It is often mentioned that John Carpenter had the luxury of time when he made THE THING ( Maintaining an office at Universal Studios from April, 1981 through the end of June, 1982 ) and that this expansive schedule in large part contributed to the films' overall quality. Although this was true in some respects it stands in contrast to a frenzied Six Week period from late October to early December, 1981 in which THE THING shape shifted into something harder and more powerful, and in the process took a decisive turn toward the dark side. During this time John restructured the film, wrote what was essentially a new Second Act to conform to the editing he had done ( including new death scenes for two characters ), adopted MacCready as his spiritual doppelganger, and scrambled to get all of it shot on location in Stewart, B.C. Coming face to face with his own greatest fear - fear of failure - he was able to make THE THING undeniably his...
This is how it happened...
( 1 ) The Quirk In The Schedule
In the summer of 1981 Universal Studios was worried about the possibility of a threatened labor strike in mid October and insisted that we advance our schedule and finish all of the stage work with the principal actors ( about 8 weeks worth ) before that date. Even though we had purposefully chosen Stewart, B.C., the then snowfall capital of the world to be guaranteed sufficient early snow for filming, it would not be possible before early December - this created a six week hole in the schedule, a hiatus from filming, where we planned, optimistically, to finish the bulk of Rob's effects work ( normally, it would have been customary to have begun production several months later and made the transition to Stewart almost immediately for the Exterior work )
This break from filming, forced by circumstance and very unusual at the time, gave John an advantage he was to enjoy only once - the opportunity to view the assembled footage without the pressure of ongoing production knowing that, due to a quirk in scheduling, he would have the largest crew he'd ever had (about 250) at his disposal in British Columbia in a few weeks time...
( 2 ) " A Long Time Between Monsters"
A few days after production on stage wrapped John Carpenter stood in the doorway of my office. He had just seen a rough assembly of THE THING for the first time, and he wasn't happy. The movie didn't work. Lacking the location footage and many special effects he found the cut to be long, dull, and, above all, lacking in tension - his biggest fear. The early scenes with the men were endlessly repetitive and dragged on forever. Most of the byplay and humor fell flat. The film felt formless and just seemed to drift along, with no one character breaking out of the pack to drive the action...
Another big worry was the basic idea of assimilation that underpinned the film. The constant indirect allusions to the process were too subtle and confusing. He did not think the audience had a clear idea of what was going on, and the stakes involved...
He said the movie came to life for the first time during The Kennel, then lapsed into passivity until the next effects scene which was then the Norris transformation. And for a film that was trying to lay down its' marker as a state of the art monster movie that, I remember John saying, was "a long time between monsters"...
I saw the cut several days later at Johns' request. Although I agreed with his overall concerns it seemed to me that he had shot a better film than he was seeing. After his grim initial assessment I wondered whether John had overreacted and prematurely lost faith in his own work. I knew he had his own share of nightmares from his experience in making THE FOG, its' post-production tinkering and considerable re-shoots - was he scared that history was repeating itself ?
( 3) "DIRECTING IS ABOUT DECIDING - WHEN YOU DIRECT, DECIDE " - John Carpenter
And decide John did. He proceeded to immediately attack his film, stripping each scene down to its essentials. If something didn't directly service the story, it was gone ( and never to return ). It was pace John was initially looking for and he was ruthless in pursuit of anything he felt slowed the film down.
The earliest deletions, I remember, were scenes involving MacCready and his blow-up friend and Childs and his " magic garden ", both of which, John said, "took us nowhere". The men and their endless squabbling throughout the film was an easy target and large chunks hit the editing room floor almost immediately.
The decisions John was making were not hasty but they came quickly. His desire to wrestle with the implications of the story he was telling took on an urgency that I hadn't seen before...
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Also dropped quickly was Bennings' death scene by an unknown ( and never revealed ) assailant. A replacement itself for Bill Lancasters' much more expensive and effects-filled original scene set out on the Antarctic Ice, this sequence was designed and written by Bill as a no frills way to kill off a character by playing into Johns' wheelhouse, HALLOWEEN style. And that was part of the problem. John certainly executed it well enough, but it still felt like a scene that belonged in a different movie - a conventional murder mystery, perhaps. With no monster or even blood to recommend it John judged it "non dramatic" and set about trying to come up with something better...
John was not happy with the way he had shot the "reveal" of Fuchs death by shovel. He had already cut the earlier Greenhouse footage with Childs anyway...
... and in the space of a whirlwind week and a half John had come up with a cut that was leaner, less elaborate and more to the point, but still lacked drive and a coherent point of view. On a late Friday afternoon he said he would take the weekend to think about what came next...
On Monday Morning John called us into his office ( by us, I refer to Larry Franco, David Foster, myself, Production Designer John Lloyd, and Production Manager Robert Brown ). On his desk was a small stack of typewritten half pages, which contained a series of new scenes he had written. These pages were never officially published and were only distributed to cast and crew ( which is why it is next to impossible to find a script with them included ), and were written to conform to a new structure, of film already shot and edited and not the script itself.
In addition to being used to bridge cut material and tighten the pacing the scenes had two primary objectives :
( 1 ) To clarify for the audience the mechanics of assimilation, its' threat to the men, and the stakes involved...
( 2 ) The ascension of MacCready to full blown leading man status. Bill Lancasters' script had MacCready gradually emerging from the pack to take command much later, and then only with reluctance. Say goodbye to the ensemble. John had decided to move him front and center and have him take charge early on in order to be able to drive the action...
... John began to verbally talk us through his vision for the movie, reading aloud the new material as required. What he described in that meeting was, with scant alteration, the film you have before you now.
The new scenes written ( as filmed ) by John :
The MacCready makeover begins here. After a slightly awkward dissolve this first compact scene puts MacCready firmly in the drivers' seat. The original scene as shot on stage had the men endlessly bantering, with MacCready, ever reluctant, refusing to go up...
John turns this idea on its' head. Now, the decision to fly is MacCreadys'. Copper defers to this new status : If you say we don't fly, Mac, we don't fly "... The " Crazy Swedes" line is John's first attempt to "imitate " the laconic nature of Bill Lancasters' MacCready...
This next extended sequence, right at the core of the film, occupying some Ten and a Half minutes of screen time, is all Johns'...
Blair at the computer as originally filmed was a small and relatively insignificant part of a larger scene that came much earlier in the film. The script called for no specific information shown on screen, just a nondescript graphic of two cells splitting. The dramatic idea ( more of a brief dramatic beat, really ) was to focus on Blair and his increasing concern, not on what he was viewing, as part of a slower, more indirect buildup to his rampage...
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John fashions an entirely new scene out of a minor moment and takes the opportunity to show the audience, in no uncertain terms, exactly what's going down. We had no idea what a real program looked like and didn't much care anyway, so John instructed fellow USC Alumnus John Wash ( who animated this sequence on film ) for a video game vibe to help sell the idea by keeping it as simple as possible...
And, for the audiences delectation, a first stark appraisal - literally spelling out the stakes involved. To button the sequence, John added an additional insert of Blairs' hands going for the gun...
The next shot was made at Universal Heartland, Robs' special effects facility, in late December, 1981, after filming in Stewart ( and after the Outpost 31 interior set was taken down ) and introduces a new set constructed for this additional material. Done while Kurt Russell was still available ( the now famous alternate last shot with MacCready was also filmed this same day, right down the hall ), the shot sets in motion a sequence of events that puts Macready at the forefront...
The scene inside the Thiokol is primarily written by John, but contains a line or two of Bills' lifted from two earlier sequences that were cut ( the "Chameleon Strikes in the Dark" line, for example ). Here Fuchs comes to MacCready with the information and allows him to begin to act on it...
Designed to replace the original Bennings' death scene shot on stage, and meant to reinforce the idea of assimilation by having one of the characters being physically absorbed on camera , allowing the audience to make the visual connection between man and monster...
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A new set was designed and constructed inside The Outpost 31 Exterior in Stewart. The irony of travelling to the snowfall capital of the world to spend the first few days filming a cramped interior was lost on no one...
There was no money or time to develop anything much in the way of effects for the scene. Robs' shop in Los Angeles was overburdened and behind schedule, so they sent up a bunch a miscellaneous tentacles along with jars of Vaseline and tubes of Orange K-Y Jelly...
...Peter Maloney is wearing the same pair of prop gloves Rob had fashioned for Palmers' flight to the ceiling, shot several months earlier...
This is the first scene in THE THING that is written, directed, and scored by John - a complete package. Simply staged and elegantly shot, it does a lot with very little. John makes sure the audience is aware that, as MacCready shouts for all to hear, "It isn't Bennings ! It isn't Bennings !"...
The next scene was also shot at Universal Heartland, Robs special effects facility, in late December, 1981, when Donald Moffat was available. It's purpose is to simply underline again, in spades, what the men have just witnessed...
Hitting the nail on the head with Mac's " That was one of those Things out there, trying to imitate him "
Donald Moffat suggested that John add the personal connection between Garry and Bennings at the end of the scene. The line " I've known Bennings for 10 years, he was my friend " is the actors'...
The penultimate moment. John has mentioned that he felt it was at this point the movie needed a summation. This is it and of course MacCready makes it.
Point by point MacReady lays out the dilemma and the options for the men. They aren't pretty. World domination or death. All or nothing. With this speech he presents the purest distillation yet of Johns' ethos, almost functioning as a stand in for the director...
As MacCready makes the tape recording it gives John the chance to clear up a plot point or two ( "It rips through your clothes when it takes you over") but the relevant moment that John is looking to underline here is the weary declaration that "Nobody trusts anybody anymore". Also filmed the same time as the other work in late December, l981. Busy day...
When it came time to figure out what to do with Fuchs ( and when to do it ) John asked his Associate Producer Larry Franco what the production limitations were going to be. Larry told him he could do whatever the Hell he wanted, as long as it took Three Hours...
This is John's Three Hour version of Fuchs demise, dictated by considerations of time and money...
What other filmmaker can you think of that has the courage to kill two major characters off screen? At least Fuchs had a corpse. Poor Nauls simply disappeared...
...and none of us have a clue about what really happened to Fuchs, so I guess we'll just have to accept the mens' explanation...
To accomodate the new work the entire schedule in Stewart, with production due to begin in several weeks, was thrown into disarray. A number of short scenes and transitions were cut to make time to film the new footage. What remained ( really only Bill Lancaster's original opening and closing and The Norwegian Camp Exterior ) would have to be shot more quickly...
The new pages were unable to be integrated into the existing script. This wasn't much of a concern when filming independently, but a problem for a system as militarized as Universals' who like to keep the various divisions on the same page. The Executives and Production Department had to be informed - they hadn't seen the movie and John was about to head off to Canada to shoot material they couldn't even read. It fell to John to talk them verbally through the movie, much as he did with us in that first meeting.
That took care of the Studio. The crew had been briefed and wheels set in motion ...but what about the actors ?
( 4 ) " DON'T YOU GUYS GET IT ? IT'S ALL ABOUT THE RUBBER MAN "
That's Richard Masur ( Clarke ), quoting Wilford Brimley. Masur, speaking at a convention recently in Europe, was talking about an occasion while filming THE THING when John was knee deep in the process of setting up an effects shot with Rob. There were always delays which usually resulted in the cast being called to work and then just sitting around. One actor was complaining to another about the time John was taking, prompting Wilford Brimley to chime in with " Don't you guys get it ? It's all about the Rubber Man "...
There had been some tension on set, seldom bursting out into the open but found from time to time lurking in the shadows. John was, with the exception of Kurt, working with actors that were new to him and who customarily brought a lot to the table - they expected a lot back in return from their director. A group dynamic had developed, a byproduct of the two week rehearsal period that was convened before production, and a number wanted the running dialogue kept up.This was simply not John's method of working, who kept conversation to a minimum once filming began and expected actors to do their job. This dynamic mirrored The THING's central theme - some of the cast didn't fully trust John to watch their backs. For his part John thought some were prone to paranoia - acting like little children - for feeling shunted aside in favor of the monster. For my part, I didn't like the thought of cast and director isolated from one other ( Thirty One and some odd years later I feel sure some of this real life dynamic infiltrated, and probably enriched, the final product ).
How were they going to react to new material that unbalanced the ensemble and further diminished their roles ?
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The same afternoon the cast arrived in Stewart after the fabled bus ride from hell ( the bus slid off the road on the way in, prompting the group to literally pull together to get it back on the highway ) a meeting was convened in the vacant dining room at the hotel. Everyone had scattered since production on stage had finished, and this was the first time John was able to meet with the actors en masse. After handing out xeroxed copies John, for the umpteenth time, set about patiently and calmly explaining the changes the film had undergone, the reasons for them, and why they had new pages in front of them. And then asked for their help in seeing him through the next couple of very difficult weeks. And he got it...
... and now all that was left was for John to negotiate the cold and the snow. Despite last minute preparations and daily hardships the company was able to get the hell off the mountain in time for Christmas. It was only days after that that John " locked " the cut ( with the conspicuous exception of the effects footage ) and that was that...
( 5 ) " We AREN' T GETTING OUT OF HERE ALIVE - BUT NEITHER IS THAT THING"
Spoken resolutely by MacCready off camera - the last declaration of intent, the last wild line added by John in post-production, and the last line of dialogue he wrote for THE THING. It sums up his approach to the film. A no holds barred, take no prisoners posture spurred on by the twin galvanizing influences of instinct and fear - a time when John Carpenter was compelled to stare into the abyss and didn't blink...
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