Monday, December 03, 2012

Sam Jaffe

in Ben Casey and Dunwich Horror and The Asphalt Jungle as Dr Erwin Reidenschneider And of course, The Day The Earth Stood Still. Cue Theremin. Info for Marty

5 comments:

Rickart said...

These opening credits put into my head another set of opening credits that I wanted to look up... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-xExiIxS48
Great graphic design and cool music set the tone for an old show that, as I recall, was very intersting... but I couldn't tell you what it was about. It was like Sunday Mystery Theater in that there were 3 different casts/shows that it would rotate through. Did anyone else watch this show?

Rickart said...

Okay, so I did some research (well, someone did and I looked up the result on Wikipedia). The 3 main characters all worked for a magazine company. I remembered one episode that was this crazy scifi story which, in suitably nerdy fashion, Wikipedia when into detail about:
"The Name of the Game provided Steven Spielberg with his first long-form directing assignment: the dystopic science fiction episode, "L.A. 2017," written by Philip Wylie. In the episode, Glenn Howard is hunted down in a lethally polluted Los Angeles of the future, where the fascist government is ruled by psychiatrists and the populace has been driven to live in underground bunkers to survive the pollution, while a rather obvious explanation was included at the episode's end to return to the contemporary stance of the modern day Non Science Fiction nature of the series."
Crazy, man!

MrGoodson2 said...

I remember the Name Of The Game. I don't remember that episode. Gotta find that

MrGoodson2 said...

LA 2017 sounds like a kick


Spielberg in the far future thirty years before A.I.
2 August 2001 | by virek213 (San Gabriel, Ca., USA) – See all my reviews

Contrary to what some may be led to believe, the masterful A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE isn't exactly the first time Spielberg has gone into the far future. In fact, his actual first trip that way began while he was still a TV director. L.A. 2017, an episode he shot for the NBC-TV show "The Name Of The Game", was that trip.

Though "Name Of The Game" was usually standard TV melodrama, Spielberg's episode took on a distinct science fiction theme. Gene Barry, as series regular Glenn Howard, is driving to a conference on ecology and tape-recording an essay for his magazine "People" (not the one we all know), when he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes. When he wakes up, it is to a nightmarishly yellow-orange skyline; and he is found by men in gas masks. He is taken to an underground complex, where he is met by the new "mayor" of Los Angeles (Barry Sullivan). Sullivan's explanation for the state of L.A.'s problems is that a toxic algae spread across the world and mixed with L.A.'s smog, creating a deadly mix that killed all life above ground. Barry learns that he has somehow travelled nearly half a century into an ecological nightmare of the future.

Anticipating certain aspects of Ridley Scott's 1982 epic BLADE RUNNER, L.A. 2017 posits a cynical assessment of Mankind's abuse of the environment. Spielberg interestingly shot the scenes of the underground complex at the Hyperion treatment plant in El Segundo; and the scenes of a pollution-ridden world were shot, and enhanced with orange-yellow camera filters, in the fall of 1970 in areas of the western San Fernando Valley that had recently been devastated by a violent wind-driven firestorm. Spielberg also manages to get solid performances from his cast all around, which is astounding, given the fact that he had only twelve days and $375,000 to use.

Topped off by an eerie futuristic score by Robert Prince and Billy Goldenberg, L.A. 2017 is an excellent and very early glimpse into Spielberg's professional movie-making talents. Universal, I believe, owns the rights to this superb TV flick, which aired on NBC on January 15, 1971; it should do the right thing and release this piece on video.

MrGoodson2 said...

Long walkthrough of the movie