15 February 1980
Classic sci-fi movie Saturn 3 celebrates its joyful 45th anniversary today. Obviously, you’re familiar with it — directed by Stanley Donen, who made Singin’ in the Rain and Charade, it starred Kirk Douglas, Farrah Fawcett and Harvey Keitel, and had a script by Martin Amis. It couldn’t fail.
And yet, and yet…
Roger Ebert called it “awesomely stupid” and “totally implausible”; a score by Elmer Bernstein was largely junked; Amis’ script was rewritten beyond all recognition; the original director was forced out; the effects budget was slashed because producer Lew Grade was trying to make Raise the Titanic at the same time (of which he later said “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”); the set took over two whole sound stages at Shepperton, and required a map because the crew kept getting lost; Harvey Keitel was dubbed; 15 minutes were chopped out in a vain attempt to make it watchable; and approximately 12 people went to see it.
There is, rather wonderfully, an entire website dedicated to this story, from where I nicked a lot of this detail.
I am enormously grateful to Gregory Moss for creating and maintaining that resource. For the dedicated Amis reader, it really is a must.
The sorry saga began with a production designer, John Barry — who did, indeed, have the same name as a far more famous composer, but put the latter out of your mind. He has nothing to do with this appalling farrago. (In some ways, this is a cautionary beware-of-what-you-wish-for tale, because this John Barry was known for his work on Star Wars, A Clockwork Orange, and Superman — but we all have ambitions beyond our day jobs, and who’s to say what might have happened if this project had gone right?)
Anyway, the said John Barry was working with Stanley Donen, and mentioned an idea he’d had for a modestly budgeted sci-fi movie. There are many hurdles at which this film might have fallen, and the first, it seems to me, is pitching to a renowned director who must constantly have had people trying to pitch things to him, but Donen was receptive, and suggested Barry write an outline. Barry did, and then a full draft. Donen liked that so much, he said he’d produce and Barry should direct it — although he did think the script needed a little extra something, for which he brought in Amis, a sci-fi enthusiast with (then) two novels to his name. Donen thought the amoral tone of the second, Dead Babies, was a good fit.
Donen then showed the script to Lew Grade, who bought the rights (but only after he’d offered the female role to Farrah Fawcett when she also happened to be on the flight on which he read the script). Fawcett was then around 31, so — well, obviously — needed a love interest in his 60s. Enter Kirk Douglas. (To be fair: this was after Sean Connery, then in his late 40s, turned it down. He was in tax exile, so not interested in filming in the UK.)
In some ways, Barry was lucky it had even got this far. He’d written things before, and had some optioned, but this was the first one to go into production. This, though, was the high point, as it turned out. Barry was a first-time director, and it quickly became clear that he wasn’t used to handling actors. Donen decided he needed to be on set, too, ostensibly helping. Feeling undermined, Barry left, and returned to production design — on The Empire Strikes Back, no less. Tragically, he died of meningitis, two weeks into filming.
Donen took over direction, but — given how many scenes there are in which Kirk Douglas gets his kit off — it may be that he couldn’t altogether stand up to the male lead either. In fact, if you want to know about Saturn 3, the best thing to do is not to watch it, but to read the work it inspired: Amis’ masterpiece, Money, in which ageing movie star Lorne Guyland disrobes with alarming regularity and asks “Is this the body of an old man?” specifically so that people will reassure him that it is not.
It is a genuinely terrible film. At under 90 minutes long, it still manages to overstay its welcome. It has three stars in it, all of whom are mostly unwatchable. The plot — a word which gives the work considerably more dignity than it deserves — concerns happy age-gap couple Fawcett and Douglas pottering about on their space base, finding themselves interrupted by murderous invader Keitel, and then having to contend with a huge robot, which also wants to murder them all.
As Gregory Moss’ website says:
Based on the anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, the eight foot droid took two years to perfect at a cost of over a million dollars.
So, obviously, it didn’t work very well, and looked ridiculous. Still, at least the movie was modestly budgeted, as planned: a reported $10 million. Unfortunately, it brought in less than half that.
Martin Amis later said
Little of my script was used
…but any blow he may have suffered from the artistic and commercial failure was lessened by the traditional compensation people receive for even passing contact with the film industry. He was paid at least £30,000 for his work — the equivalent of something like £170,000 today, which must have been a help in his decision to become a full-time writer in 1980, the year Saturn 3 was finally presented to an entirely indifferent world.
In the kind of savage irony he might have appreciated, Amis’ novels The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Money, and London Fields were all adapted for the screen, none of them successfully. The Zone of Interest, however, was widely considered a triumph. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and won the Grand Prix — on 19 May 2023, the day Amis died.
