Dark Star at 50: How a micro-budget student film changed sci-fi forever | Hacker News Reader

Dark Star at 50: How a micro-budget student film changed sci-fi forever

bbc.com

214 pointskeepamovin113 comments

I run a quote/clip from this movie in my cybersecurity classes

  "Doolittle I do have a malfunction on this readout, but I can't
   pinpoint it exactly.
    
   Don't worry about it. We'll find out what it is when it goes bad."

Basically the entire history of software engineering in a nutshell in a 1974 movie.

It's a great way to make an important point. How do you teach them to solve that problem? They can't dig into every problem in a real job - resources are always constrained.

Yeah good question, that's the trick isn't it!

I often use that one in the context of talking about signals (events)... about aircraft flight deck signal hierarchies and types... like alert, caution, warning, critical, emergency....

Some signals are proportional and escalating, so if you miss them first time don't worry as they will sound again and again until you attend. Other signals will (can) only appear once and the next time (if there is one) is catastrophic.

Also it fits into the topic of information overload and mental capacity for tracking things (Miller's 7 +/- 2). Lots of bad things happen because alerts are too aggressive and people turn them off! :)

What I remember is basically the same subject...

The guys sitting in front of their fake movie prop consoles and wildly mashing keys.

> Scenes had to be added to pad out the runtime to the requisite length. These additional scenes include a lengthy sequence in which Pinback does battle with an alien in the form of a beach ball with clawed feet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vywgEsuyGEY

I have a hazy memory of a scene where the beach ball alien is punctured and is propelled about the room like a deflating balloon.

> its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

(if you are concerned about spoiling the ending of the movie, you may prefer to watch the entire film from the start rather than clicking the above link)

"Let there be light" is such a good joke.

It's very well-telegraphed as well. The bomb paraphrases the first few verses of the Book of Genesis beforehand: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=...

One of my favourite phrases in sci-fi is "talk to the bomb"

    <ext4> I have no proof it was false data
    <zfs> YOU HAVE NO PROOF IT WAS CORRECT DATA!

> Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things".

It's said that 'every generation thinks they discovered sex', as if prior generations wouldn't imagine the things the new generation does in the bedroom. Every generation also thinks they discovered existential despair, and seem to have to same attitude about that: What a cool, knowing take-down of those old people and their simple-minded optimism. I see people doing the same these days (though right now existential despair is really having a moment).

That is a very fair take, but I do like the variations that folks put on this ideas even if they arent new.

I mean these were probably the first guys to be reasoning with an AI powered bomb about the meaning of life and empiricism. A fresh take on an old idea.

It looked better when Bruce Willis was doing it (reasoning) with Milla Jovovich.

Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery review Dark Star on their first podcast episode. [0]

It’s worth listening to even if you don’t really follow their work. It’s what finally motivated me to watch this movie after seeing it in the video store my whole childhood and then forgetting about it for decades.

[0] https://videoarchivespodcast.com/episodes/dark-star-cocaine-...

Love QT's work. I listened to this pod and watched the movie because of it. Honestly, I absolutely hated the movie, and I'm a huge Sci Fi fan.

I just do not get why people like this movie.

Make it a double-feature with "A Boy and His Dog" and you have the quintessential sci-fi indie scene from the 70's that we lost after "Star Wars". (Ha ha, should I add "THX 1138" and make it a triple feature? Thanks, George!)

I have a theory that between them Star Wars and Blade Runner killed, or at least seriously damaged, SF.

Instead of forward-looking weirdness (like 2001) a lot of SF - especially written SF - turned into reruns of WW II in space and 30s detective noir decorated with some stick-on SF greeblies.

There are obvious exceptions. But a lot of SF became less interesting, with endless reassuringly predictable variations on battleships in space, and gumshoes/mercenaries with laser blasters.

I understand what you mean, and there very definitely was a change, but I've always felt it was the shift away from late sixties / early seventies high-concept, almost-fantasy, semi-hallucinogenic wonderful weirdness. Just as culture pretty quickly went post-hippie (as it were), so too did science fiction. I feel as tho, somewhat tongue-in-cheek here, we collectively went "well that was a little embarrassing" after the sixties and reverted a bit to form culturally - not just in popular fiction, I mean, but more generally.

thats entertaining but no.. disagree.. the "hippy visionary" gestalt got lots of airplay for certain.. but there was always a straight-line science crowd that went deep-dive into elaborate scenarios.. with Science.. not the easily-identifiable fuzzy-glowey you allude to.. heck, give credit where credit is due, and point to more interesting book covers, background settings and other ephemera to the artsy people.. and also see the heirarchy, hard logic, high-tech machines and serious life and death events that drove a lot of stories and their production..

Star Wars began life as George Lucas' treatment for Apocalypse Now, in which the Rebels were the PAVN and VC, which would make WWII entirely the wrong war for SF creators to try and recreate...

Maybe, but cinematically, most of the tropes Lucas used predate Vietnam. The actual movie is entirely constructed from nostalgia for movies before the 1960s.

Apocalypse Now is itself, a treatment of the Heart of Darkness published 1899.

Pulp storylines have co-existed with "future looking" conceit driven SF in publishing for over a century. And, of course, they can co-exist in the same work.

If Star Wars had an impact, beyond greatly expanding the SF market, it was in breaking the ability of a narrow set SFF fans and writers to pretend that all science fiction was (or could be, or should attempt) was something like "produce pleasurable estrangement by imagining the impact of some unfamiliar future technology" and that "space opera", originally a slur, was some outside thing, over there, separate from the genre.

You weren't going to be able to keep the kids on the moisture farm after they had seen the galaxy.

Aye, it is merely the gentrification of our quaint little Very weird strange little neighborhood in outer space or time or dimension or parallel reality.

Where oh, where will the true weirdos move to now that we can say there goes the neighborhood

The pendulum has sung too far in the other direction in the last 20-30 years in my opinion. Now its a race to have the hardest sci-fi and anything less than a master's thesis on why the macguffin is plausible is rejected by fans. Its quiet tedious and misses the forest for the trees. At least Star Wars and Blade Runner had ideas and weren't just a regurgitation of Wired.

I think we have it all.

Just thinking about TV alone-- Foundation, ongoing Star Wars, ongoing Star Trek, Silo, The Expanse, For All Mankind, Stranger Things, 3 Body Problem, etc.

Some of these are harder; some are galactic empires; some are weird.

If your definition of killing a thing is making it popular to the masses while making the first inroads into acceptance of nerdishness in global culture, sure.

Strange definition though.

Hollywood and finance killed SF (to the extent that it's dead, which it really isn't - Severence? Foundation? Silo? Three Body Problem? etc).

I can't claim to have ran the numbers, but I suspect the amount per year of "serious" sci-fi media that was also good from those days is similar, if not lower than today. And today we also get the adventures and horrors and thrillers with scifi dressing as well - some good and some bad like everything else.

Don't forget Zardoz!

"The gun is good! The penis is evil!"

That movie was ridiculously horny.

Not to mention Sean Connery's nipples.

There was rather a lot of nipples all around in that film.

Also "Silent Running" and "Logan's Run".

Recently watched Logan’s Run on a flight and was pleasantly surprised to hear the source to some MF DOOM samples.

Super cool movie.

Don't forget Idaho Transfer

Most famous scene: I remember the argument with the bomb. But for me, the most memorable scene is the final one, when the surfer astronaut surfs away through outer space.

That scene, combined with the argumentative bomb, are reminiscent of the final scene of Dr. Strangelove, with Slim Pickens in his cowboy hat stradling the bomb, yee-ha-ing, and riding it to armageddon.

I saw this in a cinema when it came out, and loved it. It's astonishing that it cost only $60,000 to make. I mean sure, it wasn't exactly a cast of thousands; and the beach-ball alien was obviously cheap as chips ("It's your turn to feed the alien!"), but I had no trouble suspending belief. Maybe it was the drugs; I have no idea what I was taking back then.

For me it's the alien attack in the elevator. At that moment I couldn't determine if the ridiculous looking alien is tickling or eating him.

And of course the end of the elevator scene.

And the Rossini (Barber of Seville) score is just perfection.

*suspending disbelief

Thanks! Yes, that's what I meant!

Question from someone who knows nothing about making film: How do two film students get $60K? I get that's a small budget for a movie, but it's a huge amount for a pair of individuals.

>How do two film students get $60K?

I want to know this, as well, especially if you consider that $60K in 1972 was equivalent to today's $445K [1].

1: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1972?amount=60000

A friend of mine sold the house he inherited for making a movie.

They didn't get $60k for a student film as that is the final budget on the movie. They got a tiny fraction of that to make a short student film. It ended up being so good that they were able to use it as a proof of concept to secure most of that $60k budget to expand it into a feature-length movie.

Basically they made an MVP on the cheap and used that to secure additional funding to turn the MVP into an actual product.

Rich parents/social circle or maxing out credit cards, typically.

It's kinda misleading to call this a 'micro budget film', in 1973 this was a serious chunk of money, equivalent to $2-300,000 today.

Robert Rodriguez wrote a fun book about the making of his first feature film (El Mariachi) and how he saved up the money to finance it. On the strength of that he got a contract with Columbia Pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Without_a_Crew

As in any article that overlooks the great Ron Cobb, I just wanted to point out that his designs were influential into shifting the direction of how sci-fi should look.

It always takes more than the people who's names are mentioned to build anything.

He and Syd Mead were a pair. I think Ron Cobb's work was more "grounded" though.

I've got his cartoon books and Colorvision art book, his website is still up:

Disney cel art: (1956-)

Concept Art for Film (1974 - 2015): https://roncobb.net/film.html

Initial Dark Star napkin sketch: https://roncobb.net/img/filmography/02-Dark_Star/441-on-Ship...

Dark Star Gallery: https://roncobb.net/02-Dark_Star.html

Unrelated, but I would implore everyone who enjoys anything relating to the words "dark star" to listen to this compilation of the jams of every Dark Star the Grateful Dead played in 1972. It has so much continuity, and is a great bit to have playing while working. https://archive.org/details/DarkStar_1972

The only thing that'd make this even better is if after hearing 11.5 hours of Dark Star, it gracefully transitioned into El Paso!

Relevant to your comment (and not the film) is John Oswald's super-collage of many, many live recordings of Dark Star: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayfolded

I found out about Dark Star from the album "Trevor Something Does Not Exist" (https://youtu.be/LYOtZvwNCsc?feature=shared&t=2942), it uses the conversation with the bomb as part of music, which contains spoilers!

The band Pinback, named after Sergeant Pinback, also samples the film in a bunch of songs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDxylYWcHuA&list=OLAK5uy_kmJ...).

There's also the beloved (unrelated to the movie) Grateful Dead song Dark Star.

This movie blew my mind as a kid and a serves warning of things to come with AI that kinda became a movie trope, but had some memorable scenes in Dark Star:

<Commander Powell> Talk to the bomb.

<Doolittle> But I have been talking to it, sir. And Pinback's talking to it right now.

<Commander Powell> No, no, Doolittle. You talk to it.

<Commander Powell> Teach it phenomenology

> <Commander Powell> Teach it phenomenology

Oy vey:

> Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

My assumption is that it's an attempt to cause the bomb to be suicidal.

> phenomenology

Where I got my BA in philosophy the department head was all about Husserl.

Another philosophy professor from a neighboring college told a number of us about Dark Star. In hindsight I do wonder if it was because of the phenomenology reference, or because they were philosophers who took in 60s/70s/... scifi/speculative fiction.

I keep Dark Star in a nostalgic mental cabinet alongside Dr Strangelove and The Prisoner.

But somehow that last Cmdr Powell line, with italics, immediately makes me think of Schizopolis.

"Nomenclature"...

My first reasonably useful Linux computer was called "darkstar" because it was the default on Slackware.

I have taken to giving that name to my main computer.

Came to post the same. Slackware 3, Kernel 2.x IIRC. Installation from floppies so slow you could read the package descriptions during unarchiving. Always laughed reading "bison - a parser generator in the style of yacc". Awesome.

I like how the article brings up Alien, which Dan O'Bannon later wrote the screenplay for. They have a lot of similarities -- both presenting space travel not as glamorous but as something the future equivalent of truckers do, and also about the problems of picking up alien life without a quarantine, although it is played for laughs in Dark Star and deadly seriously in Alien.

It's worth watching "Jodorowsky's Dune" if you haven't to see the direct-line connection - Jodorowsky happened to see "Dark Star" playing at a film festival while out in California and wanted whoever did the special effects to come work on his doomed "Dune" adaptation. He hired O'Bannon, who came out and met future Alien collaborators HR Giger and Moebius. It's fair to say Alien would not have happened, (or would not be the Alien we know now), if not for Dark Star.

I think I remember reading in an interview with O'Bannon, likely linked from hn when he died, that he came up with the idea for Alien after experiencing a cinema audience in terrified silence through the elevator scene, instead of the intended laughs. Something along the lines of "if I can't make them laugh but make them fear without even trying, what if I do try?" If there's and truth to this story, Alien is quite literally a remake of a Dark Star side story, just pivoted a bit.

Never heard about that Jodorowsky angle before, thanks. Must be the most influencial movie that never happened.

You need to watch both of them: Jodorowsky's Dune and H.R Giger's documentary "Dark Star: HR Gigers Welt". Giger was a true artist to the bones, his house was like a macabre gothic castle from dracula, full of statues, books and art.

Jodorowsky hired Dan O'Bannon, HR Giger, Jean Giraud Moebius, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Pink Floyd... not to mention his own son.

He and Moebius created L'Incal and Metabarons, one of the wildest rides in the realm of european comics. Moebius was one of the most talented artists in the history of the Franco Belgian comics scene of France.

Surreal that Jodorowsky's Dune never materialized. I think it would have been truly amazing and far better than Lynch's Dune. I won't even mention the modern adaptation. How can the guy who made Blade Runner 2049 fails to deliver something so important for Science Fiction? Villeneuve was saved by legitimate actors on blade runner.

I first saw Alien with my roommate soon after we had both graduated from nautical school. We had a similar thought: the crew of the Nostromo were sailors. In their behavior, the things they talked and laughed and bitched about. Move the timeline back to late 20th century on a commercial oceangoing ship and they'd be right at home.

I love it, my wife hates it. It has been a running joke between us for the last twenty years.

It is an love-it-or-hate it type of movie. I didn't like it at all when I first saw it many years ago; now I appreciate it much more.

The video game that shares its name (if not its plot) isn't bad either:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(1984_video_game) https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/0001263

Disrupt has a nice track with samples from Dark Star called Bomb 20.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2r59XMMvM

The whole album Foundation Bit is full of samples from movies like Blade Runner, Tron, THX 1138 (George Lucas) etc.

A real gem if you like electronic/reggae.

The Forger (Meat Beat Manifesto) also samples Dark Star at the start and end of The Good The Bad And The Forger. Lots of other video samples in the track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kZQfM2z9mk

Am I missing something? Because Solyaris [1] predates Dark Star. Not mention though.

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/

Was Solaris even released to US cinemas in 1972? I can only find information that it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in the year of its release. And even if Carpenter and O'Brannon knew about the movie it might very well be that they didn't see it as influental as it is seen today in the western world. Apparently Lem didn't like the movie either, so it might very well have been overlooked at the time because it didn't fit the "Zeitgeist".

It was very slow-moving. First time I saw it, I fell asleep. The 2002 remake is more pacy, but I'm afraid I can't take Clooney seriously as an actor. I think it was 20 years before I watched the original again, and enjoyed it.

There's that whole 7 straight minutes of a self-driving car with no dialogue scene to filter out casual audiences before you even get into space, too.

Influence is not a straight line and more than one movie can "change sci-fi forever".

My immediate (incorrect) association upon seeing the words "Dark Star" on HN was with the Grateful Dead song, which is about 56 years old. The Live/Dead version was a true epiphany for me, now 18 years ago. After really only liking the late 60s Dead for about a decade I have apparently aged into liking their later stuff. There is a nice live video of Dark Star from 1974 on YouTube: search "Grateful Dead - Dark Star (Winterland 10/18/74)".

https://archive.org/details/dark-star-movie-1974-from-john-c...

Dan O'Bannon, RIP.

I hadn't realized the link between Dark Star and Red Dwarf! In retrospect, it's kind of obvious.

$60,000 1970s dollars is a "micro-budget"?

Who paid for it?

Not really micro. In 1970, the US dollar was about €1.8. Inflation since then has been 560% (here), so that would make for €600k.

Euros were introduced in 1999, and the preceding "European Currency Unit" (just for accounting) was introduced in 1979.

El Mariachi has entered the chat.

$7000 budget in 1992 that made director Robert Rodriguez famous, and happens to be a good movie.

Primer, one of the great time travel movies, also had a $7000 budget.

Both Primer and El Mariachi are excellent, excellent examples of how to make a quality movie on a tight budget.

Primer is an absolute mind funk. I've got to watch it again, twice in a row.

Like these films, but hate this indie budget math. The way to get to low number is to barter as much as possible and steal the rest. People still put the hours in, but nobody gets paid. Handful of key people get the ip and something for their reel. The rest get taken advance of. It’s like doing an open source project except end result is commercial product licensed to a company. By all means do films for cheap but at least pay people salary or give a piece of the ip.

They're doing it for exposure!

But really, they helped a friend - or family member - make a movie. I would help a friend make a movie. And I'd be thrilled if he made it big. Granted, I have the luxury of having a steady job - and of not having movie making be my career. But still.

I mean, I get what you're saying. But let's look at Robert Rodriguez and the cast of El Mariachi. He put several of them in Desperado, and I bet they got paid working money for that.

Looking through the cast of El Mariachi, it looks to me like every single one of them who made any other movies, also made movies with Robert Rodriguez. It seems like if they wanted to act, Rodriguez helped them get work. I don't know that for sure, but that's what Googling the results looks like.

I get that dynamic and maybe it’s not great to look at one of the all-time most succesful indie productions as an example. Rodriquez really did a lot by himself in that one also. Maybe to clarify a bit what I take issue with is the culture of celebrating no-budget success stories. It’s not less work to make those films so in the end you do spend the work hours, you just leave them out of accounting as nobody got paid. It’s really sort of a accounting trick leaving out sweat-equity. In what other field would we celebrate creating commercial products that take years of collective effort for cheap by not paying anyone.

Maybe it shows that I work in the field and get asked to do these all the time. Sometimes I do them, but it’s just sponsoring promising talent.

> Maybe it shows that I work in the field and get asked to do these all the time.

Oh man, yeah. Getting asked to do free labor in your field is rough. Sympathies.

> It’s not less work to make those films

It's more! That's part of what makes it impressive.

You can come at it from the perspective of "It's merely an accounting trick and slave labor" but I think that's missing it for what it is. Most art is created without an expected paycheck. Movies especially are collaborative and everyone involved in small indie projects with no budgets knew there were working for little to no pay. You think the actors, camera man, lighting and set guys, were all thinking they were going to make a bunch in the box office from Dark Star / Mariachi? Likely not. They probably were thinking they'd try their shot at exposure. Actors might get recognized and get a career out of it, or not. Film crew at least had something on their resume. It's not like the directors (Cameron, Rodriguez) were making any promises they couldn't keep.

A friend of mine in high school made a terrible zombie movie on a budget of approximately $5. He asked me to be in a scene and I happily agreed, I didn't feel taken advantage of at all. We also got the cops called on us for a noise complaint (we were filming at midnightish at a trailhead near some homes) so we even got some fun memories out of it.

if that movie went on to be extremely successful you might feel differently though.

I have a friend who works on low budget films, and it's a struggle. The directors are usually passionate and put in a lot of work, but also get all the credit and rewards if it succeeds. There's a budget, but it's mostly spent on paying travel expenses for out of state actors or for props and equipment and it's taken very personally if any background person want to be paid. "You'd take away from the quality of the movie just for your personal benefit! how greedy!" And in general expecting people with much less stake in the film to be just as invested and willing to sacrifice as they are without any of the upside.

>if that movie went on to be extremely successful you might feel differently though.

Nah, he did 95% of the work. I just put on some facepaint and shambled and moaned a little.

...was it Tropic Thunder? Are you Robert Downey Jr?

ah fair enough, idk your project, sounds like a fun time

just saying that people who are expected to put in significant hours to semiprofessional low budget movies sometimes feel exploited. if you don't for yours hell yeah

This is a good point but there are counter-example(s).

What about Kevin Smith with Clerks? Yes he got the IP and ostensibly the $/career but he's also brought basically everyone involved in that film with him along for his ride and continues to give them work in sequels/podcasts/tv shows etc.

It can be done ethically but to your point it doesn't seem to often be the case.

Well, plus the $200,000 that Columbia Pictures spent for post-production to fix it up for release to actual movie theaters. Still an amazing achievement, of course.

The average Hollywood movie in the early 1970s cost $6 million.

A budget of 1% the average counts as “micro.”

Sounds more like a centi-budget. ;)

Around 500k in today's dollars. I can not imagine a group of Adults raising this kind of Money with the expectation of no return, let alone a group of college kids. Shows you the privilege required to be able to make it.

I would guess only around .1 % of the US population would ever get this kind opportunity and we are one of the richest countries in the world.

One of the best debuts of all time

“It’s time to feed the alien”

It was only last year that I realized the country music opening theme "Benson, Arizona" was about relativistic travel through space, shortly after playing it because I had just driven through Benson, Arizona.

Lyrics, MP3 and background information here: https://www.benzedrine.ch/darkstar.html

It's interesting, that it predates '39 by Queen by a year: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%9939

Love that John Carpenter wrote the music.

Yes, he‘s a true Auteur. Writing, directing and composing (and often playing) the score.

There's now a Dark Star Road in Benson. Someone's a fan.

The group Clam Chowder, who played at conventions in the Washington, DC area and beyond, did a cover of Benson Arizona that was extremely popular at their concerts.

When I saw "Dark Star" was fifty years old, I was confused as Mos Def and Talib Kweli have not been around for that long:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Star_(rap_duo)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mos_Def_%26_Talib_Kweli_Are_Bl...

Their song "RE:DEFinition":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JQpnilvvk4

Also Mos Def's "Mathematics":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5vw4ajnWGA

Dark Star, Black Star, Purple Star, Purple Rain… Hey! The article ain’t about Prince, either?!

Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star. Not Dark Star.

It's the literal name of their first album and you even linked to the right wikipedia page.

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