Westworld (1973)

 

100 best Science Fiction films

Popular Mechanics list

#97. Westworld (1973)

 

 

 

The comparisons between this film, Michael Crichton’s second Directorial outing and the first to appear in theatres, and his later novel “Jurassic Park,” by far his most popular work (first published 1990, made into a block-buster film 1993), are both inevitable and revealing.

 

They are both set in SF Theme-Parks where the attractions turn deadly for the guests, and the both address the theme of the Inherent Instability of Closed Systems (more on that later). The key to the difference between them is hidden is a small little fact – “Westworld” is the first Crichton story that wasn’t a novel before it became a film. I am pretty sure that Crichton went direct to Screenplay because he knew he had a great concept (apparently inspired by a trip to Disney Land and the animatronics of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride (first opened in 1967)), but couldn’t close all the illogics to a reader’s satisfaction, or at least not do so without losing the fun of the concept along the way. As a movie, which is more show, less tell, all Reality is presented through our two most easily manipulated senses, the ears and eyes. In a book the Reality needs to be constructed internally, so there’s way too much risk the reader will say, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense.” In a movie, the viewer can better be seduced into just sitting back and enjoying the ride.

 

Crichton’s first five novels were all Crime Thrillers. His first SF was “The Andromeda Strain” (1969), but notably had an exactly contemporary setting. Between 1969 and 1972 (so right before this movie project) he published another seven novels, only two of which were SF (three if you count the Terrorist Thriller “Binary,” which he Directed as the TV movie “Pursuit” (both 1972)) and continued the trend of an exactly contemporary settings. The script-without-a-novel for “Westworld” was his first bit of near-future World Building, but as good a writer as he was, he was no Robert Heinlein, and I think he knew it. It would take almost two decades of his growth as an Author, and the clever substitution of hungry Dinosaurs for killer Androids, for him to tackle this subject again, this time in meaty, full-fledged novel with a fully-imagined SF world (yeah, I know, “Jurassic Park” was also contemporarily set, but once the Characters were on the Island, it’s New World, exotic enough to be the Future or another Planet).

 

Like most great movies, the conceit is simply conveyed, but open-ended enough that once things get rolling, you have a lot of space to run around in and explore. The tag line (one of my all-time favorites) says it all, “Boy, have we got a vacation for you. Westworld, where nothing can go wrong…go wrong…go wrong…”

 

That tag-line is taken almost word-for-word from the script, specifically a commercial for Delos Resort that appears very early in the film. This was a post-production addition, ill-timed in its creation because of a Hollywood Writer’s Strike, so Crichton avoided using a Union Scriptwriter and had an Advertising Copywriter pen it to make sure it sounded like a Real-World commercial.

 

Delos offers Hedonistic Dream Vacations at the price of $1,000 dollars a day (this seems absurdly low, even for the 1970s, sort of like how the Cyborg in “Six Million Dollar Man” (TV series first aired in 1973) would’ve to cost more than a mere $6 million). Westworld is not your only option, there was also Medievalworld and Romanworld, each giving the, mostly male, tourists a chance to enjoy murder, rape, and pillage without consequence or conscience because everything they’re abusing are Machines, having no feelings, no identity, and no rights. That makes it all innocent fun.

 

Each of the three parks have period-specific décor that are not entirely Historically correct, but that’s the point, they are all Hollywood-images of the past, not History lessons, and in keeping with this, in Westworld (where most of the action takes place) Crichton perceptively mimics the Directorial styles of movie Western from a generation earlier. Director Crichton later wrote, “Most of the situations in the film are clichés; they are incidents out of hundreds of old movies. I felt that they should be shot as clichés.” An exception was the use of Slow-Mo during gun fights, then-popular but I thought was a misstep. There’s also a nice, dry, wit running through even the film’s darkest moments, something that Crichton stumbled badly on with in some of his other Directorial outings.

 

The first characters we’re introduced to are John Blane (James Brolin) and Peter Martin (Richard Benjamin). They are two friends from Chicago and John has been to Westworld before. John thinks that the no-stakes shooting and whoring opportunities will help Peter get over his Depression and Restore his masculinity so badly wounded by his recent divorce. John’s a smug know-it-all, happy to act as guide. Meeker Peter obligingly follows and one suspects he’s been a follower all his life.

 

Peter is nervous, and putting on his Western costume he admits he feel it’s, “silly – like a joke.”

 

John responds, “It’s not a joke! It’s an amusement park! All you have to do is have fun.”

 

Soon after, when John and Peter enter a Saloon, Peter orders a vodka martini, rather than a whisky, and earns derisive looks from the rest of the patrons.

 

Crichton’s lingering on these two as long as he did before he gets to the action is quite effective. It sets the stage because John is a braggart who has nothing to really brag about, and Peter is a schlemiel who asks too many questions; these were both solidly drawn Characters and a deft trick to slip in essential exposition reasonably naturalistically. Had this been given much more time, they both would’ve become insufferable, but don’t worry, the duo will soon be fighting for their lives and then, blessedly, they mostly shut up.

 

This is a story of men in the USA cast adrift in the Mundane World because newly-uppity women are getting more demanding and men are afraid to question their basic assumptions. Like children who won’t give up their toys in the sandbox, they retreat into immature and self-serving Fantasy worlds. This film lacks even one significant female character, but that’s not a flaw, it’s the point. This is a boys-only indulgence that will soon twist, turn, and bite them.

 

The main Villain is one of the Androids, an un-named Gunslinger played by Yul Brynner, dressed exactly as he did “The Magnificent Seven” (1960). Though given virtually no dialogue, he’s expertly famed in every shot and Brynner was always a powerful presence. John easily dispatches him in their first, meaningless, confrontation. Next time though …

 

Critic Tim Brayton nicely described Brynner, “his unchanging expression of barely-contained rage are tremendously threatening and effortlessly iconic.” Though a smallish part for the first half of the film, with Crichton’s encouragement, Brynner owns every scene he’s in. Though there is nothing appealing in his Robotic Character, but he’s powerful in a way the Flesh-and-Blood Characters are not. SF is full of killer Robots, but in this case, quite deliberately, we’re tempted to root for the Gunslinger over the Innocent Humans, because we’ve become disgusted with how the Humans treat the Robots and anyway, people can be so annoying.

 

After a day of meaningless violence and sex with Robot Prostitutes (Peter will soon admit "John, this place is really fun!") night falls and the clean-up crews come out to pick up the bullet-ridden Robot bodies. Now the action moves underground and we are introduced to another un-named Character, but Human this time, the Chief Supervisor (Alan Oppenheimer). Little of the coming disaster is explained because the Scientists are never given enough time to figure it out, but the Supervisor does offer a few telling hints, like, “We aren't dealing with ordinary machines here. These are highly complicated pieces of equipment. Almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work.”

 

We see the Robots laid-out on tables to be repaired. There’s a dead horse, the Gunslinger, and a few others. The scene looks like a Hospital, but there’s a sterile indifference among the staff that one would hope Humans are never treated with. This is a theme repeated in a lot of Crichton's work, reflecting a Humanistic rage against the Scientific, specifically the Medical, Establishment. Crichton had been a Medical Doctor before achieving success as a Novelist, and his books often hint of a Moral Turmoil that might have encouraged his in switching Professions.

 

With the first hints of something is going awry, the Supervisor recommends that they shut down all three parks and full Diagnostics be run on every Robot. He’s overruled. His bosses are sure the problem can be contained and they, "Can't disappoint a guest."

 

Soon enough, All Hell Breaks Loose. Soon it appears that every Human, both above- and below-ground, have been Murdered except for Peter, the Character least prepared to play an Action Hero. Trying to escape, Peter passes through Romanworld and ends up in Medievalworld, with the Gunslinger relentlessly pursuing him all the way. All around Peter are the bodies of Butchered Guests and Robots whose batteries have run dry.

 

Somehow, the Gunslinger battery doesn’t run dry as fast as all the others, he just keeps coming. Writer/Director John Carpenter has said the Gunslinger inspired the murderous Michael Myers in “Halloween” (1978) and it seems obvious he also inspired title Character of Writer/Director James Cameron’s “The Terminator” (1984) as well.

 

The film’s very last scene has exquisite, bitter, irony.

 

One of Crichton's often-returned-to themes is the Inherent Instability of Closed Systems. Among the advances in his writing that emerged between this film and “Jurassic Park” was his ability to articulate the idea better. He based one of “Jurassic Park’s” Heroes on University of Maryland Professor of Mathematics and Physics James A. Yorke, who famously coined the phrase “Chaos Theory.” To quote Yorke, “[S]mall differences in initial conditions, such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation, can yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction of their behavior impossible in general.”

 

As a Novelist, Crichton has always shown unusual skill in wedding dense Exposition and an Adventurous narrative, while as a Script Writer he’s always deftly avoided most Exposition (Note: he didn’t Write any of the “Jurassic Park” film scripts). Unlike “Jurassic Park,” this film couldn’t flesh out the theme of the Instability of Closed Systems theme with a discussion of Chaos Theory in part because Yorke’s work was largely unknown until 1975 or 1977. (Yorke ultimately became a big fan of the “Jurassic Park” film series.) Anyway, this film is better for its lack of Exposition.

 

There’s a lot of great show-not-tell, like the Android’s batteries running dry and their poor eye-sight demonstrated when we get to see the world through the Gunslinger’s POV: their vison was Pixelated and despite its limited use and now primitive-ness, these POV shots were landmark (if you’re generous you can say it was the first feature film to utilize CGI, though most other movie buffs insist the first really substantive use of CGI was “Star Wars” (1977)).

 

Other things don’t survive much scrutiny. The way the Parks play out the Fantasies essentially requires very few visitors at any given time, which isn’t a good economic model. And it made no sense to put real bullets in all the guns, and the excuse that heat sensors stop the Robots from killing Humans is inadequate. The swords and knives of the other two Parks raise even worse issues. Hadn’t Crichton ever heard of Insurance Regulations?

 

Crichton did include another important real Science concept: While pondering the escalating crisis the Supervisor says that, "there's a clear pattern here which suggests an analogy to an infectious disease process, spreading from one…area to the next…I must confess I find it difficult to believe in a disease of machinery."

 

He means a Computer Virus, a self-replicating Program that can be transferred, or transfers itself, to other Machines. It was first postulated in 1949 by Mathematician, Physicist, Computer Scientist, Engineer and Polymath John von Neumann; that was less than a half decade after the creation of the first electronic Computer, and two decades before the creation of the Internet which is so essential for Computer Viruses to become Epidemic.

 

The first Real-World example of a Computer Virus was in 1967 with the creation of a benign “Creeper” Virus called ARPANET, which was designed to “packet switch,” to assist Scientists frustrated by the fact that most of them didn’t have large Computers to work on. ARPANET allowed them to use phone lines to run their programs on another’s Computer, so this first Virus wasn’t a threat spread over the Internet, but one of the fundamental Technologies for creation the Internet. Why is the Internet vulnerable to Computer Viruses? Because on the simplest level, the Internet is a Computer Virus.

 

Computer Viruses first appeared in a SF in Gregory Benford’s short-story, “The Scarred Man” (first published 1960) Benford. It is also used in Crichton’s novel, “The Terminal Man, (1972), but that idea didn’t make it into the film version (1974). “Westworld” was the first introduction of the idea to a mass audience.

                    

“Westworld” came at the height of the Auteur Theory and the New Hollywood, where Studios were willing to take greater risks with talented Directors because that up-and coming talent (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, etc) were cranking out body of distinctive, industry-transformative, works that often proved hugely profitable, but Crichton was not part of that gang. Every major studio turned the project down except for MGM, and it was not only the most anti-New Hollywood of the bunch, but considered fully retrograde. Crichton again, “MGM had a bad reputation among filmmakers; complained bitterly about their treatment there. There were too many stories of unreasonable pressure, arbitrary script changes, inadequate post-production, and cavalier recutting of the final film ...

 

“An orderly preproduction was impossible. We didn't have our cast until forty-eight hours before shooting began. MGM kept demanding script changes right up to the day of shooting. ...

 

“MGM had agreed to make the film only if it could be done for less than a million dollars ... impossible … [so] Metro reluctantly increased the budget by $250,000.”

 

The $250,000 covered the cast salaries in a film with forty speaking parts and a few well-known Actors. The remaining million dollars disappeared quickly too, $400,000 to crew of eighty over the six-week shooting schedule. Another $50,000 went to the extras, “a Hollywood extra gets about forty dollars a day plus fringe benefits” And the remaining $550,000 went for everything else: sets, props, special effects, extras, and so on.

 

Crichton again, “art director, Herman Blumenthal, only $75,000 for set construction. had to build twenty sets covering nearly 200,000 square feet. His floors had to be built with such fine tolerances that a camera rolling over them would not wobble or bounce. Many interiors had to be aged. In the final film, almost everything was used more than once. We used one medieval stairway three times, in different places. We used a single underground corridor nine times with six light changes, then tore out a false wall and used the same corridor, now widened, as teh robot-repair area. We used one hotel room twice, changing furniture and camera angles.”

 

Part of keeping the price down was that MGM had a pre-existing backlot to exploit for the Westworld scenes, and Romanworld was actually a Beverly Hills Estate that once belonging to silent film star Harold Lloyd.

 

I suspect that MGM also managed to get a lot of its impressive talent on the cheap. Actor Brynner was the biggest star, and his screen time was limited. Brolin was, at least back then, a B-lister. Benjamin was a somewhat bigger name than Brolin, but typecasting was increasingly regulating him to supporting roles, and not too long afterwards he’d chose to focus on Directing. This was only Crichton’s second job as Director, first on a major film, so he would’ve also had to come cheap; I can’t confirm this, but I bet MGM paid more for his Script than his Directing work. Crichton was truly blessed with Cinematographer Gene Polito, who came to this project with a long and impressive resume, but virtually all of it was TV so he would’ve come cheaper than, let’s say, Conrad Hall.

 

Crichton again:

 

“As director, I was camera-cutting. This means I would never shoot a whole scene from a single angle. I'd shoot part of a scene from one angle; part from another angle, with little or no overlap. It was the fastest way to work, but also the riskiest. If the scene didn't work as shot, I had no extra footage to play with.

 

“I was also picking certain sequences to dwell on, and shooting the others quickly. I knew I could not shoot the whole film well in the thirty days I had been given, so I picked the key scenes and concentrated on them. The rest of the scenes were plainly shot in haste, with hope that the audience would forgive me later.

“Two weeks after shooting, I saw the assembled film for the first time. It was horrible. It was boring, contrived, self-indulgent and slack. I left the projection room in silent depression. All of our energy and enthusiasm had been wasted on a piece of silly garbage.

 

“[Editor] Dave Bretherto was the only person in good spirits. He cheered me up enough to start editing. We went sequence by sequence, changing timing, replacing shots, adding and dropping things within the narrow limits that were possible with the minimal footage I had shot. The picture slowly improved. After a month, I thought we might have something decent after all.

 

“We ran the film for the MGM executives. A few executives liked it, but the general feeling was that it was a disaster. However, there was no talk of taking the picture away from me - everyone knew that I had camera-cut, and there was no spare film to play with. And the MGM management did agree to some additional shooting.”

 

So that last bit would’ve involved another increase in the film’s meager budget.

 

“Westworld” went on to gross nearly ten-times the Production costs, and this success, and that of “Soylent Green” (also 1973), encouraged the deeply troubled MGM to recommit to SF cinema.

 

 

“Westworld” became a franchise. First came the disappointing sequel, “Futureworld” (1976), a project handed over to a different studio, AIP, because neither Crichton nor MGM had interest in it. Director Richard T. Heffron wasn’t especially talented and had no experience with SF. One would’ve hoped for better out of Writer Mayo Simon (who co-Wrote with George Schenck); Simon had Scripted many film films, specifically good SF ones. “Futureworld’s” fundamental flaw in this film is that it missed the best trick of the first, the Satirizing the Human Characters and encouraging the audience to identify with the Robots’ resentments. Instead, we get a ho-hum tale over Evil Robots plotting to replace World Leaders with Duplicates, already a tired cliché at least a decade earlier. It’s a shame really, because it featured fine performances by Blythe Danner and Peter Fonda, and some well-written dialogue, especially when the two leads face off with their Doppelgangers. The very best scene features Brynner as the Gunslinger showing up in a Kinky Dream Actress Danner has while in Virtual Reality, but a really good VR game defeats the point of the Amusement Park investing so much in building Robots.

 

Next came the TV series, “Beyond Westworld” (first aired 1977). I haven’t seen it, I know on no one else who has, but had essentially the same story as “Futureworld” with an inferior cast. It was canceled after only producing only six episodes, of which only four were aired.

 

Then came the wholly unexpected and shockingly good TV series “Westworld” (first aired 2016). It goes back to the idea of shifting our identification to the Robots, and takes it a step farther -- the Robots don’t know they’re not Real. Their identities are scripted, and after being Murdered or Raped their memories are wiped clean so they can start over. The illusion of their Humanity is so perfect that some Human guests develop fixations on them, either by falling in love or returning again and again to harm the same Robot family repeatedly. In fact, the illusions are so perfect, these Humans gradually force a more complete consciousness to emerge inside the Robots. When Robots realize what they are, and what’s been done to them, they become enraged. It’s an exceptionally dark and multi-layered tale of Moral Corruption and Revenge, and climax of Season One features one of the finest surprise twists ever executed in SF cinema or TV. It has been nominated for 43 Emmys (with nine wins) for everything from the Writing, Direction, Acting, Production Design, Cinematography, Music, Costume, etc, etc.

 

Westworld (movie) Trailer:

Westworld (1973) Trailer #1 | Movieclips Classic Trailers

Westworld (TV 2016) Trailer:

Westworld Season 1 Official Trailer (2016) | HBO (MATURE)