What's To Watch? - May 20 - Turn of the Wheel

 

     A nearly single-topic piece this week (with some alternates mentioned near the end), and one that's open for anyone to see. It'll just be a question of whether or not it's something to your tastes.
 

    In the winter of 1950, Arthur C. Clarke landed a spot for a short story in the periodical New Worlds #8. Titled "Guardian Angel". It became a seed he expanded in 1952 into a novel, incorporating it as the book's opening. Finalized and released in 1953 as Childhood's End, a fairly sleek novel (just 214 pages, so arguably flirting with novella status), Clarke's first widely successful, and possibly best, novel. It plays on themes of mankind's contact with aliens, a caretakers' invasion, the concepts of telepathy and ESP, and a transcendent next stage for human beings themselves.
     It was his third novel, and one that sparked much development interest over the years. The ESP and paranormal themes were ones that Clarke became estranged from, as scientific validation of them - which he'd expected to happen - disappointedly failed to manifest. His earnest early interest in psychic phenomena led him through years of following investigations only to see each evaporate or be revealed as scams while under scrutiny. Consequently, his later works didn't deal with those subjects, and he counted himself a hard skeptic by the early 1990s.

    The core of the story involves an extremely advanced alien race arriving at Earth, ushering in what will be offered as a Golden Age for humanity. Aside from the shocking appearance of huge ships over key locations, and momentarily interrupted media, all aircraft were gently stopped in their paths, and just as delicately lowered to open areas on the ground. Everyone - or at least presumably every adult - was then visited by what appeared to be a deceased loved one, each delivering the same

message from a being named Karellan, who is the designated "Supervisor for Earth." A human intermediary is chosen by the aliens, initially taken away in a deliberately showy manner such that word gets around, and media is poised and waiting upon his being returned, so a global audience is poised to receive the first of the messages.
     New, non-polluting technologies for power generation are provided, no warfare is permitted, and while in general mankind is left to self-govern, they are directed to realign existing industries to broadly benevolent applications, with alien tech doing the heavy lifting. This includes repurposing Saudi oil extraction and processing pipelines, as such polluting technologies are no longer needed, into irrigation channels for desalinated water as part of a process of turning desert regions into farmland and idyllic settings. Diseases are cured in global waves, all basic human needs provided, it soon becomes unnecessary to have a job, and be forced to toil at work that one would otherwise only do to pay the bills.

     That this upsets the apple carts of those who had previously been at the pinnacles of wealth and power, makes huge military apparatus unnecessary, leaving them to be abandoned or repurposed, and largely removes the want and suffering that have ever been key elements of indoctrinating people into religious belief and worship, combined with so much unaccustomed idleness, means that there's a loud group of suspicious, somewhat angry grumblers. That the aliens, dubbed "Overlords" by a suspicious media, refuse to reveal their true appearance, and purely altruistic actions are seldom taken at face value, there is a counterculture that organizes to cast suspicion on the agenda of these caretakers.
     Multiple attempts - along with several statements of interest - to adapt it to other media came up over the years. Stanley Kubrick was among those interested, but the novel had already been optioned by director Abraham Polonsky, and as Polonsky was blacklisted at the time it was doomed to go nowhere. Screenplays by Polonsky and playwright Adam Koch (unfortunately also blacklisted) were written, but had no support to be produced. Kubrick's attention shifted instead to an earlier short story, "The Sentinel", which became the seed for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The themes of alien intervention and human ascendance were there, too, which is likely what made it a convenient side-step project.
     A mid-seventies radio production was proposed but went nowhere.
     Via Universal studios, an adaptation as a miniseries for CBS or a lengthy tv movie for ABC began

with a script by tv writer and producer Philip DeGuere, but contracts Universal had with Clarke reached back to the late fifties, and were out of date. The contracts were ironed out by 1979, and DeGuere's script had been accented by preproduction drawings and additional material by comics and graphic design legend Neal Adams (who we just recently lost), the combination resulting in plans that met with Clarke's approval. Unfortunately, it would have required a budget around $40 million, and Universal wasn't prepared to exceed $10 million. No go. (A few paragraphs down I have a link related to Neil's development work, btw,)
     A two-part radio adaptation was produced by the BBC in 1996, airing in '97, so it finally managed one type of adaptation.
     By 2013 the project finally came around to becoming a Syfy Channel project, with a contemporized script, and became a three-part, U.S.-Australian miniseries that ran on three consecutive nights in mid-December 2015.  I was oblivious to all that at the time. Work issues, with the challenges of a newly rebuilt lab, the expense of which was bringing interference, heightened fiscal expectations from above, and, along with my being in a diminished state from what would be diagnosed two months later as heart problems, has me realizing in hindsight why I wasn't noticing things like Syfy programs.
     This finally brings me around to why I brought it up here. I just recently stumbled across it among Tubi's offerings.  After refreshing myself on the source novel (which I'd read decades earlier) I gave it a watch. On the whole, I was happy with it, and generally understood the reasons for the changes made in the screenplay. The world's changed considerably in a bit over sixty years.

     Clarke's novel was all forward-looking, but from his early 1950's perspective. It was certainly prescient, inasmuch that it anticipated a U.S./Soviet space race, albeit set ten to fifteen years later than what ended up happening in our reality, where the ominous beep -- beep -- beep of Sputnik in 1957 pulled the trigger on an especially loud starter's pistol. As much as I might wish otherwise, that's not a backdrop that's going to resonate with a 2015 audience. There's one thing this adaptation fails at, though, and that's in conveying why one of the odd casualties of the unburdening of mankind is the seeming death of (popular) culture, including the arts.
     Science fiction often best attempts to address contemporary issues, directly or by proxy. The 2015 adaptation leans on pollution and the climate crisis, along with perennial human condition problems of political divides, poverty, nationalism and armed conflict, all of which are bound to be more relatable to a modern audience than framing it against a space race between superpowers. Similarly, the main human character in the story, Rikki Stormgren, United Nations General Secretary, was replaced by an everyman, midwestern, farmer and local peacemaker, Ricky Stormgren, selected by Karellan from among the entirety of mankind, via an unspecified process. (Karellan even reveals that it came down to a choice between Ricky and an 82 year-old, blind Korean woman.)
     Here's the 2015 trailer for the start of the series: Childhood's End (2015 - combined running time of 4h 7m, plus some commercials).

     As mentioned, all three parts - and with low levels of commercial interruption - are available on Tubi. As I've mentioned in some earlier pieces, if you can see this blog post, you can stream Tubi. It's a free site, easy to access, nicely curated, and remains in my view the exemplar for any such free streamers that are depending on ad revenue.

     I'll also direct any interested - though this is best done after watching the miniseries if one's not familiar with the story, because it casually gives away a significant/key revelation from the end of the first part - to Neal Adams' blog, and the first of three, serial entries he ran each of the three nights of the broadcast, where he brought out the production materials he'd developed for the project in the late '70s.

     Shifting to a retrospective, tonight and Saturday night HBO (and also over on HBO Max) there's a two-part documentary covering the career of comedy icon George Carlin. Gone nearly fourteen years, his comments on U.S. society in particular are often more timely than ever. It's George Carlin's American Dream.

     The general themes of times passing, changes, dawns and dusks - the ephemeral aspects of existence - have been speaking to me loudly. A lot of light and life left chez Norton last weekend, and the resulting dimness threatens to drag my mood down farther. Instead, I need to shift my attention between my feet - the day-to-day steps to be taken - and the horizon of approximately next March, when the living arrangements are planned to change again, and I'll be adapting to new circumstances.
    I have flickers of wisdom, but they're apparently riding on really cheap candles, repeatedly

guttering and going out. Still, I'll give myself a little credit that I keep coming back to them - however slowly and feebly - trying to at long last take vital lessons to heart, and so into action. Reality is unconcerned with my discontent, and my failure to try to make the best of things only compounds matters by wasting more time -- which only adds to the mound of regret.
     Rather than take a calming breath and try to take a page of acceptance from, say, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, I think I need to take a stand, dig deeper into my discontent and try to rewire my brain to be more like the protagonist in Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine.  To become "good at being uncomfortable" and adapt to make the best of adversity. For now I need the kick of discontent, not the peace of the compost heap.

     Next week we'll be back in another of those floodgates opening stretches, with new and returning items arriving or imminent. In the meantime, I'm still enjoying the weekly hits of new episodes of Barry (Sundays on HBO), The Baby (also Sundays and HBO), Better Call Saul (Mondays on AMC - though that'll be on a "mid-season" break after next Monday), Star Trek: Brave New Worlds (Thursdays on Paramount +), Hacks (HBO Max Thursdays; 2 episodes per week), Bosch: Legacy (Fridays on Freevee; 2 episodes per week), and likely one or two others that have slipped my mind. I'm still also really enjoying the new Kids In the Hall episodes over on Amazon Prime, which I'd talked about last week.
     Enjoy the weekend - locally we're suddenly expected to pull mid- to even upper-90s temps Saturday and Sunday! - and generally take care. See you back here next Friday. - Mike