LIVE FROM THE BUNKER: Donald F. Glut Talks ESB, Dinosaurs, and More
[featured image: DonGlutsDinosaurs.com]
Earlier this week, we posted part one of our interview with Donald F. Glut, who has had a long career as an author, screenwriter, filmmaker, and amateur paleontologist. The focus of the earlier piece was his Tales of Frankenstein project. Now, part two opens up the rest of Glut’s career, with insights into The Empire Strikes Back and his opinion of the Jurassic Park movies.
On His Last Amateur Movie:
“As far as I know, that was the first amateur Spider-Man movie ever made. Possibly, people made them before me, but it’s the only one I ever heard of, and there was somebody else who made one approximately the same time or shortly after. I was at a New York comic convention in 1973, and they ran his Spider-Man movie. And all I remember, Kraven the Hunter was the villain.
On Writing The Empire Strikes Back:
“That’s one of three questions I hate answering, because I’ve answered it so many times, and it comes out — you know the Abraham Lincoln robot at Disneyland? It says the same thing over and over … It was just a simple thing. They asked me to do it, and they made me an offer, and I did it.”
“The ending kept changing, I don’t know, on a weekly basis. And I knew what the ending was from the very get-go, but I couldn’t write the ending. I had to write the fake pages. I had to write the ending based on the fake pages they kept giving me because they were so paranoid about anybody finding out the great revelation at the end, that they kept it a secret. It was not a pleasant experience.”
On Not Liking Star Wars:
“It sort of became this thing that everybody worships now, and it just never pushed the buttons on me. I saw in it a lot of clichés that I’d seen earlier, you know, in old movie serials and things. I thought the acting, with the exception of Peter Cushing and James Earl Jones, was pretty bad in that first movie. I thought the dialogue was pretty bad. Clunky.”
On Liking Jurassic Park:
“I love those movies. There’s a lot of scientific inaccuracies in them, you know, which … I have to sort of bite the bullet. I keep telling myself it’s not a scientific educational documentary I’m watching. This is a monster movie. And I love Godzilla, and I love Ray Harryhausen films. But these are fantasy movies, these are science fiction movies, and once I get beyond that I think they’re great.”
