Explorers
Characters and childlike wonder power unfinished science fiction sleeper
Video Days is on summer vacation and idling away the afternoons in our treehouse, craving an adventure. Join us in the month of June for five films combining adolescent spirit and a journey.
EXPLORERS (1985) is more imaginative and made with greater finesse and care than a lot of movies prepped, shot and edited with an abundance of time and studio support. Raced to completion without an ending, this science fiction/ adventure not only arrived in theaters as a rough cut, but trailing a rival “Kids on Bikes” picture in The Goonies (1985) and one about a teenager conducting a science experiment that would dominate the box office for months in Back to the Future (1985), both executive produced by Steven Spielberg. Explorers has moments that are as great if not greater than either of those movies, excelling at something elusive for a filmmaker to capture: the wonderment of a child’s dreams.
Eric Luke grew up in Los Altos Hills in northern California and until the age of thirteen, didn’t have a television in his house. His mother and father were computer programmers, and Luke credited the latter with introducing him to science fiction novels and magazines (like The Worlds of If). He’d started making movies on the family’s wind-up 16mm film camera as a boy and graduated from UCLA Film School in 1978 with a 24-minute student thesis film. Titled Dark Ages, it was about a samurai wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland with an AI companion that looked like a golf club. Working part-time at the Santa Monica location of Change of Hobbit, a science fiction/ fantasy bookstore, Luke started writing screenplays, initially, ones he thought would be commercial. Attack From Outer Space was a spin on fifties science fiction movies, involving a hot rodder who races aliens. Nightmare was a horror script about little monsters lurking in the walls. Cold-calling had landed him a literary agent, but Luke was working as a camera assistant for Private Stock Effects, a company in North Hollywood contracted to do dimensional effects for Jaws 3-D (1983). One night after work, Luke was staring at the moon and recalled his fascination with the Apollo program as a boy, of climbing into garbage cans with his brother and sisters to pretend they were space capsules.
Luke spent the next year working on his third script. Titled Explorers, it was about three boys who build their own spaceship and journey to the stars to meet the aliens who’ve been communicating with them, in dreams. After staging the first half of Attack From Outer Space on Earth and the second half beyond the stars, and realizing his script stumbled in its second half, Luke set two-thirds of Explorers on familiar territory and the last third in outer space. His agent didn’t know what to make of it, but another agent leaving the company told Luke she’d represent him. Sent to market, Explorers was passed on by all but one person: David Bombyk, head of creative affairs for Edward S. Feldman Productions. Feldman was a Bronx native and U.S. Air Force veteran who’d segued from a prolific career in film publicity to producing the weepies The Other Side of the Mountain (1975) and its 1978 sequel, and Hot Dog: The Movie (1984), a harmless Porky’s variation on skis. Bombyk’s assessment of Explorers was that its first 65 pages were sensational. Once the story shifted to the stars, the piece turned into a space opera like Flash Gordon that seemed familiar, as well as cost prohibitive. Feldman agreed and when they sent Explorers out to studios, submitted only those 65 pages to the buyer who responded positively: Paramount Pictures.
Paramount’s vice-president of production David Kirkpatrick and a junior production executive named Darlene Chan championed Explorers, embracing the script’s childlike innocence. Luke had developed his characters and story around a problem: How would kids build an operational spaceship? His third act was intended as a boys’ adventure, good and evil aliens vying for a crystal. Paramount added Luke to their payroll to work on his script. In 1984, he joined several screenwriters–Herschel Weingrod & Timothy Harris of Trading Places (1983), WarGames (1983) scribes Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes, and Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. who penned the first draft of Top Gun (1986)--assembled by Paramount on what had been a vacant third floor formerly used for wardrobe. The writers would be available to doctor scripts, or work in proximity with executives on projects the studio was developing, like Explorers. To direct, Paramount had attached Wolfgang Petersen, whose lavish (by European standards) fantasy adventure The NeverEnding Story (1984) was set for release in Western Europe in March and in the States in July. Petersen’s preference was to shoot Explorers at Bavaria Studios in Munich, inevitably giving it a look similar to The NeverEnding Story that had been anything but American. Jeffrey Katzenberg, Paramount’s president of production, preferred the assignment handled by a director like Joe Dante, moments from finishing the darkly comic fantasy he’d been working on for producer Steven Spielberg: Gremlins (1984). Dante had been looking forward to a vacation and spent six weeks turning Katzenberg down. As a courtesy, Dante conceded to give Explorers a read. A studio reader was dispatched to Dante and stood post until the director could finish reading the top-secret script. Dante and his producing partner Michael Finnell agreed the material was too good to pass on and in July 1984, Dante signed on to direct, David Bombyk and Edward S. Feldman as producers and Michael Finnell an executive producer.
Jeffrey Katzenberg gave the filmmakers the maximum amount of time to produce Explorers within a window of releasing it in late summer 1985. Barely fourteen months. By comparison, Dante had nearly twenty-four months to plan, produce and perfect Gremlins. Another challenge would be adhering to California labor laws which permitted children 17 and under no more than four hours of work per day, with three hours of mandatory classroom instruction. Casting commenced immediately, in August 1984 on the Paramount lot. An estimated 4,000 boys were auditioned over a three-month period. A 13-year-old named Ethan Hawke accompanied a friend to the audition, perhaps for the opportunity to visit a movie studio, and struck Dante as being so awkward and appealing (Hawke wearing braces at the time) that he was asked to read. With no professional acting experience, Hawke would be cast as Ben, the heart of the team. River Phoenix had appeared in 22 episodes of the TV series version of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers for CBS and played Robert Kennedy Jr. in a mini-series. He was considered for the role of the group mechanic, Darren, a child abuse survivor, but Dante found an actor he thought was perfect for that part: Jason Presson, who’d played a traumatized 9-year-old in The Stone Boy (1984) opposite Robert Duvall and Glenn Close as his parents. With the “hands” of the team cast, Dante liked River Phoenix so much he plugged him into the role of Wolfgang, the brain. Playing Lori Swenson, the object of Ben’s dreams, was Amanda Peterson, who’d appeared in a well-received drama series for NBC titled Boone and several TV movies.
On his first read of Explorers, Dante appraised Eric Luke’s script as very entertaining and having no third act. The version Dante read had excised the space opera but climaxed with the boys playing baseball with the aliens. Katzenberg assured Dante he could fix the ending before needing to shoot it, and the director retained Luke to not only continue his work on the script, but to shadow him throughout production. Shooting commenced October 1984 in Petaluma, California, in the North Bay region of San Francisco. Exteriors for Ben, Darren and Lori’s houses, the sidewalks and streets, the hill overlooking the town and riverfront where the spacecraft crashes were all shot locally. The production returned to Los Angeles to shoot exteriors for Wolfgang’s house (in Glendale). The Pickwick Drive-In in Burbank stood in for the outdoor movie theater and snack bar, while the shuttered Aviation High School in Redondo Beach was turned into “Charles M. Jones Junior High School,” the school’s marquee Dante’s tribute to the animator who created most of the Looney Toons characters. Interiors were shot on the Paramount lot.
Reteaming with Rob Bottin–the makeup effects maestro who designed the werewolves for The Howling (1981) and the vaguely Looney Toons creatures for Dante’s segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983)--Dante had proposed that the aliens in Explorers could be realized as puppets, similar to those Chris Walas had built for Gremlins. Bottin pointed out that the dialogue required of the aliens would take a great deal of time to capture via puppetry and suggested a combination of body makeup augmented with wire-controlled appendages. Robert Picardo was again cast to sit in the makeup chair for Bottin, having played the swamp witch Meg Mucklebones in Legend (1985) under makeup that, with Picardo’s performance, had completely transformed him. For the earthbound scenes, Mary Kay Place–who played the most compelling character in The Big Chill (1983)--was cast as Ben’s mother. Going into production with seven pages of mediocre material in which the boys interact with the aliens, Dante arrived on a pop culture twist. Not only would they reveal the aliens as children themselves, but fans of American television signals, using TV theme songs, commercials or game show bits from the 1950s to communicate.
One month before Explorers began shooting, Paramount’s top executives–chairman Barry Diller, president Michael Eisner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg–resigned. Katzenberg would follow Eisner to Walt Disney Productions to preside over its rebuild. Dante continued to race Explorers to the late August 1985 finish he’d agreed to, but in May, Paramount’s new regime, headed by Frank Mancusco Jr., announced that they needed Explorers two months sooner. Time would be deducted from editing and testing the picture. Dante and editor Tina Hirsch were reduced to finishing Explorers by cutting material as opposed to tweaking or completing it. At least half an hour would be chopped. Mary Kay Place’s role was reduced to two scenes, and other than receiving a “Special Thanks” in the end credits, she goes uncredited. Scenes that hit the cutting room floor included a supper in which Ben talks about Space Camp, a distracted father and jerk older brother (glimpsed during the drive-in sequence complaining that the movie looks fake) cut completely. Cornered by bullies at school, Darren pulls a fire alarm to alert an adult, drawing detention from an unsympathetic teacher played by the screenwriter, Eric Luke, whose scenes were also dropped. After their maiden flight, there was a major scene set at Lori’s birthday party, where Ben gives her a moon rock ring he thinks is neat. After returning to Earth, the boys used a newly acquired power to make their tormentors’ clothes disappear, a gag which Dante had no time to finish. In his post-mortem, Dante missed the teen romance and dream connectivity most. He’d tried to introduce a theory that consciousness is part of a larger collective, an idea that had bubbled to the surface of the ill-fated Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). Bread crumbs leading to this idea remain in Explorers during scenes featuring Dick Miller as a pilot whose sighting of the boys’ spacecraft rekindles dreams he had as a boy. While most viewers found Miller’s scenes tantalizing as opposed to puzzling, Dante declared the last five minutes of Explorers a mess, its finale taking place atop the hill in Petaluma and looped with new dialogue.
Explorers opened July 12, 1985 in 1,705 theaters in the U.S. Reflecting the director’s own opinions, reviews leaned negative. Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert turned two thumbs down on their syndicated TV program. Siskel stated he was rooting for the boys to discover something special and found the aliens “dumpy.” He summarized the movie as not bad but lacking a payoff. Ebert commented on an inconsistency of tone, with realistic childhood scenes on Earth and wacky comedy in outer space. With her dissenting opinion in the New York Times, Janet Maslin concluded: “Explorers, which is lively but largely familiar until the point when it reaches its batty pinnacle, frequently shows off Mr. Dante’s sense of humor to good advantage. It should be remembered, however, that this is the man who put a gremlin in a blender. Explorers also marks a new triumph for Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects outfit that has devised yet another way to show space travel, and makes the flight sequences really soar.” Explorers would be buried commercially by five other films, namely Back to the Future in its second weekend of release and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome in its debut. Explorers spent two weekends among the top ten grossing films in the country, a blip by its third weekend. Dante took advantage of the window between the film’s theatrical release and its bow on home video, trimming three minutes for a running time of 106 minutes. The director would very candidly point out that an episode of Amazing Stories–titled “Fine Tuning,” directed by Bob Balaban from a story by Steven Spielberg and airing in November 1985–did in 24 minutes what Explorers struggled to do in two hours, its tale about three high school students who receive signals from aliens announcing their love for TV and desire to meet their favorite stars, like Milton Berle, who plays himself. Like most of the episodes of the NBC anthology series, it’s been forgotten, while Explorers endures as a favorite of many who discovered it as kids.
Newspaper critics teed off on how disappointed they were by the third act of Explorers and how derivative the rest was of Steven Spielberg, then regarded by some as a Willy Wonka character running a film factory that turned out nothing but hits. It is true that Spielberg was the originator of the “Kids on Bikes” movie with Poltergeist (1982) and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) and several suburban fantasies went into production as a result of his success. But from its beginning, Explorers inverts the Spielberg model. The evidence is in their titles. E.T. was about an alien who encounters some children. Explorers is about children who encounter aliens. In pairing Eric Luke with a director in Joe Dante who seized on something he related to in the material, Explorers owes much to Ray Bradbury’s fiction: an ode to childhood, when imagination opened the doors to endless possibilities. As spaceships go, the Thunder Road may be the most lovable. The ship doesn’t just resemble something built in a junkyard; it’s one we watch assembled in a junkyard. We know which character picked each part. We watch those parts being installed and road tested. Explorers is a movie for motorheads who’d rather watch a carburetor rebuild than a film (set designers Les Gobruegge, Donald High, and Eugene C. Nollmann II most responsible for the Frankenstein vehicle). Even its capabilities, far-fetched to say the least, are credibly explained by the script.
Some of what would’ve neatly separated Explorers from other “Kids on Bikes” movies, as well as made it a better film, hit the cutting room floor. Otherworldly creatures were already a dime a dozen–those in Cocoon (1985) masqueraded as marine biologists who shed their human skin like unwrapping butterscotch candy–and Rob Bottin’s aliens, lovingly drawn from Tex Avery characters like Woody Woodpecker or Chilly Willy, aren’t any more interesting than the performance Robert Picardo summoned from them. Along those lines, what Explorers had in its favor weren’t creatures, but a superior cast performing deeper material. Susan Arnold, who before she became a film producer cast four of Dante’s pictures, found stars in Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix. Dante directs children exceptionally well, understanding precisely why each of them are doing what they’re doing scene to scene, like what draws their attention when they rummage through Wolfgang's laboratory. Something else that makes Dante a great director is how he comments on the universe while making popcorn pictures. His film-within-a-film, an Italian schlockfest featuring Picardo and titled Starkiller, is a howl, made by people who adore science fiction B-movies. Whatever level Explorers lands on for each viewer (7 or an adjustable 8 feel right), two points were added by virtue of the enthralling visual effects (optical effects veteran Bruce Nicholson supervising the team at ILM) and rousing musical score by Jerry Goldsmith that rates as one of the era’s most powerful.
Video rental category: Science Fiction
Special interest: Kids on Bikes