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Planet of the Apes is a 1968 American science fiction film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and based on the novel La planète des singes by Pierre Boulle, released in 1963. The film stars Charlton Heston and features Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, James Whitmore, James Daly and Linda Harrison. It was released by 20th Century Fox.
The film tells the story of an astronaut crew who crash land on a
strange planet in the distant future. Although the planet appears
desolate at first, the surviving crew members stumble upon a society in
which apes
have evolved into creatures with human-like intelligence and speech. The
apes have assumed the role of the dominant species and humans have been subjugated into slavery.
The script was originally written by Rod Serling but had many rewrites before eventually being made.[1]
Changes included character names and a more primitive ape society,
instead of the more expensive idea of having futuristic buildings and
advanced technology.[2] J. Lee Thompson and Blake Edwards were approached to direct the film but the film's producer Arthur P. Jacobs,
upon the advice of Charlton Heston, chose Franklin J. Schaffner to
direct the film. Filming took place between May–August 1967, mostly in California and Arizona however the opening scene was shot at Lake Powell, Utah. The film's budget was around $5,800,000.
Planet of the Apes was released on February 8, 1968 in the United States and was a commercial success, gaining $32,589,624 at the international box office. The film was ground-breaking for its prosthetic makeup techniques by artist John Chambers,[3] and was well received by critics and audiences, launching a film franchise,[4]
including four sequels, as well as a short lived television show,
animated series, comic books, various merchandising, and eventually a remake in 2001 and a new film to be released in 2011. Roddy McDowall, in particular, had a long-running relationship with the Apes
series, appearing in the original series of five films (one only via
stock footage from an earlier film), and also in the television series.
In 2001, Planet of the Apes was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Astronauts Taylor (Heston), Landon (Robert Gunner), Stewart (Dianne Stanley), and Dodge (Jeff Burton) are in deep hibernation when their spaceship
crash-lands in a lake on an unknown planet in the year 3978 A.D. after a
2006-year voyage at near-light speed (during which the crew ages only
18 months due to time dilation).
The planet has no moon and the clouds at night are luminous. The
astronauts awaken to find Stewart's decomposed body, and that their ship
is sinking. They use an inflatable raft to reach shore. Once there,
Dodge performs a soil test and pronounces the soil incapable of
sustaining life. Taylor suggests they are on a planet in the
constellation of Orion some 320 light years from Earth but admits he is not sure.
The three astronauts set off through the desert, finding first a single plant and then others. They find an oasis at the edge of the desert where they decide to go swimming, ignoring strange 'scarecrows'.
While they are swimming, their clothes are stolen. Pursuing the
thieves, the astronauts find their clothes in shreds and the
perpetrators — a group of mute, primitive humans — contentedly raiding a
cornfield. Suddenly, gorillas on horseback charge through the
cornfield, brandishing firearms, snares,
and nets, which they use to capture whatever humans they can and kill
those they cannot. While fleeing, Dodge is killed, Landon is bashed in
the head and knocked unconscious, and Taylor is shot in the throat. The
gorillas take Taylor to "Ape City," where his life is saved by two
chimpanzee scientists,"animal" psychologist Zira (Hunter) and surgeon Galen. Upon awakening, Taylor—now housed in a cage with a girl whom he later calls Nova (Harrison), who was captured on the same hunt—discovers that his throat wound has rendered him temporarily mute.
Taylor discovers that the apes, who can talk, are in control and are
divided into a strict class system: the gorillas as police, military,
and hunters; the orangutans as administrators, politicians, and lawyers;
and the chimpanzees as intellectuals and scientists. Humans, who cannot
talk, are considered feral vermin and are hunted and either killed outright, enslaved for manual labor, or used for scientific experimentation.
Zira and her fiancé, Cornelius,
an archaeologist, take an interest in Taylor after he tries to
communicate by mouthing words. While Cornelius and Zira are talking to
their boss, an orangutan named Dr. Zaius
(Evans), Taylor writes in the dirt and attempts to call Cornelius and
Zira's attention to it. Nova runs her hands over it, to which Taylor
pulls her away, but when a primitive man ruins it as well Taylor kicks
him away. This angers the man, and he attacks Taylor. A gorilla comes in
with a torch and burns Taylor, but only Zaius sees Taylor's writing.
Realizing that Taylor is intelligent, he destroys the writing with his
cane. Eventually, Taylor steals paper from Zira when she comes close to
his cage and uses it to write messages to her. Zira and Cornelius are
convinced that Taylor is intelligent; upon learning of this, Zaius
orders that Taylor be castrated.
Taylor manages to escape before the procedure can be carried out and
flees through Ape City, which he discovers to be an architecturally
primitive version of 20th Century Earth. During his flight, he finds
himself in a museum, where Dodge's corpse has been taxidermied
and put on display. Shortly thereafter, Taylor is recaptured by
gorillas; finding that his throat has healed, he angrily addresses them,
shouting, in what has become one of the most memorable film lines,
"Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"
When back in his cell, Nova is then transferred to a cell across from
Taylor's cell as the warden Julius (Buck Kartalian) sprays Taylor with
water. The shocked apes hold a tribunal to determine Taylor's origins
(in a parody of the Scopes "Monkey" Trial) run by the President of the Assembly (James Whitmore), Dr. Zaius, and Dr. Maximus (Woodrow Parfrey) with Dr. Honorious (James Daly)
as the prosecution. Taylor tells of his two comrades and explains that
one was killed and the other lost. At this point the court produces
Landon, who has been subjected to a primitive lobotomy that has rendered him catatonic.
After the tribunal, Dr. Zaius holds a private meeting with Taylor, where he threatens to lobotomise him if he doesn't lie about where he came from. With help from Zira's socially-rebellious nephew Lucius (Lou Wagner),
Zira and Cornelius intervene early the next morning and "kidnap" Taylor
and Nova, taking them to "The Forbidden Zone," a region outside of Ape
City. Cornelius explains that no one knows why it is called The
Forbidden Zone; it is merely an ancient taboo and has remained
quarantined for centuries. Some years earlier, Cornelius had been
digging near the zone and found artifacts of a previous generation that
were not simian, thereby postulating his theory. Upon arriving, the
party travels down a river that flows into a nearby sea, but they are
intercepted by Dr. Zaius and his men. Taylor threatens to shoot him, but
Zaius complies and the party goes inside the cave. Cornelius shows them
the remnants of a technologically advanced human society buried in the
cliff by the sea, which he discovered a year earlier while on his
archaeological expedition. The tell-tale artifact turns out to be a
human doll, which Nova begins playing with, but all of a sudden, the
doll "cries," much to the shock of everyone. Taylor angrily confronts
Zaius, imploring why an ape would make a human doll that talks.
The truth is revealed that the apes' world was, at one time, controlled
by humans, but at some point in history, apes developed sentience and
the roles of apes and humans were inverted, with apes becoming the
dominant species and man becoming the apes' household pets, and later
becoming animals living in the wild, incapable of speech.
Dr. Zaius soon admits that he has always known about man and the fact
that human civilization existed long before apes ruled the planet. He
explains that The Forbidden Zone was once "a paradise," but man's
destructive tendencies caused it to be annihilated thousands of years
earlier. Zaius agrees to exile Taylor and Nova. Taylor can't help but
question why it is called "the Forbidden Zone." It then becomes apparent
that there is one discovery to be made, as Zaius implies that somewhere
within the zone lies something that completely reveals the truth (that
human civilization reigned before). To protect the dignity and identity
of the ape civilization, this area was considered "forbidden" so that no
one would discover what lay in it. Zaius advises Taylor not to look for
it because he will not like what he finds. When asked by Zira, "What will
he find out there, Doctor?", Zaius replies: "his destiny." Once Taylor
and Nova have ridden away on horseback, Dr. Zaius has the gorillas lay
explosives and destroy the evidence of the human society. It is implied
that Dr. Zaius doesn't go after Taylor because Taylor had spared his
life when he could have easily killed Zaius, or that Dr. Zaius figured
out that since Taylor didn't come from a jungle on the other side of the
Forbidden Zone, he would die in the desert anyway.
After an unspecified time spent following the shoreline, Taylor and
Nova finally do discover the truth that Dr. Zaius warned them about;
Taylor stops the horse and dismounts, staring up in disbelief at an
object not quite clear to the viewer yet. He begins approaching the
object before descending into a fit of rage and screaming: "We finally
really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you. God damn you all
to hell!" The picture zooms out to reveal the charred remnants of the Statue of Liberty, half-submerged in the shoreline, revealing that the planet he was on was actually Earth the whole time, and that the paradise that became The Forbidden Zone was once New York City.
[edit] Production
In the late 1960s, most studios were not convinced that this film was
a feasible production. One script that came close to being made was
written by Twilight Zone
creator Rod Serling, though it was finally rejected for a number of
reasons. A prime concern was cost, as the technologically advanced ape
society portrayed by Serling's script would have involved expensive sets, props and special effects. Serling's script was rewritten and the ape society made more primitive as a way of reducing costs.
However his stylized twist ending (a trademark from his Twilight Zone
days) was retained, leading to one of the most famous movie endings of
all time. The exact location and state of decay of the Statue of Liberty
(as seen in the 1998 documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes)[5] changed over several storyboards. One version depicted the statue buried up to its nose in the middle of a jungle while another depicted the statue in pieces.
To convince the Fox Studio that a Planet of the Apes film could be
made, the producers shot a brief test scene using early versions of the
ape makeup. Charlton Heston appeared as an early version of Taylor
(named Thomas, as he was in Rod Serling-penned drafts of the script), Edward G. Robinson appeared as Zaius, while then-unknown actors James Brolin
and Linda Harrison played Cornelius and Zira. Harrison, who was the
girlfriend of the head of the studio at the time, later played Nova in
the 1968 film and its first sequel, and had a cameo in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes
more than 30 years later (as did Heston). This test footage is included
on several DVD releases of the film, as well as the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes.
Dr. Zaius was originally to have been played by Robinson, but he backed
out due to the heavy make-up, and long sessions to apply it, that were
required. (Robinson later made his final film, Soylent Green (1973), opposite his one-time Ten Commandments (1956) co-star Heston).
John Chambers had actually tested the ape makeup some time earlier, in the TV series Lost in Space (1965–1968) (another 20th Century Fox production at the time). In one episode,[6] Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris) and Major West are imprisoned along with an ape-like alien. Harris was offered a role in Planet of the Apes but, like Edward G. Robinson, turned it down due to the complexities of makeup.
Filming began on May 21, 1967, and ended on August 10, 1967. Most of
the early scenes of a desert-like terrain were shot in northern Arizona
near the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River, Lake Powell,[7] Glen Canyon[7] and other locations near Page, Arizona[8] Most scenes of the ape village, interiors and exteriors, were filmed on the Fox Ranch[9] in Malibu Creek State Park, northwest of Los Angeles, essentially the backlot of 20th Century Fox. The concluding beach scenes were filmed on a stretch of California seacoast between Malibu and Oxnard
with cliffs that towered 130 feet above the shore. Reaching the beach
on foot was virtually impossible, so cast, crew, film equipment, and
even horses had to be lowered in by helicopter.[10] The remains of the Statue of Liberty were shot in a secluded cove on the far eastern end of Westward Beach, between Zuma Beach and Point Dume in Malibu.[11] As noted in the documentary Behind the Planet of the Apes,[5] the special effect shot of the half-buried statue was achieved by seamlessly blending a matte painting with existing cliffs.
[edit] Reaction
[edit] Critical reception
Planet of the Apes was well received by critics and is widely regarded as one of the best films of 1968.[12][13][14] The film holds an 89% "Certified Fresh" rating on the review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 44 reviews.[15] In 2008, the film was selected by Empire magazine as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.[16]
[edit] Academy Awards
Planet of the Apes won an honorary Academy Award for John Chambers for his outstanding make-up achievement. It was nominated for Best Costume Design (Morton Haack)[17] and Best Original Score for a Motion Picture (not a Musical)(Jerry Goldsmith). The score is known for its avant-garde compositional techniques, as well as the use of unusual percussion instruments and extended performance techniques. The film was eligible for nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1968, but failed to make the final list of five films.[18][19]
[edit] Other awards
The movie is on several of the American Film Institute's lists but did not make the top 100 movies either time. However, the musical score by Jerry Goldsmith was picked as the 18th best film score in American Cinema according to AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores.[20] Also according to the American Film Institute, it contains the 66th best movie line: "Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape!"[21] The film is also ranked at #59 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills list.[22]
In 2001, Planet of the Apes was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[23]
[edit] Sequels
Planet of the Apes was followed by four sequels:
and two short-lived television series:
The movie was "reimagined" in 2001 by director Tim Burton.[24]
Director Rupert Wyatt is currently working on Rise of the Apes,[25] scheduled for release in 2011.[26]
Marvel Comics produced full comic book adaptations of all the films, a number of original stories in the Apes universe, including Terror on the Planet of the Apes, Future History Chronicles and others. Mailbu Comics also produced several Planet of the Apes titles, including Planet of the Apes and the Alien Nation crossover Ape Nation.
[edit] Parody
Along with lampooning elements from such iconic science fiction television and movie franchises as Star Wars, Star Trek and Alien, the 1987 Mel Brooks sci-fi parody movie Spaceballs took aim at the ending of the 1968 Planet of the Apes
movie. The upper sections (the head and right arm) of the antagonists'
"Mega-Maid" space vessel, after it is mistakenly destroyed through its
own self-destruct system, land on a beach in a manner that resembles the
Statue of Liberty from the "Apes" movie, with the two horseback-riding
simians that spot Dark Helmet, President Skroob and Colonel Sandurz
emerging from the statue's "nose", bemoaning the presence of the
Spaceballs on their world.
In an episode of "Futurama"
The Late Philip J Fry, three of the characters travel in a time machine
that can only go forward in time. In the year 10,000 they see that the
Statue of Liberty has been blown up as well as its ape, bird, cow, and
slug creature equivalent.
A musical based on the Planet of the Apes is featured in The Simpsons episode, "A Fish Called Selma". When Troy McClure
is asked about starring as Taylor in 'Planet of the Apes', his initial
query is "...The movie, or the planet?", implying that he believes it
actually exists. The famous line is amended for the stage (and to better
suit the musical mitre) to "Get your hands off me, you...dirty apes!".
In later episode "Deep Space Homer",
Homer unwittingly re-enacts the final speech of the film when he
belatedly realises that the Planet of the Apes was Earth. In "Rosebud", Mister Burns envisions himself in the world of Planet of the Apes, as a chemically-preserved head attached to a robotic body.
Tom Holt penned a satire of the film in his short story Escape from the Planet of the Bears, in which the Earth has been (somehow) taken over by animals that resemble and behave like those featured in Disney animated films; the protagonist lands in a Winnie the Pooh
civilisation, employing a feudal system of Bears used as brute force,
Pigs as scientists and Donkeys as rulers. He later finds a half-buried
statue of Mickey Mouse with the inscription "Welcome to the United States of Disn-".
- ^ "30 Years Later: Rod Serling's Settling the Debate over Who Wrote What, and When". www.rodserling.com. http://www.rodserling.com/pota.htm. Retrieved 2007-08-04.
- ^ "Those Damned Dirty Apes!". www.mediacircus.net. http://www.mediacircus.net/pota.html. Retrieved 2007-08-04.
- ^ Biography for John Chambers (I) IMDb.com, August 4, 2007
- ^ "Planet of the Apes (1968) A Film Review by James Berardinelli". www.reelviews.net. http://www.reelviews.net/movies/p/planet_apes68.html. Retrieved 2007-08-04.
- ^ a b "Behind the Planet of the Apes" (1998) (TV)
- ^ "Lost in Space" Junkyard of Space (1968)
- ^ a b Planet of the Apes Revisited, p. 61
- ^ Planet of the Apes Revisited, p. 59
- ^ Planet of the Apes Revisited, p. 68
- ^ Planet of the Apes Revisited, P. 79
- ^ Final shot location at Westward Beach, Malibu at movie-locations.com
- ^ "The Greatest Films of 1968". AMC Filmsite.org. http://www.filmsite.org/1968.html. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "The Best Movies of 1968 by Rank". Films101.com. http://www.films101.com/y1968r.htm. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "Most Popular Feature Films Released in 1968". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/year/1968. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
- ^ "Planet of the Apes Movie Reviews, Pictures". Rotten Tomatoes. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1016397-planet_of_the_apes/. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "Empire's The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time". Empire Magazine. http://www.empireonline.com/500/28.asp. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ Morton Haack at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ Wiley, Mason; Bona, Damien (1986). MacColl, Gail. ed. Inside Oscar: The Unofficial History of the Academy Awards. New York: Ballantine Books. p. 768.
- ^ The 5 nominated films for Best Picture of 1968 were Funny Girl, The Lion in Winter, Oliver!, Rachel, Rachel, and Romeo and Julet. The winner was Oliver!.
- ^ "AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores". afi.com. http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/scores25.pdf?docID=222. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes". afi.com. http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/quotes100.pdf?docID=242. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "AFI's 100 Years... 100 Thrills". afi.com. http://www.afi.com/Docs/tvevents/pdf/thrills100.pdf. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "Planet of the Apes: Award Wins and Nominations". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063442/awards. Retrieved May 21, 2010.
- ^ "Planet of the Apes (2001)". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133152/. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
- ^ "Rise of the Apes". IMDb.com. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1318514. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
- ^ "Rise of the Apes Gets Release Date, Director & CGI Chimps". screenrant.com. http://screenrant.com/rise-of-the-apes-release-date-director-niall-58779/. Retrieved June 6, 2010.
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