WTF Happened to The Black Hole?

For much of the 1970s, many big science fiction films tended to be based more on planet Earth, but that changed in 1977 when George Lucas smashed box office records with Star Wars after that lucrative saga set in a galaxy. Far, far away, suddenly everyone in Hollywood was Desperate for their own profitable outer space epic and Juggernaut Merchandising, for the next few years audiences would travel the spaceways with Battlestar Galactica, a big screen revival of the heroes of the Star Trek pulp comic, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, the terrified alien crew, and even James. Bond traded in his Walther for energy weapons in Moonraker Disney's own trip into the cosmos was The Black Hole, a haunting slow burner that, unlike the studio's previous releases, was aimed at more mature moviegoers, but was also sure to include some Exciting laser gun battles, robots ready for action figures. and spectacular special effects, but the studio's expensive Singularity failed to draw significant crowds to its Event Horizon when it hit theaters in '79, you mean we're going to the

black

hole

, yeah, launch the probe and find out what

happened

to this movie , the history.

The

black

hole

actually began spinning several years before Star Wars burst onto screens. The project began in 1974 as a script called Space Station One, originally conceived as an Irwin Allen-style disaster movie, but that version floated through. from development hell for years until the Star Wars led the studio to seriously reconsider its sci-fi program buoyed by the success of Luke Skywalker's Adventure The Runaway, the project was dusted off and began to gain momentum. Disney immediately understood that their film would need something special to visually differentiate itself from all the others. The Race to Space Legendary film artist Peter Ellenshaw, responsible for the visual magic in Disney classics Mary Poppins and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, was lured from retirement to work on production design.

He was joined by his talented son Harrison, who had made an incredible dunk. paintings for Star Wars, appropriately enough, the Ellenshaws scrapped most of the existing NASA-inspired designs by artist Robert McCall, who would coincidentally go on to Star Trek, the film that would end up being a direct box-office competitor to the black hole as the appearance While the film was being determined, the studio looked for someone to sit behind the camera. British director John Huff, who had made Orson Welles' Treasure Island and Disney's Escape to Witch Mountain, was originally attached to direct the project, but the pre-production process dragged on too long and Huff left due to other commitments, the The studio then approached Gary Nelson, who was primarily a television director but had recently made the Disney body-swap comedy Freaky Friday.

Nelson read the script and immediately said no. Nelson liked the general idea, but he thought the script was full of excess. of melodrama and families in Danger and what he described as typical Disney, but the studio was persistent and convinced the director to meet with Peter Ellenshaw to see some of the conceptual art and miniature models that had been created, those attractive images and The opportunity to work with advanced film technology sealed the deal for Nelson. Disney had realized that they would really need to wow audiences after George Lucas's groundbreaking Blockbuster and compete with the studio's other upcoming sci-fi projects in the works.

More than $1 million of the budget went toward development. A sophisticated new computer-controlled technology called Aces, the automatic camera effects system, and a complex matte scanning capability that allowed a camera to pan and tilt over matte paintings instead of the static shots the process previously required. The film would eventually include several hundred effects shots, including 150 matte paintings, unprecedented at the time, filmed. The revolutionary process for the film's spaceship, Ellenshaw and his artists took a different approach to the method of attack on film kits. Star Wars, where vehicles were assembled from random parts found in various plastic scale models, rather than black hole ships.

They were constructed from thousands of small machined brass parts and took several months to construct the detailed models of the massive USS Cygnus, each measuring 12 feet long and weighing nearly 200 pounds. Numerous models of Vincent and the other key robots were also built because separate versions were each needed for specific actions and movements the machines would perform, but the script, which had already gone through half a dozen writers, would quickly be scrapped by the airlock when Gary Nelson made considerable modifications that the key element of a sinister black hole had endured in every draft. but an expansive cast was whittled down to just a handful of main characters and the plot was transformed from a standard rescue adventure to a more atmospheric mystery with a haunted house setting that better suited the gothic tone of Ellen Shaw's artwork. with history stabilized.

It's time to find some actors to send into space. The role of palominos. Captain Holland went to Robert Forster, perhaps best known at the time for the dramatic medium. His impulsive right-hand man, Charlie Piser, would be played by Joseph Bottoms, who had made a big impression. Psychostar Anthony Perkins and screen veteran Ernest Borgnine would also join the team in the television miniseries Holocaust. The familiar voices of Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens would bring uncredited post-production life to the floating robots Vincent and Bob for the role of Dr. Kate McRae. A scientist who can communicate telepathically with Vincent Nelson had considered Sigourney Weaver in his pre-Ripley days, but that idea was rejected by the casting director supposedly because they simply didn't like her name, instead casting the model-turned- actress Jennifer O'Neill, who had made her spring breakthrough in the 1971 period drama Summer of 42, but when Gary Nelson began filming zero-gravity footage she discovered that the loose performance of her long, flowing hair was destroying the illusion of floating weightlessly in space after some back and forth.

O'Neill eventually agreed to substantially trim her hair for the film, unfortunately on the same night of the Fateful haircut she was hospitalized after a serious car accident while filming was underway. The role was quickly recast with Yvette Mimiu, whose long blonde hair would also be cut by the same zero. fulfillment of gravity for Hans Reinhardt, the enigmatic and obsessed captain of the long-lost Starship Cygnus, Nelson had set his sights on respected Austrian actor Maximilian Shell despite knowing of the performer's Mercurial temperament Nelson traveled to Vienna to meet with the actor about the project, only for Shell to instead recommend Jason Robards whom he praised for his work on the recent political miniseries Washington Behind Closed Doors, but when Nelson informed the actor that he had directed it himself that television drama, said that date gave me a big kiss on the mouth. and said: I'll make your movie and that was it, ironically the movie's menacing red robot, Maximilian, supposedly inspired by the tournebog demon from Fantasia, had already been named after him before Shell was released, the project had been retitled Probe space 1, but both Nelson and Disney's marketing department were unsurprisingly unhappy with the name supposedly before filming began.

New name suggestions were solicited from almost every Disney employee and over 500 different possibilities were considered before they inevitably settled on the black hole, which seems to be the most obvious. Principal photography began in October 1978, with the ambitious project taking up all four of Disney's available sound stages, the film was shot primarily chronologically with some particular wire stunt challenges, especially in the tight interior Palomino scene that opened the film. Forester Bottoms and Me MU versus received a crash course in circus. camp training to learn how to act with wires, and while today those wires would simply be digitally removed in post-production, hiding them for the black hole required some creativity, such as painting the wires the same color as the background or flipping the footage. upside down in post-production. production, as most moviegoers wouldn't think to look for cables falling to the ground, in total, the Zero G movie stunts took over 40 days of filming and, although the actors initially enjoyed the suspension experience , a process would eventually take a physical toll, as Forster later described. the harness as a literal ball breaker with the astronomical scope and technical complexity of the film, the filming process was slow depending on the scene and how much was involved some days could result in only one take being filmed, the cast and crew would prepare for the scene in the morning rehearsal and then capture the afternoon footage principal photography ended up running for 26 weeks for that memorable moment when Anthony Perkins' scientist dies from off-camera evisceration that the rotating blades of the homicidal robot a million a failed paper protection was actually an improvisation on the day, according to Nelson's quote, I had this image of Tony holding this book with all his great knowledge to protect himself and Maximilian just crushes it.

Another unscripted moment was Reinhardt's subsequent plea to Kate, which he thought to protect me from. Maximilian, but at the end of production there was a minor problem: the script still had no ending, apart from a vague statement about the surviving heroes entering the black hole. Nelson had gone ahead with filming with the assumption that he or the Ellenshaws would eventually come up with a fantastic ending, but after 125 days of filming it was still a worrying void. Nelson came up with the idea of ​​zooming in on a close-up of Kate's eye and pulling a shot of Michelangelo's famous creation of the Adam painting, but the studio balked at the religious connotations and rejected it instead.

Nelson and Ellenshaw ultimately established the process of capturing and completing the film's special effects to pay off, as the filmmakers and studio were impressed by the results, particularly the Corridor's iconic main meteor sequence, a deft combination of miniature mats and live action elements. Director Gary Nelson later described Peter Ellenshaw as a genius and called Disney's team of in-house effects artists magnificent. His extraordinary work earned an Oscar nomination for visual effects, but he would lose the statue to Lee Scott's Alien. The impressive black hole special effects would be front and center of the film. The movie and Disney publicity machine was fully primed for a potential bonanza in merchandise sales with one million copies of the novelization, 6 million action figures and games and a wide range of other toys and related items already being sold.

They were on store shelves for the previous 1979 Christmas season. The film even hit the screens. The Black Hole hit theaters on December 21, 1979, just in time for Christmas, released under the Buena Vista banner. It was the first PG-rated Disney film aimed at a more adult audience after four decades of strictly G-rated releases. The Mouse House, whose budget was initially estimated at 18 million had been expanded to 20 million, by which time the most expensive film ever made by Disney hit the screens just two weeks after Star Trek, the film, the black hole seemed to suffer in the wake of The Return of the Enterprise was not a box office phenomenon, grossing $4.5 million in its opening weekend and finishing with $35 million domestic, just a fraction of Star Wars' total of $230 million in its opening 1977 box office, even the R-rated Alien had earned $60 million during the summer of 1979.

Critics at the time were predominantly negative, calling the film ambitious but silly and boring. Many younger Star Wars fans who had anticipated more exciting space adventures in outer space were bored by the pacing or horrified by the lobotomized crew. and let's be honest, Maximilian was great, but Vincent and Bob were no C-3PO and R2D2, the black hole toys that were expected to occupy homes alongside the X-wings and Darth Vaders quickly ended up in the discount bins of the stores.stores rather than, of course, Disney would eventually get its own Star Wars in the form of Star Wars, but over the years, the black hole has developed a solid cult of followers who appreciate the haunting tone and deliberate tempo, the skilled cast, Moody John Barry's score, and even that audaciously strange metaphysical ending. was a commercial failure at the time, the risky proposition remained a notable part of Disney's portfolio and the studio was even developing a remake featuring Tron's legacy and Maverick director Joseph Kaczynski, that update appears to have been absorbed by a cosmic anomaly, but For many sci-fi fans, the technical ingenuity and stunning visuals of the 1979 original still hold up after more than 40 years abroad.