Scenes/Return of The Thing
By James Delson
He’s been obsessively driven to make movies since he was eight. It’s all he’s ever wanted to do, and the only thing for which he’s really qualified. Today he is thirty-four, and the obsession has finally started to pay off. With the release this July of his first big-budget studio film, Universal’s THE THING, John Carpenter has arrived. And despite incredible resistance and neglect by the movie industry, he’s done it on his own terms.
No other major director of this generation has triumphed over such desperately underfinanced conditions as Carpenter. Using massive amounts of imagination to supplement the bargain-basement budgets on his 1974 science-fiction comedy, DARK STAR (budget $60,000), and the gritty, violent, police-under-siege drama ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 (1976, $100,000), he created two of the best B-films of the past decade.
It was HALLOWEEN, however, his 1978 horror story about a maniac stalking teenage girls, that really put Carpenter on the map. Costing $320,000, it has thus far grossed over $75 million. Using a ratio, of dollars spent versus money earned, this makes him the most successful filmmaker of all time.
While finishing up THE THING at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Carpenter paused to discuss his less than meteoric rise to prominence. A quiet, lanky, long-haired man, he talks with just the slightest trace of a southern drawl, a reminder of his Bowling Green, Ky., origins. "I began to shoot monster, war, and science-fiction movies when I was about eight," he says, sharing a Pepsi across the workmanlike wooden desk in his sparsely decorated office. "Most of those films were only two or three minutes long, and they were pretty crude, with props from the five-and-ten and the university buildings where my father taught as sets. But a couple became real epics, like Gorgon the Space Monster (1959-$100). I learned how to animate Kleenex on that one, making it look as if my toy tanks were firing at the monster, and got so carried away by the special effects that the film ended up being forty-five minutes long."
Carpenter’s passion for films evoked little encouragement from family and friends in Bowling Green, so he trekked to California to study moviemaking at the University of Southern California, following in the footsteps of George Lucas, John Milius, and Randal Kleiser. "From the moment I hit Los Angeles, I had a single purpose: to make Hollywood movies. It was the course I pursued through film school and one that I never strayed from." Carpenter’s first feature, DARK STAR, was filmed in school by him and several other would-be filmmakers who wanted a showcase to display their talents. And despite an almost total lack of funds, they put together a picture that is widely regarded as having influenced a number of subsequent space operas, most significantly STAR WARS, which borrowed Carpenter’s concept of the leap to hyperspace.
"DARK STAR was a great exercise in ingenuity," Carpenter recalls. "We just couldn’t get enough money to do anything properly, so we faked everything. The space suits were asbestos fire suits with air-conditioning hoses stuck on with tape, and our life-support systems were Styrofoam packing sections from a typewriter, with press-type lettering rubbed on to make them look more authentic." Then, he was given another chance to direct with ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, an austere little film with every penny of it’s $100,000 budget spent efficiently.
"ASSAULT was a modern-day Western set in an urban ghetto, explains Carpenter. "People outside of urban situations didn’t really go for it, but it was like a football game for some audiences. And, depending on where it was shown, the crowd sometimes cheered when the gang was ahead, which wasn’t exactly the way I’d planned it. That was a lesson: you can never second-guess the audience."
Like DARK STAR, ASSAULT found a strong cult following, but Carpenter couldn’t parley it into another theatrical movie deal. He then turned to television, writing and directing SOMEONE'S WATCHING ME and directing ELVIS! "I wanted to make a true life story about Presley," he says, "bringing in the whole drug situation. But because of censorship problems it turned out an homage. After that I knew I never wanted to work in television again unless I had to."
So it was back to low-budget movies, this time to do a little item originally entitled "The Baby-sitter Murders." "We sat around talking about the film," Carpenter remembers, and decided we needed something more than just a psychopathic killer hacking up teenage girls. And then Irwin Yablans, the film’s executive producer, suggested setting it on Halloween night.
"The big shocker in those days was Tobe Hooper’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. It was great entertainment, but I was irritated by his victims screaming kind of continuously. I thought silence would be much more frightening." Carpenter explains: "Let’s say you hear something in the middle of the night. You get out of bed, come downstairs, and look into the darkness. Now, if somebody is standing there shouting and screaming that’s not as frightening as walking in there in dead silence and having someone jump out at you. That’s a heart-stopper.
"What I was able to do with HALLOWEEN was take the time to play around with the audience’s expectations. I gave them a couple of jolts to set them up, then tried to play out the rest of the film in surprises, dropping things on them when they least expected. I played on the fact that they knew what was going on. I let them get ahead of me. Then I got them."
Carpenter's films reflect his own tastes as well as the commercial necessities of the marketplace. But as his budgets have grown, he has been able to enrich and expand his vision in a steadily upward curve, ending his B-movie career with the spectacular success of Halloween, then making the transition to moderate budgets with THE FOG and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, starring Kurt Russell. After all these years of filmmaking, he has achieved at last his ambition of making a real Hollywood studio film with THE THING. His new movie-about an outer-space monster on the loose in the Antarctic—costs $15 million, more than the combined budgets of his six previous films.
"Everything before now was relatively small," Carpenter reasons. "But in order to do this project properly, it had to cost fifteen million. I’m aware that THE THING is going to have to make something like seventy million just to break even, but I’m counting on this picture to draw the same size crowds that HALLOWEEN attracted."
"I guess you just have to draw the line sometime. You can’t go on forever making little pictures if you’ve got big ones inside you waiting to be told."
THE THING is the next logical step in Carpenter’s career, the culmination of his long, low-budget apprenticeship. And, like his other films, one expects the textbook-perfect story construction, straightforward dialogue, and superb technical craftsmanship that have marked him as super-director Stanley Kubrick’s heir apparent since HALLOWEEN in 1978. THE THING may prove to be Carpenter's leap into cinematic hyperspace, just as Lucas’s STAR WARS, Spielberg’s JAWS, and Coppola’s THE GODFATHER brought them to national prominence. But even if this isn’t the film for him, it’s only a matter of time before he’s recognized as one of the world’s most important filmmakers.
