The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made was a fascinating volume in which David Hughes looked at movies that never went into production or eventually emerged from development hell. These included Ridley Scott’s I Am Legend, the confusion over The Watchmen, the truth behind Supernova and the disasters that befell Richard Stanley’s The Island of Dr Moreau. It was published in hardcover by Titan Books, with a foreword by H. R. Giger and an eight-page colour section of pre-production artwork.
Hollywood Vampire: A Revised and Updated Unofficial and Unauthorized Guide to Angel was a new version of the 2000 book by Keith Topping. Edited by Roz Kaveney, Reading the Vampire Slayer was subtitled An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel and included some heavy academic essays along with an episode guide to the plots.
Andy Lane’s Randall & Hopkirk {Deceased}: The Files was an illustrated guide to the revived TV series, with an introduction by producer Charlie Higson.
Scarecrow Press reprinted the late Curt Siodmak’s 1997 autobiography, revised under the new title Wolf Man’s Maker: Memoir of a Hollywood Scriptwriter.
From McFarland 8c Company, Lisa Morton’s The Cinema of Tsui Hark was an illustrated hardcover that looked at the career of one of China’s most famous film-makers.
David Kalat’s The Strange Case of Dr Mabuse: A Study of the Twelve Films and Five Novels was an illustrated look at the career of the super-villain created by German author Norbert Jacques and most famously filmed by Fritz Lang.
The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia by Peter Dendle was an A-Z guide of the walking dead, while White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film was Gary D. Rhodes’s in-depth illustrated study of the 1932 poverty-row film starring Bela Lugosi, with a foreword by the late George E. Turner.
The Gorehound’s Guide to Splatter Films of the 1960s and 1970s by Scott Aaron Stine was an A-Z guide of gore films.
John Kenneth Muir’s Terror Television: American Series, 1970–1999 was another hefty reference work, while the same author’s An Analytical Guide to Television’s ‘One Step Beyond’, 1959–1961 looked at the now-obscure ‘reality’ anthology show.
In I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Film-makers, the talented Tom Weaver talked with such nearly-forgotten actors as Faith Domergue, Ray Walston and Maureen O’Sullivan.
Also from McFarland, Harris M. Lentz III’s monumental Science Fiction, Horror & Fantasy Film and Television Credits: Second Edition combined four earlier books and updated and revised more than 2,000 pages into one of the most important and impressive reference volumes of the year.
From Midnight Marquee came Memories of Hammer Films, editors Gary J. Svehla and Susan Svehla’s collection of interview transcripts from the annual FANEX convention in Baltimore, Maryland. Amongst those profiled were Christopher Lee, Barbara Shelley, Ingrid Pitt and Jimmy Sangster. In Monsters Mutants and Heavenly Creatures, Tom Weaver interviewed the people behind the drive-in classics.
From the same publisher, The Spawn of Skull Island was Michael H. Price and Douglas Turner’s revised and expanded edition of the 1975 volume The Making of King Kong by the late George E. Turner and Orville Goldner. Forgotten Horrors 2: Beyond the Horror Ban was Price and Turner’s follow-up to their previous volume about poverty-row horrors.
Published by The John Hopkins University Press as an oversized softcover, Chris Fujiwara’s Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall was a welcome reissue of the 1998 illustrated study of the director of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Night of the Demon, with a foreword by Martin Scorsese.
In Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies, Jay Slater looked at the gory sub-genre from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, and The Horror Movie Survival Guide by Matteo Molinari and Jim Kamm was a pointless A-Z list of movie monsters and their various attributes.
From Maryland’s Sense of Wonder Press, Famous Forry Fotos: Over 70 Years of AckerMemories was a softcover collection of black and white stills from the archives of legendary fan and editor Forrest J. Ackerman, who turned eighty-five in November and celebrated with a party at The Friar’s Club in Beverly Hills, California. To commemorate the event, guests received It’s Alive @ 85, a special publication limited to 250 copies with an introduction by Ray Bradbury.
Among the attendees at Ackerman’s birthday celebrations was director John Landis, who guest-edited The Best American Movie Writing 2001, which included essays by Jack Kerouac, Tom Weaver, Lawrence Kasdan, John Irving, Stanley Kubrick and others.
Although Gladiator walked off with Best Picture at the 2001 Academy Awards, the martial-arts fantasy Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon picked up Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Original Score Oscars, while The Grinch won Best Make-up for Rick Baker.
Arthur C. Clarke presented the Oscar for Best Screenplay Based on Material Already Published or Produced via a pre-recorded clip from his home in Sri Lanka. He did not know in advance that Traffic was the winner.
Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks of September 11th had an immediate effect on Hollywood, with studios shelving, postponing or abandoning any films that might have appeared insensitive. These included Tim Allen’s new Disney comedy Big Trouble and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage.
Somewhat more bizarrely, even just the inclusion of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers resulted in scenes being changed and promotional campaigns being pulled. The trailer for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man film was withdrawn from theatres and the Internet because it contained a scene (produced exclusively for the trailer) in which a helicopter was trapped in a giant spider’s web strung between the two buildings. Meanwhile, the producers of Columbia Pictures’ sequel Men in Black 2 announced that the ending of the movie would be re-shot because the World Trade Center was used as a backdrop. Any other scenes featuring the structures would also be changed.
Warner Bros, even postponed by one week its planned 500 sneak previews of the Stephen King adaptation, Hearts in Atlantis starring Anthony Hopkins. It didn’t help, and after an opening of $9.8 million the film took less than $21 million at the US box office.
Costing £90 million to make and £30 million for Warner Bros, to market, Christopher Columbus’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (retitled Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone in America) was released the first weekend in November and smashed box-office records on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, where it was released on a quarter of all the screens in the country, it easily beat the previous record set by The Lost World — Jurassic Park ($71 million) and the Potter movie became the first film to make $100 million in its first four days. In the UK it beat the previous weekend record set by Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace (£14.7 million), and the film went on to take more than $300 million worldwide.