The Terminal Man’s Catholic hero Harry Benson (George Segal) turns to religion for help (Ian Wolfe is the priest)
The Terminal Man’s Catholic hero Harry Benson (George Segal) turns to religion for help (Ian Wolfe is the priest)
“A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”
Stanley Kubrick
When Hodges had finished editing Pulp, he took his family – in a Land Rover – to North Africa, for a long holiday. On his return, in the pile of mail waiting for him, was a letter from Warner Bros’ John Calley, together with a copy of Michael Crichton’s novel The Terminal Man.
Calley wanted Hodges to adapt, produce and direct the novel, a story about a brilliant computer scientist called Harry Benson, who, as the result of a head injury, begins to experience violent seizures and occasional bouts of uncontrollable rage.
After reading the book and a meeting with Calley in London, Hodges accepted and in January 1973, he left for Los Angeles. Having always been interested in working in Hollywood, he was anxious to see what it would be like – but there was a problem. About to embark on his most dangerous mission to date – his first Hollywood feature – he was suffering from severe depression.
“It had been building up for a while and the holiday hadn’t really helped. I was going through hell and wasn’t stable at all. I was in a situation where I was married, had two kids at private school, a house in London, a house in the country, two cars, everything that we needed – and I just loathed it. My depression, I think, all stemmed from realizing how I’d ended up. It’s not what I’d intended, as I’m not a materialist in that sense.
Out of control, Benson strangles the priest
“Nevertheless, when I was sent the book I was drawn to it, even though it was dangerous territory for a man who was seriously depressed.
“Anyway I went to Los Angeles and immediately hated it. In fairness I simply didn’t know anybody there. The studio put me in the Beverly Hills Hotel and I quickly ended up like Harry, the lead character in the film. I used to think my head was going to explode and I would be rocking on the floor of my luxury suite, unable to leave. I could hear people going by, on their way to breakfast, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave my room. When I did go out, I’d face other terrifying scenarios, like driving. There’s no escape from driving in LA. I rang the rental company and asked for a small car. When I finally plucked up the courage to go down to the hotel’s garage I found that they had delivered this mother of a car which, compared to my Mini back home, was like a tank!”
In a complete state of confusion and disintegration, Hodges was becoming alarmingly like the lead character in the movie he was supposed to be producing and directing. And although he had previously tried to work through his problems with a psychiatrist, he didn’t find the process much use. Instead, Hodges managed to hold on to his sanity by constantly photographing the contents of his hotel room. “Looking through a camera helps with vertigo. I know. I suffer from vertigo.” Taking the reality out of his situation, he made himself treat life like watching a film, seeing everything through a small square box. Hodges took pictures of anything and everything. More than once, he recalls sitting on the toilet, taking pictures of his trousers around his ankles. He’d also take photographs of his breakfast tray, the television set, the hotel bathroom, anything that was around him.
By looking through the view finder of his camera, Hodges was somehow able to hang on and make some sort of sense of his personal predicament. While initial attempts at defining himself within his new LA world resulted in feelings of uncertainty and anxiety, these feelings eventually gave rise to a simultaneous responsibility to have to create something in place of that emptiness.
“A magnificent, overwhelming picture … achieves moods that I’ve never experienced in the movies before”
Terrence Malick on The Terminal Man
When Hodges came out of the depression and managed to focus on his life and current project, his breakdown ultimately became a breakthrough. Luckily, he got through the general Hollywood mayhem and insanity and did a great job. Hodges’ own isolation and loneliness provided the basis for the whole mood of the film. While Hodges was being “looked after” by his agents and the studio in The Terminal Man, Harry Benson found himself in the hands of cold, unfeeling medics.
Much of the film is concerned with the attitudes of those who treat Benson, a group of aloof, shallow individuals who treat patients like machinery to be mended. Brilliantly played by George Segal, Harry Benson volunteers for revolutionary treatment and is implanted with a “lympic brain-pacing device”, a kind of microcomputer, which sends tiny electric shocks to the brain to neutralize his violent seizures whenever they occur.
Head surgeon, Dr Ellis (Richard Dysart) and doctors Ross (Joan Hackett), Morris (Michael C Gwynne) and McPherson (Donald Moffat) successfully carry out the operation and place Benson under 24-hour guard while they monitor its effect. Dr Ross and electronics technician Gerhard (Matt Clark) test the implant by using it to stimulate the various pleasure, emotion and pain centres of Benson’s brain. In this disturbing scene, Dr Ross sits interviewing him while, behind a mirrored window, the technicians activate the various implant nodes. They go from making him feel like he’s just tasted a ham sandwich to having him feel the desperate urge to urinate, as well as inducing various childhood memories. The doctors induce a seizure under clinical surroundings and prove that the implant prevents it from overwhelming the patient.
However, the seizures begin to increase in frequency. The doctors realize that Benson’s brain has become addicted to the electric shocks and is actually triggering the seizures to obtain more stimulation. Driven by the addictive need, he escapes the hospital and takes refuge with his girlfriend Angela Black (Jill Clayburgh). The doctors think his next seizure will be in a few hours and, sure enough, Benson is suddenly seized with another attack. He grabs a pair of scissors and stabs his lover to death.
With the tiny computer in his brain malfunctioning at an increasingly greater rate, Benson is transformed into a pitiful, rampaging monster, a modern-day Frankenstein set loose in Los Angeles. During his next seizure, he breaks into his old laboratory to destroy a robot he was working on before his injury, and later he attacks and kills a priest whom he’d gone to for help.
Before the operation, Benson takes questions from medics about his rare condition
Dr Ross has gone home to rest. She is notified of these latest events just as she hears Benson’s voice downstairs in her home. She panics and tries to talk him into going back to the hospital. As another seizure comes over him, Dr Ross stabs him. He flees, mortally wounded, to a nearby graveyard and deliberately jumps into an open grave. It’s a place where he can do no more harm. Dr Ross is brought to the scene by the police. As she tries to talk him into giving himself up, a police helicopter arrives. Benson raises his handgun in defiance and a sharpshooter from the helicopter above shoots him dead.
The film ends as it started with the police helicopter. At the start it is taking off, at the end it is landing. A lot has happened in between.
To this day, George Segal maintains the Harry Benson character is his favourite movie role:
“I loved that character. I knew that to play a guy smarter than myself, I’d have to be calm. I think that people who are really smart see everything and therefore they never have those little ups and downs of excitements and lows. So to prepare, I would do yoga. It seemed to help me look cold. It was minimal acting in a kind of way and he got minimal performances out of all of us, which keeps it a nice clean movie to still look at.
“Mike was dealing with such a cold subject full of madness and possession but he seemed to have such a loving mentality and real humanity. He had such a wonderful relationship with the cameraman and all the technicians. I remember that they were so excited to be doing something that had never been done before and being asked to extend themselves. We all couldn’t get over how he’d made a Warner Bros’ film stage into such an authentic-looking hospital. But Mike had such strong ideas about how the film was supposed to be and how it was to be mounted. He knew roughly what he wanted before he got there and yet, at the same time, he was improvisational with the actors. He always made it feel like a collaboration, which is the easiest kind of atmosphere in which to work. Working on that film was a really pleasurable experience. With Mike, it’s all invisible – there’s no pain, no strain, no histrionics. Compared with other directors I’ve worked with, he’s top of the list.”
Hodges admits to being a big fan of improvisation: “A film is alive. You shouldn’t stifle it. You should never over art-direct, over conceive, over research, or walk in with an exact idea of how
“A film is alive. You shouldn’t stifle it. You should never over art-direct, over conceive, over research, or walk in with an exact idea of how things should be done. “ Mike Hodges
things should be done. An actor and a location can always give you something you don’t expect. Wonderful accidents happen. You’ve got to dance with a film, let it live.”
With The Terminal Man, Hodges has, in fact, made a black-and-white film. His visual style involves having the scenes outside the hospital as clinical as the ones inside it. Contrasted with the darkness of Benson’s hospital room are the doctors’ ultra-clean, futuristic homes, decked out in the same white-on-white colour scheme as the wards they work in. In the hospital, these professionals wear bright white robes and aprons and during out-of-work hours, they dress in black formal dress.
Hodges’ decision to, at one point, use an extract from the old black-and-white movie Them! (1955), ties in well with the concept of creating a cold thriller, absent of bright colours, although the idea for the look of the film didn’t come from other movies:
“My inspiration came from the American painter Edward Hopper who was relatively unknown in the UK in those days, and up until then, 1974, I’d certainly never heard of him. Something made me pick up this voluminous book of his paintings in Pickwick’s bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard. I opened it and there was my film. There was the sheer loneliness of urban America framed on every page. I can remember at that moment deciding to strip my film down to match the loneliness that Hopper had captured. I still have that book.”
Hodges ordered in half-a-million dollars worth of surgical and computer hardware for the production, which in the early 1970s was big money. The sophisticated gear included a headless computerized robot, a gleaming X-ray machine and operating table, monitors and gurneys. It was all there to lend authenticity to a brain operation which was carefully researched and plotted by three of Los Angeles’ finest brain surgeons.
The actual operation took weeks to film and constituted about a third of the film’s playing time. Hodges took great pains to make it as authentic and clinical as he could:
“I didn’t want to let the audience off the hook with that particular scene. I wanted them to realize that mind control of this dimension was a reality. I wanted them to see what it is like to put wires into the head of a man. It was very unpleasant for George Segal lying for long periods on the operating table! I really was concerned for him. We devised a way of covering his face during the surgery so that I could use a stand-in, a lie-in to be more accurate. That helped a lot.
“Joan Hackett was very impressive, I think, as Dr Ross. She was perfect for the part. She even cut off her beautiful long hair to make herself appear more like a doctor who has little time for vanity. We looked at hours of surgical films and lectures so that she was fully introduced to the character she played.
“I don’t usually storyboard but for the operation sequence I had to. If I hadn’t have storyboarded those scenes, I’d have gone crazy trying to remember all of the different shots. It was all in the detail.
“At first, having used only locations on Get Carter and Pulp, I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the studio. I was desperate to shoot the operation scene in a real hospital. After looking at every possible operating theatre in Los Angeles, I realized there was nowhere we could do it and have the freedom necessary. Eventually, my production designer, Fred Hartman convinced me that we should build our own theatre in the studio. Fred did me a big favour. I ended up loving every minute of it! Since then I’ve always loved shooting in studios. For a filmmaker, it is sheer bliss. Everything is possible and you are in total control of light, sound, everything. In the studio you can be a conjuror. It’s like working in a magic box where you can create anything, even the elements – sun, rain, or snow.
“For the first time I started to think of myself of a proper filmmaker. I felt I was making a film in the way my favourite directors did when I was a kid. All those films I’d seen in the late forties and fifties. Back to the very first one I’d ever seen, Top Hat, and films like Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes. And, of course, all studio-based musicals, Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris. I never missed any of the musicals. Weird, I can’t watch any of them now. I don’t know why.”
Crichton’s original novel was stuffed with techno jargon to lend his plot realism. Although Hodges captured his overall idea of mind-control by computer, in the name of medicine, he decided to concentrate more on the human element. The focus is shifted to the anxiety of losing control, something we all share. Benson’s wary relationship with computers and machines is something we recognize, even more so now than when The Terminal Man was made. Like Pulp it is a very prescient film.
Before The Terminal Man, in Pulp Hodges had satirized Catholicism, with a very funny scene involving a line-up of identical priests (Gilbert’s assassin is disguised as a priest). Here, in The Terminal Man, Hodges looks more seriously at the religion. He made his hero a Catholic. But when Harry Benson turns to his religion for help, it can’t oblige. Nothing and no one can help Benson. He has his third attack and, out of control, strangles the priest. In Crichton’s book, the climax is a shoot-out in the basement of the hospital. In Hodges’ film, it takes place in a cemetery. He felt that the film couldn’t just be about the perversion of scientific progress or science replacing religion. Instead, it had to deal with the harsh realities of life and death:
“I can understand why Crichton wanted to end the film with a shoot-out in the hospital basement. It’s a technological end to a technological problem. That’s perfectly valid but, for me, that’s unsatisfactory! It doesn’t go deep enough. So, even though Crichton didn’t agree with me, I changed the ending, and with it the whole mood of the film.
“Technology isn’t just out there on its own. We create it and we use it. Ultimately, it has to relate to humans. When it doesn’t, when it de-humanizes, there is a problem. I felt that the breaking in, the opening up of a person’s brain to change its circuitry is like invading a foreign country, or opening a tomb. Change it and we are somebody else. Of course, some of our relatives shrank the heads of their enemy and wore them. In the British Museum the other day I came across a skull turned into the bell of a trumpet. Blowing a tune through an enemy’s head is rather touching, I think. In short the head has always been considered somewhere special. Maybe some think it’s where the soul resides? If it is, opening it up is like opening up the tabernacle in a church.
“It’s a film about the inevitably impersonal coldness of any institution, and hospitals in particular. Apart from Dr Ross, and obviously Harry, the rest of them are cold and detached. It’s a curious film and is divided into two distinctive parts. The first part is about the operation. The second is a more conventional thriller with a series of deaths and the culmination of the whole piece. Welding the two was not easy but the visual style hopefully helped.”
Later, in an HBO television drama W.G.O.D (1985) and in A Prayer for the Dying (1987), Hodges would also turn what could have been run-of-the-mill thrillers into quite complex, serious films, brimming with his own quirky references and general distrust of religions, especially Catholicism. Hodges has only one regret about The Terminal Man:
“I agreed to a change early in the film which I regret deeply. Feedback from the studio concluded that audiences had no one to root for. This was incomprehensible to me – if they can’t root for Harry Benson, who the hell are they going to root for? The guy was completely trapped with nowhere to go, no one to turn to, but they couldn’t root for him because he wasn’t coated in sugar. Harry wasn’t very affable. The studio suggested I switch a restaurant scene where the hospital PR man is briefing the surgeons on the media coverage. If placed close to the beginning, before the opening credit sequence, we could insert before-and-after photographs of Harry and his family in happier times before the car accident, Harry’s battered wife, Harry under police escort, and so on. This was meant to make him more sympathetic. In my view it didn’t make a scrap of difference. The scene is absolutely unnecessary and I’ve been trying ever since to get it removed if only from the DVD. I’ve failed because nobody gives a sod except me. I could kick myself for agreeing to it in the first place.”
Before the scene in the restaurant, however, there is the prison sequence in which an anonymous eye peers through a security peephole. It’s a guard staring into Benson’s cell.
He asks his colleague: “What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s bananas,” is the reply.
This is also the point when Glenn Gould’s piano begins a Goldberg Variation, enhancing the film’s eerie beginning. A similar sequence comes at the end, with the comment: “They want you next”. A shot of the same eye staring through the peephole brings this mesmerizing film to a close.
In the end, The Terminal Man wasn’t even given a release in the UK and, in the US, after bad previews and terrible reviews, it was dumped.
“I think American audiences found the film too uncompromising, too tough to take, and perhaps they had a problem accepting George Segal in a serious role for a change. At the time, he’d developed a reputation as a light comic actor, but I decided on him for the film mainly because, wait for it, I thought the audience would root for him. I still think he is terribly good in it. He’s a very good actor.
“While waiting for my first preview in LA my wife and I went to see a preview of Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands (1974). It was also with Warner Bros. We both loved it but the rest of the audience didn’t seem to enjoy it. Again it was too tough for them. It was then I realized it would be the same fate for The Terminal Man. I remember turning to Jean in the cinema and saying that I thought I’d made it too spare, too close to the bone. I meant to write to Terrence Malick to congratulate him but I didn’t for whatever reason.
“I really felt bad about this when, out of the blue, I received a letter headed ‘Terry Malick’ but with no address. It was the most wonderful letter to get when I was feeling so bruised by the negative reaction to the The Terminal Man. I replied, of course, but because I had no address I sent it care of Warner Bros. Months later I received the letter back stamped ‘Not known at this address’. So the man who had made one of the great films of the decade was not known by the studio that had financed it. Perfect.
When I eventually managed to contact Terrence I sent him the returned letter with a note: ‘That’s showbusiness!’
During pre-production, Hodges received a letter from Michael Crichton, who clearly didn’t like Hodges’ script. Since then, it looks like the man behind Jurassic Park and ER has changed his mind. As George Segal recalls: “At the time, I remember Michael Crichton was feeling usurped because he’d just decided he wanted to start directing but I guess had already sold the film rights to The Terminal Man. But since that time, while critics began reappraising the film, he sent me a note extolling the film. So it looks like he came round too!”
Now, it seems, viewers and critics are re-evaluating this underrated film. When it plays on television, reviews in the film guides are a lot kinder. In fact, The Terminal Man is a film that plays on television regularly in America, where it was first rejected. Hodges says he knows this to be the case because of the large residuals he receives from US television networks.
That a film has found a substantial audience two decades after it was made could mean that people’s taste in movies has changed, although it does seem to suggest that if the studio had bothered to get behind The Terminal Man in the first place, it would have met with more success. It’s also a good reason for Warner Bros. to release this lost gem on DVD.
