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The Abyss

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Konten disediakan oleh Edward Havens. Semua konten podcast termasuk episode, grafik, dan deskripsi podcast diunggah dan disediakan langsung oleh Edward Havens atau mitra platform podcast mereka. Jika Anda yakin seseorang menggunakan karya berhak cipta Anda tanpa izin, Anda dapat mengikuti proses yang dijelaskan di sini https://id.player.fm/legal.

On this, our 100th episode, we eschew any silly self-congratulatory show to get right into one of James Cameron's most under appreciated films, his 1989 anti-nuke allegory The Abyss.

----more----

TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

We're finally here.

Episode 100.

In the word of the immortal Owen Wilson, wow.

But rather than throw myself a celebratory show basking in my own modesty, we’re just going to get right into another episode. And this week’s featured film is one of my favorites of the decade. A film that should have been a hit, that still informs the work of its director more than thirty years later.

But, as always, a little backstory.

As I quite regularly say on this show, I often do not know what I’m going to be talking about on the next episode as I put the finishing touches on the last one. And once again, this was the case when I completed the show last week, on Escape to Victory, although for a change, I finished the episode a day earlier than I usually do, so that would give me more time to think about what would be next.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday. All gone. Still have no clue what I’m going to write about.

Sunday arrives, and my wife and I decide to go see Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D at our local IMAX theatre. I was hesitant to see the film, because the first one literally broke my brain in 2009, and I’m still not 100% sure I fully recovered. It didn’t break my brain because it was some kind of staggering work of heartbreaking genius, but because the friend who thought he was being kind by buying me a ticket to see it at a different local IMAX theatre misread the seating chart for the theatre and got me a ticket in the very front row of the theatre. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie in IMAX 3D, but that first row is not the most advantageous place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. But because the theatre was otherwise sold out, I sat there, watching Avatar in 3D from the worst possible seat in the house, and I could not think straight for a week. I actually called off work for a few days, which was easy to do considering I was the boss at my theatre, but I have definitely seen a cognitive decline since I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D in the worst possible conditions. I’ve never felt the need to see it again, and I was fine not seeing the new one. But my wife wanted to see it, and we had discount tickets to the theatre, so off we went.

Thankfully, this time, I chose the seats for myself, and got us some very good seats in a not very crowded theatre, nearly in the spot that would be the ideal viewing position for that specific theatre. And I actually enjoyed the movie.

There are very few filmmakers who can tell a story like James Cameron, and there are even fewer who could get away with pushing a pro-conservation, pro-liberal, pro-environment agenda on an unsuspecting populace who would otherwise never go for such a thing.

But as I was watching it, two things hit me.

One, I hate high frame rate movies. Especially when the overall look of the movie was changing between obviously shot on video and mimicking the feel of film so much, it felt like a three year old got ahold of the TV remote and was constantly pushing the button that turned motion smoothing off and on and off and on and off and on, over and over and over again, for three and a half hours.

Two, I couldn’t also help but notice how many moments and motifs Cameron was seemingly borrowing from his under-appreciated 1989 movie The Abyss.

And there it was.

The topic for our 100th episode.

The Abyss.

And, as always, before we get to the movie itself, some more background.

James Francis Cameron was born in 1954 in small town in the middle eastern part of the Ontario province of Canada, about a nine hour drive north of Toronto, a town so small that it wouldn’t even get its first television station until 1971, the year his family would to Brea, California. After he graduated from high school in 1973, Cameron would attend Fullerton College in Orange County, where would initially study physics before switching to English a year later. He’d leave school in 1974 and work various jobs including as a truck driver and a janitor, while writing screenplays in his spare time, when he wasn’t in a library learning about movie special effects.

Like many, many people in 1977, including myself, Star Wars would change his life. After seeing the movie, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver and decided he was going to break into the film industry by any means necessary.

If you’ve ever followed James Cameron’s career, you’ve no doubt heard him say on more than one occasion that if you want to be a filmmaker, to just do it. Pick up a camera and start shooting something. And that’s exactly what he did, not a year later.

In 1978, he would co-write, co-produce, co-direct and do the production design for a 12 minute sci-fi short called Xenogenesis. Produced at a cost of $20,000 raised from a dentist and starring his future T2 co-writer William Wisher, Xenogenesis would show just how creative Cameron could be when it came to making something with a low budget look like it cost far more to produce. There’s a not very good transfer of the short available on YouTube, which I will link to in the transcript for this episode on our website, at The80sMoviePodcast.com (). But it’s interesting to watch because you can already see themes that Cameron will revisit time and time again are already fully formed in the storyteller’s mind.

Once the short was completed, Cameron screened it for the dentist, who hated it and demanded his money back. But the short would come to the attention of Roger Corman, The Pope of Pop Cinema, who would hire Cameron to work on several of his company’s upcoming feature films. After working as a production assistant on Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Cameron would move up becoming the art director on Battle Beyond the Stars, which at the time, at a cost of $2m, would be the most expensive movie Corman would have produced in his then-26 year career, as the production designer on Galaxy of Terror, and help to design the title character for Aaron Lipstadt’s Android.

Cameron would branch out from Corman to work on the special effects for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, but Corman would bring Cameron back into the fold with the promise of running the special effects department for the sequel to Joe Dante’s surprise 1978 hit Piranha. But the film’s original director, Miller Drake, would leave the production due to continued differences with the Italian producer, and Cameron would be moved into the director’s chair. But like Drake, Cameron would struggle with the producer to get the film completed, and would eventually disavow the film as something he doesn’t consider to be his actual work as a director. And while the film would not be any kind of success by any conceivable measure, as a work of storytelling or as a critical or financial success, it would give him two things that would help him in his near future.

The first thing was an association with character actor Lance Henriksen, who would go on to be a featured actor in Cameron’s next two films.

The second thing would be a dream he would have while finishing the film in Rome. Tired of being in Italy to finish the film, and sick with a high grade fever, Cameron would have a nightmare about an invincible cyborg hit-man from the future who had been sent to assassinate him.

Sound familiar?

We’ve already discussed how The Terminator came to be in our April 2020 episode on Hemdale Films, so we’ll skip over that here. Suffice it to say that the film was a global success, turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a beloved action star, and giving Cameron the clout to move on to ever bigger films.

That even bigger film was, of course, the 1986 blockbuster Aliens, which would not only become Cameron’s second big global box office success, but would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including a well deserved acting nomination for Sigourney Weaver, which came as a surprise to many at the time because actors in what are perceived to be horror, action and/or sci-fi movies usually don’t get such an accolade.

After the success of Aliens, Twentieth Century-Fox would engage Cameron and his producing partner, Gale Anne Hurd, who during the making of Aliens would become his second wife, on a risky project.

The Abyss.

Cameron had first come up with the idea for The Abyss while he was still a student in high school, inspired by a science lecture he attended that featured Francis J. Falejczyk, the first human to breathe fluid through his lungs in experiments held at Duke University. Cameron’s story would involve a group of underwater scientists who accidentally discover aliens living at the bottom of the ocean floor near their lab.

Shortly after he wrote his initial draft of the story, it would be filed away and forgotten about for more than a decade.

While in England shooting Aliens, Cameron and Hurd would watch a National Geographic documentary about remote operated vehicles operating deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, and Cameron would be reminded of his old story. When the returned to the United States once the film was complete, Cameron would turn his short story into a screenplay, changing the main characters from scientists to oil-rig workers, feeling audiences would be able to better connect to blue collar workers than white collar eggheads, and once Cameron’s first draft of the screenplay was complete, the couple agreed it would be their next film.

Cameron and Hurd would start the complex process of pre-production in the early days of 1988. Not only would they need to need to find a place large enough where they could film the underwater sequences in a controlled environment with life-size sets under real water, they would need to spend time designing and building a number of state of the art camera rigs and costumes that would work for the project and be able to capture the actors doing their craft in the water and keep them alive during filming, as well as a communications system that would not only allow Cameron to talk to his actors, but also allow the dialogue to be recorded live underwater for the first time in cinema history.

After considering filming in the Bahamas and in Malta, the later near the sets constructed for Robert Altman’s Popeye movie nearly a decade before, Cameron and Hurd would find their perfect shooting location outside Gaffney, South Carolina: an uncompleted and abandoned $700m nuclear power plant that had been purchased by local independent filmmaker Earl Owensby, who we profiled to a certain degree in our May 2022 episode about the 3D Movie craze of the early 1980s.

In what was supposed to be the power plant’s primary reactor containment vessel, 55 feet deep and with a 209 foot circumference, the main set of the Deepcore rig would be built. That tank would hold seven and a half million gallons of water, and after the set was built, would take five days to completely fill. Next to the main tank was a secondary tank, an unused turbine pit that could hold two and a half million gallons of water, where most of the quote unquote exteriors not involving the Deepcore rig would be shot.

I’m going to sidetrack for a moment to demonstrate just how powerful a force James Cameron already was in Hollywood by the end of 1987. When word about The Abyss was announced in the Hollywood trade papers, both MGM and Tri-Star Pictures started developing their own underwater action/sci-fi films, in the hopes that they could beat The Abyss to theatres, even if there was scant information about The Abyss announced at the time.

Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham’s DeepStar Six would arrive in theatres first, in January 1989, while Rambo: First Blood Part Two director George P. Cosmastos’ Leviathan would arrive in March 1989. Like The Abyss, both films would feature deep-sea colonies, but unlike The Abyss, both featured those underwater workers being terrorized by an evil creature. Because if you’re trying to copy the secret underwater action/sci-fi movie from the director of The Terminator and Aliens, he’s most definitely going to do evil underwater creatures and not peace-loving aliens who don’t want to hurt humanity.

Right?

Suffice it to say, neither DeepStar Six or Leviathan made any kind of impact at the box office or with critics. DeepStar Six couldn’t even muster up its modest $8.5m budget in ticket sales, while Leviathan would miss making up its $25m budget by more than $10m. Although, ironically, Leviathan would shoot in the Malta water tanks Cameron would reject for The Abyss.

Okay. Back to The Abyss.

Rather than cast movie stars, Cameron would bring in two well-respected actors who were known to audiences but not really that famous.

For the leading role of Bud Brigman, the foreman for the underwater Deepcore rig, Cameron would cast Ed Harris, best known at the time for playing John Glenn in The Right Stuff, while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio would be recognizable to some for playing Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in The Color of Money, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Other actors would include Michael Biehn, Cameron’s co-star from The Terminator and Aliens, Leo Burmester, who had been featured in Broadcast News and The Last Temptation of Christ, Todd Graff, who had starred in Tony Bill’s Five Corners alongside Jodie Foster and John Turturro, character actor John Bedford Lloyd, Late Night with David Letterman featured actor Chris Elliott in a rare non-comedy role, and Ken Jenkins, who would become best known as Doctor Kelso on Scrubs years down the road who had only made two movies before this point of his career.

More than two millions dollars would be spent creating the underwater sets for the film while Cameron, his actors and several major members of the crew including cinematographer Mikael Salomon, spent a week in the Cayman Islands, training for underwater diving, as nearly half of the movie would be shot underwater. It was also a good distraction for Cameron himself, as he and Hurd had split up as a couple during the earliest days of pre-production.

While they would go through their divorce during the filming of the movie, they would remain professional partners on the film, and do their best to not allow their private lives to seep into the production any more than it already had in the script.

Production on The Abyss would begin on August 15th, 1988, and would be amongst the toughest shoots for pretty much everyone involved. The film would endure a number of technical mishaps, some due to poorly built supports, some due to force majeure, literal Acts of God, that would push the film’s production schedule to nearly six months in length and its budget from $36m to $42m, and would cause emotional breakdowns from its director on down. Mastrantonio would, during the shooting of the Lindsey resuscitation scene, stormed off the set when the camera ran out of film during the fifteenth take, when she was laying on the floor of the rig, wet, partially naked and somewhat bruised from being slapped around by Harris during the scene. “We are not animals!” she would scream at Cameron as she left. Harris would have to continue shooting the scene, yelling at nothing on the ground while trying to save the life of his character’s estranged wife. On his way back to his hotel room after finishing that scene, Harris would have to pull over to the side of the road because he couldn’t stop crying.

Biehn, who had already made a couple movies with the meticulous director, noted that he spent five months in Gaffney, but maybe only worked three or four weeks during that entire time. He would note that, during the filming of one of his scenes underwater, the lights went out. He was thirty feet underwater. It was so dark he couldn’t see his own hand in front of him, and he genuinely wondered right then and there if this was how he was going to die. Harris was so frustrated with Cameron by the end of the shoot that he threatened to not do any promotion for the film when it was released into theatres, although by the time that happened, he would be making the rounds with the press.

After 140 days of principal photography, and a lawsuit Owensby filed against the production that tried to kick them out of his studio for damaging one of the water tanks, the film would finally finish shooting on December 8th, by which time, Fox had already produced and released a teaser trailer for the movie which featured absolutely no footage from the film. Why? Because they had gotten word that Warners was about to release their first teaser trailer for their big movie for 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman, and Fox didn’t want their big movie for 1989 to be left in the dust.

Thirty-four years later, I still remember the day we got both trailers in, because they both arrived at my then theatre, the 41st Avenue Playhouse in Capitola, Calfornia, within five minutes of each other. For the record, The Abyss did arrive first. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the day before we opened the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged, and both Fox and Warners wanted theatres to play their movie’s trailer, but not the other movie’s trailer, in front of the film. I programmed both of them anyway, with Batman playing before The Abyss, which would be the last trailer before the film, because I was a bigger Cameron fan than Burton. And as cool as the trailer for Batman was, the trailer for The Abyss was mind-blowing, even if it had no footage from the film. I’ll provide a link to that first Abyss teaser trailer on the website as well.

But I digress.

While Cameron worked on editing the film in Los Angeles, two major teams were working on the film’s effects. The artists from Dreamquest Images would complete eighty effects shots for the film, including filming a seventy-five foot long miniature submarine being tossed around through a storm, while Industrial Lights and Magic pushed the envelope for computer graphics, digitally creating a water tentacle manipulated by the aliens that would mimic both Bud and Lindsey in an attempt to communicate with the humans.

It would take ILM six months to create the minute and fifteen second long sequence.

Originally slated to be released in time for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, one of the busiest and most important weekends of the year for theatres, The Abyss would be held back until August 9th, 1989, due to some effects work not being completed in time, and for Cameron to rework the ending, which test audiences were not too fond of.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

When The Abyss opened in 1533 theatres, it would open to second place that weekend with $9.3m, only $350k behind the Ron Howard family dramedy Parenthood. The reviews from critics was uniformly outstanding, with many praising the acting and the groundbreaking special effects, while some would lament on the rather abrupt ending of the storyline.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

In its second week, The Abyss would fall to third place, its $7.2m haul behind Parenthood again, at $7.6m, as well as Uncle Buck, which would gross $8.8m. The film would continue to play in theatres for several weeks, never losing more than 34% of its audience in any given week, until Fox abruptly stopped tracking the film after nine weeks and $54.2m in ticket sales.

By the time the film came out, I was managing a dollar house in San Jose, a point I know I have mentioned a number of times and even did an episode about in September 2021, but I can tell you that we did pretty good business for The Abyss when we got the film in October 1989, and I would hang on to the film until just before Christmas, not because the film was no longer doing any business but because, as I mentioned on that episode, I wanted to play more family friendly films for the holidays, since part of my pay was tied to my concessions sales, and I wanted to make a lot of money then, so I could buy my girlfriend of nearly a year, Tracy, a nice gift for Christmas. Impress her dad, who really didn’t like me too much.

The film would go on to be nominated for four Academy Awards, including for Mikael Salomon’s superb cinematography, winning for its special effects, and would enjoy a small cult following on home video… until shortly after the release of Cameron’s next film, Terminator 2.

Rumors would start to circulate that Cameron’s original cut of The Abyss was nearly a half-hour longer than the one released into theatres, and that he was supposedly working on a director’s cut of some kind. The rumor was finally proven true when a provision in James Cameron’s $500m, five year financing deal between Fox and the director’s new production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, included a $500k allotment for Cameron to complete his director’s cut.

Thanks to the advancements in computer graphics between 1989 and 1991, Industrial Lights and Magic was able to apply what they created for T2 into the never fully completed tidal wave sequence that was supposed to end the movie. Overall, what was now being called The Abyss: Special Edition would see its run time expanded by 28 minutes, and Cameron’s anti-nuke allegory would finally be fully fleshed out.

The Special Edition would open at the Loews Village VII in New York City and the Century Plaza Cinemas in Century City, literally down the street from the Fox lot, on land that used to be part of the Fox lot, on February 26th, 1993. Unsurprisingly, the critical consensus for the expanded film was even better, with critics noting the film’s story scope had been considerably broadened. The film would do fairly well for a four year old film only opening on two screens, earning $21k, good enough for Fox to expand the footprint of the film into more major markets. After eight weeks in only a total of twelve theatres, the updated film would finish its second run in theatres with more than $238k in ticket sales.

I love both versions of The Abyss, although, like with Aliens and Cameron Crowe’s untitled version of Almost Famous, I prefer the longer, Special Edition cut. Harris and Mastrantonio gave two of the best performances of 1989 in the film. For me, it solidified what I already knew about Harris, that he was one of the best actors of his generation.

I had seen Mastrantonio as Tony Montana’s sister in Scarface and in The Color of Money, but what she did on screen in The Abyss, it still puzzles me to this day how she didn’t have a much stronger career. Did you know her last feature film was The Perfect Storm, with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, 23 years ago? Not that she stopped working. She’s had main or recurring roles on a number of television shows since then, including Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Blindspot and The Punisher, but it feels like she should have had a bigger and better career in movies.

Cameron, of course, would become The King of the World. Terminator 2, True Lies, Titanic, and his two Avatar movies to date were all global box office hits. His eight feature films have grossed over $8b worldwide to date, and have been nominated for 45 Academy Awards, winning 21.

There’s a saying amongst Hollywood watchers. Never bet against James Cameron. Personally, I wish I could have not bet against James Cameron more often. Since the release of The Abyss in 1989, Cameron has only made five dramatic narratives, taking twelve years off between Titanic and Avatar, and another thirteen years off between Avatar and Avatar 2. And while he was partially busy with two documentaries about life under water, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep, it seems that there were other stories he could have told while he was waiting for technology to catch up to his vision of how he wanted to make the Avatar movies.

Another action film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. An unexpected foray into romantic comedy. The adaptation of Taylor Stevens’ The Informationalist that Cameron has been threatening to make for more than a decade. The adaptation of Charles Pelligrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima he was going to make after the first Avatar. Anything. Filmmakers only have so many films in them, and Cameron has only made eight films in nearly forty years. I’m greedy. I want more from him, and not just more Avatar movies.

In the years after its initial release, both Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio have refused to talk about the film with interviewers and at audience Q&As for other movies. The last time Harris has ever mentioned The Abyss was more than twenty years ago, when he said he was never going to talk about the film again after stating "Asking me how I was treated on The Abyss is like asking a soldier how he was treated in Vietnam.” For her part, Mastrantonio would only say "The Abyss was a lot of things. Fun to make was not one of them.”

It bothers me that so many people involved in the making of a film I love so dearly were emotionally scarred by the making of it. It’s hard not to notice that none of the actors in The Abyss, including the star of his first three films, Michael Biehn, never worked with Cameron again. That he couldn’t work with Gale Anne Hurd again outside of a contractual obligation on T2.

My final thought for today is that I hope that we’ll someday finally get The Abyss, be it the theatrical version or the Special Edition but preferably both, in 4K Ultra HD. It’s been promised for years. It’s apparently been completed for years. Cameron says it was up to Fox, now Disney, to get it out. Fox, now Disney, says they’ve been waiting for Cameron to sign off on it. During a recent press tour for Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron said everything is done and that a 4K UHD Blu-ray should be released no later than March of this year, but we’ll see. That’s just a little more than a month from the time I publish this episode, and there have been no official announcements from Disney Home Video about a new release of the film, which has never been available on Blu-ray after 15 years of the format’s existence, and has been out of print on DVD for almost as long.

So there it is. Our 100th episode. I thank you for finding the show, listening to the show, and sticking with the show.

We’ll talk again soon.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about James Cameron, The Abyss, and the other movies we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.

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The Abyss

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Konten disediakan oleh Edward Havens. Semua konten podcast termasuk episode, grafik, dan deskripsi podcast diunggah dan disediakan langsung oleh Edward Havens atau mitra platform podcast mereka. Jika Anda yakin seseorang menggunakan karya berhak cipta Anda tanpa izin, Anda dapat mengikuti proses yang dijelaskan di sini https://id.player.fm/legal.

On this, our 100th episode, we eschew any silly self-congratulatory show to get right into one of James Cameron's most under appreciated films, his 1989 anti-nuke allegory The Abyss.

----more----

TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

We're finally here.

Episode 100.

In the word of the immortal Owen Wilson, wow.

But rather than throw myself a celebratory show basking in my own modesty, we’re just going to get right into another episode. And this week’s featured film is one of my favorites of the decade. A film that should have been a hit, that still informs the work of its director more than thirty years later.

But, as always, a little backstory.

As I quite regularly say on this show, I often do not know what I’m going to be talking about on the next episode as I put the finishing touches on the last one. And once again, this was the case when I completed the show last week, on Escape to Victory, although for a change, I finished the episode a day earlier than I usually do, so that would give me more time to think about what would be next.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday. All gone. Still have no clue what I’m going to write about.

Sunday arrives, and my wife and I decide to go see Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D at our local IMAX theatre. I was hesitant to see the film, because the first one literally broke my brain in 2009, and I’m still not 100% sure I fully recovered. It didn’t break my brain because it was some kind of staggering work of heartbreaking genius, but because the friend who thought he was being kind by buying me a ticket to see it at a different local IMAX theatre misread the seating chart for the theatre and got me a ticket in the very front row of the theatre. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a movie in IMAX 3D, but that first row is not the most advantageous place to watch an IMAX movie in 3D. But because the theatre was otherwise sold out, I sat there, watching Avatar in 3D from the worst possible seat in the house, and I could not think straight for a week. I actually called off work for a few days, which was easy to do considering I was the boss at my theatre, but I have definitely seen a cognitive decline since I saw Avatar in IMAX 3D in the worst possible conditions. I’ve never felt the need to see it again, and I was fine not seeing the new one. But my wife wanted to see it, and we had discount tickets to the theatre, so off we went.

Thankfully, this time, I chose the seats for myself, and got us some very good seats in a not very crowded theatre, nearly in the spot that would be the ideal viewing position for that specific theatre. And I actually enjoyed the movie.

There are very few filmmakers who can tell a story like James Cameron, and there are even fewer who could get away with pushing a pro-conservation, pro-liberal, pro-environment agenda on an unsuspecting populace who would otherwise never go for such a thing.

But as I was watching it, two things hit me.

One, I hate high frame rate movies. Especially when the overall look of the movie was changing between obviously shot on video and mimicking the feel of film so much, it felt like a three year old got ahold of the TV remote and was constantly pushing the button that turned motion smoothing off and on and off and on and off and on, over and over and over again, for three and a half hours.

Two, I couldn’t also help but notice how many moments and motifs Cameron was seemingly borrowing from his under-appreciated 1989 movie The Abyss.

And there it was.

The topic for our 100th episode.

The Abyss.

And, as always, before we get to the movie itself, some more background.

James Francis Cameron was born in 1954 in small town in the middle eastern part of the Ontario province of Canada, about a nine hour drive north of Toronto, a town so small that it wouldn’t even get its first television station until 1971, the year his family would to Brea, California. After he graduated from high school in 1973, Cameron would attend Fullerton College in Orange County, where would initially study physics before switching to English a year later. He’d leave school in 1974 and work various jobs including as a truck driver and a janitor, while writing screenplays in his spare time, when he wasn’t in a library learning about movie special effects.

Like many, many people in 1977, including myself, Star Wars would change his life. After seeing the movie, Cameron quit his job as a truck driver and decided he was going to break into the film industry by any means necessary.

If you’ve ever followed James Cameron’s career, you’ve no doubt heard him say on more than one occasion that if you want to be a filmmaker, to just do it. Pick up a camera and start shooting something. And that’s exactly what he did, not a year later.

In 1978, he would co-write, co-produce, co-direct and do the production design for a 12 minute sci-fi short called Xenogenesis. Produced at a cost of $20,000 raised from a dentist and starring his future T2 co-writer William Wisher, Xenogenesis would show just how creative Cameron could be when it came to making something with a low budget look like it cost far more to produce. There’s a not very good transfer of the short available on YouTube, which I will link to in the transcript for this episode on our website, at The80sMoviePodcast.com (). But it’s interesting to watch because you can already see themes that Cameron will revisit time and time again are already fully formed in the storyteller’s mind.

Once the short was completed, Cameron screened it for the dentist, who hated it and demanded his money back. But the short would come to the attention of Roger Corman, The Pope of Pop Cinema, who would hire Cameron to work on several of his company’s upcoming feature films. After working as a production assistant on Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Cameron would move up becoming the art director on Battle Beyond the Stars, which at the time, at a cost of $2m, would be the most expensive movie Corman would have produced in his then-26 year career, as the production designer on Galaxy of Terror, and help to design the title character for Aaron Lipstadt’s Android.

Cameron would branch out from Corman to work on the special effects for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, but Corman would bring Cameron back into the fold with the promise of running the special effects department for the sequel to Joe Dante’s surprise 1978 hit Piranha. But the film’s original director, Miller Drake, would leave the production due to continued differences with the Italian producer, and Cameron would be moved into the director’s chair. But like Drake, Cameron would struggle with the producer to get the film completed, and would eventually disavow the film as something he doesn’t consider to be his actual work as a director. And while the film would not be any kind of success by any conceivable measure, as a work of storytelling or as a critical or financial success, it would give him two things that would help him in his near future.

The first thing was an association with character actor Lance Henriksen, who would go on to be a featured actor in Cameron’s next two films.

The second thing would be a dream he would have while finishing the film in Rome. Tired of being in Italy to finish the film, and sick with a high grade fever, Cameron would have a nightmare about an invincible cyborg hit-man from the future who had been sent to assassinate him.

Sound familiar?

We’ve already discussed how The Terminator came to be in our April 2020 episode on Hemdale Films, so we’ll skip over that here. Suffice it to say that the film was a global success, turning Arnold Schwarzenegger into a beloved action star, and giving Cameron the clout to move on to ever bigger films.

That even bigger film was, of course, the 1986 blockbuster Aliens, which would not only become Cameron’s second big global box office success, but would be nominated for seven Academy Awards, including a well deserved acting nomination for Sigourney Weaver, which came as a surprise to many at the time because actors in what are perceived to be horror, action and/or sci-fi movies usually don’t get such an accolade.

After the success of Aliens, Twentieth Century-Fox would engage Cameron and his producing partner, Gale Anne Hurd, who during the making of Aliens would become his second wife, on a risky project.

The Abyss.

Cameron had first come up with the idea for The Abyss while he was still a student in high school, inspired by a science lecture he attended that featured Francis J. Falejczyk, the first human to breathe fluid through his lungs in experiments held at Duke University. Cameron’s story would involve a group of underwater scientists who accidentally discover aliens living at the bottom of the ocean floor near their lab.

Shortly after he wrote his initial draft of the story, it would be filed away and forgotten about for more than a decade.

While in England shooting Aliens, Cameron and Hurd would watch a National Geographic documentary about remote operated vehicles operating deep in the North Atlantic Ocean, and Cameron would be reminded of his old story. When the returned to the United States once the film was complete, Cameron would turn his short story into a screenplay, changing the main characters from scientists to oil-rig workers, feeling audiences would be able to better connect to blue collar workers than white collar eggheads, and once Cameron’s first draft of the screenplay was complete, the couple agreed it would be their next film.

Cameron and Hurd would start the complex process of pre-production in the early days of 1988. Not only would they need to need to find a place large enough where they could film the underwater sequences in a controlled environment with life-size sets under real water, they would need to spend time designing and building a number of state of the art camera rigs and costumes that would work for the project and be able to capture the actors doing their craft in the water and keep them alive during filming, as well as a communications system that would not only allow Cameron to talk to his actors, but also allow the dialogue to be recorded live underwater for the first time in cinema history.

After considering filming in the Bahamas and in Malta, the later near the sets constructed for Robert Altman’s Popeye movie nearly a decade before, Cameron and Hurd would find their perfect shooting location outside Gaffney, South Carolina: an uncompleted and abandoned $700m nuclear power plant that had been purchased by local independent filmmaker Earl Owensby, who we profiled to a certain degree in our May 2022 episode about the 3D Movie craze of the early 1980s.

In what was supposed to be the power plant’s primary reactor containment vessel, 55 feet deep and with a 209 foot circumference, the main set of the Deepcore rig would be built. That tank would hold seven and a half million gallons of water, and after the set was built, would take five days to completely fill. Next to the main tank was a secondary tank, an unused turbine pit that could hold two and a half million gallons of water, where most of the quote unquote exteriors not involving the Deepcore rig would be shot.

I’m going to sidetrack for a moment to demonstrate just how powerful a force James Cameron already was in Hollywood by the end of 1987. When word about The Abyss was announced in the Hollywood trade papers, both MGM and Tri-Star Pictures started developing their own underwater action/sci-fi films, in the hopes that they could beat The Abyss to theatres, even if there was scant information about The Abyss announced at the time.

Friday the 13th director Sean S. Cunningham’s DeepStar Six would arrive in theatres first, in January 1989, while Rambo: First Blood Part Two director George P. Cosmastos’ Leviathan would arrive in March 1989. Like The Abyss, both films would feature deep-sea colonies, but unlike The Abyss, both featured those underwater workers being terrorized by an evil creature. Because if you’re trying to copy the secret underwater action/sci-fi movie from the director of The Terminator and Aliens, he’s most definitely going to do evil underwater creatures and not peace-loving aliens who don’t want to hurt humanity.

Right?

Suffice it to say, neither DeepStar Six or Leviathan made any kind of impact at the box office or with critics. DeepStar Six couldn’t even muster up its modest $8.5m budget in ticket sales, while Leviathan would miss making up its $25m budget by more than $10m. Although, ironically, Leviathan would shoot in the Malta water tanks Cameron would reject for The Abyss.

Okay. Back to The Abyss.

Rather than cast movie stars, Cameron would bring in two well-respected actors who were known to audiences but not really that famous.

For the leading role of Bud Brigman, the foreman for the underwater Deepcore rig, Cameron would cast Ed Harris, best known at the time for playing John Glenn in The Right Stuff, while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio would be recognizable to some for playing Tom Cruise’s girlfriend in The Color of Money, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Other actors would include Michael Biehn, Cameron’s co-star from The Terminator and Aliens, Leo Burmester, who had been featured in Broadcast News and The Last Temptation of Christ, Todd Graff, who had starred in Tony Bill’s Five Corners alongside Jodie Foster and John Turturro, character actor John Bedford Lloyd, Late Night with David Letterman featured actor Chris Elliott in a rare non-comedy role, and Ken Jenkins, who would become best known as Doctor Kelso on Scrubs years down the road who had only made two movies before this point of his career.

More than two millions dollars would be spent creating the underwater sets for the film while Cameron, his actors and several major members of the crew including cinematographer Mikael Salomon, spent a week in the Cayman Islands, training for underwater diving, as nearly half of the movie would be shot underwater. It was also a good distraction for Cameron himself, as he and Hurd had split up as a couple during the earliest days of pre-production.

While they would go through their divorce during the filming of the movie, they would remain professional partners on the film, and do their best to not allow their private lives to seep into the production any more than it already had in the script.

Production on The Abyss would begin on August 15th, 1988, and would be amongst the toughest shoots for pretty much everyone involved. The film would endure a number of technical mishaps, some due to poorly built supports, some due to force majeure, literal Acts of God, that would push the film’s production schedule to nearly six months in length and its budget from $36m to $42m, and would cause emotional breakdowns from its director on down. Mastrantonio would, during the shooting of the Lindsey resuscitation scene, stormed off the set when the camera ran out of film during the fifteenth take, when she was laying on the floor of the rig, wet, partially naked and somewhat bruised from being slapped around by Harris during the scene. “We are not animals!” she would scream at Cameron as she left. Harris would have to continue shooting the scene, yelling at nothing on the ground while trying to save the life of his character’s estranged wife. On his way back to his hotel room after finishing that scene, Harris would have to pull over to the side of the road because he couldn’t stop crying.

Biehn, who had already made a couple movies with the meticulous director, noted that he spent five months in Gaffney, but maybe only worked three or four weeks during that entire time. He would note that, during the filming of one of his scenes underwater, the lights went out. He was thirty feet underwater. It was so dark he couldn’t see his own hand in front of him, and he genuinely wondered right then and there if this was how he was going to die. Harris was so frustrated with Cameron by the end of the shoot that he threatened to not do any promotion for the film when it was released into theatres, although by the time that happened, he would be making the rounds with the press.

After 140 days of principal photography, and a lawsuit Owensby filed against the production that tried to kick them out of his studio for damaging one of the water tanks, the film would finally finish shooting on December 8th, by which time, Fox had already produced and released a teaser trailer for the movie which featured absolutely no footage from the film. Why? Because they had gotten word that Warners was about to release their first teaser trailer for their big movie for 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman, and Fox didn’t want their big movie for 1989 to be left in the dust.

Thirty-four years later, I still remember the day we got both trailers in, because they both arrived at my then theatre, the 41st Avenue Playhouse in Capitola, Calfornia, within five minutes of each other. For the record, The Abyss did arrive first. It was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, the day before we opened the Bill Murray comedy Scrooged, and both Fox and Warners wanted theatres to play their movie’s trailer, but not the other movie’s trailer, in front of the film. I programmed both of them anyway, with Batman playing before The Abyss, which would be the last trailer before the film, because I was a bigger Cameron fan than Burton. And as cool as the trailer for Batman was, the trailer for The Abyss was mind-blowing, even if it had no footage from the film. I’ll provide a link to that first Abyss teaser trailer on the website as well.

But I digress.

While Cameron worked on editing the film in Los Angeles, two major teams were working on the film’s effects. The artists from Dreamquest Images would complete eighty effects shots for the film, including filming a seventy-five foot long miniature submarine being tossed around through a storm, while Industrial Lights and Magic pushed the envelope for computer graphics, digitally creating a water tentacle manipulated by the aliens that would mimic both Bud and Lindsey in an attempt to communicate with the humans.

It would take ILM six months to create the minute and fifteen second long sequence.

Originally slated to be released in time for the Fourth of July holiday weekend, one of the busiest and most important weekends of the year for theatres, The Abyss would be held back until August 9th, 1989, due to some effects work not being completed in time, and for Cameron to rework the ending, which test audiences were not too fond of.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

When The Abyss opened in 1533 theatres, it would open to second place that weekend with $9.3m, only $350k behind the Ron Howard family dramedy Parenthood. The reviews from critics was uniformly outstanding, with many praising the acting and the groundbreaking special effects, while some would lament on the rather abrupt ending of the storyline.

We’ll get back to that in a moment.

In its second week, The Abyss would fall to third place, its $7.2m haul behind Parenthood again, at $7.6m, as well as Uncle Buck, which would gross $8.8m. The film would continue to play in theatres for several weeks, never losing more than 34% of its audience in any given week, until Fox abruptly stopped tracking the film after nine weeks and $54.2m in ticket sales.

By the time the film came out, I was managing a dollar house in San Jose, a point I know I have mentioned a number of times and even did an episode about in September 2021, but I can tell you that we did pretty good business for The Abyss when we got the film in October 1989, and I would hang on to the film until just before Christmas, not because the film was no longer doing any business but because, as I mentioned on that episode, I wanted to play more family friendly films for the holidays, since part of my pay was tied to my concessions sales, and I wanted to make a lot of money then, so I could buy my girlfriend of nearly a year, Tracy, a nice gift for Christmas. Impress her dad, who really didn’t like me too much.

The film would go on to be nominated for four Academy Awards, including for Mikael Salomon’s superb cinematography, winning for its special effects, and would enjoy a small cult following on home video… until shortly after the release of Cameron’s next film, Terminator 2.

Rumors would start to circulate that Cameron’s original cut of The Abyss was nearly a half-hour longer than the one released into theatres, and that he was supposedly working on a director’s cut of some kind. The rumor was finally proven true when a provision in James Cameron’s $500m, five year financing deal between Fox and the director’s new production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, included a $500k allotment for Cameron to complete his director’s cut.

Thanks to the advancements in computer graphics between 1989 and 1991, Industrial Lights and Magic was able to apply what they created for T2 into the never fully completed tidal wave sequence that was supposed to end the movie. Overall, what was now being called The Abyss: Special Edition would see its run time expanded by 28 minutes, and Cameron’s anti-nuke allegory would finally be fully fleshed out.

The Special Edition would open at the Loews Village VII in New York City and the Century Plaza Cinemas in Century City, literally down the street from the Fox lot, on land that used to be part of the Fox lot, on February 26th, 1993. Unsurprisingly, the critical consensus for the expanded film was even better, with critics noting the film’s story scope had been considerably broadened. The film would do fairly well for a four year old film only opening on two screens, earning $21k, good enough for Fox to expand the footprint of the film into more major markets. After eight weeks in only a total of twelve theatres, the updated film would finish its second run in theatres with more than $238k in ticket sales.

I love both versions of The Abyss, although, like with Aliens and Cameron Crowe’s untitled version of Almost Famous, I prefer the longer, Special Edition cut. Harris and Mastrantonio gave two of the best performances of 1989 in the film. For me, it solidified what I already knew about Harris, that he was one of the best actors of his generation.

I had seen Mastrantonio as Tony Montana’s sister in Scarface and in The Color of Money, but what she did on screen in The Abyss, it still puzzles me to this day how she didn’t have a much stronger career. Did you know her last feature film was The Perfect Storm, with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, 23 years ago? Not that she stopped working. She’s had main or recurring roles on a number of television shows since then, including Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Blindspot and The Punisher, but it feels like she should have had a bigger and better career in movies.

Cameron, of course, would become The King of the World. Terminator 2, True Lies, Titanic, and his two Avatar movies to date were all global box office hits. His eight feature films have grossed over $8b worldwide to date, and have been nominated for 45 Academy Awards, winning 21.

There’s a saying amongst Hollywood watchers. Never bet against James Cameron. Personally, I wish I could have not bet against James Cameron more often. Since the release of The Abyss in 1989, Cameron has only made five dramatic narratives, taking twelve years off between Titanic and Avatar, and another thirteen years off between Avatar and Avatar 2. And while he was partially busy with two documentaries about life under water, Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep, it seems that there were other stories he could have told while he was waiting for technology to catch up to his vision of how he wanted to make the Avatar movies.

Another action film with Arnold Schwarzenegger. An unexpected foray into romantic comedy. The adaptation of Taylor Stevens’ The Informationalist that Cameron has been threatening to make for more than a decade. The adaptation of Charles Pelligrino’s The Last Train from Hiroshima he was going to make after the first Avatar. Anything. Filmmakers only have so many films in them, and Cameron has only made eight films in nearly forty years. I’m greedy. I want more from him, and not just more Avatar movies.

In the years after its initial release, both Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio have refused to talk about the film with interviewers and at audience Q&As for other movies. The last time Harris has ever mentioned The Abyss was more than twenty years ago, when he said he was never going to talk about the film again after stating "Asking me how I was treated on The Abyss is like asking a soldier how he was treated in Vietnam.” For her part, Mastrantonio would only say "The Abyss was a lot of things. Fun to make was not one of them.”

It bothers me that so many people involved in the making of a film I love so dearly were emotionally scarred by the making of it. It’s hard not to notice that none of the actors in The Abyss, including the star of his first three films, Michael Biehn, never worked with Cameron again. That he couldn’t work with Gale Anne Hurd again outside of a contractual obligation on T2.

My final thought for today is that I hope that we’ll someday finally get The Abyss, be it the theatrical version or the Special Edition but preferably both, in 4K Ultra HD. It’s been promised for years. It’s apparently been completed for years. Cameron says it was up to Fox, now Disney, to get it out. Fox, now Disney, says they’ve been waiting for Cameron to sign off on it. During a recent press tour for Avatar: The Way of Water, Cameron said everything is done and that a 4K UHD Blu-ray should be released no later than March of this year, but we’ll see. That’s just a little more than a month from the time I publish this episode, and there have been no official announcements from Disney Home Video about a new release of the film, which has never been available on Blu-ray after 15 years of the format’s existence, and has been out of print on DVD for almost as long.

So there it is. Our 100th episode. I thank you for finding the show, listening to the show, and sticking with the show.

We’ll talk again soon.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about James Cameron, The Abyss, and the other movies we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.

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