Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Probably the best of these is Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov. He did such a superb job of turning
that very tedious film into a brilliant book that it has seldom if ever been out of print and the myth has
arisen that the film was actually based on his novel! Well it wasn't. The film came first and he was asked
to write the book in order to promote the film. He succeeded in completely overshadowing it.
However most film "novelisations" are as bad as you might expect them to be, particularly the ones
written by Alan Dean Foster (which is most of them, he seems to have cornered the market). Orson
Scott Card did quite a creditable job with The Abyss, but he is an exception, not a rule.
A great number of SF books have never been filmed -- and would probably be quite dismal if they were.
Many will almost certainly never be filmed for reasons of terminal weirdness or technical difficulty.
Stanley Kubrick is on record as having said that if it can be written he can film it, but I would be willing to
bet that even he would have enormous difficulty with books such as A Clash of Cymbals by James
Blish which deals with, among other things, the destruction of the entire universe and the beginning of
(possibly) several more.
Two and a half SF books have, however, been filmed brilliantly. These are Forbidden Planet from the
play by William Shakespeare, A Clockwork Orange from the novel by Anthony Burgess, and 2001
from the novel by Arthur C. Clarke. You could, with justification, deny that this last is a film of a novel
since both book and novel grew almost simultaneously as both Kubrick and Clarke contributed to the
other's project (see Clarke's fascinating The Lost Worlds of 2001 for more information on this).
However one is unequivocally the work of a film maker and the other is unequivocally the work of a
novelist. The assertion is close enough to the truth.
I find it interesting that the last two were both filmed by Stanley Kubrick. It seems to me that he is
someone who is particularly sympathetic to the SF point of view. Even his other films skirt around the
edge of the subject. Consider Dr Strangelove (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the
bomb) and The Shining. Even Spartacus flirts with it (I'll swear I saw Conan in the background).
Forbidden Planet, of course, only half way counts since it is a film of Shakespeare's The Tempest
with SF trappings. Nevertheless that is close enough to qualify it -- The Tempest is a magnificent
fantasy story in its own right. I saw it again a few years ago as part of the BBC's epic bardathon (a
project over several years to show all of the plays). Michael Hordern played Prospero, and it was a
wonderfully moving and emotional performance.
I've always loved movies. That's an odd statement to come from someone as non-visual as myself. As I
think I've explained before, visual images leave me largely unmoved. I much prefer the print media.
Nevertheless I subscribed to Sky television as soon as it appeared because a channel devoted to nothing
but movies was just too attractive to resist.
The first time that I ever went to the cinema was to see a Disney movie called (I think) The Vanishing
Prairie. I was about three years old and my mother decided it was time I learned about cinemas. I retain
no memory of the event, but my mother said that I paid very little attention to what was happening up
on the big screen. It seems I was much more fascinated by the fact that my seat was on springs and
when I stood up it folded back all by itself. I spent the whole three hours of my visit to the cinema
standing up, sitting down, and standing up again.
Thus began a life long fascination with movies. Every Sunday afternoon at home I would sit glued to the
radio listening to a programme called Movie Go Round which played excerpts from current movies and
reviewed them. It was only much later on in life that the surrealistic aspects of listening to movies on
radio dawned on me. At the time, I was hooked.
Movies were the high spots of my teenage life and the cinema was a place of constant pilgrimage. I
smoked my first cigarette in a cinema and got my first grown up kiss in a cinema; and in between I saw
a lot of wonderful films.
In the intermission, ladies with trays around their necks would appear, and you could buy ice cream and