, modern look was achieved, but
for the past, everything takes on a softer focus and a pastel color palette.
For many scenes, especially during the montage where Collier and McKenna share an
afternoon together, Szwarc attempted to recreate many French impressionist
paintings, prints of which he'd brought with him to the island. He also borrowed
from French farces for a few sequences in the middle of the film. He and
Matheson both agreed that the film needed moments of levity to keep it from
getting buried by its own self- seriousness, and so they came up with a
few different places in the film where a little bit of humor could be thrown in
or improvised.
There were some interesting challenges along the way. Most of the film was done
on location on Mackinac Island, with a few other scenes done in Chicago, but the
Grand Hotel, while welcoming to the cast and crew, was
still open and filled with guests the entire time, which required a lot of
tricky maneuvering. One way they made it work was to hire several guests and
Island residents as extras. To save money, several props and set decorations were
borrowed from Universal stock, but one place that Szwarc refused to compromise
was on the costume design, done by Jean-Pierre Dorleac. Hundreds of costumes
were created, not just for the main cast but also for the dozens of extras and
several background characters, with a lot of effort expended to achieve not only
period-appropriate attire but also attire that was appropriate to that
particular area of America and for theater performers of the age.
Dorleac's work was impressive enough that he got an Academy Award nomination for it.
The cast and crew weren't able to stay at the Grand Hotel itself but at a
different location not far away, and they got around mostly by using bicycles. As a
result, transporting film equipment was a significant hurdle. The crew was able to
get permission to use a single vehicle for transporting the heavy stuff, but
everything else had to be done by horse and buggy, bicycle, or even just by hand.
One positive from the experience was the fact that the cast and crew were
confined together on the island, which practically forced them to form an
intimate, familial bond with one another that isn't typical of a Hollywood film.
It was also a relatively small crew, both for financial and logistical reasons, and
most of those involved had signed on to the project out of a genuine love of the
script. Almost every interview I watched while preparing for this video included
a moment where a cast member or crew member said they only agreed to do the
film because the script spoke to them in a way that movie scripts usually don't.
Given that the budget was so small, it is perhaps inevitable that the only people
who signed on were people who believed in it enough to do it for less money
than they probably had preferred. Regardless of the reasons, however, it
feels like people were unusually passionate about this film, and I think
that passion definitely translates to the final product.
Speaking of which, Szwarc knew he needed to find somebody very skilled to put
together the soundtrack, as music would be especially important for the film.
Jane Seymour was good friends with the famed film composer John Berry, who'd
scored among others Born Free, The Lion in Winter, and several James Bond movies.
Szwarc and Stark didn't think they could afford to even ask Barry to do Somewhere
in Time, but Seymour went ahead and asked and Barry was shown an early cut of the
film at his home. Barry and Szwarc consulted at great length about the film
that night, with Szwarc insisting that it was driven almost entirely by mood, by
idealized romance and lyricism, and Barry subsequently agreed to do it. Both men
knew that Barry's florid, string-heavy style would be a perfect match. The
centerpiece, outside of Barry's main theme, needed to focus on a piece of
period-appropriate music that Collier and McKenna could share diagetically
within the story itself. In the novel and script, Matheson had used a composition
by Mahler, but for various reasons, that didn't work on film, so Barry eventually
settled on using the famed 18th variation of Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a
Theme of Paganini. It's important to note that Barry was, at the time, dealing with
the recent death of his parents, who had died a few months apart.
Barry admits he let his emotions do a lot of the work for him, something he
usually avoided in his compositions, and he would go on to consider Somewhere in
Time perhaps his most emotionally draining but personally rewarding film
score. He even reworked many of his themes for other movies later in his
career, most notably retooling the love theme for Out of Africa.
Many people, myself included, think Somewhere in Time is simply his best
work, and it's hard to understate how much the movie owes to John Barry.
Without his score, the whole movie would probably fall apart. Early test
screenings in Canada and the U.S. went incredibly well, so much so that the
producer Ray Stark changed the release plan to make it go wide instead of
letting it trickle through North America and build word-of-mouth. This would prove
to be a disastrous mistake, because when the film released on October 3, 1980, it
was a box-office disappointment, grossing a mere nine point seven million dollars,
which while technically profitable, was well below expectations.
Critics lambasted it as well, brutalizing everybody involved with some of the
worst insults ever hurled at a major motion picture. To this day, critics don't
seem to like it very much, and Szwarc attributes that to the fact that
professional critics tend to be cynical, that an unashamedly romantic fairy tale
movie like Somewhere in Time is simply never going to move a critic the way it
will move a general audience. Other factors contributed to its poor
performance as well. It released on the same week as The Blues Brothers, an
actors strike prevented the cast from going on the publicity circuit, and the
studio didn't really know how to market it, giving it a weak trailer and not much
press. The underperformance was a blow to cast and crew, especially Szwarc, and the
film seemed destined to disappear into obscurity once it dropped out of
circulation. Bizarrely though, it proved to be a massive hit in China, playing for
an absurd 18 months in Hong Kong. It did have its fans in North America, and one
of them was Jerry Harvey, the Director of Programming for Los Angeles's pay TV
service, Z Channel. After Harvey began putting it on Z Channel, it gathered a
lot of momentum on other cable networks. Then, when home video exploded throughout
the 80's, Somewhere in Time gathered an even bigger following. To say it became a
cult classic is kind of understating how big its fandom became in the years
that followed. A fan club popped up around the 10th anniversary of the
film's release called INSITE, which stands for the International Network of
Somewhere in Time Enthusiasts. To this day, INSITE publishes quarterly magazines
and organizes events about the film, most notably co-sponsoring the Grand Hotel's
annual Somewhere in Time Weekend. As with the unusually passionate cast and crew,
if you find a fan of Somewhere in Time out there in the wild, or spend even a
few minutes talking to somebody at INSITE, you'll discover that fans have
very strong feelings for the movie, and time, fittingly enough, has done nothing
to diminish them. It's not just women, either, with INSITE boasting that half
of their members, including the club's founder, are men.
I'm not personally a member of INSITE, at least not yet,
but I am an enthusiast of Somewhere in Time. Technically speaking, I don't
actually consider it science-fiction-- forced to be pedantic, I'd say it's
magical realism at best, but primarily it's romance--but since it involves
time-travel, albeit in an unusual way, it qualifies for consideration as a sci-fi
classic. Whatever genre you want to put it in, though, it's one of the best love
stories ever put to film, and I'll fight anybody who says otherwise.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. If you've seen Somewhere in Time, be sure to
tell me what you think in the comments. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe
if you haven't already, and consider joining my Patreon, where you can get
early access, see your name in the credits, vote on future topics, and more.
You can also check out my website at emagill.com, where you can find written reviews
of plenty of other science-fiction classics in both film and literature,
including written reviews of Somewhere in Time and Matheson's original novel.
Until my next video, in which I'll be covering my first sequel, this is the
Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love
...as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"Young woman, if you do not walk with me, I shall go mad, positively insane,
and do crazy things to myself."