The 1956 sci-fi novel John Carpenter always dreamed of adapting: “Wouldn’t have been an intimate film”
Anyone trying to get from Manhattan out to the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for the World Cup games at the moment will probably identify very closely with the 1981 John Carpenter classic Escape From New York, the only difference being it costs about £3 to rent that rather than the $100 they’re charging to take a packed train for an eight-mile journey.
At least if they wanted the authentic experience, they could cue up the iconic soundtrack while sweating away, attempting to get excited at forking out a down payment on a house to drink $20 beers while watching Norway versus Senegal, because that’s always worth a listen. Why? Because John Carpenter makes a hell of a soundtrack, that’s why.
While other directors have attempted to score their own movies, none have done it to the standard that Carpenter did, and Escape From New York is a perfect example of what he did best. Synth-driven, dark, foreboding, and pretty simple, it suits the movie perfectly, and it was influential, too. Have a listen to the main theme, and you’ll hear how much it inspired Brad Fiedel’s main tune from The Terminator, which came three years later.
It was a trick that Carpenter perfected on other films too, most notably on his horror debut Halloween in 1978, the brilliant, Dirty Harry-aping Assault on Precinct 13 and the haunting piano motif of the music for his creepy 1980 effort The Fog. But he didn’t get everything his own way. For a long time, when he was making his most successful movies, Carpenter was desperate to make a film based on a sci-fi novel from the 1950s by the American novelist Alfred Bester.
As Carpenter told Vulture: “I wanted to adapt The Stars My Destination. Never got to”.
Along with a sequel to his incredible 1982 horror The Thing, a film version of the novel was Carpenter’s dream project, but he admitted defeat, saying, “It couldn’t be done. I realised, you know what, it’s a novel. That’s what makes it work”.
The book was first published in the UK in 1956 and was named Tiger! Tiger!, borrowing from William Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’, before being renamed for the US market. It is set hundreds of years in the future, when humans have left Earth and are living on other planets, and the main protagonist is a man hellbent on revenge after being left adrift on an attacked spaceship.
Thematically, it fitted perfectly within Carpenter’s filmography, but ultimately it was going to be far too expensive, and the filmmaker argued with studio producers over the ending of the book, which he was unwilling to compromise on.
Now often mentioned as one of the great works of science fiction, The Stars My Destination is also considered a predecessor of cyberpunk, and while a radio dramatisation was broadcast by the BBC in the early 1990s, it is still widely thought of as unfilmable, although the rights have been bought by studios on two separate occasions.
While he genuinely believed that had he been handed $30million to make the film, he would have produced the greatest science fiction novel to movie of all time, Carpenter once said, “Stars would have been a giant special-effects movie, requiring a huge time commitment on my part. It wouldn’t have been an intimate film, and I was longing to do a picture with people in it.”
