Screenwriters are the great unsung heroes of Hollywood. Without them there would be no story to tell, no movie to make, yet some of the most ardent film buffs would be hard-pressed to connect such masters as Frank S. Nugent, Ernest Lehman, I.A.L. Diamond, or Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett with beloved movies they wrote (respectively: The Searchers, North by Northwest, Some Like It Hot, and It’s a Wonderful Life). If I rattled off the writers who’ve contributed over the years to the Planet of the Apes franchise, you’d probably draw a blank on all of them except Rod Serling—who was, of course, a TV personality, introducing his own and others’ stories on The Twilight Zone.
As Thomas Wolfe wrote, you can’t go home again, especially when home has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. But then Dehn had one of those light-bulb moments, which not only permitted the series to go forward but also breathed new life into it. In Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971), the chimpanzee scientists Cornelius (Roddy McDowall) and Zira (Kim Hunter) manage to pilot the Heston character’s spacecraft back through time and arrive on earth in the present day. Essentially Dehn was telling the original story for a third time, but turning it on its head: now the apes were the strangers in a strange land, hunted by a sinister Washington bureaucrat (Eric Braeden) who considers them—and Zira’s unborn child—a threat to humanity. Grosses for the Apes movies were declining steadily, from $32 million to $18 million to $12 million for the latest installment, but Dehn’s narrative innovation made the stories cheaper to produce, because the line items for sets, costumes, and especially the expensive ape makeups were much smaller.
Rise became a gigantic summer hit, and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which opened last weekend, seems on track to do the same. But this time Silver and Jaffa have taken as their model Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), the last and, after Beneath, the weakest of the original series. Written by John and Joyce Corrington (another married couple), with a final script polish by Dehn, Battle was a ham-fisted pacifist parable, set in a postnuclear world where Caesar and his minions have founded their own society out in the wilderness. Silver and Jaffa have appropriated its basic story, in which Caesar clashes with a belligerent gorilla who wants to exterminate the surviving humans, and it doesn’t play any better the second time around. After Battle for the Planet of the Apes, which grossed a piddling $8 million, Arthur P. Jacobs called it a day; by contrast, Silver and Jaffa have already been announced as producers of another installment, scheduled for summer 2016. This time they’ll be facing something even more terrifying, and thrilling, than a world ruled by apes: a blank page.
Directed by Matt Reeves
