“Seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely. That’s about it. Tell me, though. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Does he still keep his neighbor’s children starving?” – Taylor, Planet Of The Apes.
1968 was a bad year, a twelve-month long slog marked by murder, political upheaval and war. Horrors came and went, and soon people became numbed by them, hardened against tragedy and no longer willing to weep about the things they might have once wept over.
The Americans felt it worst. They, after all, had seen their heroes murdered – had sat back and watched as a host of their best and brightest were gunned down, their legacies reduced to a slowly expanding pool of blood on a stranger’s floor.
The losses were too many to name, but there were some that hurt more than others. For many left-leaning Americans, the hardest came on the fifth of June, 1968, when Bobby Kennedy, the future of the Democratic party and a beloved heir to the Kennedy political legacy, addressed an elated crowd at the Ambassador hotel, only to be shot on his way out to his car. He took three bullets and died the next day.
Worse still, his passing came only two months after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, murdered while standing on a motel balcony by an extremist named James Earl Ray. In the last speech he had ever delivered, King had acknowledged that the road ahead was hard – that there were some “difficult days” waiting for the African-American community. But he believed that before long, absolution would wash over the country he so loved. “I’m happy tonight,” he intoned. “I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
But it was a message that some people were finding increasingly hard to swallow. The war in Vietnam was far from over, and the spread of affordable TV sets meant suddenly the bloodshed had reached the American home. People were eating dinner while watching the news, and their brand new sets were babbling to them about the murder of young men, and the horrors of napalm, and the ever-rising death toll, all while home owners sat there, stunned, trying to swallow their meatloaf.
All the jingoism and anti-Communist propaganda that had circulated before the Americans had found themselves tangled up in the bloodbath of Vietnam had soured somewhat. Nobody felt good about fighting overseas anymore; nobody felt comfortable, or safe. The daily struggle of life was being conducted in the shadow of this great atrocity – in the shadow of a war unfurling in a country most people hadn’t visited, against a force that few people understood.
So perhaps it was unsurprising that on Tuesday November 5, when it came time for the American people to show up and vote, they cast their ballot for a slick-haired, long nosed Republican named Richard Nixon. Nixon, after all, had promised them that the Vietnam war could be won; that the Cong could be vanquished and Americans could finally get back to talking about something else.
A Nixon campaign commercial from 1968
Nixon’s platform was one of deep cynicism, and the picture he painted was of a world hanging over a precipice. He took the horrors Americans had seen and he doubled down on them, building up anxieties till they were the size of dark, ivory towers. The political world, he assured voters, was a cesspit of murderers, thieves and criminals, and only Nixon amongst them had the strength to stand up to the swamp. The world beyond America’s front door was one gripped by chaos and uncertainty, but America was too – decimated, Nixon said, by drug addicts and thieves.
In the face of that nihilism, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey barely stood a chance. His message was one of peace and love, and he assured Americans that the world was not as ravaged as Nixon wanted them to believe. But Americans didn’t trust him for a moment. How dare he speak of potential and hope and growth when the world was so evidently fucked? How did he have the gall to get up on a stage and tell Americans that they were prosperous and well-fed when they were so damn scared all the time; when they were so convinced that the apocalypse lay in hiding around the next corner?
When defeat came for Humphrey, it came hard. Nixon didn’t just win – Nixon won easily, picking up 301 votes in the electoral college against Humphrey’s 191. It was fitting, really. The year had been a non-stop bloodbath; it made sense that the career of the only man in politics ready to say things weren’t as bad as they seemed should go down in tatters.
Of course, before long Nixon would reveal himself. He had no plan to end the war. His only goal was to eke it out, slowly grinding the Cong down in the hope that the ever-accumulating causalities might force them into surrender. America was not emerging into a new era of peace by electing Nixon. The horror had only just begun.
Then there was the looming threat of international war. The Russians were armed with nukes and making themselves ever more known; ever more threatening. It would be another year before Americans would put Neil Armstrong on the moon, and they lived in the collective fear that the Russkies might get there before them. After all, for many, space was not the final frontier but a brand new arena of war; a dark, vast battlefield that could be filled with missiles and the chrome, radioactive harbingers they feared the battles of the future would be fought with.
But above all else, Americans were tired. They were burnt out. All that bad news had gotten under their skin, and the great waft of US promise and ingenuity that had washed over them from the end of the fifties to the mid sixties was beginning to stink. They were sick with sadness; collectively ill, no longer certain that they could rule the world, or even that the world had much of a future left. And it was in this new, blood-soaked era that a little film called Planet Of The Apes was released, and the shape of American cinema was changed forever.
Pierre Boulle’s Planet Of The Apes was a strange little novel, released to some fanfare and middling sales in 1963. Boule had been a special agent during the war, and had used his experiences as a political prisoner to write The Bridge On The River Kwai, a harrowing epic that was later turned into a celebrated film by British director David Lean.
It was that on the basis of that novel that Boulle’s reputation had been forged, and when Apes was first released, it seemed unlikely that he was suddenly going to be heralded as a new voice in science fiction – for the public at large, Kwai was still his main contribution to popular culture.
After all, Planet Of The Apes was too odd, a story within a story that drew as much on antiquated work like The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner as it did on the concerns of contemporary science fiction writers. And it was too stridently political, a dark, disturbing work about the shaky hold man had on the planet, not to mention the threats we collectively faced from a natural world in revolt.
Still, Planet Of The Apes sold enough copies to attract the attention of Hollywood, and before long the job of adapting the novel to the big screen fell in the capable hands of Mr Rod Serling. The smooth-voiced, relentlessly ingenious creative force behind the lauded television series The Twilight Zone, Serling knew he had a difficult task ahead of him. Even Boule considered the novel “unfilmable” – the author couldn’t see how one could adapt the novel’s odd structure, or communicate the nuances of its taboo-testing plot.
And yet, in the manner of all good screenplay writers who find themselves faced with adapting impossible material, Serling triumphed not by straying slavishly close to the original novel, but by gutting it.
He abandoned the book’s quaint beginning: rather than opening with two astronauts discovering an audio log that describes the discovery of a planet of apes, Serling cut straight to the quick, and began the film with a dark monologue delivered to the abyss of space by the film’s hero Taylor. And in the place of the book’s so-so ending, Serling wrote in one of the all-time great cinematic twists, ironically certifying the novel’s place in history by blessing it with an ending that the original text didn’t even feature.
But the studio was not entirely happy with the script Serling turned in. If nothing else, it was too lavish, and would require considerably more capital than the film’s producer Arthur P. Jacobs was willing to put up. Jacobs knew he couldn’t shoot a sci-fi film starring a clan of apes on the cheap, but he was still unwilling to take the risk represented by Serling’s script. So, to cut down on costs he hired Michael Wilson, a disgraced screenwriter who had been smeared by the anti-Communist Hollywood blacklist, and together he and Wilson worked to trim down Serling’s most extravagant ideas.
Watch a trailer for Planet Of The Apes below
Meanwhile, Jacobs began searching for his cast and crew. He tapped Franklin J. Schaffner as the director early on, impressed by the way Schaffner had handled the legendarily difficult Yul Brynner on the set of his previous film, The Double Man. Of course, Jacobs had more practical reasons for selecting Schaffer too – the director was no lauded Academy Award winner, and so could be placated by a middling salary.
The same could not be said of the actor Jacobs pegged for the lead. By 1967 when Planet Of The Apes entered production, Charlton Heston was a bona fide cinematic star. He had already picked up a number of acting awards for his turn in Ben-Hur, and had won considerable acclaim for his oddly terrifying portrayal of Moses in The Ten Commandments. He was at his creative and commercial peak as a performer, and Jacobs hoped Heston’s star power would help convince audiences to see a strange sci-fi film based on a novel few members of the general public had ever encountered.
Of course, to reap those benefits, Jacobs had to put up with the difficulties of having Heston around on set. By the time the shoot began, the actor was already fiddling around with the script, demanding line changes and generally making life hell for Schaffner.
Not that the director was too bothered. He had eaten the likes of Heston for breakfast, and was stridently old school in his filmmaking style. The actors, as far as he was concerned, had to stand at their marks and bark out their lines – nothing more, nothing less – and he had little time for the patience-testing behaviour of prima donnas.
Anyway, he had the hostility of the landscape to deal with. Although much of the primate community featured in the film was shot on a lot, the early scenes were filmed on location, in the harsh locale of northern Arizona. The days was long, the sun was unbearably hot, and, working on a budget of a mere $5.8 million, the cast and crew were forced to move fast. Never mind that most of the principal cast were coated in layers of PVC, make-up and rubber – they had to shoot scenes as though their lives depended upon it, and the film wrapped in a mere four months.
No-one involved with the film really knew what they had on their hands by the time that Planet Of The Apes was done. It certainly didn’t seem like a guaranteed bona fide box office success. For his part, Schaffner was sure that the make-up would impress – John Chambers, the man behind Apes‘ prosthetic effects was an industry legend, and the work he had done for the film would eventually get him nominated for an Oscar. But otherwise, Schaffner had no idea how the public would receive his work: he had made sure-fire hits before, and he was convinced Apes was not one of those.
So it was with trepidation that Fox prepared to release Planet Of The Apes. They had no idea what they had on their hands – no clue the impact the film would make, or the money it would soon reap for them. And on the night before the film’s release, Schaffner and Jacobs both went to bed nervous men.
What Jacobs and Schaffner failed to consider, of course, was the feeling of discontent in the air. Americans no more wanted to see another airy, bright cinematic fantasy than they wanted to listen to Humphrey tell them that it was all going to work out in the end, and they went to Planet Of The Apes not to be reassured, but to be terrified.
After all, Planet Of The Apes is at its heart a genuinely disturbing film, and not only because it drops human beings right at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. What Planet Of The Apes suggests is not only that we are violent, dangerous and hideous creatures, but that, much more eerily, we are not unique. There is nothing special about us as a race, Apes posits – nothing that makes us different, or separates us from the animals that we so aggressively spurn and mistreat.
After all, Heston’s Taylor is one of the most determinedly cynical heroes of modern times. He spends the film’s first third chiding and berating his other astronauts, teasing their faith in the human spirit, and he seems to put little stead even in the science that has catapulted them through time. When one of his colleagues plants a miniature flag on the rocky surface of what they assume to be an alien planet, Taylor just laughs, the camera zooming in on his maniacal, sun-blasted face. And he sees no beauty in the expedition that has brought them to the film’s titular planet, cruelly mocking his colleagues when they do.
For that reason, Taylor is exactly the kind of hero 1968 needed; exactly the central character audiences wanted to see. Taylor is not here to save the day, largely because there is no day to be saved. He has no hope, no optimism and no faith, but that doesn’t put him at a disadvantage – it only makes him smart. While those around him fall over themselves to murmur valiant but hollow lullabies concerning the great depth of humanity’s spirit, Taylor rolls his eyes.
In that way, he is an onscreen cipher for Nixon – or at least, the living, breathing embodiment of Nixon’s views about the world. Like Nixon, he is reassuring not because he convinces us that our fears are unfounded, but because he does the opposite. Like Nixon, he repeats back to us all the terrible things that we suspect about the world, and solidifies our secret, unspoken fear that we are just mounds of flesh batting around a rock that will one day be swallowed by a sun; that there is no point to our most valiant actions and no repercussions for our darkest ones.
So although it might be a cliché to suggest that some films are released at exactly the point that the world needs them most, it’s hard to otherwise explain the Planet Of The Apes phenomenon. The American public, swollen with news of bloodshed and devastation, couldn’t get enough of the film. They saw it, and then they saw it again. They told their friends about it. They let it haunt them; let it keep them up at night. And they helped it become one of the biggest commercial successes of the year, launching a string of sequels and a number of imitators.
There has never been a film like Planet Of The Apes. But that’s because Planet Of The Apes wasn’t even really a film. It wasn’t just another special effects laden Hollywood blockbuster about man’s insecure place in the universe, nor was it a cautionary tale designed to load us up with guilt, and with fear. There is nothing to feel guilty about, Apes said, because there is nothing about the essential indignity of humanity that can be changed. We are doomed to be this way for all times, Apes said. And in this way, it is more collective nightmare than film; an ever-shifting, uncompromising worry, a work of art that spreads like a tumour blossoming in a chest.
