Before there was"Fear Factor" there was just Fear

One of my favorite teachers in high school was my AP Freshman English maven, Mrs. Eberly. She used to say all the time that we’d be the same people we were right then in five years except for the people we met, the books we read and the movies we went to see. I’d add that you almost never know what form the change will take until long after it’s happened.

At some point in 1978 or 1979 I went to see the Michael Crichton thriller COMA with my parents. I remember really wanting to see it because the trailers were simultaneously hypnotic and terrifying and I remember my mom and dad thinking the themes and story might be a bit much. When my ferocious pre-teen whining won out, I’m not so very sure I won in the end. I can tell you – without a doubt – the remnants left by this film, sandwiched between the folds of my cerebellum, are the main reason I was so freaky freakersoned out before having my recent surgery. My residual fears lived on like so many popcorn nubbins left in the folds of the seats at The Village.

In case you haven’t seen this movie, let me issue a huge SPOILER ALERT right now. What follows below pays creepy homage to Crichton’s delightfully macabre and wickedly imaginative storyline. In this film, oodles of perfectly healthy patients (amongst them a young Tom Selleck and Lois Chiles) come in for routine surgeries and mysteriously all fall into comas. They’re then all sent a long-term care facility where only their exterior husks are preserved so their loved ones can visit them from time to time. Unbeknownst the patients’ families, THE ORGANS OF THESE HEALTHY MEN AND WOMEN ARE HARVESTED AND SOLD (holy crap!).

At the time the idea seemed nearly impossible to me. But – because it was just likely enough to happen – my paranoia neurons fired like it was the Fourth of July. Bam! Pow! The world – and the authority figures in it – were never quite the same for me.

Besides upending trust I had in doctors, Crichton was also pretty slick in his choice of main character. The rockstar whistleblower in this film is an unconventionally foxy female doctor (Genevieve Bujold). When her own doctor boyfriend (Michael Douglas) doesn't believe her and the evil, guilty male doctors around her try to paint her concerns and suspicions as “hysterical” it makes them look, well, like the manipulative a-holes they are and in the process makes her passionate outcry look like the noble act that it is.

Wherever Michael Crichton is now I’d like to invite him to suck it for making me so afraid of my own routine surgery…and say thank you for creating a female character so dynamic she’d still be a trailblazer if her kind appeared in a film thirty years after COMA.

This One Also Goes to Eleven and Might Even Go All The Way To China

I can't walk away from talking about films with journos that I love without mentioning THE CHINA SYNDROME. It's another one that fell off the list but still deserves a mention, I think, because it shows the evolution of the mistrust of government in the 1970s. And it kicks ass.

It's more than half a decade after ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. No one is shocked any longer when there are accusations that a large company is trying to cover up some kind of evil deed. But adding the complication that women in the workplace were still fighting stereotypes (Jane Fonda plays a reporter who always gets assigned the "Fluffy the Cat" story) and so the accusations of Fonda's character were not immediately taken seriously ups the cultural ante in a pretty interesting way for me.

This is more a story about what we're willing to believe depending on who says it to us - and our own prejudices about that person - than it is about journalism or anything else. I must give mad props to Michael Douglas for producing it, James Brooks for directing it and Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda for acting the crap out of it.

And, in case you're wondering, the writing - done by Mike Gray, T.S. Cook and Brooks - isn't bad either:

Jack Godell: What makes you think they're looking for a scapegoat?
Ted Spindler: Tradition.

This clip really only shows the opening credits of the movie and some great shots of SoCal roads in the late 1970s. I'm including it just as much for the time capsule it provides. I was astonished to see all those freeways with almost no one on them.