The summer of '82 changed science fiction cinema forever

There was a time, not so long ago or in a galaxy far, far away, when the summer movie landscape wasn’t cluttered with disposable sci-fi and fantasy blockbusters. When studios and distributors hadn’t yet been trained to put all their eggs in an ever-shrinking collection of well-worn baskets. “More than four decades ago,” as Chris Nashawaty writes in his new book “The Future Was Now,” “we were entertained, enthralled and delighted. Today, we’re simply beaten into callous submission over and over again and treated like children spoon-fed the same gruel of sound and fury.”

Nashawaty’s book focuses on a specific period—the summer of 1982—that he posits as a peak flowering and last hurrah of the science fiction genre as serious, ambitious, and original popular art. Watching with envy the unexpected, unprecedented, and lucrative frenzy surrounding “Star Wars” (1977), film executives asked the question that film executives are so good at asking, though not necessarily answering: How can we make something like that (or, at least, something that makes equally obscene amounts of money)?

Just as executives of the previous decade reveled in the results of “Easy Rider,” “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Graduate,” this group sought to put its energies and resources into movies that young people would enjoy, even if that generation was more enthralled with escape than revolution.

As Nashawaty writes, “The only problem was that all the studios seemed to learn exactly the same lesson at the same time.” “The Future Was Now” speeds through the making and reception of eight films that Nashawaty categorizes under the rubric of science fiction, all of which somehow invaded theaters in the same two-month span. “Blade Runner,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior,” “Poltergeist,” “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “The Thing” and “Tron”—all competed for moviegoers’ attention and disposable income. This was an excess that could not be sustained. What would the studios learn from this?

The premise is promising and there is no shortage of juicy stories in “The Future Was Now.” Take Steven Spielberg, who had already made a science fiction classic, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and who had two projects ready to start filming at the same time: the optimistic “ET” and the terrifying “Poltergeist.”

Since the Directors Guild of America had explicit rules against directing two films at once, Spielberg had to find someone else to direct “Poltergeist.” He chose Tobe Hooper, who had already cut his teeth with “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” Then, by many accounts, Spielberg ended up directing “Poltergeist” over Hooper’s shoulder.

Like the rest of the book, this episode is fully documented; Nashawaty was able to speak with many of the people he writes about here, including Spielberg.

Not all of these summer 1982 films were hits, and some of their directors paid a high price for their part in the eight-film pile-up.

Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of his space horror film “Alien” (the making of which is lovingly detailed here), had a falling out with his “Blade Runner” star Harrison Ford; with his crew, who mostly regarded him as a dictator; and with the executive producers who took over the film in post-production. Chastened, Scott temporarily retired to his advertising career.

Meanwhile, John Carpenter fared even worse when “The Thing” was greeted with indifference by audiences and open hostility by critics. His multi-picture contract with Universal was broken and his career never fully recovered. “They treated me like an animal,” he tells Nashawaty.

There’s a lot going on in “The Future Was Now,” sometimes too much. An eight-film study will almost by definition be diffuse, and at times it seems as though Nashawaty is just beginning to get to the heart of one topic when he feels compelled to move on to the next. Nashawaty’s passion for this story is clear, but it’s also diluted by the need to serve so many masters.

The author is not only a good reporter, but also an excellent and thoughtful critic, and the book's breakneck pace is no match for this skill. I wanted to know more about what this excellent cinematic thinker feels when watches these films; although this is not the purpose of the book, a little more of Nashawaty's voice would have been helpful.

That said, major books dealing with cinema thematically are now few and far between, and “The Future Was Now” is a welcome addition to the catalogue. Beneath the detailed description is a history of the acceleration and sale of fan culture, both its charms and its discontents (which, come to think of it, could be a great book in itself).

For Nashawaty, the summer of 1982 was a watershed moment, after the big breakout of “Star Wars” and before studios turned blockbusters into gimmicks. He writes: “By the early 1990s…what should have been a new golden age of science fiction and fantasy cinema became a pop culture beast that would eat itself to death and infantilize its audience in the process.” And the results are still coming to a theater near you.

Chris Vognar is a freelance cultural writer.