Turner Classic Movies

Turner Classic Movies generally doesn't bring to mind '70s paranoid alarmism. Yet this little nit on the the AOL-Time Warner behemoth chose Presidents' Day to air a tripleheader of 30-year-old we're-all-gonna-die classics: Soylent Green, Rollerball and Silent Running. For one viewer of this dated doom-fest, it became clear that they truly don't — and couldn't — make post-apocalypse pictures like this anymore. It's no wonder that most of the genre's remakes are stuck in development hell, while the one that did get made, Rollerball, was just hell.

These movies were made when the hippie dream was just about dead, large conglomerates like ITT were all the business rage, and the environment was a wreck. People generally felt that things sucked, and would continue sucking at an accelerated pace. In Silent Running, Earth's vegetation has been wiped out by nuclear war. The few trees and plants left are on a cargo spaceship helmed by Bruce Dern. The bigwigs on Earth decide the vegetation isn't needed anymore, and declare it should be nuked (don't people ever learn?). Dern kills his colleagues, jettisons the ship, and lives out his days with his three robots, Huey, Dewey and Louie (did the ever-litigious Disney know about this?). Like most alarmist movies of this generation, it was set between 1999 and 2022, to give it a sense of We'd Better Do Something About This urgency.

But something was being done. Sort of. The Environmental Protection Agency was formed two years before the film's release, and the Clean Air Act was signed the year before. Of course, nuclear war still looked like a good bet back then. So what would Simon "Con Air" West hang the story on in the remake he's apparently tried to develop for years? Well, he could always bring back Steven Bochco, one of Silent Running's original scribes, to write it, if only to film long stretches of Dennis Franz bitching by himself in space.

The makers of Rollerball (based on William Harrison's 1973 Esquire short story) couldn't know that most of the giant '70s conglomerates would fall apart in the '80s, even if the Houston Energy Corp. team led by James Caan sounds like a dream of Enron. In Rollerball, one corporation rules the world, and the lazy people want to be in its protective cocoon. Rollerball, a violent mix of hockey, roller derby and Ultimate Fighting, is invented to show the masses that the individual cannot win over the group, but Caan's character, Jonathan E., screws that up by thriving as a star player. The corporation makes the game more violent, hoping Caan will be whacked like Sonny Corleone. Instead, he ends up the only living Rollerball player.

The message about corporate control and our lust for violence seems more pointed than the recent remake's focus on getting North American television rights for the game. Perhaps the Rollerball remake should have focused on the evil Wal-Mart taking over the world because of people too cheap to buy light bulbs at their local store, but good luck getting video distribution after attacking one of your top vendors.

Soylent Green has never been slated for a remake, and with good reason — the movie only works because of Charlton Heston's amazingly over-the-top performance. By the time of the movie's 1973 release, Heston was the master of the '70s alarmist movie, warming up with 1968's Planet of the Apes, and following that with 1971's The Omega Man, playing the only non-mutated survivor (he thinks) of a germ war between Russia and China. In Soylent Green, Heston was in full teeth-gritting mode as Thorn, a cop in 2022 New York, population 40 million and suffering from environmental destruction and overpopulation. (The book on which this was based, Harry Harrison's 1966 "Make Room! Make Room!", was one of the first of a wave of overpopulation screamers in the late 1960s.)

This movie has the biggest cult of the genre, thanks to the big reveal at the end (the worst-kept secret since Citizen Kane's sled): "Soylent Green is people!" Then there's the cast of Hollywood warhorses — Heston, Joseph Cotten, Edward G. Robinson (in his last performance) and, in an appropriate casting with the future NRA president, Chuck "The Rifleman" Connors.

After watching Robinson being led to his very pleasant suicide by Dick Van Patten, it became clear that no attempt to remake Soylent Green could ever come close to the overwrought, star-studded quality of the original. TCM, no doubt inspired by its paranoid ex-leader, Ted Turner, provided a public service by showing this Doomsday marathon, if only to stop filmmakers from remaking these classics. We don't want Soylent Green with Josh Hartnett.

In the wake of Sept. 11, anthrax scares, the Enron collapse, and the dot-com bust, are we due for a wave of similarly bleak and paranoid films? Even amid talk of remaking Westworld, The Omega Man, Logan's Run and the like, it's doubtful; as the Planet of the Apes and Rollerball remakes proved, today's pessimism doesn't come close to the misanthropy, dashed dreams and nuclear fears of the '70s.

Or maybe it was the cocaine.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)