The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, by Chris Nashawaty 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

For folks like me who were alive and into sci-fi movies in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the new book by film writer Chris Nashawaty, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, will bring a déjà vu-like rush of memory of that summer, when the movies E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior were all released within a searing eight-week period.

In the five years before that eventful summer we had had the first two Star Wars movies, Alien, and the rather woeful first Star Trek film, but that fateful eight-week period reshaped the landscape of Hollywood moviemaking in a way that is still being felt now, over 40 years later; indeed, the MCU, the DC movies, X-Men films and the whole tradition of summer blockbusters and multi-film series can trace their beginnings to the Summer of 1982.

Within the same timeframe that saw these movies come about, sci-fi and fantasy conventions, including the nascent ComicCon movement, were starting to bloom. The fan base that fed these conventions, steeped in the sci-fi writing of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, and Phillip K. Dick, as well as the fantasy of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and even the vintage fantasy of Edgar Rice Burroughs, comprised a built-in movie-going demographic that would nurture the new reality of sci-fi/fantasy blockbuster movie series.

In The Future Was Now Chris Nashawaty delves deeply into the backstories of the development of these eight individual films, bringing out a wealth of detail about the work of the writers, directors, producers, special-effects artists and studio suits that underlay the final product that moviegoers saw on the screen.

I admit to a certain fascination with the whole messy process of bringing a film project from idea to finished product, and Nashawaty does not disappoint on that count. The back story on Bladerunner, for example, is quite fascinating, with its multiple rewrites and reframings of the story, and the issues that the filmmakers encountered working with Phillip K. Dick, the famously reclusive author of the book upon which the movie is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

As I read about the intermingled assemblage of Hollywood personalities—writers, directors, producers, etc.—behind the films discussed in the book, I imagined the author making a chart to keep them all straight, like the rock ’n roll influences chart that Jack Black’s Dewey Finn character drew on the chalk board in School of Rock.

There is a wealth of fascinating back story in the book about these eight movies and the events of that fateful summer: the background on Mad Max director George Miller, an Australian emergency-room physician turned filmmaker; the creation of groundbreaking visual effects techniques to bring the futuristic vision of Tron to the screen; the hide-and-seek relationship of the producers, director Ridley Scott, and writers Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples of Blade Runner with the source book’s author Phillip K. Dick; and the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Star Trek stars Leonard Nimoy and George Takei about whether they would even appear in the second movie based on the cult TV series, and how much their involvement would cost.

The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982 is destined to feature in the syllabus of many a film-studies class in the future. If you are interested in the film industry, in the background on how movies are made, in sci-fi/fantasy movies in general, and in particular these eight dare-I-say-it iconic films in those genres, and how they changed the landscape of the film industry in one eventful summer, this book is required reading.

Release date July 29, 2024.