Invaders from Mars: Remembering the Good Times

Who can forget their first job? Certainly nobody who works in the film business can forget theirs.  They will be able to relive it whenever the first film they worked on is shown again, thus embarking on a bright and nostalgic skip along memory lane or a repulsive stumble into the dark side.  Sometimes, depending on the film and the experiences, it can be both (and for me, it was). In honor of that long ago on-the-set adventure, for the next couple of entries I’d like to talk about my first film job.

The other day, partway into an extended period between jobs, while successfully avoiding all forms of productivity, I came across my very first film.  They were showing it on one of the outer channels in the satellite dish movie array, past HBO, Showtime, and any other recognizable franchises. Frankly, if I hadn’t been channel surfing for far too long, killing time and the battery life of my remote, I never would have found it.

Invaders from Mars was an ‘80’s remake of a truly creepy 1953 sci-fi movie of the same name.  The plot was the stuff of a child’s nightmare: your parents and then everyone else in your town is taken over by… something horrible, and they become zombified, possessed automatons.  You are all alone, the only person left who is still human.  Come to think of it, this is probably the stuff of adult nightmares, too.

The Martians have landed in a big sand pit outside of town, but just over the hill in your own backyard.  People go up the hill and disappear into the sand.  When they come back, they aren’t themselves.  As the one kid who hasn’t been taken over by Martians, it’s up to you to save yourself and everyone else.  And that requires going down into the sand pit, to find out exactly what is under there. What you find is pretty amazing.   Scary, too, if you are between the ages of four and seven.

If you get a chance, and you, like me at the moment, have the inclination to slothfully dispose of some time which could be better spent doing something (anything) else, give this film a look.  The production design, done by Leslie Dilley with the help of Craig Stearns and sets designed by Randy Moore, is actually very impressive.  The script is not, however.  It suffered by being a product of Cannon Films filmmaking standards (slapdash, fast money, remarkably unconcerned with quality) at the time. Still, there’s fun to be had, somewhere in there.

I do recall what my mother said after seeing it for the first time, though. The very first job on a film her beloved daughter had ever had, a many months’ long ordeal of hard work and endless hours, framed by daily commutes from the north end of the San Fernando Valley down to Long Beach on the worst freeway in the world, the dreaded 405.  For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of LA, that is a distance of approximately 400 miles, one way.

I was anxious to hear what she thought of this epic endeavor, and called her at home the night it opened, after she had gone to see it.

She was only slightly apologetic. “Oh honey, I don’t want to embarrass you, but that movie was pretty terrible!”

A Trick of the Light

Depending on your brand of physics, light may be the fastest thing in the universe.  However, light is not a thing, exactly.  Light is both a wave and a particle, but it is neither until it is observed.  Light seems to be extremely important, both in the concrete, everyday world sense, and in the metaphysical sense, the sense of reality itself.

I think about light quite a bit—its wavelength determines the colors our eyes perceive, and our perception is tied in with our emotions.  Color choices can affect the entire feel of a film.  If you don’t believe me, look at any David Lynch film (except Eraserhead which was shot in black and white for the emotional effect the lack of color engendered: fear, alienation, the darkness of nightmares).

Red makes us feel somehow different than blue, and the juxtaposition of colors can be pleasing or jarring, exciting or disturbing.  Some responses we have to color are learned, while others, such as the “strobing” of colors which are equal in luminescence are pre-wired in our brain.  An example of this, called “equiluminence” can be found here Luminance Differences Affect Our Perceptions

I recently reviewed Newton’s old experiments with a prism and along the way, discovered that in medieval times all painting was done with egg as the binder for the various pigments they made from minerals or vegetable matter.  Medieval painters had no way to paint layers of color on top of each other, which is why medieval paintings appear so flat (although perspective wasn’t very well done or even understood, either).  Instead, each new color muddied or threatened to erase the color beneath.

But then oil paints, using vegetable oil rather than egg to bind the pigments, came into use.  This meant that different colors could be layered on a painting without disturbing the layer of color put on before.  Once this elementary, but debilitating problem of egg-based paint had been overcome, painters could use all sorts of colors over, with and next to each other, and they could mix colors on the canvas as they painted.  Finally people could play with color and thus, play with light.

Another innovation that arrived with oil paint was varnish, and if you have ever tried to get more depth into your colors or add dimension to a painting, you know that the colors and the depth of your work look much, much better, somehow, when you varnish, whether your varnish is gloss or matte.  Somehow, that layer of clear or tinted clear stuff brings your painting alive.

I finally found out why this is so.  It involves a trick of the light. While researching Newton I came across a diagram that shows how light is transferred and mixed by a layer of varnish, and how varnish brings out the colors of your painting.  You can find it here: Optical Properties of the Paint Surface .

Isn’t that cool?  I don’t understand how light can be so many things at once: energy, particles, waves, single photons, just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes are designed to detect…  Light is a Mystery.

But I do know light looks real pretty if you can get it to do what you want to in a painting or on a set.  And film can do even more with light and color than varnish, adding dimension and depth and breathtaking reality—-even creating entirely new realities.  Film, after all, is light. You go, light!