Review by C.J. Bunce
Lost in Space, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In the 1960s and 1970s, these and more became The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen, coming to bookstores in less than 2 weeks and available for pre-order now here at Amazon. Writer Jeff Bond’s extensive research (the book is 600 pages and full of color photographs) unveils major genre movie filmmaker and TV producer Irwin Allen as a big kid, and Billy Mumy, who worked for Allen for five years and crafted the book’s foreword, confirms it. But he wasn’t one of these filmmakers with a lot of baggage. The same man who brought fascinating science fiction and fantasy to a generation of kids and adults wasn’t as complicated like so many other of Hollywood’s memorable icons. To the public he was a master of adventure TV series and disaster movies, but to Hollywood he was a filmmaker who knew how to manage a giant production within his budget all while keeping a happy production crew.
Readers will learn a lot about Irwin, from obscure personal qualities, to the box office and TV viewing audience stats on his biggest projects. Irwin may have coined term “blockbuster”–long thought to come along with Spielberg and Lucas years later–in referencing the marketing and expectations of his own movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Making movies and TV series 60 years ago would be unfamiliar to filmmakers today. As an example, Allen had to contend with even greater censorship and intrusion than today and at different levels, like objections from the U.S. Navy on his proposals for his movie’s ship the Seaview. The Navy didn’t like how he was scripting details of a fictional U.S. Navy vessel. This left him to make his creation a civilian ship instead.
Allen was a man of many talents. He began in college as a journalism student, and would become an Academy Award-winning filmmaker at RKO–he won an Oscar for his first movie (the 1952 climate change documentary The Sea Around Us), an unprecedented feat. That Oscar would fast-track him into making movies and TV shows at Fox, with his movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea revisited as a TV series. Using his years as college trained marketing man and publishing agent to sell ideas and to acquire rights to novels for adapting into film projects, he was an early master of “packaging” deals.
This book has it all–delivering an understanding of a legend like Gene Roddenberry or Richard Donner, as well as a history of the TV and film industry, digging into Allen’s series and movies via storyboards, movie and TV props, schematics for ships and elaborate sets, blueprints for monster creations, miniature filming models, title cards and set-ups, concept art paintings, call sheets, press and marketing ephemera of every variety, from desk memos to movie posters, lobby cards, screencaps, behind the scenes shots, and more. Readers will find covers of many Dell and Western Publications’ Gold Key comic book covers from the publishers that adapted Irwin projects, too.
New and vintage interviews detail the man, his process, his stock company of returning directors, writers, actors, costumer (Paul Zastupnevich), propmakers, composers–you name it–he was like another Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater. Readers will dig into budget discussions, the beginnings of new projects, and ideas that never made it past planning phases, like an Edgar Allan Poe TV show.
Count among the best features of this book the coverage of his “Swiss Family Robinson in space” inspired in part by a Space Family Robinson comic: Lost in Space, the series that opened the door for Star Trek. It’s only 73 pages of the book, but for a series that never got the many behind the scenes books as Star Trek would get, this is a wealth of information and photos. It has blueprints for the Jupiter 2 spacecraft, the Space Pod, all sorts of images and angles for the Chariot, Bob May’s Robot, monster and costume sketches, plus model kits, toys, and game images.
Allen had three network series running: Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and The Time Tunnel, followed by Land of the Giants, before he turned back to making movies. The book includes a great chapter on Allen’s projects that were never made, including some science fiction series that would be fun to see resurrected one day.
By 1971 Allen’s TV work was over, despite running on local Tv stations in reruns forever after. Then he made The Poseidon Adventure. One of my earliest memories was sitting in a drive-in watching the first scenes of the movie, my parents assuming I’d fallen asleep. The opening sinking scene is forever etched on my mind. One schematic in the book is a real treasure in particular–it’s a detailed image of the production path of the screenplay following the survivors as Gene Hackman’s reverend leads them through the upturned ship to safety. It is fantastic film history. Production designer Bill Creber recounts some humor as a cameraman joked about not getting the shot to Allen of the key man falling through the window at the beginning of the memorable ship sinking sequence–you get the feeling that Allen truly wasn’t one of those stereotypical stodgy directors you hear about. And you have to laugh at a description of Shelley Winters’ instantly beloved character as a “three-hanky death.” The actual S.S. Poseidon model is on display at the Los Angeles Maritime Museum, and the book includes several close-up photographs.
The Towering Inferno production illustrator Joe Musso recounts how the clever Allen tricked Steve McQueen into getting into a helicopter for a scene–McQueen was afraid of heights. He had the stunt man befriend McQueen early on so McQueen would not want to look like he wasn’t a tough guy in front of him when the scene was ready to film.
Ray Harryhausen, John Williams, John Chambers, Martin Caidin, Vincent Price, Alistair MacLean, Paul Gallico, Sam Jones, Stirling Siliphant and a pitch for a Marvel Daredevil TV series in 1984–many familiar genre names and concepts find their way into this book. Alas, the only detraction is this massive 600-page encyclopedia has no index. But this truly is a book as big as the man it’s about. And it will be a superb travel back in time for fans of any of his productions. Don’t miss it. Order The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen now here at Amazon.
