All Creatures Great and Small ... and Whatever

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"If one place is as good as any other, it's high time we decided. Otherwise when we get there, we won't know we've arrived."

Doctor Dolittle (Rex Harrison)

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For most people living today, I suppose, the mention of "Doctor Dolittle" brings to mind images of Eddie Murphy in the 1998 movie that went by that title and was often labeled a remake of the movie that made its debut 50 years ago today.

In fact, though, the movie that was released in 1998 was merely inspired by the books by Hugh Lofting; very little of the material from the original books was used in either of Murphy's "Doctor Dolittle" movies.

The movie that marks the 50th anniversary of its American premiere today (it premiered in England a week earlier), however, was a more faithful telling of Lofting's stories — well, three of them, anyway. Lofting wrote nearly two dozen Doctor Dolittle books.

In the 1967 version Doctor Dolittle was played by Rex Harrison. He was a physician in Victorian England who had treated humans but shifted to treating animals — and lived with a veritable menagerie. His sister once served as his housekeeper, but as the animal population in the house grew, she delivered an ultimatum: Either he got rid of the animals, or she would leave. He chose the animals.

Doctor Dolittle claimed he could talk to the animals — and he did. Movie audiences saw him carrying on conversations with the parrot. (The parrot's voice was supplied by talented voice actress Ginny Tyler.)

Ostensibly Lofting's books were written for children, but there was a decidedly adult angle to the movie's dialogue. For example:

"I speak over 2,000 languages," the parrot told Doctor Dolittle, "including Dodo and Unicorn."

"Unicorn?" Doctor Dolittle asked.

"I had a classical education," the parrot replied.

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Movie audiences in 1967 first saw Doctor Dolittle when Anthony Newley's character and his young friend brought a sick duck to see the doctor.

Then, when he was treating a horse, Doctor Dolittle offended the horse's owner, and he was scolded for it by the owner's niece (Samantha Eggar).

The horse's owner and his niece went on to play more prominent roles in the movie.

A friend of Doctor Dolittle's sent him a rare pushme–pullyou — a creature that looked like a llama with heads at both ends of its body — and the doctor took it to a circus (Richard Attenborough played the ringmaster), where it became the main attraction. At the circus the doctor made friends with a seal that longed to be reunited with her husband at the North Pole, and he tried to help her escape, dressing her in a woman's clothes. Fishermen observed the doctor tossing the clothed seal into the water and believed he had murdered a woman.

They had him arrested; the judge in the trial was the horse's owner.

Although the doctor was acquitted, the judge insisted on sentencing him to a lunatic asylum. His animal friends saved him, and they set sail in search of the Great Pink Sea Snail.

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It turned out that Eggar had stowed away on board, and in making her case to be permitted to stay, Eggar's character proclaimed, "I promise to ask for no special privileges."

"I promise to grant none," Doctor Dolittle replied.

They decided their destination would be Sea Star Island, a floating island that was determined to be in the Atlantic Ocean at that time.

Well, that led to other adventures for the travelers — and probably contributed to the verdict of sneak preview audiences that it was too long. Trying to compress three children's books into a single movie was a bit ambitious. Cuts were subsequently made, but even at its final 2½–hour running time, it was probably still too long.

The movie ran into production problems that, in hindsight, probably were predictable — and many may have been nothing more than legends. For example, there were stories that a goat ate a script and a parrot learned how to yell "Cut!"

But there was no disputing the evidence of the bottom line. The movie made about $9 million at the box office; it cost $17 million to make.

There could be many reasons for that. Personally, I have always wondered if the fact that musicals' popularity was on the wane in the late 1960s could explain why "Doctor Dolittle" fared so poorly.

Nevertheless the studio launched an unprecedented campaign for Oscar recognition and was rewarded with nine nominations, including Best Picture. It even won two — for Best Song ("Talk to the Animals") and Best Special Visual Effects.

Same Old Same Old

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Steven Spielberg is probably the most gifted filmmaker of my lifetime.

But I'll be the first to say that sequels are just not his thing.

He's a terrific story teller, but his inclination is to tell the story in a single sitting, usually not in installments — even when the response to one of his movies appears to be a cry for more — and move on to the next project.

"Jaws," for example, was great. The sequels, not so much. But Spielberg really didn't have a hand in them.

Inexplicably, he was the director of both the original "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which premiered on this day in 1997. The original was a first–rate example of Spielberg's filmmaking at its best; the second was an uncharacteristic example of giving in to the temptation to make some easy money essentially repeating yourself.

Well, it might have been better if Spielberg had repeated himself. Instead he tried to concoct an entirely new story with basically the same ingredients. Spielberg knows how to push all the right buttons to get the desired response from the audience, but these movies centered on the dinosaurs that had been created by Richard Attenborough's character in the first movie. It was almost as if Spielberg directed a documentary.

(That would have pleased my journalism professors. Their advice to us was always that, whenever we wrote about something, we should be like flies on the wall. "The reader shouldn't even know you're there," one of my professors said.)

Attenborough had a cameo role in the sequel. So did the child actors who played his grandchildren in the earlier movie.

And Jeff Goldblum was back — but none of the others returned. Instead you had Arliss Howard, Julianne Moore and a whole new cast of good guys and bad guys, all brought together to explore an island where the dinosaurs had been bred before being brought to Jurassic Park where they would be the main attraction. When the park was abandoned, the isolated supply island was forgotten.

Except by the audience. If I remember correctly, there was nothing to forget because this island was never mentioned in the original.

That was just one of the many hurdles Spielberg had to clear in order to make this movie. And I guess he succeeded in most of his objectives, but when the movie was finished and showing in the theaters, it lacked the one thing it needed the most, the one thing that just about every Spielberg movie has — a sense of awe, of wonderment.

Call it the Wow Factor. It is when Spielberg merges all the best elements of filmmaking that are at his disposal at the time.

I remember that moment in the original "Jurassic Park." It was when all the guests saw a wide assortment of dinosaurs in an open field. There was no comparable moment in the sequel.

I'm not saying Spielberg didn't try. But the dinosaurs in his sequel were always aggressive. The audience knew why, of course, and understood. But it got in the way of what one expects from Spielberg. He is the gold standard, always on the cutting edge.

His imagination takes us places we never dreamed we would go. He does the dreaming and turns it into movie reality. To borrow the words of 19th–century British poet Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Spielberg is "the music maker and the dreamer of dreams."

Sequels just aren't his thing.

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Making movie magic is his thing.

Spielberg has never struck me as a director of violent movies. I know he directed "Jaws" — but the shark never became a malevolent monster. It did what animals do — it hunted for food. In "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," the dinosaurs were malicious. They killed indiscriminately. Hunger had little to do with it.

Oh, there was a sense of wonder — initially — from some of the cast members — and most of the folks in Spielberg's audiences.

It could hardly be avoided. Spielberg's dinosaurs appeared to be the real thing. It was hard for audiences, whether watching the original or the sequel, not to be astonished by what they saw.

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But where Spielberg came up short was by not reimagining the material and coming up with a unique story that did the visuals and the human characters justice.

That's when Spielberg has always been at his best — when, in addition to the movie making bells and whistles, he also gave audiences a story that surprised them, that wasn't what they expected.

Film critic Roger Ebert agreed with me, by the way.

"Perhaps the time to do the thinking on this project was before the first film, when all the possibilities lay before Spielberg," Ebert wrote 20 years ago. "He should have tossed aside the original Michael Crichton novel, knowing it had given him only one thing of use: an explanation for why dinosaurs might walk among us. Everything else — the scientific mumbo–jumbo, the theme park scheme — was just the recycling of other movies."

Recycled is the right word, I think. When I saw "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," at a theater, I kept thinking that I had seen it before — just not with dinosaurs. I still can't say that it reminded me of a specific movie, just a genre — the monster movie.

Another thought that I had was that Spielberg's dinosaurs were always getting loose and terrorizing humans in the rain. In the original movie, it was during a rain storm — at the time I presumed it was some sort of tropical storm — that the dinosaurs escaped their pens and roamed the island.

They did essentially the same thing under the same circumstances in the sequel, and when I watched the movie, I presumed again that it was some sort of tropical island.

But then the plot called for one of the adult dinosaurs to be taken to San Diego where, sure enough, it was raining. Now, San Diego has a very agreeable climate most of the year with little rain — maybe a foot or so all year.

So that part, that this vessel carrying a living dinosaur, arrived in San Diego on one of the few rainy days of the year, probably surprised some people in the audience — but that really isn't the kind of surprise I've been talking about.

It was more recycling.

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Looking Ahead by Looking Back

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Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

Jeff Goldblum (Ian Malcolm)
Jurassic Park

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I'm not entirely sure, but I think "Jurassic Park" was the last movie I went to see at the theater with my mother.

She died about two years after it came out so it is possible that we saw another one, but I really don't think so. She and I didn't really have an opportunity to see any other movies together after that. At least, I don't think we did.

It is a significant point for me because we used to go see movies together all the time — Mom always used to love to talk about a movie after she had seen it, and I like to do that, too, but, since she's been gone, it's been hard to find someone to watch movies with me.

Anyway, I was visiting my parents a few weeks after "Jurassic Park" hit the theaters. Mom and Dad had already seen it — and Dad is not the sort of person who likes to see most movies more than once — but Mom suggested that the two of us go to see it, and so we did on a hot Sunday afternoon in late June of 1993.

As I say, Mom lived nearly two more years after that, but we lived in different states at the time. I can think of a few times when I visited my parents in those two years, and it is possible that we saw a movie together on one of those occasions, but I honestly can't recall one.

Even if I am wrong, though, I like to think that "Jurassic Park" was the last movie Mom and I saw together if only because it was directed by Steven Spielberg.

I can think of several directors whose work I have enjoyed over the years, but I don't think any other director — at least, in my lifetime — has been as gifted as Spielberg at squeezing every conceivable emotion out of every frame of film in a movie.

Every movie he has made has been special, even the ones that were judged as mediocre (at least, when compared to Spielberg's most noteworthy achievements).

And "Jurassic Park" was hardly mediocre.

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Of course, as there is with any movie, there were continuity problems. The one that always bothered me was the rainstorm that was severe enough to leave puddles that were deep enough to prevent the children from being crushed when a Tyrannosaurus rex flipped the tour car in which they were riding and stepped on it — yet, shortly thereafter, when Ellie (Laura Dern) came looking for Alan (Sam Neill) and the children, the ground was dry. Nary a puddle in sight.

Well, perhaps that is quibbling.

After all, there is very little wasted effort in a Spielberg movie.

Everything that is said, everything that is done on the screen, every prop, every item of clothing ... everything has a purpose. Spielberg is always messing with your head, giving you something that foretells something or harkens back to something, and often you don't realize it until you've seen the whole movie — at least once — and had a chance to reflect on it a bit.

And, in hindsight, one of the most interesting examples of that from "Jurassic Park" came when Richard Attenborough's grandchildren and Neill were stranded in the park at night.

One of the children (Ariana Richards) asked Neill, "What will you and Ellie do if you don't have to dig up dinosaurs anymore?"

"I guess we'll have to evolve, too," he replied.

In the context of the movie, it was a reasonable question. Attenborough's character — well, the technology he had pioneered — had rendered the traditional work of researchers obsolete by reviving long–extinct dinosaurs. In the story, people wouldn't have to look at dinosaur bones and try to imagine what they looked like. They could look at the real thing.

But it had more long–term relevance for me than I realized at the time.

In 1993, Spielberg showed movie audiences that computers would revolutionize special effects, and I believed it. What I didn't realize was how rapidly emerging technology was going to change so much of the world in which I lived.

In my field, journalism, the changes have come so quickly that they have caught many by surprise, and newspapers have scrambled to find ways merely to survive. Survival has meant changing the roles in the newsroom, and many jobs have been eliminated in the process.

People like myself and the folks with whom I have worked are becoming today's dinosaurs. I don't feel obsolete, and I'm sure my colleagues don't feel obsolete, either. Perhaps we aren't — but some of our skills are.

It wasn't that piecemeal in "Jurassic Park." Dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years; apparently, it hadn't been a gradual thing, either. In fact, I am often amazed that so many dinosaur skeletons have been preserved virtually intact all this time.

But to revive the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," it was necessary to blend the DNA information that had been retrieved from fossils with DNA from frogs. The frog DNA filled in the genetic gaps. So, in a way, I guess it was piecemeal.

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One of the things I remember being astonished by at the time — aside from the impressive special effects — was how little Neill was mentioned in the reviews I read. Most of the attention was given to Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern and Attenborough.

Neill, as I recall, was treated almost as an afterthought when, in fact, he had about as much screen time as anyone else — as he and the children tried to make their way through a park in which all barriers between man and dinosaur had broken down.

Mind you, I'm not saying that I think Neill is a great actor. Frankly, I've always thought that he capitalized on his looks and probably couldn't provide a truly convincing performance if given a really challenging role.

But, in the 1990s, he was on something of a roll. "Jurassic Park" and "The Piano," two of arguably his best movies, were in the theaters at this time 20 years ago. He'd been in "The Hunt for Red October" a few years earlier, and he was in "Dead Calm" in 1989.

He was getting a lot of exposure. But he has never been what I would call a major star.

Ironic, isn't it? A blockbuster movie about the perils of reviving the past didn't foretell his future success — at least, not yet.

The Extraordinary Life of a Silent Film Icon

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Today is a milestone anniversary in the story of Charlie Chaplin.

On this day in 1977, the silent movie icon died in Switzerland at the age of 88.

And 15 years later, on this day in 1992, a movie about his life (directed by Richard Attenborough) made its debut.

I couldn't say how old I was when I first saw a Charlie Chaplin movie. Not very old, I'm sure. I just know that I have always enjoyed his work.

Nor am I sure how long I have admired Richard Attenborough.

It probably began whenever I was first exposed to his work as an actor, but who knows which film that was? He was acting in movies long before I was born so it may have been in a movie that was shown on TV (i.e., "The Great Escape") or it may have been a movie I saw at the movie theater ("Doctor Dolittle").

I'm sure my first introduction to Attenborough was not through a movie he directed — that was probably "Gandhi," and I know I was aware of him long before that.

Attenborough is mostly retired now. He is, after all, 89 years old, and he hasn't participated in the production of a film since 2007. It was an increasingly rare occurrence at that time, and Attenborough's brother said last year that he probably won't be making any more movies.

That is, indeed, a shame. His skill as a director surely exceeded his talent as an actor, and "Chaplin," his biopic that was released 20 years ago today, is a fine example of that.

As I have written here before, I truly admired his biopic of Gandhi — but Gandhi's life was so publicly inspiring that it always seemed to me just about anyone could hit that softball out of the park.

Chaplin's life story was a lot more challenging — but, in its way, every bit as inspiring.

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As I say, that life ended 35 years ago today. I can't say with any certainty that I remember what was said about the timing of the release of the movie about Chaplin's life, but I'm just about convinced that it wasn't coincidental.

I must say, though, that I found Robert Downey Jr.'s frenetic portrayal of Chaplin to be revealing in unexpected ways — not the least of which was the obvious, albeit unspoken, comparison of Downey to his subject.

For all his talent, Chaplin had a private sort of greatness, and I suppose the same could be said of Downey.

Lisa Kropiewnicki of AllRovi wrote that the movie was "a thoughtful mixture of melancholy and humor, juxtaposing Chaplin's private loneliness and loss with his professional comedic talents and fortitude."

That's probably an accurate assessment of both Downey and the man he portrayed. But Downey's downfall after "Chaplin" really is another story, isn't it?

I can't help reflecting on the irony, though.

Downey was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as Chaplin, yet Chaplin was seldom recognized with an Oscar nomination during his life (although he was given an honorary Oscar five years before his death).

Chaplin was a "genius," said George Bernard Shaw, and he was the world's best–known movie star by the end of World War I.

Twenty–two years after Chaplin's death, he was named the 10th–greatest male star of all time by the American Film Institute

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Downey's performance was a fitting tribute to Chaplin's remarkable life, warts and all.

Being Faithful in Spirit

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"No man's life can be encompassed in one telling. There is no way to give each year its allotted weight, to include each event, each person who helped to shape a lifetime. What can be done is to be faithful in spirit to the record and to try to find one's way to the heart of the man."

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I can understand why the filmmakers chose to preface their movie "Gandhi" with such a disclaimer.

It is a considerable task to tell anyone's life story — let alone one as complex as Mohandas Gandhi's — but, all in all, I think director Richard Attenborough did an incredible job.

I have long been a fan of biographical movies — "biopics," as they are called in our McNugget culture that appears to regard whittling things down to a single syllable or initial or two as progress — but "Gandhi," which premiered 30 years ago today, is my favorite.

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I remember reading about the movie when it was still in its casting stages and hearing that Ben Kingsley had been cast in the title role. I couldn't understand it. I wasn't familiar with his previous work — which was almost entirely, if not exclusively, in TV productions. I didn't necessarily think he was a bad choice. I just felt that the actor who was chosen to portray someone as significant to the history of the 20th century as Gandhi needed to be someone with stature in the acting community.

Actually, an actor with some heft in the acting community — Dustin Hoffman — reportedly was interested in the part, but he was offered the lead role in "Tootsie" and wound up taking that role instead.

(Among the actors I heard mentioned as possible leads before Kingsley was chosen were Alec Guinness, Anthony Hopkins, Peter Finch and Albert Finney. I don't know if any of them really were interested in the part, but, in hindsight, I don't think any of them would have been nearly as effective as Kingsley.

(And I say that as someone who has admired Hopkins' work for a long time. I thought he did a remarkable job of portraying Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone's "Nixon." I'm old enough to remember Richard Nixon, and I can say without fear of contradiction that Hopkins neither looked nor sounded like Nixon, but he had his personality down.)

Kingsley may not have brought a high–powered resume to the project, but he sure left with one. His performance earned him an Oscar and propelled him into acting's stratosphere. Ironically, Kingsley beat Hoffman for the Best Actor Oscar.

Kingsley has gone on to give brilliant performances in many movies, including another one of my personal favorites, "Schindler's List."

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Gandhi himself probably would have insisted that he couldn't have accomplished the things he did without the help and support of millions. Likewise, Kingsley was surrounded by an impressive supporting cast — Martin Sheen as the journalist Walker, John Gielgud as the viceroy, Candice Bergen as photographer Margaret Bourke–White.

In fact, I heard that the extras who were brought in to line the streets in the re–creation of Gandhi's funeral procession — roughly 300,000 — far outnumbered the extras who have appeared in any other movie.

But the portrayal of Gandhi was a triumph for Kingsley. He truly was faithful in spirit to the man and his life.

A Hero's Birthday

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"I believe we need heroes. I believe we need certain people who we can measure our own shortcomings by."

Richard Attenborough

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Today is Richard Attenborough's 86th birthday.

I'm not sure what modern viewers think of when they hear his name. Many may only know him as a film director, and he certainly has made his mark in that area. He won an Oscar as the director of one of my favorite films, "Gandhi," and he directed many other films as well.

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Others may think of him as an actor, and he has had a distinguished career in front of the camera as well.

Certainly, moviegoers remember him as the grandfatherly entrepreneur in 1993's "Jurassic Park," but his time as an actor dates back to 1942.

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That was a couple of years before he married his wife, Sheila Sim, who recently observed her 87th birthday.

In their 60–plus–year marriage, the Attenboroughs had three children together. One of their daughters, Jane, was killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, along with her own daughter and her mother–in–law.

An advocate of education, Attenborough took his grief and turned it into a positive, establishing the Jane Holland Creative Centre for Learning at Waterford Kamhlaba in Swaziland in his daughter's memory.

That was truly an heroic act.