All the Old Familiar Places

This month I’m going to talk about something other than writing—science fiction scripting and screenplays.

To start with, I must admit to a pair of unseemly pastimes. I have a predilection for both old science fiction movies and geology. There. I said it. Hopefully after reading the preceding, people other than telephone solicitors, distributors of Jack Chick’s fatwas, and folks sporting tin foil lined hats will find it in their hearts to still speak to me.

I blame this disgusting interest of mine on the movies made in the American Southwest during the Truman-Eisenhower years. When the monsters/flying saucers/robots/aliens (the latter from rather farther away than Sonora) or the beautiful blond wasn’t on screen, the audience was left to look at various desert rock outcroppings while creepy music played. After a while, the different forms of the rocks began to interest me (a sure sign of advancing bad taste and/or boredom). I was lost the first time I furtively stole into that den of iniquity, the Roanoke Public Library, and sidling up to the procurer known as “Librarian,” asked in a hushed voice, “Please, ma’am, do you have any books about rocks?” In my teenage years, I kept books filled with disgusting arrays of sedimentary, metamorphic, and—most scandalous of all—igneous formations without even the tissue-thin clothing of plant life hidden under my bed.

All the shame of this came flooding back this morning as I paged through a copy of Roadside Geology of New Mexico. A gypsum bluff in a picture jumped out at me. It was the same bluff that the hero and heroine were driving by when the flying saucer confronted them near the beginning of “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.” Some pages later, and there was the volcanic neck that the giant spider lurked behind in “Tarantula.” Still further on, another outcropping stirred a feeling of familiarity, but I couldn’t place it—“The Monolith Monsters” or “It Came from Outer Space?” My better half thought perhaps “Mesa of Lost Women,” but I don’t remember seeing that one.

This set me looking for the New Mexico setting of the 1954 Oscar nominee “Them!” In the movie, the town of Alamogordo and White Sands Proving Ground are mentioned prominently. I checked the valleys on both sides of the San Andres Mountains—the Jornada del Muerto (obviously not named by the Chamber of Commerce) and the Tularosa Valley—from Socorro south to El Paso. Nada. Even the mountains in the distance didn’t look right. But, James Whitmore was in a New Mexico State Police car—and James Whitmore is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men. “Is a puzzlement,” as some monarch or other used to say.

I decided to watch the movie once more (any excuse to do nothing constructive). The first scene opens with the word “Them!” in creepy-looking wiggly letters (I’m not sure exactly why wiggly letters are supposed to be creepy–but then, with the number of my geology magazines the wife has dropped while reading in the bathtub, I may just be inured to the sight). Looking at the country behind the letters, I’m smacked in the eye by JOSHUA TREES! Uh oh. We’re not in New Mexico anymore, Toto.

As it happens, the nearest Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia) to New Mexico is 310 miles west (or 24,690 miles due east if you want to sneak up it from behind). Hmm, time for Google Earth. A few quick keystrokes, a mouse click, and we’re in beautiful downtown Joshua Tree, California; a nicely earth-toned community of about 4,500 (depending on how hard and from which way the wind is blowing that day) just southwest of Twentynine Palms, the family theme park, and three hours drive from LA (two weeks during rush hour). To the south and southeast is Joshua Tree National Park and to the north across an extremely flat basin lie—Hey presto!–the ridges seen in the movie. This is definitely the Great Basin of Basin and Range geological province fame (speaking of Basin and Range, a plug for John McPhee’s very fine book of that name–nonfiction writing the way it should be done).

So what has all this to do with writing science fiction for TV and movie production? It’s just an illustration of the old Hollywood saying, “There’s many a slip twixt the typewriter and the screen.” The reason the screenwriter, George Worthington Yates, set “Them!” in New Mexico was that it was about giant ants. And to get giant ants, as everyone who’s slept through Earth Sciences class knows, you have to irradiate a place, and California hasn’t been irradiated…yet. On the other hand, budgets for science fiction movies of the time were notoriously small. Thus, a New Mexico State Police cruiser blasting past Joshua trees and a very near Oscar win.

1 August 2011: Feast of St. Bernard Due.