"Robert A. Heinlein - Shooting Destination Moon (Article)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

SHOOTING DESTINATION MOON




“Why don’t they make more science fiction movies?”
The answer to any question starting, “Why don’t they—” is almost always,
“Money.”
I arrived in Hollywood with no knowledge of motion picture production or
costs, no experience in writing screen plays, nothing but a yen to write the
first Hollywood picture about the first trip to the Moon. Lou Schor, an agent
who is also a science fiction enthusiast, introduced me to a screen writer,
Alford van Ronkel; between us we turned out a screen play from one of my
space travel stories.
So we were in business— Uh, not quite. The greatest single production
problem
is to find someone willing to risk the money. People who have spare millions
of dollars do not acquire them by playing angel to science fiction writers with
wild ideas.
We were fortunate in meeting George Pal of George Pal Productions, who
became infected with the same madness. So we had a producer—now we
were in business.
Still not quite— Producers and financiers are not the same thing. It was
nearly a year from the writing of the screen play until George Pal informed us
that he had managed to convince an angel. (How? Hypnosis? Drugs? I’ll
never know. If! had a million dollars, I would sit on it and shoot the first six
science fiction writers who came my way with screen plays.)
Despite those huge Hollywood salaries, money is as hard to get in Hollywood
as anywhere. The money men in Hollywood write large checks only when
competition leaves them no alternative; they prefer to write small checks, or
no checks at all. Even though past the big hurdle of getting the picture
financed, money trouble remains with one throughout production; if a solution
to a special-effects problem costs thirty thousand dollars but the budget says
five thousand dollars, then you have got to think of an equally good five
thousand dollar gølution—and that’s all there is to it.


1
.1 mention this because there came a steady stream of non-motion-picture
folk who were under the impression ~hat thousand-dollar-a-week salaries
were waiting for them in a science fiction picture. The budget said, “No!”
The second biggest hurdle to producing an accurate and convincing science
fiction picture is the “Hollywood” frame of mind—in this case, people in
authority who either don’t know or don’t care about scientific correctness and
plausibility. Ignorance can be coped with; when a man asks “What does a
rocket have to push against, out there in space?” it is possible to explain. On
the other hand, if his approach is, “Nobody has ever been to the Moon; the
audiences won’t know the difference,” it is impossible to explain anything to
him; he does not know and does not want to know.
We had plenty of bothsorts of trouble.