Unfinished Monkey Business - The Making Of Planet Of The Apes
"Statue Of Liberty?! That was our planet!" etc.
As a genuinely groundbreaking production, it’s perhaps not surprising that Planet Of The Apes spent so long in development limo. After touting Pierre Boulle’s novel around Hollywood, producer Arthur P Jacobs spent most the 1960s waiting for the green light, only to see the film plagued by rewrites, effects hitches and budget cuts.
All the inconvenience would prove worthwhile, however, as Planet Of The Apes would be recognised among the finest science fiction films ever made - one that’s remembered as much for its Spielberg-surpassing set pieces (the cornfield hunt, the chase though Ape City, the discovery of the doll, the finale of all finales) as for the way director Franklin J Schaffner used the baggage brought by Charlton Heston (who made his reputation playing out-and-out heroes) and screenwriter Michael Wilson
(a victim of the McCarthy witch-hunts) to add irony and steel to the symbolism.
The film not only changed Hollywood’s attitude towards science-fiction, it completely altered the way movies were made. Before Apes, it hadn’t occurred to that many people that box-office success could be replicated in a sequel. Likewise it was Apes that spawned the spin-off TV series, the novelisation and mass merchandising.
More significantly, it remains the film that lifted sci-fi out of the B-movie ghetto, reinventing it as a serious cinematic genre. And as the triumph of the recent Rupert Wyatt-Matt Reeves cycle of primate pictures further illustrates, filmgoers simply can’t enough of going ape.
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