The Greatest SF Movie Never Made
Harlan Ellison and Isaac Asimov: I, Robot: The Illustrated Screenplay (Warner Books; 1994; ISBN 0-446-67062-6; illustrated by Mark Zug).
Inspired by this podcast mentioned by the folks at SF Signal, I hauled this book down for another read. I had read it once before, enjoyed the two introductions (one by Asimov, one by Ellison) immensely, but had kind of been left cold by the rest...I found the form (a screenplay) hard to handle.
This time around, I must have been in the right mindset. Because I found this to be the greatest science fiction movie never made.
What's that you say? Didn't this get made into a movie, with a wise-cracking Will Smith and a ultra-hot Susan Calvin and hordes of murdering, rampaging robots?
Nope, what happened there was that the studio had the rights to the Asimov concepts and had the rights to a action-adventure script and slapped the two together thinking we'd all be fooled. Sorry, but retroactively slapping some Asimov buzzwords, some concepts and some character names onto a completely different and incompatible story does not make the flick an Asimov story.
This, my friends, is an Asimov story.
Ellison tells the genesis and multiple failed attempts to bring this epic to the screen in a introduction that is both as funny and as sad as his extended introduction to the novel Phoenix Without Ashes (written by Edward Bryant and based on Ellison's pilot script for the show Starlost). In the heady days after the first Star Wars movie minted box office gold, everybody wanted to get in on the money machine. Ellison was hired to write the screenplay for a movie based on Asimov's robot tales and produced this fine work. Unfortunately, he ran into a studio head (initially credited with the intellectual ability of an artichoke; later that assessment was downgraded), and despite many attempts, under various directors, the film was never made.
Which is a dang shame. Especially when you couple the words with the visual concepts (sixteen color illustrations and a large number of black-and-white sketches) of Mark Zug. What a movie this would have been! No explosions, no spacecraft chasing each other, almost no violence on screen...but yes, thought-provoking dialog, interesting characters, spectacular opportunities for special effects and a story that ties together Asimov's concepts and several of his stories.
The tale involves a quest, acting as a linking or framing story. Four of Asimov's tales are directly involved in the plot (Robbie, Runaround, Liar!, Lenny), one is hinted at (Escape!) and two are used to develop the backstory (Evidence and The Evitable Conflict). The screenplay contains many Asimovian touches, a lot of Ellisonian touches and, in my mind, even manages to work in some touches that Clifford D. Simak would have generated.
It could have been the science fiction version of Citizen Kane. It could have been the greatest science fiction movie ever made. Alas, it appears that we will never see it as such.
All is not lost. You can still get copies of the book, fairly easily, and I urge you to do so. Start reading it, study the brilliant illustrations, and soon enough you'll have the whole movie running in your head. In the theater of the mind...
(Counts as seven entries in the 2008 Year in Shorts since I re-read the tales the screenplay is derived from.)
Posted by Fred Kiesche at June 1, 2008 07:32 PM