30th Anniversary of the Jurassic Park
On June 11, 1993, Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" was released nationwide in 2,404 locations across the United States on 3,400 screens. This film premiered two days earlier at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, as part of a charity event in support of two children's organizations. The film broke box office records on its opening weekend, grossing $47 million.
The prehistory of the creation of this film began, one might say, in 1971. That year at Universal Pictures, director Robert Wise ("The Sound of Music", "West Side Story") was filming "The Andromeda Strain", based on a 1969 novel by Michael Crichton. This novel was not the first work in the work of Crichton, but the first on which it was decided to make a film. Naturally, the young writer (Crichton at that time was 29 years old) was interested in everything related to filmmaking, and he asked to organize a tour of the film studio for him. Wise commissioned Steven Spielberg to lead the tour. Spielberg, then 25, had several short films and television films to his credit and had just signed a four-movie contract with Universal Pictures. The guided tour revealed the coincidence of many interests of Spielberg and Crichton and marked the beginning of their long-term friendship.
In the early 1980s, Michael Crichton hit upon the idea of creating a novel about the return of dinosaurs to life. The impetus for the emergence of this idea was the discovery of insects in amber that retain their DNA. He shared his idea of cloning dinosaurs with some scientists, and they advised him to write a novel on this topic. In 1983, Crichton wrote a screenplay about a pterodactyl cloned from an egg. But this scenario was not destined to be realized. Crichton's closest friends and acquaintances, whom he always trusted to evaluate the drafts of his works, unanimously rejected this scenario.
Crichton then pitched his idea to Spielberg, who liked the idea. Since childhood, Spielberg has been a fan of the classic giant monster films, particularly "King Kong" (1933) and "Godzilla" (1954), and wanted to make his own film with a similar theme. However, one film about a giant monster had already been made by him - "Jaws" (1975) - and was a huge success. Spielberg bombarded Crichton with leading questions that actually allowed the writer to shape the storyline of the future novel. By May 1990, the novel "Jurassic Park" was completed.
Even before the publication of the novel, Michael Crichton's agents, on his behalf, sent proofs of the work to six major film studios and several directors. At the same time, Crichton set a fixed price for the film rights, as well as the condition that it was he who would decide who would become the director of the film based on his novel. The price was set at $1.5 million. Four film companies participated in the auction: Warner Bros. wanted Tim Burton to direct, Columbia Pictures wanted Richard Donner to direct, 20th Century Fox was nominating Joe Dante, and finally Universal Pictures wanted Steven Spielberg to direct. The desire to make a film based on Crichton's book was also expressed by James Cameron, but he was late with the application. In addition, the Carolco film company insisted on creating a continuation of the "Terminator".
As expected, the choice of the writer fell on the film company Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg. Crichton hoped that Steven Spielberg, in turn, would sign him a contract to write the script. So, in principle, it happened: in addition to one and a half million dollars for the rights to the film adaptation, Crichton also received a contract to create a script in the amount of 500 thousand dollars. However, the script written by Crichton did not suit Spielberg, and he contracted another screenwriter to develop the script - David Koepp. It was his script that was ultimately recognized as final. According to Crichton, no more than 10 to 20 percent of the contents of the novel and the screenplay written by Crichton remained in Koepp's script.
After the approval of the script, a preparatory period began, lasting 25 months. Spielberg intended to shoot the film exactly in the area described in the novel, not far from the coast of Costa Rica. However, the government of this country opposed the intentions to create a transport infrastructure to ensure the filming process. As a result, Spielberg had to look elsewhere. The most suitable Spielberg seemed the island of Kauai, part of the Hawaiian archipelago. In August 1992, the film crew arrived on this island and began filming, which, according to plans, was to last 4 months. However, nature has made its own adjustments. On September 11, 1992, three weeks after the start of filming, the most powerful hurricane Iniki broke out over the island, destroying the scenery, cutting off communication and power lines, in short, making it impossible to continue the filming process. During the hurricane, Spielberg instructed the operator to film what was happening. Subsequently, footage with a real, not fake, hurricane was included in the film. As soon as the hurricane subsided, the film crew moved to Los Angeles, where in the studios of Universal Pictures and partly Warner Bros. 12 days earlier than planned and without exceeding the budget, the filming process was completed.
Film critics greeted Steven Spielberg's film "Jurassic Park" generally favorably, but not without some skepticism and sarcasm. Thus, Janet Maslin, a columnist for the influential New York Times, in a review dated June 11, 1993, noted:
"It becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away. Sweetening the human characters, eradicating most of their evil motives and dispensing with a dinosaur-bombing ending (so the material is now sequel-friendly), Mr. Spielberg has taken the bite out of this story."
On the same day, Rita Kempley from another influential edition of The Washington Post noted in her review:
"it's a cinematic landmark, but in terms of plot and character, it's about as well developed as "Godzilla." The human actors are little more than Spielberg's designated dinosaur-gawkers. Jaws suitably agape, they simulate awe for the arrival of every skyscraping beast."
The guru of American film criticism Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4 possible and in his review (also dated 06/11/1993) noted that the dinosaurs in this film
"are indeed a triumph of special effects artistry, but the movie is lacking other qualities that it needs even more, such as a sense of awe and wonderment, and strong human story values....Spielberg devoted most of his effort to creating the dinosaurs. The human characters are a ragtag bunch of half-realized, sketched-in personalities, who exist primarily to scream, utter dire warnings, and outwit the monsters."
The film received even more sarcastic barbs in the reviews of experts representing the scientific community. Such inaccuracies were noted as: the simultaneous existence of representatives of various geochronological periods, in particular, the Jurassic and Cretaceous; the absence of feathers in some dinosaur species, contrary to paleontological data; the transformation of dinosaurs from slow, dumb and cold-blooded reptiles into agile, intelligent, and warm-blooded animals, whose behavior is more consistent with that of modern mammals. It was noted that the filmmakers, as the custodian of dinosaur DNA, managed to show the only species of mosquito that is not blood-sucking.
And, finally, it was noted that DNA cannot be preserved for more than 6.8 million years, and, therefore, the preservation of the DNA of animals that became extinct 65 million years ago is even theoretically impossible. However, we all know very well that films on historical themes, as a rule, are replete with blunders and historical inaccuracies. Even those of them that are devoted to relatively recent events. For example, "Gladiator" or "Braveheart". What can we say about the creatures that lived many millions of years ago?!
However, moviegoers, for whom the film was created, remained indifferent to the comments of film critics and scientists. With a budget of $63 million, "Jurassic Park" earned $914.7 million worldwide and was the highest-grossing film of all time for four and a half years before the release of James Cameron's "Titanic" (1997). At the same time, the personal income of Steven Spielberg himself amounted to $ 250 million, which to this day is a record amount of income for one person from one film.
But "Jurassic Park" doesn't stop at the box office. An even larger amount of revenue, estimated at about $1 billion, came from related marketing activities. Immediately after the film's release, a traveling exhibition entitled "Dinosaurs from Jurassic Park" began, featuring dinosaur skeletons and props from the film. Merchandise named "Jurassic Park" has been released, including toy dinosaurs, calendars, books, figurines, bread, yogurt, fast food, video games, comics, T-shirts, and more. And the total cost of these costs amounted to approximately 65 million dollars.
As for the festival achievements of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, in comparison with commercial success, they can be considered very modest. The film received a total of 44 film awards, but the only prestigious award was from the Japan Film Academy for Best Foreign Film, received in 1994. Andrew Davis' "The Fugitive" and Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" also competed for this award. The film also won three Academy Awards, but only in technical categories. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association did not honor the film with a single nomination.
The high audience rating of Steven Spielberg's film "Jurassic Park" manifested itself not only in its colossal box office performance, but also in the ratings on the IMDB and Kinopoisk websites. 73% of the users of these sites rated the film from 8 to 10. And 20% of users, one in five, rated the film with the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Steven Spielberg's film "Jurassic Park" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,392, which allowed it to take 371st Rank in the Golden Thousand.
