“With my hand raised, I promise never to let anyone screw me or one of my books again. I look forward to the day when, sink or swim, I can translate one of my other novels into an interesting and successful film.”¹

 

 

   There are many examples of a particularly American identity and culture. However, few have made such a global impact as Hollywood and the American  film industry. Historian and film critic Arthur Schlesinger Jr. states, “Film is the only art where the United States has made a real difference. Strike the American contribution from drama, painting, sculpture, dance, even possibly from poetry and the novel, and the world’s achievement is only marginally diminished. But film without the American contribution is unimaginable.”²  However, devotees of the likes of David Mamet, Thomas Eakins, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway may disagree. Indeed, critics Leonard Quart and Albert Auster have called Schlesinger’s argument “inflated.”³  Nevertheless, they agree on the importance and impact of the U.S. film industry: “Hollywood was able to create resonant and suggestive images, characters, dialogue and behavior that both reflected  and helped shape the audience’s consciousness, granting us much insight into American culture.”⁴

 

   Within the film industry, movies in the science fiction genre have been disproportionately successful both critically and financially. For example, a panel of 1500 critics, actors and fans compiled a list on behalf of the American Film Institution of the best 100 films of the last century. Not including animated, fantasy or horror films such as King Kong, Fantasia, and Frankenstein, all of which could arguably be included under the SF heading,  three SF films were voted in the top 25 and four in the top 100 overall (Star Wars in 15^th position, 2001: A Space Odyssey 22^nd, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 25^th  and  Close Encounters of the Third Kind 64^th).⁵   Similarly, of The Movie Times Online’s list of the Top 100 Grossing Movies of All Time (again omitting animated, fantasy and horror films), nearly one quarter are SF based and six out of the top ten are science fiction ( Star Wars in 2^nd position, E.T.,3rd, Jurassic Park, 4^th, Return of the Jedi, 7^th, Independence Day, 8^th, and The Empire Strikes Back, 9^th.⁶

 

   In The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, editor David Pringle asks:

How popular and influential is science fiction? Some might judge it to be a minority taste; but consider the following: Which are the most successful movies ever produced? The two most popular Hollywood films, measured by box-office receipts, are E.T. (1982) and Jurassic Park (1993), both directed by Steven Spielberg  and both, as it happens, works of science fiction.⁷

 

Financial success is not a measure of artistic merit however, and the above named films hardly add to the reputation of the genre as a subject for “serious” academic study. Nevertheless, in their own way, these films are fine examples of the American frontier tale in the tradition of, for example, Mark Twain or  Jack London. Critic John Huntington has noted that, “SF can be very popular and important and yet have few, if any, works that are acknowledged as “classics” by anyone outside of the circle of addicts itself.”⁸ However, some SF films do deserve serious academic study. SF movies can be divided into three general categories: first is the B.E.M. or “Bug Eyed Monster” movie, for example, The Thing (1951), War of the Worlds (1953), Invaders From Mars (1953), Them (1954), The Quartermass Xperiment (1955), The Blob (1958), Quartermass and the Pit  (1967), Alien (1979) and Species (1995). Some of these films were developed from SF novels or short stories; for example, The Thing (1951) is based on John W. Campbell’s critically acclaimed Who Goes There, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1938. The movie, however, does not remain faithful to the book, instead substituting a forgettable horror plot. Similarly, H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was updated and set in the 1950s, where it became a simple metaphor for the horrors of nuclear war.

 

   Some critics even argue that many of these movies are not SF at all. Writer Stephen King, for example, states:

It’s a trap this matter of definition, and I can’t think of a more boring academic subject…but you can draw your own borderline, if you want – and if you try, you might find that it’s a very squiggly border indeed. Alien, for instance, is a horror movie even though it is more firmly grounded in scientific projection than Star Wars, Star Wars is a science fiction film, although we must recognise the fact that it’s sf of the E. E. `Doc’ Smith/Murray Leinster whack-and-slash school: an outer space western just overflowing with PIONEER SPIRIT.⁹

 

Furthermore, when discussing pre-1971 SF movies, critic Richard Hodgen states, “science fiction” is indistinguishable from “horror,” and “horror” from sadism.” ¹⁰ 

 

   In his foreword to John Brosnan’s book Future Tense (1978), Harry Harrison theorises on why there are so many pseudo-SF films being made:

…cobbled-together, derivative plots ground out by bored screenwriting hacks. These overly familiar stories will be magically transformed into `sf’ by the addition of sf furniture. This does not mean they will be science-fiction at all. Dressing an actor in a dentist’s smock does not make him a scientist; nor does putting him into a tin suit make him a robot. If the author of the screenplay does not know what a scientist really is or what a robot could possibly be, then the film, no matter how much it looks like science-fiction, will not be science-fiction.¹¹

 

Furthermore, Hodgen states, “Expensive and careful treatment of a careless script cannot overcome the script’s bad logic in science fiction or anything else.”¹² He also notes perceptively that, “Motion picture adaptations have ruined any number of good works of literature without casting a pall, in the public mind, over literature in general. The science fiction films, however, seem to have come close to ruining the reputation of fiction from which they have malignantly sprouted.”¹³  Harrison, however, has a bold solution to the problem: “Just as the film-makers ignore science, so they also ignore science fiction while pretending that they are producing it…science fiction films should be written by science fiction

authors.”¹⁴ The author has a particular grievance since he was not involved in the screenplay for Soylent Green (1973), the film adaptation of his 1966 novel on overpopulation Make Room! Make Room!. Stanley Greenberg’s screenplay for Soylent Green is a prime example of the misuse of source material, and the story of how and why this movie differs so much from the novel upon which it is based is a revealing insight to the Hollywood movie industry.

   Harrison’s 1966 novel was ahead of its time. Although other SF stories had touched on overpopulation issues previously, for example, Isaac Asimov’s Caves Of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957), Frederich Pohl’s The Census Takers (1956) or Brian Aldiss’s Earthworks (1965), Make Room! Make Room! was the first to fully extrapolate the consequences of the problem. However, by the end of the decade, overpopulation problems had became a topical issue. As Carter notes,

By the end of the 1960s we were hearing of Zero Population Growth as a goal, and many Americans seemed to be arranging their personal lives accordingly. Science fictionists, far from relaxing into the complacency of “we told you so,” redoubled their efforts, and population explosion stories became one of the more popular forms.¹⁵

Encouraged by studies such as Dr Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968), birth control became more of a political issue. Sensing a financial opportunity, Hollywood began to take an interest, but it took a bizarre plot twist to get Soylent Green made. Harrison remembers,

it was all [Charlton] Heston’s doing that the film ever got made. He’d read the book and had been trying for five years to set it up. He got the producer, Walter Seltzer, involved in the project early on as well and they both kept trying. The size of the budget was one of the problems – it was almost $4,000,000 – and MGM, the studio they were both working for would not do it. But they persisted; they invested a good deal of their own money and had a screenplay written and drawings made but the MGM chiefs kept saying that they didn’t think the subject of overpopulation was important enough. So when they came up with the plot-twist of cannibalism MGM finally decided it was a viable theme for a film – which gives you some idea of how the film industry thinks!¹⁶

 

 

   Harrison has stated publicly, on a number of occasions, that he was swindled by MGM and that they did everything they could to keep him at arm’s length from the project: “They organised a whole firm just to cheat me and it was MGM all the time. They had a lawyer – I forget the name of the firm. I remember their logo, a big silver screw over a U. Screw U productions!…But the worst thing was I had no control over the screenplay. It was written by a total incompetent Stanley Greenberg.”¹⁷ However, by bombarding the company with letters and generally making himself a nuisance, the author did manage to make his way on to the film stage. He handed out copies of his book and was able to help actor Edward G. Robinson with his motivation for the character Sol. Harrison also uncovered  inaccuracies in the technical side of the script:

I…corrected outrageous scientific errors – you know they had this meatleggers shop there. I saw a set with a meatlegger. There’s no meat in this total vegetarian period. They’re talking about bits of dog and things. There’s a bag boy with plastic bags there. This is America, California. I said what’s that? He said “bags to carry home.” Plastic! Plastic is made out of left over oil. There is no oil left in the world. How do they take their food home? Like Europeans they take their own wrapping with them. “Oh they do that in Europe?” Yes, you bring your own bag. “I didn’t know that.” I knew that.¹⁸    

 

There was little the author could do, though, with the main diversion from his novel, the ridiculous addition of a cannibal plot. However, this was not to be the only change made by Greenberg. For example, the film was to be called Soylent Green rather than Make Room! Make Room! Harrison explains why: “The decision [was] made in high places that my title might be associated with a long-dead TV series named “Make Room for Daddy.” Moral: when you throw away a good title you always get a bad one.”¹⁹ In hindsight, it is obvious that MGM wanted a more SF sounding name, preferably one similar to the successful 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), with a future date in the title. Indeed, Soylent Green was originally to be called THORN: 2022.²⁰

 

  The screenplay of Soylent Green contains a number of other small, but important, differences to the novel. Firstly, it is set in the year 2022 whereas the novel is set in 1999. Harrison set the date 33 years into the future, far enough ahead for the changes in society to take place, but not so far ahead that the society was unrecognisable. People alive in 1966 would still be alive in 1999. However, Soylent Green was released in 1973 so the time difference between then and 2022 is 49 years. It seems Greenberg has picked an arbitrary figure of 50 years from when he was writing the screenplay without considering the implications of the change of date. To a movie audience in 1973, the year 2022 may as well be 3022, 4022, etc. as the story has now been set in a different century. Harrison’s 1999 date is exotic but familiar. For example, people buying mortgages in 1966 may have been considering retiring around the end of the century. But few people would plan 50 years ahead.

 

   Greenberg  also changed some characters’ names and personalities. The main protagonist in the novel, Andrew Rusch, becomes “Detective” Thorn in the movie. In the novel, Rusch is a plain man with a pot belly brought on by poor diet. In the movie, however, he is played by square-jawed, clean-cut actor Charlton Heston. There is no real reason for this except that maybe “Thorn” is a more macho name than Rusch and that Heston fits Hollywood’s stereotypical leading man image. Similarly,  gangster Michael O’Brien becomes William Simonson, an executive in the Soylent Green Corporation; Formosan immigrant Billy Chung becomes a Caucasian called Gilbert, a vacuous, callous character who, perhaps, represents the 1960s counterculture; Soloman Khan becomes Sol Roth for no obvious reason, and Tab Fielding, O’Brien’s black bodyguard, keeps his name but not the colour of his skin. In the film the character is played by Chuck Connors, and is similar to Harrison’s creation in name only.

 

   The biggest mistake Greenberg made, however, was to alter the story to include a plot about cannibalism. Make Room! Make Room! is, on the surface, a straight-forward detective story. However, Harrison uses this foreground plot to show the background of the worn out and depleted world of 1999. Whereas the Soylent Green of the novel is an unappetising Soya bean and lentil wafer, in the film, Greenberg changes it to the flesh of dead humans. A number of artistic and practical problems arise from this change. For example, the story becomes more horror than SF; people who have died of starvation and disease will hardly make an economical or appetising meal; and, on a simple story-telling level, anyone with any wit will realise, very quickly, where the plot is leading. Greenberg’s “shock” cannibalism ending is, therefore,  a rather inane and uninspired idea. Of all the horrors the future may hold, the best that Hollywood can come up with is, sadly, that humans will be eating each other.

 

   In sacrificing the original storyline, however, Greenberg has undermined one of the main plot devices. Harrison’s murderer is a Formosan refugee and as integral a part of the novel as Rusch. The reader sees the lowest strata of society through the eyes of a boy whose everyday life is a struggle for food and survival. We see the  squalid, ghetto conditions of the boy’s home, and the poverty, violence and despair of life on the streets. However, in the film, the audience sees only the worlds of Thorn and Shirl. Furthermore, unlike the novel, Shirl is allowed to live in the spacious apartment as a `furniture girl’ or prostitute. In the novel, her relationship with Thorn develops and it seems they will stay together in the best tradition of “leading man gets girl.” However, she is unable to cope with Rusch’s cramped apartment and she eventually leaves him. When Rusch spots her on the arm of a rich man at a New Year’s Eve party, there is a real sense of despair and empathy for the Detective. In the film, however, no such connection is made with the character. Similarly, due to the inept screenplay, Shirl’s character is diminished so much that she really becomes just a part of the furniture. 

 

   In the novel, Rusch’s elderly roommate, Soloman Khan, joins a protest march to advocate birth control. He breaks a hip and, without the money to buy medicine, develops pneumonia and dies. Again, however, this is lost in the screenplay. In Soylent Green, Sol, played by the excellent Edward G. Robinson, decides to end his own life because of his despair at discovering the “secret of Soylent Green.” He goes to a “suicide parlour,” a device used in many SF stories but not by Harrison. He explains:

The suicide parlour sequence worked okay…I didn’t put it in the book because I didn’t want to use any of the old science fiction gimmicks. I wanted to keep it all as realistic as possible, but the scriptwriter obviously didn’t realize that the suicide parlour is such a cliché sf device, so he put it in. And I’ve got to admit that in the film it took on a different aspect and worked very well – perhaps he wasn’t such a dummy because certainly no one has ever put a suicide parlour in a film before.²¹

 

Unlike the novel, the film ends with the fatal shooting of Thorn. Harrison made sure there was no easy escape for the reader--Rusch has to live the rest of his miserable life in his horrible world--however, in the movie, Thorn is shot and  taken away whilst shouting the famous line, “Soylent Green is people!” His problems are over but the audience is left to wonder if anyone will believe him. Greenberg probably had in mind here the ending to Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers where, towards the end, the movie’s leading man, Dr Miles Bennel, ineffectually tries to wave down drivers on a freeway while shouting, ”They’re coming! They’re coming.” However, he is completely ignored since he appears to be mad.²² This blatant copying is further evidence in support of Harrison’s argument that Hollywood screenwriters simply do not know how to write SF. Whereas Greenberg can only imitate work which has been done  before, Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! is an original piece of work. However, in the film industry, originality is considered to be a financial risk.

 

   Science fiction Weekly  describes Soylent Green as “powerful and haunting,” but criticises Richard Fleischer direction: “the profundity of humanity’s transformation is dealt with in less than a masterful manner.”²³  However, it would be more appropriate to apportion blame to the screenplay; Greenberg interpreted the novel as a straightforward detective story and added a cannibalism plot to make it more like what he assumed science fiction to be. He used a formula  which Harrison is very much aware of, having written, drawn and edited detective stories before becoming an SF writer. Indeed, the author has remarked, “Science fiction resembles the detective story in many ways: the deepening mystery, the adventure, the chase, and – only too often – the corpse, all building toward the finally revealed ending.”²⁴ Harrison knows the conventions of the detective story genre and deliberately subverts them in Make Room! Make Room! to make the reader more aware of the terrible world in which the story takes place. He draws the reader in, lulling him with a familiar “detective solves murder and gets girl” plot. By the end of the novel, however, the reader is thinking more of how this futuristic dystopia has come about than who murdered Michael O’Brien. Greenberg missed this entirely. His screenplay leads up to its own supposedly shocking conclusion. As a result, Soylent Green resembles the novel only in patches.  

 

   Despite this, critic Edwin Jahiel describes Soylent Green as, “Eminently worth seeing,” and as Fleischer’s, “Last good film, and probably his very best.”²⁵ Critic Roy Pickard calls the movie, “One of the most important science-fiction films of the 70s.”²⁶ A review of Soylent Green in Variety Film Reviews describes it, grudgingly, as, “Plausible and proximate…a good futuristic exploitation film”²⁷ and, unfortunately, they are right. Greenberg chose to emphasise the “big business” aspect of the novel perhaps to reflect what writers Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner have called, “Populist fears [which] were directed at the powers of large corporations.”²⁸ By this time, big corporations, particularly those involved in supplying arms and material for the American war effort in Vietnam, were treated with suspicion by American liberals. The concentration and centralisation of American business had begun in earnest after World War II. As historians Morison, Commager and Leuchtenberg affirm,

The giant corporation came to be more and more gigantic, and the ten years after 1948 saw no fewer than 2191 mergers and combinations of corporations worth over $10 million…Three giant corporations-General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler-dominated the automobile industry…Three networks all but monopolized the air; six tobacco companies fed the insatiable appetite of Americans for cigarettes...In many cities newspaper publishers held a news monopoly by owning the radio and television stations as well. Automation increased apace, as computers stored and used information to control, adjust, and correct complex operations.²⁹

 

Whatever Greenberg’s motives were, however, his “inarticulate development”³⁰ of Harrison’s original idea meant that the movie was only an average thriller when it could have been much more.

 

   Unfortunately, this sort of treatment of source material is not unusual. The film industry is just that--an industry which has to make money to please shareholders. It therefore sticks to tried and trusted formulas and the recycling of old scripts and ideas. Witness, for example, the proliferation of sequels such as the Mad Max or Alien franchises, the remakes of old films such as Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978), The Blob (1988), movies which use successful comic strip characters like Superman (1978) and Judge Dredd (1995), and movies which are remakes of old TV series such as Lost In Space (1998), The Avengers (1998), and the Star Trek series. Artistically, this is not good either for SF or the film industry in general. However, Hollywood  is mainly concerned with profit. For example, in American Film Now (1979), critic James Monaco states, “While the current myth of American film has it that contemporary filmmakers enjoy far more freedom than their predecessors on the Hollywood film assembly line, the fact is that that freedom is severely circumscribed.”³¹ He also points out that, “Science fiction was a notoriously low-profit genre – until recently, that is.”³² Star Wars broke all box office records in 1977. However, when Soylent Green was proposed, the only really successful SF movies financially were the 1968 films 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet Of The Apes. The former was an intelligent, classic  SF story, the latter escapist, enjoyable hokum. The popularity of these two films led Hollywood executives to believe that there were only two formulas for a successful SF movie. It is clear from watching Soylent Green which formula Greenberg chose for his screenplay.

 

   Soylent Green  had a huge budget for the time of $4 million, but it recouped that amount and made a profit. In Hollywood terms, that was probably justification enough for re-writing the novel. However, Make Room! Make Room! was good enough to be chosen as one of David Pringle’s 100 best SF novels. Pringle states:

It is a simple story, lacking in sensationalism or heroics. And narrated in a dignified fashion with much careful – and moving – detail. It is not a mystery novel, for the reader knows the identity of the killer from the first, but it uses the crime story format in order to build up a picture of a city in long-drawn-out crisis…Even if 1999 in New York turns out to be nothing like Harrison’s imaginings, this will remain a truthful novel…In Make Room! Make Room! he produced his most serious and heartfelt work. It is a great pity that when it was filmed, as Soylent Green (1973), the story was trivialized by the introduction of cannibalism and other gruesome elements which are not in the book. An impressive sf novel became just another mediocre movie.³³

 

   If one good thing came out of Soylent Green it was that  Harrison used his experiences with MGM to write Technicolor Time Machine (1967), a satire of Hollywood described by Brian Aldiss as, “full of rewards,” with, “engaging…cheerful cynicism,” and, “a splendid romp, all the better for serious intentions lurking in the background.”³⁴  This comic novel’s basic premise is that a major movie studio in financial trouble hires a professor and his time machine to travel back to Viking times and film events as they are actually happening. This will have the benefit of saving money on extras and also on the star of the movie, (preposterously titled “Viking Colombus”), Ottar, a huge Viking who can be paid with whiskey. The novel contains such classic, comedy dialogue as,

“The first expedition [to America] was led by Eric the Red -”

“Kill that idea! You want to get us blacklisted with a commie picture?”³⁵

 

Harrison talks of “barely legal, lifetime-at-hard-labor contracts,”³⁶ and, in a scene lifted straight from his experiences of Soylent Green, film executive L. M. Greenspan states, “Viking Colombus. A good title. We’ll have to change it.”³⁷

 

   In Technicolor Time Machine  all studio executives are crooks, even Barney Hendrickson, the film’s producer, who proposed the whole idea. He is the main vehicle for the story but it becomes clear, as he draws up crooked contracts and uses every Hollywood trick to cut costs, that he is as bad as the rest. Harrison states:

The serious thing there [in Technicolor Time Machine] is this awful hack producer, Barney, who begins as a hack and ends as a hack…he can’t do anything, he really isn’t very good at all, and the whole thing is done despite his complete lack of talent, and when you realise that he becomes a historical character in the sagas!…And he’s a tragic figure—there are so many of them in Hollywood. Completely incompetent people making films—all these incompetent films that come out year after year. To me this was a sub-theme that a lot of people didn’t notice, but it was very important to me.³⁸

The novel ends with L. M. Greenspan’s blasphemous proposal for another film using the time machine: “That…gives me an idea for the absolutely infinitive religious picture of all time, a theme that positively cannot miss!”³⁹ In an ironic postscript to this novel, SFX magazine reported in its May 1997 issue, “Top SF author-Harry Harrison tells us `I just got back from Hollywood where I have six books optioned. Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions have the rights to Technicolor Time Machine  and have commissioned a script…I’m quite hopeful because they actually took me to lunch!’”⁴⁰

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

¹ Harry Harrison, “A Cannibalized Novel Becomes Soylent Green”  Omni’s Screen Flights-Screen Fantasies: The Future According to SF Cinema,  ed.  Danny Peary (N.p.:  Doubleday,  1984)  146 

                   

² Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,  foreword, American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image, eds.  John E. O’Connor and Martin A Jackson  (New York:  Ungar,  1979)  x.

 

³ Leonard Quart and Albert Auster,  American Film and Society Since 1945 (London:  MacMillan,  1984)  3.

 

⁴ Leonard Quart and Albert Auster,  American Film and Society Since 1945 (London:  MacMillan,  1984)  4.

 

⁵ Giles Whittell,  “Critics pan Hollywood list of top 100,”  Times, 18th Jun.  1998:  21.

 

⁶ http;//www.the movie times.com/thrsdir/Top 100ever.html

 

⁷ David Pringle, The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: the definitive illustrated guide  (Dubai:  Carlton,  1997)  6.

 

⁸John Huntington,  “Science Fiction and the Future”  Science Fiction: A Collection Of Critical Essays ed. Mark Rose  (New Jersey:  Prentice-Hall,  1976)  166.

 

⁹ Stephen King  Danse Macabre  (London:  Warner,  1994)  30-31.

 

¹⁰ Richard Hodgen,  “A Short Tragical history of the Science Fiction Film,”

 SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson  (Bowling Green, Ohio:  Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971)  260.

 

¹¹ Harry Harrison, foreword,  Future Tense,  ed.  John Brosnan  (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1978)  6-7.

 

¹² Richard Hodgen,  “A Short Tragical history of the Science Fiction Film,”

 SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson  (Bowling Green, Ohio:  Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971)  259.

 

 

¹³ Richard Hodgen,  “A Short Tragical history of the Science Fiction Film,”

 SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson  (Bowling Green, Ohio:  Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971)  248.

 

¹⁴ Harry Harrison, foreword,  Future Tense,  ed.  John Brosnan  (New York:  St. Martin’s Press, 1978)  8.

 

¹⁵ Paul A Carter, The Creation Of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of magazine Science Fiction  (New York:  Colombia University Press,  1977)  268.

 

¹⁶ Harry Harrison,  “Boom Two (1970-73),” Future Tense,  ed.  John Brosnan (New York:  St. Martin’s Press,  1978)  205.

 

¹⁷ Harry Harrison,  personal interview,   6^th July 1997

 

¹⁸ Harry Harrison,  personal interview,   6^th July 1997

 

¹⁹ Harry Harrison, “A Cannibalized Novel Becomes Soylent Green”  Omni’s Screen Flights-Screen Fantasies: The Future According to SF Cinema,  ed.  Danny Peary (N.p.:  Doubleday,  1984)  144.

 

²⁰ Paul Tomlinson,  Make Room! The Harry Harrison Appreciation Society  September 1985:  4.

 

²¹ Harry Harrison,  “Boom Two (1970-73),” Future Tense,  ed.  John Brosnan (New York:  St. Martin’s Press,  1978)  208.

 

²² See Stephen King’s intelligent and witty analysis of this film in Danse Macabre, (London:  Warner, 1994)   343-63, 381.

 

²³ Tamara I. Hladik, Science Fiction Weekly (online) 1997, http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue55/classic.html

 

²⁴ Harry Harrison,  Nova 1,  (New York:  Dell,  1971)  209.

 

²⁵ Edwin Jahiel, http://www.prairienet.org/%7Eejahiel/soylgren.htm

 

²⁶ Roy Pickard,  Science Fiction in the Movies an A-Z, (London:  Muller, 1978)  104.

 

²⁷ Murf,  rev.  Soylent Green,  Variety Film Reviews 1971-74, (New York:  Garland,  1983)  April 18, 1973.

 

²⁸ Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica,  (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press,  1988)  255.

 

²⁹ Samuel Eliot Morison,  Henry Steele Commager,  William E. Leuchtenburg,  A Concise History of the American Republic  2^nd ed.  (Oxford:  Oxford University Press,  1983)  706.

 

³⁰ Murf,  rev.  Soylent Green,  Variety Film Reviews 1971-74, (New York:  Garland,  1983)  April 18, 1973.

 

³¹ James Monaco,  American Film Now,  (New York:  Oxford University Press,  1979)  50.

 

³² James Monaco,  American Film Now,  (New York:  Oxford University Press,  1979) 54.

 

³³ David Pringle,  Science Fiction: the 100 best novels: an English language selection, 1949-1984,  (London:  Xanadu,  1985)  119-20.

 

³⁴ Aldiss,  Brian.  rev.  of  Technicolor Time Machine,  by Harry Harrison.   Amazing Stories,  Oct.  1967:  103.

 

³⁵ Harry Harrison,  Technicolor Time Machine,  (London:  Futura,  1984)  20.  

 

³⁶ Harry Harrison,  Technicolor Time Machine,  (London:  Futura,  1984)  27.

 

³⁷ Harry Harrison,  Technicolor Time Machine,  (London:  Futura,  1984)  51.

 

³⁸ Harry Harrison,  “The Harry Harrison Interview,”  Parallel Worlds: The Worlds Of Harry Harrison,  ed.  Paul Tomlinson, number 4,  1987:  3-4.

 

³⁹ Harry Harrison,  Technicolor Time Machine,  (London:  Futura,  1984)  174.

 

⁴⁰ “Technicolour Mel,”  SFX   May 1997: 12

 

   Home

 

   Photogallery

 

   Title Page and Copyright details

 

Foreword

 

Why is Soylent Green people?

 

Bowb the Chingers!

 

Parallel Worlds

 

Afterword

 

Bibliography

 

Appendix: interviews with the author