I run a quote/clip from this movie in my cybersecurity classes
"Doolittle I do have a malfunction on this readout, but I can't
pinpoint it exactly.
Don't worry about it. We'll find out what it is when it goes bad."
Basically the entire history of software engineering in a nutshell in a
1974 movie.
It's a great way to make an important point. How do you teach them to solve that problem? They can't dig into every problem in a real job - resources are always constrained.
I often use that one in the context of talking about signals
(events)... about aircraft flight deck signal hierarchies and
types... like alert, caution, warning, critical, emergency....
Some signals are proportional and escalating, so if you miss them
first time don't worry as they will sound again and again until you
attend. Other signals will (can) only appear once and the next time
(if there is one) is catastrophic.
Also it fits into the topic of information overload and mental
capacity for tracking things (Miller's 7 +/- 2). Lots of bad things
happen because alerts are too aggressive and people turn them off! :)
> Scenes had to be added to pad out the runtime to the requisite length. These additional scenes include a lengthy sequence in which Pinback does battle with an alien in the form of a beach ball with clawed feet.
(if you are concerned about spoiling the ending of the movie, you may prefer to watch the entire film from the start rather than clicking the above link)
> Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things".
It's said that 'every generation thinks they discovered sex', as if prior generations wouldn't imagine the things the new generation does in the bedroom. Every generation also thinks they discovered existential despair, and seem to have to same attitude about that: What a cool, knowing take-down of those old people and their simple-minded optimism. I see people doing the same these days (though right now existential despair is really having a moment).
That is a very fair take, but I do like the variations that folks put on this ideas even if they arent new.
I mean these were probably the first guys to be reasoning with an AI powered bomb about the meaning of life and empiricism. A fresh take on an old idea.
Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery review Dark Star on their first podcast episode. [0]
It’s worth listening to even if you don’t really follow their work. It’s what finally motivated me to watch this movie after seeing it in the video store my whole childhood and then forgetting about it for decades.
Make it a double-feature with "A Boy and His Dog" and you have the quintessential sci-fi indie scene from the 70's that we lost after "Star Wars". (Ha ha, should I add "THX 1138" and make it a triple feature? Thanks, George!)
I have a theory that between them Star Wars and Blade Runner killed, or at least seriously damaged, SF.
Instead of forward-looking weirdness (like 2001) a lot of SF - especially written SF - turned into reruns of WW II in space and 30s detective noir decorated with some stick-on SF greeblies.
There are obvious exceptions. But a lot of SF became less interesting, with endless reassuringly predictable variations on battleships in space, and gumshoes/mercenaries with laser blasters.
Pulp storylines have co-existed with "future looking" conceit driven SF in publishing for over a century. And, of course, they can co-exist in the same work.
If Star Wars had an impact, beyond greatly expanding the SF market, it was in breaking the ability of a narrow set SFF fans and writers to pretend that all science fiction was (or could be, or should attempt) was something like "produce pleasurable estrangement by imagining the impact of some unfamiliar future technology" and that "space opera", originally a slur, was some outside thing, over there, separate from the genre.
You weren't going to be able to keep the kids on the moisture farm after they had seen the galaxy.
If your definition of killing a thing is making it popular to the masses while making the first inroads into acceptance of nerdishness in global culture, sure.
Strange definition though.
Hollywood and finance killed SF (to the extent that it's dead, which it really isn't - Severence? Foundation? Silo? Three Body Problem? etc).
I understand what you mean, and there very definitely was a change, but I've always felt it was the shift away from late sixties / early seventies high-concept, almost-fantasy, semi-hallucinogenic wonderful weirdness. Just as culture pretty quickly went post-hippie (as it were), so too did science fiction. I feel as tho, somewhat tongue-in-cheek here, we collectively went "well that was a little embarrassing" after the sixties and reverted a bit to form culturally - not just in popular fiction, I mean, but more generally.
thats entertaining but no.. disagree.. the "hippy visionary" gestalt got lots of airplay for certain.. but there was always a straight-line science crowd that went deep-dive into elaborate scenarios.. with Science.. not the easily-identifiable fuzzy-glowey you allude to.. heck, give credit where credit is due, and point to more interesting book covers, background settings and other ephemera to the artsy people.. and also see the heirarchy, hard logic, high-tech machines and serious life and death events that drove a lot of stories and their production..
The pendulum has sung too far in the other direction in the last 20-30 years in my opinion. Now its a race to have the hardest sci-fi and anything less than a master's thesis on why the macguffin is plausible is rejected by fans. Its quiet tedious and misses the forest for the trees. At least Star Wars and Blade Runner had ideas and weren't just a regurgitation of Wired.
Just thinking about TV alone-- Foundation, ongoing Star Wars, ongoing Star Trek, Silo, The Expanse, For All Mankind, Stranger Things, 3 Body Problem, etc.
Some of these are harder; some are galactic empires; some are weird.
Aye, it is merely the gentrification of our quaint little Very weird strange little neighborhood in outer space or time or dimension or parallel reality.
Where oh, where will the true weirdos move to now that we can say there goes the neighborhood
Star Wars began life as George Lucas' treatment for Apocalypse Now, in which the Rebels were the PAVN and VC, which would make WWII entirely the wrong war for SF creators to try and recreate...
Maybe, but cinematically, most of the tropes Lucas used predate Vietnam. The actual movie is entirely constructed from nostalgia for movies before the 1960s.
I can't claim to have ran the numbers, but I suspect the amount per year of "serious" sci-fi media that was also good from those days is similar, if not lower than today. And today we also get the adventures and horrors and thrillers with scifi dressing as well - some good and some bad like everything else.
Most famous scene: I remember the argument with the bomb. But for me, the most memorable scene is the final one, when the surfer astronaut surfs away through outer space.
That scene, combined with the argumentative bomb, are reminiscent of the final scene of Dr. Strangelove, with Slim Pickens in his cowboy hat stradling the bomb, yee-ha-ing, and riding it to armageddon.
I saw this in a cinema when it came out, and loved it. It's astonishing that it cost only $60,000 to make. I mean sure, it wasn't exactly a cast of thousands; and the beach-ball alien was obviously cheap as chips ("It's your turn to feed the alien!"), but I had no trouble suspending belief. Maybe it was the drugs; I have no idea what I was taking back then.
Question from someone who knows nothing about making film: How do two film students get $60K? I get that's a small budget for a movie, but it's a huge amount for a pair of individuals.
They didn't get $60k for a student film as that is the final budget on the movie. They got a tiny fraction of that to make a short student film. It ended up being so good that they were able to use it as a proof of concept to secure most of that $60k budget to expand it into a feature-length movie.
Basically they made an MVP on the cheap and used that to secure additional funding to turn the MVP into an actual product.
Robert Rodriguez wrote a fun book about the making of his first feature film (El Mariachi) and how he saved up the money to finance it. On the strength of that he got a contract with Columbia Pictures.
As in any article that overlooks the great Ron Cobb, I just wanted to point out that his designs were influential into shifting the direction of how sci-fi should look.
It always takes more than the people who's names are mentioned to build anything.
Unrelated, but I would implore everyone who enjoys anything relating to the words "dark star" to listen to this compilation of the jams of every Dark Star the Grateful Dead played in 1972. It has so much continuity, and is a great bit to have playing while working. https://archive.org/details/DarkStar_1972
I found out about Dark Star from the album "Trevor Something Does Not Exist" (https://youtu.be/LYOtZvwNCsc?feature=shared&t=2942), it uses the conversation with the bomb as part of music, which contains spoilers!
This movie blew my mind as a kid and a serves warning of things to come with AI that kinda became a movie trope, but had some memorable scenes in Dark Star:
<Commander Powell> Talk to the bomb.
<Doolittle> But I have been talking to it, sir. And Pinback's talking to it right now.
<Commander Powell> No, no, Doolittle. You talk to it.
> Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.[1]
Where I got my BA in philosophy the department head was all about Husserl.
Another philosophy professor from a neighboring college told a number of us about Dark Star. In hindsight I do wonder if it was because of the phenomenology reference, or because they were philosophers who took in 60s/70s/... scifi/speculative fiction.
Came to post the same. Slackware 3, Kernel 2.x IIRC. Installation from floppies so slow you could read the package descriptions during unarchiving. Always laughed reading "bison - a parser generator in the style of yacc". Awesome.
I like how the article brings up Alien, which Dan O'Bannon later wrote the screenplay for. They have a lot of similarities -- both presenting space travel not as glamorous but as something the future equivalent of truckers do, and also about the problems of picking up alien life without a quarantine, although it is played for laughs in Dark Star and deadly seriously in Alien.
It's worth watching "Jodorowsky's Dune" if you haven't to see the direct-line connection - Jodorowsky happened to see "Dark Star" playing at a film festival while out in California and wanted whoever did the special effects to come work on his doomed "Dune" adaptation. He hired O'Bannon, who came out and met future Alien collaborators HR Giger and Moebius. It's fair to say Alien would not have happened, (or would not be the Alien we know now), if not for Dark Star.
I think I remember reading in an interview with O'Bannon, likely linked from hn when he died, that he came up with the idea for Alien after experiencing a cinema audience in terrified silence through the elevator scene, instead of the intended laughs. Something along the lines of "if I can't make them laugh but make them fear without even trying, what if I do try?" If there's and truth to this story, Alien is quite literally a remake of a Dark Star side story, just pivoted a bit.
Never heard about that Jodorowsky angle before, thanks. Must be the most influencial movie that never happened.
You need to watch both of them: Jodorowsky's Dune and H.R Giger's documentary "Dark Star: HR Gigers Welt". Giger was a true artist to the bones, his house was like a macabre gothic castle from dracula, full of statues, books and art.
Jodorowsky hired Dan O'Bannon, HR Giger, Jean Giraud Moebius, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Pink Floyd... not to mention his own son.
He and Moebius created L'Incal and Metabarons, one of the wildest rides in the realm of european comics. Moebius was one of the most talented artists in the history of the Franco Belgian comics scene of France.
Surreal that Jodorowsky's Dune never materialized. I think it would have been truly amazing and far better than Lynch's Dune. I won't even mention the modern adaptation. How can the guy who made Blade Runner 2049 fails to deliver something so important for Science Fiction? Villeneuve was saved by legitimate actors on blade runner.
I first saw Alien with my roommate soon after we had both graduated from nautical school. We had a similar thought: the crew of the Nostromo were sailors. In their behavior, the things they talked and laughed and bitched about. Move the timeline back to late 20th century on a commercial oceangoing ship and they'd be right at home.
The Forger (Meat Beat Manifesto) also samples Dark Star at the start and end of The Good The Bad And The Forger. Lots of other video samples in the track
Was Solaris even released to US cinemas in 1972? I can only find information that it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release. And even if Carpenter and O'Brannon knew about the movie it might very well be that they didn't see it as influental as it is seen today in the western world. Apparently Lem didn't like the movie either, so it might very well have been overlooked at the time because it didn't fit the "Zeitgeist".
It was very slow-moving. First time I saw it, I fell asleep. The 2002 remake is more pacy, but I'm afraid I can't take Clooney seriously as an actor. I think it was 20 years before I watched the original again, and enjoyed it.
My immediate (incorrect) association upon seeing the words "Dark Star" on HN was with the Grateful Dead song, which is about 56 years old. The Live/Dead version was a true epiphany for me, now 18 years ago. After really only liking the late 60s Dead for about a decade I have apparently aged into liking their later stuff. There is a nice live video of Dark Star from 1974 on YouTube: search "Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Winterland 10/18/74)".
Like these films, but hate this indie budget math. The way to get to low number is to barter as much as possible and steal the rest. People still put the hours in, but nobody gets paid. Handful of key people get the ip and something for their reel. The rest get taken advance of. It’s like doing an open source project except end result is commercial product licensed to a company. By all means do films for cheap but at least pay people salary or give a piece of the ip.
This is a good point but there are counter-example(s).
What about Kevin Smith with Clerks? Yes he got the IP and ostensibly the $/career but he's also brought basically everyone involved in that film with him along for his ride and continues to give them work in sequels/podcasts/tv shows etc.
It can be done ethically but to your point it doesn't seem to often be the case.
But really, they helped a friend - or family member - make a movie. I would help a friend make a movie. And I'd be thrilled if he made it big. Granted, I have the luxury of having a steady job - and of not having movie making be my career. But still.
I mean, I get what you're saying. But let's look at Robert Rodriguez and the cast of El Mariachi. He put several of them in Desperado, and I bet they got paid working money for that.
Looking through the cast of El Mariachi, it looks to me like every single one of them who made any other movies, also made movies with Robert Rodriguez. It seems like if they wanted to act, Rodriguez helped them get work. I don't know that for sure, but that's what Googling the results looks like.
A friend of mine in high school made a terrible zombie movie on a budget of approximately $5. He asked me to be in a scene and I happily agreed, I didn't feel taken advantage of at all. We also got the cops called on us for a noise complaint (we were filming at midnightish at a trailhead near some homes) so we even got some fun memories out of it.
if that movie went on to be extremely successful you might feel differently though.
I have a friend who works on low budget films, and it's a struggle. The directors are usually passionate and put in a lot of work, but also get all the credit and rewards if it succeeds. There's a budget, but it's mostly spent on paying travel expenses for out of state actors or for props and equipment and it's taken very personally if any background person want to be paid. "You'd take away from the quality of the movie just for your personal benefit! how greedy!" And in general expecting people with much less stake in the film to be just as invested and willing to sacrifice as they are without any of the upside.
ah fair enough, idk your project, sounds like a fun time
just saying that people who are expected to put in significant hours to semiprofessional low budget movies sometimes feel exploited. if you don't for yours hell yeah
I get that dynamic and maybe it’s not great to look at one of the all-time most succesful indie productions as an example. Rodriquez really did a lot by himself in that one also. Maybe to clarify a bit what I take issue with is the culture of celebrating no-budget success stories. It’s not less work to make those films so in the end you do spend the work hours, you just leave them out of accounting as nobody got paid. It’s really sort of a accounting trick leaving out sweat-equity. In what other field would we celebrate creating commercial products that take years of collective effort for cheap by not paying anyone.
Maybe it shows that I work in the field and get asked to do these all the time. Sometimes I do them, but it’s just sponsoring promising talent.
It's more! That's part of what makes it impressive.
You can come at it from the perspective of "It's merely an accounting trick and slave labor" but I think that's missing it for what it is. Most art is created without an expected paycheck. Movies especially are collaborative and everyone involved in small indie projects with no budgets knew there were working for little to no pay. You think the actors, camera man, lighting and set guys, were all thinking they were going to make a bunch in the box office from Dark Star / Mariachi? Likely not. They probably were thinking they'd try their shot at exposure. Actors might get recognized and get a career out of it, or not. Film crew at least had something on their resume. It's not like the directors (Cameron, Rodriguez) were making any promises they couldn't keep.
Well, plus the $200,000 that Columbia Pictures spent for post-production to fix it up for release to actual movie theaters. Still an amazing achievement, of course.
Around 500k in today's dollars. I can not imagine a group of Adults raising this kind of Money with the expectation of no return, let alone a group of college kids. Shows you the privilege required to be able to make it.
I would guess only around .1 % of the US population would ever get this kind opportunity and we are one of the richest countries in the world.
It was only last year that I realized the country music opening theme "Benson, Arizona" was about relativistic travel through space, shortly after playing it because I had just driven through Benson, Arizona.
The group Clam Chowder, who played at conventions in the Washington, DC area and beyond, did a cover of Benson Arizona that was extremely popular at their concerts.
