Irwin Allen's Second Act: The Master of Disaster

Bob's note: Last month, Part 1 covered Irwin Allen becoming a producer/director of high-concept, plot-holed films and TV shows. His highest highs and lowest lows were still to come…

By the late 1960s, Irwin Allen had done it all in Hollywood. He'd worked his way up from gossip columnist and quiz show host to become a big-name producer. He'd scored hits– and misses– and a reputation for ambitious premises and showbiz spectacle. He'd spent most of the 60s running network series like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968) and Lost in Space (1966-1968). But he wanted back into filmmaking, and his timing couldn't have been better.

Hollywood was upping the action in films. Because they could, with better special effects, and because the studios had no choice. This television-acclimated audience expected faster storytelling and a rapid succession of crises. Hollywood needed producers who understood fast plotting and fast-paced action.

Allen's next act had arrived.

THE MASTERSTROKE

Universal had tempered hopes for Airport (1970). Star-studded cast or not, the "this flight is in trouble" thing had been done before. But Airport was a blockbuster hit, grossing $128 million worldwide ($1.1 billion in 2025 terms), a huge sum before modern mega-franchises. Critics were left scratching their heads at what had just happened. They coined a new term, the "disaster movie," and braced for more.

Allen had seen the trend coming. While Airport was still in production, he'd already lined up The Poseidon Adventure, a Paul Gallico novel not even published yet. Allen bought the rights for $225,000 after binge-reading an advance copy. An ocean liner capsizes at sea, and if the characters survive the unfolding wreckage, they have a narrow time window to climb to the ship's bottom and get out somehow. "Hell upside down," Allen called it.

Allen's first decision might've been his best. Sure, he could direct a boat turning upside down, but the audience needed to feel it when the cast died off one-by-one. Emotional resonance wasn't in his wheelhouse. Allen sought out director Ronald Neame based on his reputation for complex shoots and character nuance. Allen sold Neame that this wouldn't be just a disaster flick. This would be the best disaster flick they could pull off.

Next, Allen moved to package his all-star cast. Burt Lancaster--the Airport lead--and George C. Scott turned down the main role of Reverend Scott. Down the list was Gene Hackman, who was cementing his image as an engaging tough guy and terrific actor. Allen arranged for an advance screening of Hackman's The French Connection (1971). Impressed, Allen secured Hackman quickly, also a great decision. Hackman won his second Oscar for the movie, giving Allen a buzzy lead actor.

In all, five Oscar winners signed on to the ensemble: Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters, and Jack Albertson. This was the acting chops Neame demanded. Neame wanted the disaster shown on a human level, a gut level, with monologues and arguments and anguished close-ups. If the performances chewed the scenery now and then, well, this was an upside-down ship.

Allen had packaged a grand vision that no studio would touch. The $5 million projected cost scared off Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, everyone. Even Allen's initial backer, Avco Embassy, bailed when the price tag soared. Allen forged ahead on his own dime. By 1969, he was in $600,000 deep on The Poseidon Adventure.

MASTERING DISASTER

Look, Allen told Twentieth Century Fox, clearly he believed in his capsized ship thing or he wouldn't have financed it this far. He proposed to keep financing it. A partnership, he said. Allen would front the first $2.4 million to get the shooting underway. Fox would finance $2.4 million thereafter to finish and distribute the picture, and Fox would have final approval on big decisions. Any risk was Allen's.

It was an easy yes, a project on-trend and with Hackman, the script, the prep, and the director all wrapped up and ready to go. Especially the director. Look, Fox told Allen, you can be, like, way over the top. Fox stipulated that Neame must stay as director. Allen could– and did– help direct the mayhem sequences.

Allen had to console himself with a producer's fee paid from Fox's half and 10% of the backend participation. And a cut of the merch sales. And on the soundtrack, which produced Maureen McGovern's Oscar-winning "The Morning After."

EVERYTHING UPSIDE DOWN

Allen had been right about the whole project. The Poseidon Adventure raked in $125 million ($1 billion in 2025 dollars). The movie finished second in that year's box office gross, after The Godfather, and leaped among Fox's best-ever performers.

Needless to say, Fox was listening when Allen pitched his next project. True to form, Allen was thinking big, real big, but now so was Fox. Every studio was scrambling to get disaster epics into production. Universal was rushing out not one but two Charlton Heston films, a sequel to Airport and the standalone Earthquake. The field was so crowded that Fox was outbid for the rights to Allen's target novel, Richard Martin Stern's The Tower.

Plan B dropped in Allen's lap two months later. Fox was sent another skyscraper disaster novel, The Glass Inferno, with a near plug-and-play story for Allen's screenplay. Fox snatched up the rights. The problem was that two studios were making essentially the same tower fire movie on essentially the same release schedule.

Look, Allen told Fox and Warner Brothers, we can either team up on one major idea, or we can both flop separately. He was making sense. Multi-million-dollar sense. Fox and Warner Brothers partnered for their first-ever joint production, Allen's The Towering Inferno. As part of the deal, Allen again had to keep out of the director's chair.

The Towering Inferno's production budget was three times that of The Poseidon Adventure, much of it invested in star power. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman co-headlined at $1 million salaries. William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, Richard Chamberlain, and Robert Wagner also didn't come cheap.

The bet paid off. The Towering Inferno grossed over $200 million worldwide (over $1 billion in 2025 dollars).

SHARK IN THE WATER

Fox had a man on a hot streak. Hey, they said to Allen, you should think about creative cross-promotion, and they had just the project. Fox was sitting on the underperforming Marineland of the Pacific outside Los Angeles. Allen was to rebuild it as Fox World, a theme park based around his disaster films and TV shows. If that sounds like Disneyland but short on magic, you're not alone. The park flopped and was sold off to SeaWorld.

Worse, there was blood in the movie waters. Jaws (1975) exploded onto the scene and ushered in a new way big-budget movies would be made and marketed. Jaws was a summer release, a season Allen scrupulously avoided as dead. Jaws had a smaller cast, a smaller idea, and a tighter focus on character depth. Allen's package formula, his 40-year synthesis of learning Hollywood's spectacle machine inside and out, was suddenly passé.

Fox saw it. They watched late-to-trend disaster films cannibalize each other while different takes like Star Wars (1977) grabbed the cultural reins. Fox canceled the remainder of Allen's production deal.

Allen pressed on. The Master of Disaster still had no shortage of ideas. Warner Brothers hired him on, banking that his instincts were still right. The proof they'd gone wrong came quickly: The Swarm (1978). Allen's usual package of script and Oscar winners tanked. More had changed than the times. Allen hadn't packaged a director this time. He took the chair himself, and as Fox had guarded against, the movie indulged Allen's love of cheese. Beyond The Poseidon Adventure (1979) and When Time When Ran Out (1980) did no better financially or critically.

The disaster era was done.

IT'S A WRAP

For another decade, Allen continued to craft small-budget films and television projects until health forced him into retirement. He'd had the run of runs, a player who'd cut big deals and worked with the finest actors of his time. When Allen's stuff was good, it was good. Even when he wasn’t, everything turned out okay. His work never lacked zeal, a rare talent that earned him both an Oscar and a Golden Raspberry Worst Career Achievement Award.

More importantly, Allen did what he set out to do. He'd put on one hell of a show.

Little Girl, Watching Movies

Imagine a young girl, tween, early teen, sitting by herself in front of the TV on an early or late afternoon, watching the station that showed a lot of old (and once in a while reasonably new) movies. Tarzan movies (Johnny Weissmuller, of course), sci-fi, horror, dramas, comedies, and weird movies that no one else, apparently, had ever seen.  

It was quite an education.  Here are some of the highlights:

Sci-fi Movies:

Forbidden Planet - One of the best of the lot (the other will be found further down). My first meeting with Robbie the Robot.  While it took me years to figure out it was a take-off of Shakespeare's The Tempest, I loved the whole "monsters from the id" line, and the invisibility of it.  Very exciting. 

Unfortunately, most of the sci-fi movies were schlock, and the worst was probably The Queen of Outer Space - Zsa Zsa Gabor and a lot of starlets in cone bras...  

NOTE:  Cone bras apparently were everywhere in the 1950s. Why they were so popular for so long, I have no idea...  See https://www.wmagazine.com/fashion/cone-bra-corset-trend-history.  

Probably second worst:  The Attack of the Giant Leeches - B&W 1959. Has to be seen to be believed, and even then...  Trivia note:  one of the stars of the Giant Leeches was actress Yvette Vickers who was the Playmate centerfold in the July 1959 issue of Playboy, just a few months before the movie's release, which I'm sure increased attendance.  

Lesson to be learned from old American B&W sci-fi movies is that every man, monster, robot and alien wants pulchritudinous white women.   

Japanese movies, however, were different:   

Matango, a/k/a The Attack of the Mushroom People - 1963 Japanese horror movie directed by Ishiro Honda (who directed and co-wrote the original Godzilla and many more).  A group of castaways on an island are unwittingly altered into monsters after they eat certain mutagenic mushrooms...  Although I didn't know it at the time, it was almost banned in Japan because they felt that the monsters resembled facial disfigurements caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; although of course, that might have been the whole idea.  Spooky, yet strangely moving, hard to forget.

Movies that scared me silly:

1984 - Made in 1956, starring Edmond O'Brien, Michael Redgrave, Jan Sterling, and Donald Pleasance. The scene with the rats was perhaps the scariest thing I'd ever seen, and it gave me nightmares.  Interestingly, I've never met anyone who actually saw this movie in a theater - I guess it bombed at the box office.  

The Invasion of the Body Snatchers - 1954, and set in a fictional California small town. You know the plot. You know the term "pod people".  But it still packs a punch as person after person is duplicated and replaced...  And they find the pods...  And Becky falls asleep...  Well...  

Trivia NOTE: Future director Sam Peckinpah played the bit part of Charlie, a meter reader.  

The Haunting - 1963.  Based on the Shirley Jackson novel, starring Julie Harris, and Claire Bloom. I think it's the most frightening movie* ever made, simply because you never see anything. You hear it. And by the time those two great actresses, Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, are done with you, you feel it.  And it has the scariest line I've ever heard in a movie:  "God! God! Whose hand was I holding?"   (*Spielberg agrees with me.)  

Not that scary, but one of my favorites:

Rear Window - I was a tween when I saw it, and I could hardly wait to be old enough to live by myself in Jeff Jeffries' (Jimmy Stewart) apartment, watching and listening and following all the crazies around me.  

NOTE:  Interestingly, I rewatched it a couple of weeks ago, and for the first time I noticed one fatal flaw in the movie:  Jeff, who's a professional photographer, has his left leg in a cast, from hip to toes, and is in a wheelchair 90% of the time, so no wonder he spends all his time watching the neighbors.  No problem there. And he figures out that one of them killed his wife, and he's trying to find evidence, long distance, using first binoculars, and then a massive telephoto lens on one of his cameras.  He finally sees Thorvald, after his wife supposedly went on a trip, with his wife's purse, pulling out jewelry, including the wife's wedding ring.  So what's the flaw?  WHY DOESN'T JEFF TAKE A BUNCH OF PICTURES OF THORVALD AND HIS WIFE'S STUFF?  He's a professional photographer.  He's got a telephoto lens which could pick out the feathers on a flying swallow.  Surely he's got film in the house.  I don't know why I never noticed that before...  

Still love the movie, though.

Movies that for years I couldn't persuade people actually existed:

We're No Angels - Still my favorite Christmas movie of all time, with Humphrey Bogart, Aldo Ray, Peter Ustinov, Leo G. Carroll, Basil Rathbone, Joan Bennett, and St. Adolph...  Read my love-letter to the movie HERE.

The Producers - Yes, Mel Brooks' classic 1967 film. I was old enough by then to get most of the jokes, and I nearly died of laughter at the line "don't be a dummy, be a smarty, come and join the Nazi party!" My introduction to Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel, Dick Shawn (hilarious as L.S.D.), and Mel Brooks, as always, going over the top.  Loved him ever since.  

Harold and Maude - I saw Hal Ashby's 1971 classic in the theater, but most people didn't like it. I laughed so hard I was crying. After 10-11 years, it finally hit cult status, and I could finally share it with my friends.  Huzzah!

Highly Educational:

Tarzan and His Mate - 1934, pre-Code B&W, the 2nd in the series with Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O'Sullivan as Jane.  This is the film with the nude Jane/Tarzan swimming scene.  I remember it well...  You can see it on YouTube HERE.  

If I couldn't have Jeff Jeffries' apartment, I wanted Tarzan and Jane's treehouse.  And lifestyle. And I wouldn't have minded having THAT Tarzan...  

Sheer silly fun:

The Pickwick Papers - (1952)  I started reading Dickens early in life, and this adaptation is, imho, the most Dickensian I've ever seen.  B&W, with full throttle performances, perfect costumes, manners, mannerisms, everything.  I bought a copy of it years ago on DVD.  I love it.  

Mrs. Leo Hunter, reading from her own composition, 

"Ode to an Expiring Frog".

Pass the Popcorn

I watch a lot of movies. So many, actually, that I often run out of current and recent movies and wind up re-watching those I've seen many times before. At least those are easy to find: I have three dozen boxes, each holding 26 DVDs, scattered around the house, plus God knows how many more DVDs on and underneath the bookshelves here in my home office. It's enough to make my wife scream. Thank goodness I'm a great husband in all other respects (he said modestly).

Anyhow, I recently rewatched The Quiet Man, a lighthearted John Wayne/Maureen O'Hara movie set in Ireland, which on the one hand is not my usual kind of movie and on the other hand is one that I always enjoy. And it occurred to me, when it was finished and the credits were rolling, that this well-known and award-winning film was adapted not from a novel but from a short story, first published by Maurice Walsh in The Saturday Evening Post in the early 1930s. Whoodathunkit?

That, of course, got me thinking about other film adaptations from the short stuff. And since I had an upcoming and uncompleted SleuthSayers column that needed to be completed . . .

Here are my highly-biased (and always changing) picks for the ten best movies adapted from short stories:

1. It's a Wonderful Life -- from "The Greatest Gift," Philip Van Doren Stern

2. Rear Window -- "It Had to Be Murder," Cornell Woolrich

3. High Noon -- "The Tin Star," Mark Casper

4. Bad Day at Black Rock -- "Bad Day at Honda," Howard Breslin

5. The Quiet Man -- "The Quiet Man," Maurice Walsh

6. Hondo -- "The Gift of Cochise," Louis L'Amour

7. The Killers -- "The Killers," Ernest Hemingway

8. The Swimmer -- "The Swimmer," John Cheever

9. 3:10 to Yuma -- "Three-Ten to Yuma," Elmore Leonard

10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button -- "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," F. Scott Fitzgerald  

Five runners-up: The Birds ("The Birds," Daphne du Maurier), Stagecoach ("The Stage to Lordsburg," Ernest Haycox), The Tall T ("The Captives," Elmore Leonard), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ("The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," James Thurber), Million Dollar Baby ("Million $$$ Baby," F.X. Toole)

Continuing with this idea of short fiction to screen, the following are my picks for the ten best movies adapted from novellas:

1. The Shawshank Redemption -- from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King

2. Stand by Me -- The Body, Stephen King

3. The Thing -- Who Goes There?, John W. Campbell, Jr.

4. The Mist -- The Mist, Stephen King

5. Apocalypse Now -- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

6. Silver Bullet -- Cycle of the Werewolf, Stephen King

7. Hearts in Atlantis -- Low Men in Yellow Coats, Stephen King

8. The Old Man and the Sea -- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

9. The Man Who Would Be King -- The Man Who Would Be King, Rudyard Kipling

10. The Snows of Kilimanjaro -- The Snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemingway

NOTE: Yes, I like Stephen King.

Five runners-up: A River Runs Through It (A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean), Minority Report (The Minority Report, Philip K. Dick). The Fly (The Fly, David Cronenberg), Breakfast at Tiffany's (Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote), Shop Girl (Shop Girl, Steve Martin)

Breaking news: I was reminded, by SleuthSayer Joseph D'Agnese's column yesterday, of several more good movies that started out short: Arrival, All About Eve, Brokeback Mountain, etc. (Joe, do great minds think alike, or what?)

Okay, which ones, Faithful Readers, did I leave out? Which do you think shouldn't have been included? Have you writers had any of your short stories or novella-length fiction adapted for the movies or TV? (For me, no.) Anything pending or promising? (No.) Any near-misses? (Yes.) Sold any film options? (Yes.) Do you have cinematic hopes for future projects? Who knows, right? 

Who knows, indeed. If you're like me, and none of your fictional creations have made it to the big screen, don't lose hope. Hold steady, stick to the plan, maintain the course. 

Anything's possible . . .

Maybe You Don’t Want Hollywood to Turn Your Book into a Movie

I admit it: it’s a clickbaity title but work with me here. This week the issue of book-to-film rights popped up on the boards of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and it nudged me to think about the specifics of deals I’ve been privy to.Authors dream of Hollywood deals because we assume they lead to big money. Granted, everyone’s idea of big money differs, but I venture to say that these days those fantasies involve six zeroes.

I have in my possession an interesting document that confirms the fantasy is possible. Don’t ask me how I got the doc, which pertains not to one of my ghostwriting clients’ books, nor my wife’s, and certainly not one of mine. Suffice to say someone just got sloppy.

Let’s preface this by saying I’m not a lawyer, agent, or hotshot writer. But I do think that the publishing and film industries like keeping writers in the dark about how much their work is worth. So if someone was stupid enough to slip me a doc, I figure it’s okay to share, provided I don’t identify the people involved.

The document is a response to a studio option offer for a book written by a young writer who, at the time the 2024 document was written, was already a No. 1 New York Times bestselling author in one genre. This deal was for the person’s debut in another genre, which will be pubbed in 2025. No, I am not acquainted with the writer.

A year ago, the still-to-be-pubbed book must have been considered “hot,” whatever the hell that means these days, because in the push-back document the author’s book-to-film agent believed that they could get $150,000 for a 12-month initial option, with a renewal at the same rate and length. An option is the money a production company or studio pays a writer to have the exclusive rights to a work (for a fixed period of time) while the studio attempts to get the film greenlit. When talking about options, agents focus on several deal points such as:

Initial option: How much the studio or production company will pay the author to exercise their option on the work (story or book), over how much time.

Extension option: How much they will pay to renew this option on the work.

Purchase price: How much they will pay if/when the work is turned into a film or TV show.

Royalty: How they will pay per episode if the work is turned into an episodic TV show.

Backend: How much the author will participate in the gross profits of the resulting filmed project.

These are just the basics. There are a litany of other points, from the onscreen credit the author will receive, the rights the author will reserve to the project, all the way to how much creative control the author will be allowed to have on the final product, not to mention travel perks, etc.

The options I’ve seen for my ghostwriting clients, my author friends, and my wife involve a payment for a term lasting one to two years, usually with a built-in renewal clause with payments at the same rate or slightly higher. It’s safe to say that of all the contracts I’ve been involved with, I’ve never seen figures as high as the ones in this document. And yes, I’m a newb in this world.

Back to the doc in hand. If the opposing side accepted the agent’s counter, the author would earn $300,000 on the option over two years. If the production happened, the author would be paid a purchase price of $1.5 million. Already we’re at $1.8 million. This fits our six-zero dream nicely.

Remember, this is a counter-offer, so in a way it represents the agent’s wish list for the author’s book. I don’t think the agent would have been throwing around such figures if they didn’t think it was feasible. The purchase price figure seems designed to arrive at $1 million after the lawyers get involved.

In this particular document, that $1.5 million figure is thrown out as if it covers all types of productions. The memos and contracts I’ve seen tend to break out different purchase prices for, say, cable or network TV productions, major motion pictures, limited series, etc. I assume the agent wanted to send a message to the opposing side that they wouldn’t get the license for this book cheaply.

Not every literary agent has the credentials to sell their clients’ work to Hollywood. So they partner up with a book-to-film agent, who has the track record and contacts. The book-to-film agents I’ve met appear to practice the Spaghetti + Wall method of promotion. They email a glowing pitch letter with attached manuscripts or book proposals to studio heads and production companies they think might be interested, then sit back and wait.

They don’t pick up a phone to verbally pitch a damn thing—i.e., “work”—unless something in the news has suddenly made a project “hot.” (Yes, there’s that stupid word again.) Like literary agents, book-to-film agents don’t have to sell your book to make a living. They just have to sell a book. But if a name director, producer, or actor has read or heard about a book or story, then the agents can sit back, field offers, and play each bidder against the other.

Side note: My favorite movie scene of a talent agent defending his existence…

There’s always stupid additional money and perks involved in the deals these agents lock down for authors. If the book I’m discussing gets turned into a TV series, the author would theoretically be paid $7,500 per episode as a royalty, $25,000 per episode as befits the author’s proposed non-writing executive producer (NWEP) credit. (This is why everyone wants to be an executive producer.) The author will also earn a percentage of the modified adjusted gross receipts (MAGR), which is the “backend” in the laundry list above. What’s more, this particular author will be allowed to offer “meaningful consultation on all creative decisions” and be able to participate in the writers’ room if the work is turned into a TV show.

If the author must travel 60 miles from home to indulge in these bouts of creativity, the production must provide travel, accommodations, and a per diem to cover the writer’s expenses. If the film or show is nominated for awards, our author is guaranteed an invite to the award presentation, with a similar travel package and budget.

As written, every thing on this sheet of paper is a sweet deal, and I hope the writer got what the agent proposed, or close to it.

We have not discussed the impact this production will likely have on the author’s book, which, let’s remember, has not been published yet but will soon. With the kind of exposure a TV show or film is likely to generate, the book will no doubt sell phenomenally well, which is every writer’s dream.

That is the whole point of a print project going Hollywood. Movies and TV shows raise the visibility of books and authors, and have since the first moviegoer walked out of a theater hoping to snag a hard copy of Gone With the Wind. I would not have read Wicked without hearing about and later seeing the Broadway play. I’m a Baum fan from childhood, which is why I won’t be seeing the movie. Two versions of that story was enough.

So yeah—a Hollywood deal is sweet, which is why everyone wants one. It’s wonderful to have a piece of paper detailing such a juicy option in your hands—or even a complete stranger’s—except that none of it may ever come true.

Most books are never optioned by Hollywood. And the ones that are are rarely made. Notice how many times I have used the word if in discussing everything up to now. As you may have surmised from my headline, I am here to argue that sometimes it’s perfectly okay if an optioned piece of writing never gets made into a movie.

My premise is based on the experience of a friend who started in journalism and later switched to writing narrative nonfiction books. (That’s code for history that doesn’t suck.) All but one of his titles have been New York Times bestsellers. None have been made into movies. His big breakout book sold modestly in hardcover but hit its stride in paperback, when—goes the publishing biz theory—it was eagerly gobbled up by book clubbers who wanted to read a real-life story that “read like a novel.”

Decades later, his breakout book still hasn’t been made into a movie, despite being optioned way back in the early 2000s, and having a revolving door’s worth of name actors, directors, and producers attached to it over the ensuing years.

Said friend is not weeping over this state of affairs. At the time we first met him, he estimated that he had earned $100,000 from a decade’s worth of option money. That figure is now probably $200,000. The studio he signed with just kept extending the option. Again and again and again.

The writers I know who have accepted modest options on their books typically pocketed $5,000 every six months for terms that lasted 12, 18, or 24 months. Yes, that’s a small dollar figure—only three zeroes—compared to the sweet numbers and perks I detailed above, but it’s real money. The rest is so hypothetical you cannot bank on it. When you sign that contract, the option money is the only thing that’s real. Just like advance money is the only cash you’re guaranteed to receive when you sign a book contract. Royalties, if they happen, are gravy.

The most money any one of my short stories has earned—with reprints—in its lifetime is $1,220. Who am I to sneeze at a semiannual payment that is 409 percent higher?

I hope you are not reading this thinking, “Oh sure, that’s all well and good for novelists. I’m a short story writer. No one’s ever going to pay me that kind of money.”

Slap yourself upside the head right now. The films All About Eve, It’s a Wonderful Life, Arrival and tons more all started life as short stories. I am not even bothering to Google a list of the bajillion more examples that surely exist. Okay, I lied. And look at me—I keep lying. (However, in the comments, please chime in with the names of other films. I think it will warm all our hearts.) [EDIT: The day after this post appeared, fellow SleuthSayer John M. Floyd posted an entire article on short stories that became movies. See it right here!]

The real issue is learning a) to keep doing good work, and b) to be happy with so-called “small” paydays. Option only a few stories and those four-figure checks can provide an enviable income that will help you create more work. Perhaps a more accurate headline for this article might be “Getting Rich $5,000 at a Time.”

I guess the question is how you trigger that gravy train by getting your work optioned. I have seen numerous articles for writers that touch on this, and I’m sure you have too. Articles that tell you to, say, mail your work to actors and directors whose work you adore. (Don’t. I’ll explain why one of these days.) Other articles tell you to attend “pitchfests” to drum up interest in your work. (I hate talking to people, so don’t look for me at one of those things.)

Two movies I enjoyed got their start as quite obscure books. So far as I can tell, The Descendants hit the bestseller list for the first time after the George Clooney film hit theaters in November 2011. The Prestige, a marvelous science fiction novel by the late Christopher Priest, has won a respectable number of genre awards but I venture to say most of us who’ve read it did so after catching the Nolan Bros. film.

Each of these books were brought to the attention of their directors by book-to-film agents. What pushed those directors to take notice was the endorsement of someone in their circle who had read the books and loved them.

It sounds like something out of the realm of fantasy, doesn’t it? People who read books! In Hollywood! But it happens.

A producer I won’t identify used to keep an apartment in Florida so he could visit his son from a previous marriage. One morning, while riding down in the elevator of this condo building, he spied a poster for a book club meeting where attendees were slated to discuss a nonfiction book published a few years earlier. He wrote down the name of the book, bought it, read it, and later called my wife’s literary agent hoping to work out a deal.

“Wait,” I said the first time I met him. “You really read the book?”

“Cover to cover. Why, you wanna quiz me?”

---

Next time, if I get permission, I will share the details of a book-to-film contract.

See you in three weeks.

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Comedy is Hard

 

Kenneth Wishnia is no mean author of mysteries, but he also teaches English at Suffolk County Community College in New York.  I am delighted that this semester one of his classes is using as a textbook the anthology I edited, Crimes Against Nature: New Stories of Environmental Villainy.

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking to his class via zoom.  They asked a lot of great questions and - how wonderful! - had clearly read the material.

But I want to talk about one point that came up.  Someone asked which authors had influenced me and that led to me rambling about Donald E. Westlake and how terrible the movies based on his books had turned out.

Ken spoke up in defense of The Hot Rock, which I admit is the best of them, but that got me trying to think of a first-class movie comedy based on a humorous novel.  At first I couldn't come up with any. Eventually I remembered some and realized how few of the novels in question I had read.  So I am going to list what I came up with and invite you to add more.

CATEGORY 1: Read the book and seen the movie.

The Princess Bride.  One of my favorite movies, and it is based on a great book.  Perhaps not surpisingly the screenplay was written by the author of the book, William Goldman.  In As You Wish by Cary Elwes (who played Westley) we learned that on the first day of production they had to stop filming because the sound man was picking up strange noises.  It turned out that Goldman was at the far end of the set praying out loud that director Rob Reiner did not ruin his masterpiece.  Happily his prayer was granted.

American Fiction.  Based on the novel Exposure by Percival Everett.  This is a case where I liked the movie better than the book, possibly because I saw the movie first.  Both are delightful.  

Confess Fletch. Based on Gregory Macdonald's novel.  Don't get me started on the more successful Chevy Chase movie Fletch, because I despise it.

Thank You For Smoking, based on the very funny book by Christopher Buckley.

CATEGORY 2: Seen the movie but haven't read the book.

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!  Based on Nathaniel Benchley's The Off-Islanders. By the way, his father was Robert Benchley and his nephew was Peter Benchley.  Quite a talented family.

Bananas. "Elements" of the plot are from Richard P. Powell's novel Don Quixote U.S.A. 

M*A*S*H. Based on the novel by Richard Hooker, alias Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr. and W.C. Heinz. HRH really had been a surgeon in Korea.

Mister Roberts.  Based on the novel by Thomas Heggen.  Heggen's success ruined him.  He couldn't figure out how to write a second book and drowned in a bathtub at age 30 with a heavy dose of barbiturates.

The Devil Wears Prada, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger.

About a Boy, based on the novel by Nick Hornby.

No Time For Sergeants, based on a play by Ira Levin, based on the novel by Mac Hyman.

Our Man in Havana. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, based on his own novel. A few years ago Christopher Hull wrote Our Man Down In Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel. It's interesting but a more accurate subtitle would be: Graham Greene's Experiences in Cuba.

Kind Hearts and Coronets.  "Loosely based" on Roy  Horniman's 1907 novel, Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal.

Bridget Jones' Diary, based on the novel by Helen Fielding.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.  Remembered this one at the last moment!  Shane Black had apparently written most of the script when he decided it needed to be a crime story.  He took the detective elements from Brett Halliday's Bodies Are Where You Find Them and wrote/directed a very funny flick.

CATEGORY 3: Haven't read the book or seen the movie, but I've heard they are  good things bout both..

Clueless.  A California high school girl's attempts at good deeds backfire.  Based on  Emma, the only Jane Austen novel I could not get through. 

Breakfast at Tiffany's. Based on Truman Capote's novella.

Election. Based on the novel by Tom Perrotta.

Crazy Rich Asians, based on the novel by Kevin Kwan.  

Mrs. Doubtfire, based on Madame Doubtfire, by Anne Fine.

So, what am I missing? I'm sure you will mention some that make me bang my head in frustration for not thinking of them  Remember, it has to be a good comedy based on a novel.

I Was Misinformed (IMDb)

Back when, in what now seems like the Bronze Age, a guy named Col Needham started the Internet Movie Database. He was a movie nerd who lived outside Manchester, UK, and he began by scribbling notes in longhand. When he was fifteen, he got his first computer, a DYI with 256B of memory. (You read that right, 256 bytes.) This was the early 1980’s, so VHS had been introduced. Col didn’t have to go to the movies to see movies, anymore. And he was still taking notes, but now he was storing them on his computer, in a program he’d designed. The online community was primitive and insular, Col and his like-minded movie pals were file-trading on USENET. He eventually wrote a searchable database, and in 1990, he published the software for free. At this point, websites – such as they were – were college-based, or research lab proprietaries, and IMDb launched in July of 1993, at Cardiff University, in Wales. It was one of the first hundred or so websites ever curated for any purpose, anywhere. They went mainstream in 1995.

It’s worth noting that IMDb was all user-based. They were amateurs, and the database was compiled in much the same way - if you think about it – as the Oxford English Dictionary. Ask a select group of people with an odd enthusiasm, or Attention Deficit, to hunt up the earliest use of a word, say, or Robert Redford’s first screen credit (Season 3 of Maverick, 1960). See, makes it look easy.

Thirty years ago – that long ago, and that recent – AOL began sending everybody in Christendom trial CD’s of their dial-up software. Every two weeks, according to a recent article in the Post, traffic to IMDb doubled. And they started taking ads. This was a crazy idea. Nobody understood you could monetize the Web. IMDb now averages 250 million users monthly, one of the fifty most-visited websites in the world. (I hesitate to inform you that it’s owned these days by Amazon.)

Back in 1995, my public library in Provincetown, Mass., didn’t have internet, and I started going up-Cape to Orleans, where you could use their public library to log on to catalogues for print media, and pull up material on the screen at will, whereas before you had to go all the way to Boston, to the big public library on Copley Square, and research magazine and newspaper morgues on microfilm – and you were of course confined to what they had on file, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the papers of record. For me, this was revelation, apotheosis, to have access to this limitless archive. It wasn’t limitless, really, there were probably no more than a couple of thousand gateways, if that, open to public browsing, where you didn’t need academic credentials – and it was an even greater revelation to stumble onto this clunky, user-generated, fan directory. It was a vanity project, or in Col Needham’s frame of reference, an Ed Wood picture, but as far as I was concerned, a wet dream.

This, seriously, is one of those “Let’s put on a show,” moments, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney trying to save the orphanage. Col Needham and his wife Karen, and a few other dedicated goofs, made it happen. God bless.

Here’s the link to the Washington Post article.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/02/23/imdb-internet-history-col-needham/?itid=sr_1_1d1d1435-765a-42fa-8ec6-21385c936a6d

Happy Time

Looking for something to cheer us up over New Year’s, we streamed The Happytime Murders.  Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, what’s not to like?  It’s got puppets, mixed with live action, so like Roger Rabbit, you might be thinking, those cute ‘toons.  Well, first off, I have to warn you, it ain’t for the faint of heart.  It’s incredibly crude, beyond Dumb and Dumber, for example, with the explosive laxative scene.  Happytime Murders tops that, with puppet ejaculation.  (And if you’ve stopped reading, this very minute, I get it.)  There’s a barrage of graphic language, and violent dismemberment – although it’s doll stuffing, not blood squibs – but disturbing, nonetheless, to picture Raggedy Ann and Andy, torn limb from limb, before your very eyes.

Pull up your socks, snowflake.  This movie is hysterical.  I was laughing so hard, I thought I was going to wet my pants.  I know, I’m a sick puppy.  There are some extremely troubled minds behind this picture, led by the late Jim Henson’s son Brian, and it’s an acquired taste, but I have to say it’s demented genius.  It calls up Mel Brooks or Don Rickles, at their most demonic.

It is a mystery, a parody of hard-boiled, actually, with first-person voiceover narration, and all the genre tropes.  The private dick blows cigarette smoke in the cop’s face when he’s being interrogated; the puppets snort sugar – puppet cocaine – in the vice den; the (human) stripper bites the tip off a carrot while she’s pole-dancing, to get the (puppet) rabbits in the audience worked up.  I want to give you the flavor, but avoid giving too much away: half the kick of the movie is not being anywhere near ready for what they come up with.  Admittedly, it’s shameless, and they’ll stoop to anything for a laugh, but there are throwaway bits you’ll miss if you blink.  The private eye goes to a porn shop early on, tracing a lead, and on the back wall are posters for X-rated DVD’s.  I’m not going to tell you the titles, which are jaw-dropping, my point is the attention to detail.  The camera only glances in their direction, and your glimpse is fleeting, but the set design is a shock reveal, intentional and gratifying.

Granted, you’re not in this for the plot twists, which you see coming.  The surprises are in how they hit the expected beats.  A nod to Basic Instinct, say.  You’re going, WHAT?  A lot of it is that you can’t believe what you’re seeing.  Did they really do that? you ask yourself.  And then there’s the gag reel, over the end titles, which is of course a peek behind the scenes, and you get to see how they did do that.  Chinatown it ain’t, clever as it is in execution, but it ain’t Steamboat Willie, either. 

They got sued by Sesame Street. 

The Good, The Bad, and The Confusing

The ‘Wicked’ Witch of the West

At first blush, the home life of Rebecca and Maddie, Hunter and Christina might sound make-believe. They live on an idyllic farm where they raise goats, chickens, and garden vegetables south of the big city of Indianapolis. Their father is a dual-degree family physician and their mother started life as a ballerina.

They’re real, I assure you, but they have a few rules. One of them is no television. Although mother and father have different reasons for forbidding TV, they reached the same agreement.

The family actually owns a television, a huge clunker, but it’s not hooked up to anything, not even stray signals that might beam far into the countryside. Instead, it’s use is restricted to videos deemed suitable by the parents. When I visited, I raided the town’s library and borrowed a number of classic comedies the kids hadn’t seen. They loved Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton, and liked It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Betty Boop. They didn’t care much for Laurel and Hardy– Stan and Ollie slapstick didn’t appeal to them.

Popcorn Capitalism

To a degree, their upbringing mirrored my experience, including no television. The only kids’ movie I recall as a child (not counting the devastating The Little Match Girl) was sponsored by Indianapolis merchants on a shopping Saturday. To give moms a break, parents could drop off their younglings at a theatre that provided popcorn, a drink, and Abbot & Costello on the silvery screen. Our visit happened only once. A voyage into the city was a 70 miles (112km) round trip, a little over an hour and a half of driving.

However, our nearby town hosted a free summer movie nights. They showed classic (and cheap) films on an outdoor screen attached to a wall of the Armory, Masonic Lodge, or other large building. Viewers would bring blankets and cushions, and snuggle as Chief Crazy Horse played on the screen. Like drive-ins of the era, the show often led with a cartoon followed by an adult drama.

Then a funny thing happened. The venue shifted to the school, where show operators hooked the large screen to the outer wall of the school gymnasium directly across a narrow street from my grandmother’s house. Had she chosen, granny could have enjoyed the movie from the comfort of her living room.

Instead, my mother had a brainstorm. She cooked popcorn and steeped iced tea. Within minutes of our arrival, movie-goers came sniffing and mom handed out cups of Kool-Ade, tea, and brown bags of popcorn. The fare disappeared within minutes. Next time, she iced a tub of Coke and Nehi soda, and again sold out. Throughout the summer, my family ran a de facto concession stand. Mom, bless her, figured out a way to make money from free movies.

Catchin’ Up with the Crowd

But, the time and distance of running a farm and a second job meant my parents couldn’t take off to visit a city for a movie night. Until I dated in high school, I had never seen a current kids’ film. I wasn’t unaware of current showings, but when Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and Wizard of Oz cycled through movie houses, I read the stories but didn’t see the films.

Not until I was an adult. As previously mentioned, I consulted for Walt Disney World. I wasn’t an employee, a ‘cast member’ in Disney parlance, but they often extended privileges to me.

Follow me here: As you emerge from under the Magic Kingdom’s train station and face the park, to the immediate right is a theatre. Not the silent showing of Steamboat Willie under the marquee up the street, but a real theatre. On Fridays, Disney occasionally sponsored free family movie nights. For the first time, I saw Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Fantasia, and other classic animated films.

And I soaked them up. As a little kid, I loved Peter Pan. I read all versions– J.M. Barrie’s novel evolved over time from a short story of a wild boy who frequented Regent’s Park, to the novel we know and love. My Aunt Esther gave me a huge Peter Pan comic book, 25¢ instead of the usual dime. I spent hours reading and re-reading it. I would have gladly traded my brothers for one Tinkerbell and a sister like Wendy. Along the line, I fell in love with Indian Princess Tiger Lily.

But an odd thing happened when as an adult, I saw the films. I empathized with Captain Hook. He was intelligent, erudite, well-spoken, well-dressed, and very, very annoyed by a pestering brat who cost him his right hand and fed it to a crocodile. (Or left hand… it changed with stage showings and even between scenes.) Much as I admired Peter, I’d feel irritated too. I must not have been the only one to feel that way– Disney released Hook, which I saw in their Magic Kingdom theatre.

Wicked Thoughts

The same phenomenon happened with the Wicked Witches of the East and West in The Wizard of Oz. Why did sister witches hate each other so much? Was it simply because of a skin condition surprisingly similar to that which affected the Grinch, the Hulk, and perhaps Mr. Spock, all known for ill temper and lack of patience? Couldn’t one of the beautiful witch sisters lend green ones their extensive supply of Neutrogena or Aveeno?

When East Witch was unceremoniously crunched under Dorothy’s house, why couldn’t someone show sympathy to her Western sister? While thinking about it, did some witchery party give the house a little nudge to alter its landing?

Didn’t Witches North and South lie to Dorothy about how to get home?

Consider the following contrasts:

Good Witches, North and South	Wicked Witches, East and West
• are blest with great beauty	• are afflicted with green skin
• celebrate death of fellow witch	• squashed sister is mocked and derided
• lie to Dorothy knowing shoes can return her to Kansas	• mother’s valuable shoes stolen by Glinda given to Dorothy
• set Dorothy on path to kill rivals	• East Witch killed by Dorothy
• seize power after Wizard departs	• West Witch killed by Dorothy

Who exactly is the bad guy? Could it be the so-called‘good witches’? Or even Dorothy? Sure, she slummed around with Straw Man, Metal Man, and the Frightened Feline, but toward what end?

Gregory Maguire may agree with me, the author who wrote Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. I confess I haven’t read the novel, enjoyed the award-winning stage play, or seen the movie (Part 1), as I’d hoped this weekend. But hey, the showing isn’t over yet.

In what movies or stories did you find heroes to be less than honorable?

Christmas Capers

20th Century Fox

We are now into December, with its best-of lists for the year, wall-to-wall holiday ads, and bustle of work and family functions. And with it, crime.

Oh, there's plenty of real crime on the 10 o'clock news. Here in Cincinnati, though, the formerly depressed neighborhood of Over the Rhine has gone from gang violence to drunks shooting each other outside bars. Having Ubered for about four years, five if you count the Door Dashing during lockdown, I'm not surprised. OTR, as it's commonly called in Cincy, is half bars and all crowds after 10 PM on Fridays and Saturdays. Great cash, lousy company. I don't miss that side gig.

But crime is more fun in the movies. You could probably name a hundred crime movies set at Christmas. After all, 'tis the season for endless debates as to whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It is. So is Deadpool, since the Merc with a Mouth tells his favorite taxi driver "Merry Christmas." They were part of a Christmas marathon the one year I spent the holiday alone. (Along with A Christmas Story and Christmas Vacation. So there.)

But leaving the ceremonial dropping of Hans Gruber on Christmas Eve aside, when the police cruisers all become a festive red from his splattering on the pavement (OK, that's not in the movie. Just the fall.), there are literally dozens upon dozens of Christmas crime movies out there. Some pretty obvious.

20th Century Fox

Like Home Alone. I mean, it has Joe Pesci. How is that not a crime movie? Most people see it as a live-action Warner Brothers cartoon. But let's get to the nitty gritty. Home Alone is Kevin left, of course, home. Alone. Over Christmas. That's the setup. The real story is the Wet Bandits, two guys straight out of those Warner Brothers cartoons, only with a nine-year-old in place of Bugs or Daffy. I've known a couple of recovering burglars in my time, and both have said it's the stupid ones who don't turn around and leave the moment they realize someone's awake. Not these geniuses. Kevin, with a house full of groceries, plenty of time off from school, and a creepy neighbor guy who turns out to be an ally, proceeds to make as much noise as possible. Even playing with a VCR (Remember those?) to play that infamous line, "Keep the change, ya filthy animal." When noise and lights don't work, Kevin booby traps the house, tapping his inner Rambo and possibly laying groundwork for the phrase, "Come at me, bro." These are very stupid criminals, and the average kid, even pre-mobile phone, would have dialed 911 and left the phone off the hook for the entertainment of the dispatcher.

Miramax

 

Then there's Bad Santa. Once again, burglars. This time, it's a drunken mall Santa and his diminuitive elf who plan to rob the mall after close on Christmas Eve. Billy Bob Thornton is Willie, the Santa, which should scare you already. He's foul-mouthed, verbally abuses his boss (played by the late, great John Ritter), and cheats on his wife with a bartender who has a Santa fetish. (To be fair, he hooks up with a few other women off screen, so at least he's consistent.) Marcus, the elf (Tony Cox), is the smart one, planning the operation and recruiting Willie's wife as the getaway driver. Marcus can deal with his drunken, horny, misanthropic partner. But it's a kid named Thurman who throws a monkey wrench in the works. Thurman (Brett Kelly, who seemed to play every ten-year-old in every movie filmed between 2000 and 2005) thinks Willie is the real Santa Claus. Some might say this is a real-life take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but then Jim Carey played the actual Grinch right around then.

Focus Pictures

Around the same time and also featuring Billy Bob Thornton is The Ice Harvest, featuring John Cusack. Based on the Scott Phillips novel of the same name, it concerns two small-time hoods who steal $2 million from their boss. Set in Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve, the pair split up while waiting out an ice storm to flee town. Thornton holds the money while Cusack tries to lay low. But Cusack lusts after the bartender at the strip club where he's holed up. He hints he has money. She hints she might be a gold digger. Unfortunately, Cusack has picked up a buddy, played by Oliver Platt in the days before he played grumpy old men. It's a series of double-crosses that ends up with Cusack and Platt leaving town and a trail of bodies behind. Is it a Christmas movie? It's Christmas Eve. And while it may not be as Christmas-themed as Home Alone and Bad Santa (or even Die Hard, which is a Christmas movie. I have spoken.), the time plays as much into the story as the place.

So what other Christmas capers are there? Are they Christmas because they revolve around Christmas in the plot? Or just set at Christmas? Or, like Deadpool, does a smart-mouthed mutant just tell a taxi driver "Merry Christmas?"

Merry Christmas from Disney

Lawrence at 60 Years and Counting

Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.

Lawrence changed that, and I can tell you exactly how: the moment when Peter O’Toole holds up the burning match, and blows it out, and they cut to the sunrise on the desert, the music swelling.

I’ve mentioned this before, and it’s subliminal, not literal, the light suddenly dawning, but I remember how jaw-dropping it was – the shot itself, for openers, and at the same time, that I’d been let in on this world-changing secret. I was struck with awe.

Lawrence is back, and not for the first time. It was released originally at three hours and forty-two minutes, a roadshow feature, in December, 1962. Then cut by twenty minutes for general release. Then re-cut in 1970, to 187 minutes. And then restored, in 1988, to 228 minutes – this is the Director’s Cut available on DVD. I just got to see it again, theatrically, in a 4K restoration. Granted, it’s digital, not film, but it’s spectacular.

A word about the cinematography. (Freddie Young won the Oscar for it, Anne Coates won for the editing.) The movie was shot in Super Panavision 70, which is a 65mm negative printed to 35mm, projected in anamorphic – meaning the compressed image on film is widened on the screen. One of the cool things about the newest release is the amount of visual detail. You can argue that there will always be more detail captured on film negative, but the image will degrade, as prints are reproduced from the master negative.

This new digital transfer is probably the best available capture of the original, even if the purist in me kicks against it. You can see the blowing sand, the texture of a man’s skin, in close-up, or the depth of distance. Lean and Freddie Young used a 500mm Panavision zoom lens to shoot Omar Sharif’s entrance, through the dust and the heat coming off the hardpan, the figure seeming to resolve out of a mirage, or a trick of the mind’s eye. Is there really a better entrance in all of the movies?

I went back to see Lawrence twice, the initial 222-minute roadshow release, and then I saw it another three times, in its 202-minute general theatrical release. I couldn’t get enough. My pal John Davis and I could retail entire scenes of dialogue to each other – “The best of them won’t come for money, they’ll come for me” – and ape Peter O’Toole’s mannerisms. I didn’t, at that point, even know David Lean was a big deal, that he and Olivier and the Kordas had brought British cinema back from the dead, after the war, or at least brought American audiences into theaters, which is what mattered to the box office. Later on, when I was living at the Y on Huntington Avenue, I discovered a revival house up the street, and saw Great Expectations for the first time. It was Lean’s two Dickens adaptions that put him on the postwar map, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948, but this wasn’t on my radar. I was just knocked out by the picture itself, and it was icing on the cake to realize it was guy who’d made Lawrence.

Oh, and that Maurice Jarre score!

I think it was his big break. It was sweeping, and eerie, and thunderous, and sometimes all at the same time. Lots of tympani. I tried to recreate it the following summer, at a pump organ. Four of us, teenage boys. Driving a van filled with mattresses up to a summer cabin in Canada, and a shaving kit full of bathtub benzedrine, courtesy of a chemistry-adjacent friend of a friend. The four of us stoned out of our minds and flying, me pumping the foot pedals on that organ with physical fury, and picking out Maurice’s main theme on the keyboard, DOO-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-DOO-doo. It must have driven the other guys crazy, except that they were doing much the same, banging on a typewriter instead of an instrument. I think this is a story for another time. Too much left in already, when I should leave most of it out.

In any case, I think I’ve hit the highlights. Lawrence is the most important movie of my life, both as a movie that made me think organically about the movies, and as a totem, in terms of personal history. I’m enormously grateful it pointed the way.

When Shocks Met Yocks: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken

WHEN SHOCKS MET YOCKS: THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN>

by Michael Mallory

A while back I wrote about the film that gets my vote for the worst ever made, an exercise in masochism titled Hillbillys in a Haunted House (1967). It’s a little-known “scare comedy” that’s about as scary as PAW Patrol and funny as Sophie’s Choice. But there is a film at the other end of the scale that is probably familiar to most, at least by title: The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Released in 1966, it’s an old-style family-friendly comedy that has some genuinely creepy moments. It’s not a great movie, but it might be the perfect one to show the kids on Halloween as they’re working off their first sugar rush. 

The Ghost and Mr. Chicken employs a time-honored formula: a murder mystery disguised as a horror film in which the creepy goings on are investigated by an endearing but hapless coward who, when push comes to shove, turns heroic and saves the girl. Bob Hope owed his early success in film to such a blueprint. While the concept already had whiskers by the time Mr. Chicken took a crack at it, it demonstrated that it was still possible to whip up a satisfying soufflé using old ingredients, if you knew how to mix them.

Produced on a modest budget by Universal Pictures, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken starred Don Knotts, who had recently left television’s The Andy Griffith Show. Griffith, in fact, was an uncredited story consultant on Mr. Chicken. Knotts plays Luther Heggs, the timid typesetter of a small-town Kansas newspaper who learns the background of a terrible murder that occurred in an old abandoned mansion in the town, which is reputedly haunted. He writes a filler piece about the crime that generates so much attention he is dared by the paper’s smug star reporter Ollie (Skip Homeier) to follow it up by spending the night inside the “murder house.” Luther does, and is literally scared unconscious by the horrifying sights and sounds.

Surviving the night, he publishes his experience in the paper and becomes the town celebrity overnight, even making headway with the woman he’s desperately in love with, who is also being courted by the overbearing Ollie. But then the heir of the man who built the house─ who supposedly murdered his wife and then took his own life─ shows up and, intent on razing the place, sues Luther and the paper for libel because of their coverage. Things don’t go well for Luther in court, so the judge decrees that the interested parties will visit the house themselves and decide whether Luther is lying or not. The visit takes place at night, and Luther leads the group to each location where an incident occurred…but nothing happens. After everyone has left, the dejected Luther once more hears the organ music and overcomes his fear to rush back in, and solves the secrets of the house, the ghost, and the murder.

Director Alan Rafkin and writers Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum had all worked on The Andy Griffith Show, which meant they knew how to bring out the best in Don Knotts, and his best is what he delivered. The actor plays his awkward courting scenes with the object of his affection Alma (former Playboy playmate Joan Staley) with charm and warmth, but in the main set-piece of the film, the haunted house sleepover, Knotts trucks out every shaky, quaky, nervous man shtick he’d developed since his days on The Steve Allen Show. The sequence also provides jump scares galore and very creepy organ music played on a blood-spattered keyboard by an invisible organist. Composer Vic Mizzy’s eerie theme was reused in Curtis Harrington’s genuinely disturbing chiller Games the following year.

What distinguishes The Ghost and Mr. Chicken from other films of the time (particularly for Boomers who watched a lot of TV) is its cast. Dick Sargent (Bewitched’s second “Darren”), Liam Redmond, and Philip Ober round out the main cast but practically every supporting role, down to the bit parts, is filled by a Hollywood familiar face. The parade of old pros includes George Chandler, Charles Lane, Reta Shaw, Hal Smith, Ellen Corby, Dick “Mr. Whipple” Wilson, Lurene Tuttle, Hope Summers, Harry Hickox, Jesslyn Fax, Robert Cornthwaite, Sandra Gould, Nydia Westerman, James Millhollin, Phil Arnold, Al Checco, Herbie Faye, Florence Lake, Burt Mustin, Jim Boles, J. Edward McKinley, and Eddie Quillan. Those names might not ring any bells, but if you were to go online and look up their photos, a response of, “Oh, him!/her!” is all but assured.

Each seasoned actor makes the most of their moments on camera, be it a substantial role or a sight gag. True film buffs might even recognize the haunted house façade on the Universal backlot as the Dowd family’s Victorian edifice from the 1950 film Harvey (and not the Bates house from Psycho or the home of The Munsters).

There is a flaw connected to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, but it’s not in the film itself, rather on the original poster which manages to tip off the identity of the culprit. But today’s audiences would have to seek out the poster, and there’s no reason to do so. Just enjoy the film, which after nearly sixty years is still a lot of fun.