1982 forever onward

As we approach the dying days of a movie summer dominated by Deadpool & Wolverine, the premise of a new book by veteran film journalist Chris Nashawaty may sound like a bit of a tough sell. In The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, Nashawaty argues that something like the apotheosis of mainstream full-bodied science-fiction and fantasy films was achieved some 42 summers ago. In the summer of 1982, a slate of movies, including E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, and The Thing, were playing, sometimes concurrently, in theaters. This is a fine and formidable assortment, but what about the inconvenient truth that today’s multiplexes are bursting with fanciful and fantastic fare?

Thoughtful readers, however, will discern the difference: Movies such as Conan the Barbarian or Poltergeist aim to initiate audiences into their weird or uncanny worlds, to be both original and comprehensible, whereas Deadpool & Wolverine, Dune: Part Two, Despicable Me 4, and even Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes assume that viewers are already steeped in their franchises’ arcane, often incomprehensible, lore and simply want more of it. If you have missed previous installments, good luck keeping up. If you are unfamiliar entirely with the characters or “universes” being depicted, you have multiple hours’ worth of homework to do to catch up. 

In fact, the far more innocent moviegoing era that Nashawaty lovingly sketches offers a real contrast to our own. The sci-fi and fantasy movies released in the summer of 1982 were not tailored exclusively to geeky constituencies but produced to appeal to that far more amorphous and mysterious entity: the general public. To be petrified by The Thing, you do not need to be an aficionado of Howard Hawks, whose earlier film, The Thing from Another World, was the basis for director John Carpenter’s remake. To be touched, moved, or otherwise reduced to a sentimental mess by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, you do not need to be up on the film’s “world-building” but merely possess a heart. Thus, Nashawaty’s point stands.

“Four-plus decades ago, we were entertained, enthralled, and enlightened,” he wrote. “Today, we’re merely cudgeled into numb submission over and over again and treated like children being spoon-fed the same sound-and-fury pap.” 

Of course, Nashawaty’s book is not an exercise in polemics as much as nostalgia. Like the makers of Stranger Things and the movie executives who keep greenlighting reboots of Ghostbusters, Nashawaty is banking on readers who remember with affection the movies of the early Reagan administration. Simply reeling off the titles to these flicks — also included in Nashawaty’s roundup are Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Tron — is enough to send readers of a certain age into full-fledged Proustian reveries. All on its own, the original green-tipped VHS cassette tape of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial kindles memories of afternoons parked in front of the big cathode-ray TV set, long evenings playing outside unsupervised, and Morning in America.

So does Nashawaty’s engaging, unpretentious book, which argues that the success of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas’s original Star Wars in the late 1970s helped set the stage for Hollywood’s embrace of an audience synonymous with so-called “fan culture.”

“They were smart and selective sensation seekers who wanted to be swept away to strange new worlds and be dazzled by sights and stories they’d never dreamed of before,” Nashawaty wrote.

Not that it happened all at once: Nashawaty spends several chapters documenting the studios’ struggles to adjust to the new viability of sci-fi in the wake of Spielberg and Lucas’s innovations. After years of dithering, Paramount finally poured resources into a feature film version of the Star Trek series, but the resulting Star Trek: The Motion Picture from 1979 was both ploddingly overproduced and mind-numbingly ill-conceived. Just ask its director, the talented veteran Robert Wise.

“We had a rough idea about how the first act might play, but the final two-thirds weren’t even near shootable,” Wise said.

Also released in 1979 was Disney’s woebegone first effort at adjusting to the times—an outer space adventure called The Black Hole. It had a “decidedly unhip” cast that included Maximilian Schell, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall — not exactly the types to bring in the children.

Within a few years, however, enough good filmmakers had become intrigued by the expressive possibilities of sci-fi and fantasy to begin to pull the genre into the present. Animator Steven Lisberger found inspiration for his eventual film Tron by studying the deep structures in the video game Pong.

“I saw a little electronic beam going beep-beep-beep across a screen. To me, it was living animation,” he said.

To adapt Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian character for the screen, producer Edward Pressman tapped a young screenwriter named Oliver Stone, out of whose typewriter flowed such overripe lines as the title character’s definition of what constitutes a good life: “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, to hear the lamentation of their women.” To ensure that Conan the Barbarian star Arnold Schwarzenegger did not struggle too much with an overabundance of such lines, macho director John Milius provided viewing recommendations: “He would show Schwarzenegger Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai over and over again, pointing out the smallest expressions on star Toshiro Mifune’s face to imitate.” 

All the same, Nashawaty is careful not to assign too much credit to studio bigwigs, who, more often than not, seem to have stumbled into the banner year of 1982. For example, Columbia Pictures boss Frank Price considered the project provisionally titled E.T. and Me to be “a wimpy Walt Disney movie” and permitted director Spielberg to march over to Universal to make the picture.

“For the next several years, he would have it written into his contract that he would not work in any capacity with Frank Price,” Nashawaty wrote.

Although Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ended up being a near-peerless piece of popcorn entertainment, Paramount head Barry Diller mandated just three relatively unambitious conditions for a sequel: that it was better than the first Star Trek movie, that it be made for a lot less money, and that series creator Gene Roddenberry stay out of the way. Even when studios found themselves with likely hits, they often got cold feet: At Universal, Sid Sheinberg was alarmed by Conan the Barbarian, with its many scenes of “the Austrian Oak slicing, dicing, and hacking people apart,” until a Las Vegas test screening revealed an audience appetite for such things.

Most dispiriting of all is the number of lukewarm or hostile reviews these now-canonized movies received. The Los Angeles Times described Ridley Scott’s meticulously imagined Blade Runner as “Blade Crawler,” while even the B movie-attuned Roger Ebert considered John Carpenter’s elegantly apocalyptic The Thing to be merely “a great barf-bag movie.” “Is This the Most Hated Movie of All Time?” asked Cinefantastique of Carpenter’s masterpiece. In the haphazard way in which these movies made it to the screen and in the indifference with which they were sometimes received, let us acknowledge the eternal wisdom of that great screenwriter William Goldman: “Nobody knows anything.”

Of course, the public embraced most (but not all) of these movies, and Nashawaty convincingly argues for their merits singly and en masse.

“It was a brief, eight-week window when eight very different films showed what the genre was capable of and pushed its parameters in wild new directions,” he wrote.

Yet even moviegoers’ enthusiasm had unintended consequences: Except for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Nashawaty notes that every movie discussed has been “remade, rebooted, spun off, sequelized, or presequelized in some way.”

In other words, the flights of fancy from that banner year have merely become raw material to be endlessly exploited in invariably less entertaining, less illuminating, and far less artful forms. 

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“For better and for worse,” Nashawaty concludes, “we now live in a movie era that the summer of 1982 created.” 

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.