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MOVIES

The Cult of Jurassic Park

The Blu-ray is out this week. And to a weird subculture this is the event of the year.

BY BRYAN CURTIS ON NOVEMBER 7, 2011

Enough about Star Wars fanboys. The Jedi Council is adjourned until theres something new to bitch about.
Im here to talk about a rarer specimen: the Jurassic Park fanboy. We yup, we are out there. We have a
tender-verging-on-deranged love for Steven Spielbergs dinosaur epic, which is just out on Blu-ray. Consider
the following:

Exhibit A: A midnight screening of Jurassic Park in New York City this summer. The seats are filled. Just as
the movie begins, a drunken, amorous couple barges in and starts screwing around. The guy, judging from his
insipid giggles, is sitting on the womans lap. A Jurassic fanboys voice fills the theater. He and here Im
picturing an early thirties hipster in a T-shirt about as ironic as my own sounds pissed. He threatens to
throw these idiots out of the movie and back into The Tree of Life.

Exhibit B: Are you a Single Interested in Michael Crichton? Meet the love raptors stalking OkCupid.

Exhibit C: Ariana Richards played Lex Murphy the blond girl in the purple baseball cap in the 1993
movie. When she goes out these days, she often sees a young man gaping at her in the same way Sam Neill
once gaped at a Brachiosaurus. Ive come to know the signs well, Richards tells me. Jurassic Park,
incidentally, was filmed when she was 12.

I could go on. Suffice it to say, its time to back into Jurassic Park. Hold on to your butts.

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When was Jurassic Park hatched? We could start in 1924, when the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield
Osborn wrote about an alert, swift-moving carnivorous dinosaur Velociraptor mongoliensis. We could
start in 1970, when Steven, a young movie director, and Michael, a young novelist, had a chance meeting on
the lot at Universal Studios. But Im thinking we should probably start in 1983.

Entomologist George O. Poinar and his wife, Roberta, had begun taking DNA from insects trapped in
prehistoric amber. Theyd published an article about it in Science. One afternoon, a stranger dropped by their
office in Berkeley, California. Tall, pleasant guy, Poinar recalls now. Really lanky. The man quizzed the
Poinars about their work. He asked about amber mines in the Dominican Republic. Then, with his notebook
filled, the man left. He never mentioned anything about a dinosaur novel.

Michael Crichton, in fact, was already trying to bring dinosaurs back to life. But hed gotten stuck. It is
always a problem for me to believe in the stories that I am writing, Crichton later wrote to Poinar, and a
dinosaur story especially strains my own credence. When Crichton discovered the Poinars and their bugs-in-
amber, he stumbled onto the foundation of a billion-dollar enterprise. It was a beautiful premise for a thriller,
in that it both contained cutting-edge science and was ridiculously easy to understand.

Crichtons 1990 novel which, for my money, is still the purest and best form of Jurassic Park is really a
temple of facts. If youve read it 20 or 30 times, like I have, lets say them together: Dinosaurs were probably
warm-blooded. They were closer to birds than reptiles. Jack Horner, the real-life Montana paleontologist who
popularized many of these theories, tells me that by the 1980s they had become well accepted in his circles.
But to the casual dino-lover and just about anyone under the age of 15 Crichton sounded like some kind
of oracle.

This is the first thing the return to Jurassic Park shows us: that Crichtons novel works as much like a
magazine article as it does a novel. In fact, the whole thriller-by-journalism style came from Robert Gottlieb,
who edited Crichton at Knopf and later became editor of The New Yorker. When Gottlieb was editing The
Andromeda Strain (1969), he said the book should read like a New Yorker profile, Crichton later
recounted. Scientific facts say, whether a tyrannosaur could see a stationary object should be piled on
top of one another to create suspense. This approach, Crichton wrote, yielded a very cold, detached book that
was also weirdly convincing.

The plot of Jurassic Park was recycled. Crichton was an expert recycler. His Congo (1980) is King Solomons
Mines (1885) with an ape-voice synthesizer and the racism dialed down. Sphere (1987) is Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea (1870). And Jurassic Park is a reboot of Arthur Conan Doyles The Lost World (1912)
a title Crichton stole for his sequel. It was Conan Doyle who dreamed dinosaurs were hiding somewhere in
Latin America; Conan Doyle who sent an egomaniacal academic to find them. (Then, Professor Challenger;
later, our Dr. Malcolm.) What Crichton did, in literary terms, was like taking a classic automobile and
installing a newer, more powerful engine.

Crichton did something else smart at the moment of conception. He realized previous dino nuts from Ray
Bradbury1 to the creators of Land of the Lost had fallen head over heels for the T. rex. The big guy. But man
versus tyrannosaur is just a replay of David versus Goliath. Man versus velociraptor thats different. Thats
smaller. Crichtons killing machine is 6 feet tall, with cheetah speed (to quote the mathematician Ian
Malcolm) and brains to boot. If not for a bad bounce of the evolutionary football, Neill says in Jurassic Park
III, it is entirely possible that raptors, rather than humans, would have become the dominant species on this

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planet.

1. Bradbury is author of the short story A Sound of Thunder, which features the greatest T. rex in literary history. In
Jurassic Park, Crichton writes of the distant rumble of thunder.

We Jurassic fanboys know these Crichtonian facts are fudged. As he created his dinosaurs, Crichton relied on
Gregory Pauls 1988 book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World, which turned a larger animal, a Deinonychus,
into a velociraptor. In fact, the Velociraptor mongoliensis was little more than half the size of its cousin in the
book and movie.2 Theres no evidence raptors were Einsteins with claws. But it was too late. Crichton had
waged what he called a tremendous psychological campaign against the reader. Little facts! A year after the
Jurassic Park movie came out, raptors or raptors were famous enough to front a crappy NBA
franchise.

2. Scientists have since determined that raptors probably had feathers.

Its 10:30 p.m., and Terry is on the phone. Ive been looking forward to this. Ive never met a Jurassic Jedi
master, someone who could guide me as deep into the book and movie as I want to go. Terry is that master.

By day, Terry Davis Jr. is a quality assurance technician for a cable company. He laughs when he says it ha
ha ha! Because by night, Terrys real work begins. He calls it digital paleontology. Terry rewatches the
Jurassic Park movies frame by frame to dig out fossilized treasures that you and I might have missed. The
results are on his website, Jurassic Park Legacy.

Tonight, Terry and I are talking about one of his finds. Hes telling me he thinks John Hammond, Jurassics
Steve Jobs, built his Site B factory shortly before his San Diego amusement park.

Now, what about Jurassic Park Europe? I ask, trying to impress Terry. Hammond said hed bought a tract
in the Azores.

If you look at the slide show in the luncheon scene, youll see a reference to Jurassic Park Europe, Terry
says.

Did you non-fanboys follow that? Im taking a single, unremarkable line from Crichtons novel and weaving it
into the larger Jurassic canon. Thats pretty good. But then Terry, my Jedi master, is doing me one better.
Hes pointing to a shot exactly 37 minutes and eight seconds into the first movie in which the words Jurassic
Park Europe are never mentioned but are projected onto a wall. Thats just crazy-good.

Theres some stuff you ought to know about serious Jurassic Park fans. On balance, they love the first movie;
theyre OK with The Lost World; and they absolutely hate Jurassic Park III. (The proprietor of the Jurassic
Cast podcast calls it the abomination.) Moreover, Jurassic fans have a moment that is their version of
Greedo shooting first. The big numero uno, Terry says. It occurs in the third movie, when the Spinosaurus
and the tyrannosaur get locked in a Hell in a Cell match. JPers hate this scene because it ends with the
tyrannosaur getting killed.

This brings me to a second discovery about Jurassic Park: The dinosaurs are the protagonists. Maybe its
because the humans are one-dimensional and the dinos, as well see, are fantastically 3-D. Or maybe
according to some digital paleontology by Paul Lauter, a literature professor at Trinity College its that

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Jurassic Park is a colonization story. Here we are in Costa Rica (site of decades-long Spanish colonization)
and these, er, animals have been caged by greedy, technologically superior humans. You cant help but root
for the dinos. As screenwriter David Koepp once explained,3 We wanted the animals to be really innocent.
We didnt want to make them bad guys.

3. From Don Shay and Jody Duncans superb book The Making of Jurassic Park.

Spielberg even ditched his planned ending to the first movie4 when he realized the T. rex, the real hero,
should make a triumphant return.

4. A deus ex machina in which the raptors were killed when they were impaled by the bones of a falling T. rex skeleton.

Then along comes Jurassic Park IIIs Spinosaurus, from a script cowritten by Alexander Payne,5 and this
Johnny-come-lately mauls the tyrannosaur.

5. Writer-director of Election and Sideways.

He killed him like a bitch, Terry says.

Killed her, I reply. The dinosaurs at Jurassic Park are female.

My Jedi master corrects me gently. The coloration patterns were male. Terry has looked into this.

Its interesting Terry should go there. There being gender studies. Because we need to talk about
Jurassic feminist theory. There are a few critics who look at Jurassic Park and dont see man versus dinosaur.
They see man versus woman.

Gaze but not too threateningly at the paper There Is No Unauthorized Breeding in Jurassic Park:
Gender and the Uses of Genetics by Laura Briggs and Jodi I. Kelber-Kaye. Jumping off the work of critic
Marina Warner, they read volumes into the fact that Jurassic Parks dinosaurs (a) are female (Terrys T. rex
excepted), and (b) have managed to breed on their own.

Jurassic Parks real theme, Briggs and Kelber-Kaye say, is women run amok. The she-dinos are reproducing
without men and trying to stomp out the two-parent nuclear family (consisting here of Alan Grant, Tim, and
Lex, with occasional appearances by Ellie Sattler, Grants partner). The critics look at Jurassic Park and see a
racial theme, too. The Costa Rican dinos, they argue, represent Third World women. So Jurassic Park is not
just about a threat to nuclear families, but to white families.

As Alan Grant might say: I bet youll never look at blockbusters the same way again.

Now, if youre going to launch a feminist critique of Jurassic Park, you ought to at least get the girls name
right. (She is Lex or Alexis, but not Alexa.) But I have to admit, Briggs and Kelber-Kaye do score some
points. At the beginning of Crichtons novel, Tim, the boy, is a nerd an unmasculine science nut. Lex, the
girl, is a Mets fan. And yet by the books end, Crichton has reverted back to rusty, old gender roles: Tim has
gained courage while Lex is a quivering mess. (Richards tells me she read the novel before filming and was
struck by how much more stuff she got to do in Koepps script.)

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Feminist digital paleontology leads us to more amazing finds. Al Sullivans essay When Dinosaurs Were
Feminists notes the throwaway scene near the beginning of the movie, when Dr. Grant cant manage to
buckle his seatbelt on the helicopter. Do you remember what Grant does? He ties together two of the same
seatbelt parts the female parts. Can that not be a little nod to the turbulent gender politics to come?

After the humans have escaped the island, one of the movies final shots has the two kids snuggling with
Grant. It suggests that after life finds a way, chaos theory, and a series of beautiful disembowelments, what
Jurassic Park is really about is Grant agreeing to mate with Sattler and create his own white, nuclear family.6
This isnt the way I watch Jurassic Park, but lets stipulate its not a crazy way to watch it. We Jurassic
fanboys have been sold a Family Research Council pamphlet with velociraptors.

6. Grant and Sattler arent together in the novel; shes marrying a nice doctor in Chicago. In the movie, however,
Grant rather defensively tells Malcolm they are together. By the time Sattler makes a cameo in Jurassic Park III, she
seems to have reproduced with someone else, although the two have the byplay of old lovers.

Richards was fresh off a reindeer movie when Spielberg came to her with a strange request. He wanted her to
make a scream reel. So she looked into a camera and let fly. A few nights later, Spielberg was on his couch
watching audition tapes while his wife, Kate Capshaw, dozed next to him. On TV, Richards started screaming.
Capshaw leaped off the couch and ran down the hallway to check on the kids. Richards got the part of Lex and
a spot in the best scene in Jurassic Park.

You know it. Its the scene in which the tyrannosaur attacks the Ford Explorers.7 It lasts exactly eight minutes
and four seconds. The John Williams score goes completely silent for the duration.

7. Toyota Land Cruisers in the book.

Open: The sound of footsteps. Water vibrates in a plastic cup on the dash. Spielberg thought up that effect
when he was driving to the set listening to Earth, Wind & Fire. Spielberg, we should note, was 46 years old
when Jurassic Park was released. This wasnt the young hell-raiser who made Jaws; this was, to use the critic
Tom Shones phrase, your disco-dancing uncle.

Jurassic Park isnt Jaws, not even close, but for those eight-plus minutes it nearly rises to Jaws-level
moviemaking. Spielberg rolls out a series of diabolical camera shots. A zoom into the face of Tim (Joseph
Mazzello). A shot tilted upward, toward the sun oof, where the bloodied goats leg lands after being torn off by
the tyrannosaur. Then the T. rex stomps in, and Spielberg really gets going. The dinos clawed foot, shot from
behind, sinks into the mud. Grant tells Malcolm the rex cant see them if they dont move a Crichtonian fact
wedged in for realism. Then, Richardss scream and what a terrifying scream it is, the kind that touches the
protective region of your brain.

Jurassic Park isnt a mean movie. (Amazingly, only five people die in a little over two hours.) But this scene is
mean, which is part of its charm. It was supposed to be even meaner. Spielberg first imagined Richards
screaming, Daddy! Daddy! as the tyrannosaur smushed the car.

There are two distinct bits of genius here. The first is the scale. Like Crichton, Spielberg realized the key to
working with big animals was to shrink the playing field. So he shot almost the entire attack from inside the
cars. Otherwise, it becomes a Godzilla movie, Spielberg said.8

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8. A point proved definitively by Roland Emmerichs Godzilla, released five years later. Size does matter.

The second genius bit is the look and feel of the dinosaurs. Ask yourself why theyre so memorable and youll
probably remember they looked real. The T-1000 in Terminator 2, released two years before Jurassic Park,
looked beautiful, otherworldly but it wasnt real. Dinosaurs were a childhood passion, a thing you knew.
And in one of the greatest called shots in effects history, Spielberg and his team had rendered them on the big
screen.

But consider the T. rex. Jack Horner, who was on set as a paleontological traffic cop, says, Steven and I
argued about a lot of things. Basically, if I could demonstrate something was true, and everyone agreed on it,
he would change it. If it was an idea that didnt have too much behind it, he would fictionalize it. In other
words, Spielberg & Co. made a serious effort to hew to the fossil record and deliver real dinosaurs. But
whenever the record had a gap, they drove an Explorer through it.

The T. rex is a series of small gestures. Watch her pupil constrict, a touch Spielberg borrowed from E.T.
Watch her breath fog up the windows. What shes doing and what the raptors will do later in Jurassic Park
is giving a performance. My god, Dr. Grant, shes acting! And she doesnt just consist of Dennis Murens
brilliant computer effects. The computers tag-teamed with Stan Winstons 13,000-pound model, which was
dragged onto Warner Bros. Stage 16 for the shoot. The rex model was fully digitized, but Winston and his
team often insisted on controlling it manually so they could get the nuance. It acted its ass off, Winston said
later.

This is getting us close to the soul of Jurassic Park, so I make one last call to Phil Tippett. Phil an Oscar-
winning effects man who helped dream up Jabba the Hutt was Jurassic Parks dino-director. Phil says
what makes Jurassic Park click is that its a movie from a different age.

Though we remember it for the effects, Jurassic Park feels palpable in a way few CGI-loaded movies do
today. When the T. rex smushes the Ford Explorer, thats a real Ford Explorer. When the electric fence
topples, thats a real fence. Richards says perhaps 80 percent of her dinosaur scenes were shot with Winston
models, allowing her and Neill and other actors to actually be with the effects.

Fanboy-dom is about something irretrievable, a lost world of childhood. And here, from the age of Avatar, we
can see it clearly. Jurassic Park, along with The Abyss (1989) and Terminator 2 (1991), were the stars of an
amazing in-between period of summer-movie history. An interesting couple of years between the Analog Era
and the Computer Era. We were charging headfirst into the movie future, but we hadnt quite left the past.
Jurassic Park had 55 computer-effects shots; The Phantom Menace, released six years later, had around
2,000.

When he saw the first Jurassic CGI shots, George Lucas was said to have cried with joy. Ours tears are slightly
different, shed because the glorious things to come were going to bury the stuff we grew up on. So forgive us
Jurassic fanboys. After the tyrannosaur roared, our childhood movies and, you might say, our childhoods
were officially prehistoric.

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