Having just watched The Black Hole (1979) and digging around my voluminous stacks of movie memorabilia in the hope of finding something relevant I chanced upon this gem from 1979 – the first issue of Science Fiction Media News, a 12-page staple-bound A4 fanzine produced by Martin Hatfield who hailed from Oxford, England. In the days before the Internet and the ubiquitous Blog, movie fans who didn’t have access to the trade press like Variety or Box Office or Screen International would find very lean pickings in the national media who were less keen than they are now on devoting space to details of forthcoming pictures. It was left to chaps like Martin to do the digging. If you were a member of the British Science Fiction Association you got this for free, otherwise it would set you back a princely 25p.
So what was the gen in 1979? The hot news was that Dino De Laurentiis had picked up the rights to Dune for $1 million. He planned a three-hour epic. Screenplay was being written by Frank Herbert who postponed completing the fourth book in the saga to take on the job. Pink Floyd, previously assigned the music score, were out as was Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead.
With the success of the likes of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Hollywood knee deep in a new sci fi cycle, there weren’t enough SFX experts to go round, so budgets were mushrooming. Warner Brothers had to add another $1.5 million to the cost of Meteor and push back the release date by four months. Paramount’s Star Trek was worse hit, the effects budget quintupling from $4 million to a reported $20 million.
If you remember Mike Oldfield for “Tubular Bells,” you might not know that he supplied the music for The Space Movie directed by Tony Palmer. That there’s nothing new in Hollywood is attested by the fact that this newsletter was plugging Nosferatu starring Klaus Kinski while Hollywood spent a good part of the latter end of 2024 hyping, in counter-programming to top all counter-programming, the Robert Eggers version due out at Xmas.
Readers were also kept abreast of forthcoming movies like The Shape of Things to Come headlined by Jack Palance and Carol Lynley, Roger Corman’s Deathsport, Robert Altman’s Quintet starring Paul Newman, Don Coscarelli’s low-budget Phantasm and Disney’s The Spaceman and King Arthur. Given the evil genius in Moonraker planned to use a space station to destroy Earth’s inhabitants, this was also classified as science fiction (although Mr Hatfield points out “the space content of this film is being pushed as science fact rather than science fiction”).
Films reviewed include Foes starring MacDonald Carey (“may be worth a look just to see how far SF…has NOT progressed since 1950”); David Lynch’s Eraserhead (“the most original horror story to come along for years”), Nosferatu (“tantalizing”) and Quintet (“eminently watchable”). Also reviewed was Ken Campbell’s stage adaptation of radio serial The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
As ever, not all projects made it onto the screen. Paramount was scheduled to make Interview with the Vampire, but the Anne Rice novel took another 15 years to reach the screen and then through Warner Bros. British company Brent Walker planned to follow up The Stud (1978) and Quadrophenia (1979) with a contemporary vampire picture, Dracula Rocks, alas never made. Pop group The Osmonds were setting up to make a $6 million disaster movie Spaceport. Whatever happened to The Experiment based on the novel by James Clark? Or for that matter Bikers in Outer Space. Fancied seeing Vincent Price in Romance in the Jugular Vein? Too bad, it’s been cancelled. In other news, the novelization of Star Wars sold 896,000 copies in the UK, possibly a record for a novel in the genre.
The Magnificent 60s 