Cameron was the oldest child in a Canadian family of five. Born in 1954 and growing up near Niagara Falls, he was just in time to catch the tail end of the atom bomb/Sputnik hysteria and to spend his teen years watching Vietnam play out on the nightly news. “In my youth I was an absolutely rabid science fiction fan,” he says. “I read all the classics, all the old Ace paperback novels. I was really into people like Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut. When I read science fiction I saw stuff in my head that I had never seen in films.” He also loved the films of underwater pioneer Jacques Cousteau: “I began to think of the deep ocean as outer space. This was an alien world I could actually reach.”

Dad was a quiet, thoughtful electrical engineer who gave his son a healthy interest in hard science. With his younger brother Mike playing Igor to his Dr. Frankenstein (Mike would himself become an engineer, and later developed some of the equipment his filmmaker brother used to explore the depths of the sea) Cameron regularly engaged in scientific experiments. One day saw them constructing a submersible “out of a mayonnaise jar, an erector set and a paint bucket,” complete with a live mouse as crew, and sending it to the bottom of a river on a rope (the little critter survived). Another time, they had the fire department chasing (and bystanders reporting as a UFO) a hot-air balloon constructed with dry-cleaning bags and lofted into the air by the heat generated by on-board candles.

Mother, on the other hand, was an earthy, passionate, artistic influence. A nurse who spent off hours indulging in serious painting and sketching, she also served in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps, revealing her to be a gun-toting tough customer underneath the feminine exterior, just like Sarah Connor in The Terminator and Ripley in Aliens. Under his mother’s tutelage Cameron became an excellent artist in his own right, winning many prizes in local contests.

But this skill created an inner war with his formidable scientific side, causing no small amount of angst as both disciplines vied for his soul. “There didn’t seem to be any reconciliation possible,” he said later of that time. “You were either in science or you were in the arts. But I was interested in both.” Little did he know then that his drawing, painting, and conceptual skills would be a key ingredient in first fantasizing about and then bringing into existence deeply imagined science-fiction stories like Aliens using the hard technologies of cinema.

Clarity came with his first viewing of a movie so overwhelming that after the lights went up he staggered out of the theater and threw up. “As soon as I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker,” Cameron remembers. “That movie hit me hard on a lot of different levels. Until I saw that film, nothing in my life had ever lived up to my imagination. . . I just couldn’t figure out how [Kubrick] did all that stuff. But I knew I just had to learn.”

When he was sixteen his Dad scored a job in Orange County, California, and their family moved from Canada down to the States. Soon Cameron was married and driving lunch trucks for the local school district, all the while studying special effects at the USC library and fantasizing about how to break into Hollywood. The impetus for making a serious go of it was the thunderous appearance of another science fiction classic. “I walked into Star Wars and just went ‘Wow!’” Cameron says. “Star Wars was what I had been seeing in my head all along. I saw that all the things I had been imagining could now be done.”

It wasn’t long before he and a couple friends began making their own ambitious 35mm sci-fi movie, Xenogenesis (1978), using seed money acquired from dentists looking to invest in films as a tax shelter. Cameron remembers those days as exhausting but heady. “It was no problem staying up all night, every night for as long as it took. It was that young perspective where you’re willing to sacrifice everything for what you feel is important.”

Unfortunately the dentist money dried up long before principal photography was finished, so Cameron cut what little they had shot into a twelve-minute demo reel. Chock full of models, miniatures, and effects like laser blasts, explosions, and forced perspective cityscapes made out of cardboard, the end result wasn’t 2001 or Star Wars, but it was the beginnings of the style that audiences would later come to embrace in The Terminator and Aliens. “For a bunch of dumbshits who didn’t know what we were doing,” Cameron says, “it was pretty good.”

It was also enough of a résumé to finagle his way onto the effects crew of low-budget producer Roger Corman, where he soon was doing visual effects, set decoration, and art direction for such deathless masterpieces as Battle Beyond the Stars (1980 — Corman’s Star Wars) and Galaxy of Terror (1981 — Corman’s Alien). On the set of the latter film, Cameron first met a struggling actor (and, incidentally, the director of the cult music video “Fish Heads”) named Bill Paxton, and the two would become friendly, something for which lovers of Aliens will always be grateful.

The work was overwhelming and the pay minuscule, but Cameron stuck it out, took on every job he could (often to the chagrin of his less-ambitious co-workers) and began to catch the notice of other low-budget producers looking for people to help get their visions on-screen for pennies on the dollar. “I ran roughshod all over the place,” Cameron says.

It’s a culling process. Some people don’t want to deal with it, the fact that so much relies on personality and not logic. That it’s hype. That it’s the pitch. I knew you had to sell and you had to make your move. . . .

I got a lot of good experience from Roger. What I learned was just ‘Go for it.’ I learned that there was always a way to get it done and make it presentable. Roger’s kind of low-budget mentality teaches you that you can probably get by with a lot less than you think. With Roger, if push comes to shove and there’s a crunch, you can still shoot.

After contributing to the effects work on Escape from New York, he finally got a chance to direct with Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (1981). The experience was a disaster, resulting in the fledgling director’s firing a few weeks into the shoot as part of a nefarious plan by the film’s Italian producer to take over the reins himself. Depressed, disheartened, and broke, Cameron fell ill in Rome and spent a feverish night engulfed in a nightmare featuring a robotic monster rising menacingly out of flames. When he awoke, he hurriedly sketched the image before it melted away back into dreamland.

The Terminator had just stalked out of the war-torn future into our world, and the repercussions — both on sci-fi in general and on Cameron’s Aliens — would be incalculable.

Previous posts in the series “James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and Aliens”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch James Cameron’s early demo film Xenogenesis (1978). If you’re someone who’s ever attempted to make a film by yourself, counting on your own ingenuity and long months of work to substitute for a million-dollar budget, you’ll understand how impressive this short film remains even today. A bigger budget only gets you so far, and Aliens could never have been made without the sort of cheap, scrappy techniques demonstrated in this movie.

Along his lonely way, Eli stumbles into a town resembling those of the Old West. The leader of the town is a self-appointed, ruthless leader named Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman who is simultaneously a cross between Mickey Rourke from 9 ½ Weeks and Mickey Rourke from The Wrestler, as well as the whole process of evolution between the former and the latter. Carnegie is an evil megalomaniac who sends his lowlife savages in search of the Book, convinced that possession of a copy of the now-extinct Bible can help him spread his rule and establish control over degraded humanity.

In case abusing his concubine, killing some people, and treating the rest like dirt was not enough to convey that Carnegie is a bad guy, we are shown that his favorite read is Mussolini’s biography. Yet, with all the weight of culture going against him, Carnegie is the only person who had managed to forge some semblance of a settlement with brewing elements of potential civilization.   His wild town—reminiscent of an Old West settlement but surrounded with cannibals instead of Indians—is the only semi-safe and positive place in an otherwise out-of-control and collapsed world. He is assembling a hierarchical society and he needs the Book to bring, as he thinks, “all the weak and wounded” under his dominion. His intentions are sinister and self-serving, but he seems to be the only person who understands the real power of the Book and its ability to transform and civilize the brutally egotistical and animal nature of disintegrated humanity . . . while at the same time correctly assessing any man’s, including his own, inability to re-create functioning societal interactions without a binding belief system.

Eli, on the other hand, is hell-bent on delivering the Book all the way west, as if Carnegie town, the etalon of the west, isn’t west enough. Eli is unwilling to bestow the power of the Book to the maniacal ambitions of Carnegie who, nevertheless, manages to usurp the Book by exchanging it for a hostage, Eli’s model-looking girl companion (the precise type of a woman you must leave home when you are going on a mission for God, which to his defense Eli attempts to do but finds himself powerless against the Biblical urge of Hollywood producers to stick an out-of-context young pretty face in everything they do). 

When the salivating Carnegie breaks open the thoroughly locked Bible, he tragically realizes that it is written in Braille and there is no one left who can read it since there is no one left who can really read anything anyway.

At the end of the movie, to our—and even to Ray Bradbury’s—surprise that Michael Moore is not the only person he should be mad at for stealing his ideas and book titles, we find out that Eli, in fact, memorized the entire Book. He IS the book and he finally gets himself to the place where the book was needed, where God, as Eli claimed, wanted him to deliver the Book…and that place is…—and this is where I wanted to deliver my popcorn, in partially digested form, to the row in front of me—that place is San Francisco.

Alcatraz prison has been turned into a citadel of cultural values and is protected by a hi-tech armed force, making it into a cross between Berkley and Guantanamo Bay. It is here that some surviving intellectuals—including a cross between Howard Zinn and the wacky Christopher Lloyd character from the Back to the Future franchise—collect surviving cultural values, print them, and distribute them to survivors, cannibals and murderers . . . who, when they are not busy eating and killing each other for old radio parts, are of course going to read Yeats and Keats.

As the head intellectual leads Eli through the sterile archives of stored masterpieces, he points out the fact that they had recovered some pieces of Mozart and Shakespeare but hadn’t had gotten any copies of the Bible yet, and now, well, they have gotten that too … delightful, isn’t it?  Wait now. This guy Eli carried this book (or himself) through dirt and blood, killed and mutilated people who endangered his mission, was chased by cannibals and maniacs . . . and after all this, the intellectual goes …”oh, perfect we got ourselves yet another bestseller.”  That’s all?  You’re kidding me, right?

This comfortably secular and politically correct ending is sad not because it is formulaically stupid but because it robs the movie of the great potential of actually being a movie about spirit as opposed to a movie about a religious book that it lamely is.  As with most current American artistic expression, The Book of Eli blindly follows the established academic elites’ anachronistic view of a cultural value as something belonging to a museum, library, archive, university and solely validated by peer views, professional commentators, Al Gore, and accepted intellectuals—basically, anyone but the people by whom and for whom those values are created.

Ironically and particularly with the Bible, it was a different story.  The Word of God was delivered directly to the people who needed it, who in their despair and ignorance depended on it not as a cultural value but as a living breath of divinity upon which depended their very existence.  It was given to the likes of people who inhabit Carnegie’s wild settlement and it was given to people like Carnegie, willful and often times evil kings, who nevertheless had the ability to deliver the Word to the people who needed it, because the Word had the power to cut directly to the people, bypassing those who tried to use It for their selfish purposes.  It was given to ruthless emperors like Constantine and mass executioners like Paul and it transformed them.

The Word of God was given to lowlifes and prostitutes, to criminals and sinners, to murderers and tyrants. In short, the Book was given to everyone but the scribes and Pharisees, the self-appointed custodians of agreed values, the professors and intellectuals. If anything, the Word was the simple liberating truth of passion that defeated the established complex dictatorship of the mind.

And this is the real story of the Great Book of Eli instead of the religious bestseller carried by a guy named Eli who, even in a post apocalyptic wasteland, feels the urge to conform to elite snobbery which, for what we know, might have been responsible for the apocalypse in the first place.

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes:

My top pick this January, A Face in the Crowd, is admittedly a little cheap. . . But, in an era where the political commentators who shout the loudest — or (dramatic pause and sly smile) cry the most — generate the biggest ratings, the prophetic nature of this 1957 classic enhances its remarkable timeliness today. . . Fifty years later, there’s a new generation of men armed with the phony authenticity of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes.

Beck, of course, has long been mocked on liberal websites for shedding tears in the midst of emotional monologues. And comparing him to Crowd character “Lonesome” Rhodes is a favorite gag of MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann.

This is hardly the first time that Mankiewicz has overstepped the bounds of good taste to take a swipe at conservatives. Big Hollywood readers have called him onto the carpet before for inserting needless political commentary into his TCM introductions for films like The Fighting Seabees (1944) and Capricorn One (1977).

As a former co-host of the liberal radio talk show The Young Turks, he frequently unloaded on ideological enemies with stunning vitriol. In one episode, he scoffed at a video of conservative journalist Michelle Malkin pointing out that most terrorists are “young Muslim males” with a rejoinder about “dumb Asian bitches.” (his radio partner, Cenk Uygur, promptly dipped even further into rank misogyny, dismissing Malkin as a “racist whore.”) In another public appearance, the same duo graced their audience with the following banter:

Cenk Uygur: “This is non-partisan, so when I say that Republicans suck c***, I just mean that literally.”

Ben Mankiewicz (laughing): “Name a Republican who’s not gay. Can that be done?”

All of this is par for the course among Lexus liberals, who ever luxuriate in their reputation for tolerance in between rants filled with the worst sorts of racism, sexism, and class warfare. I still remember laughing out loud earlier this year when, in a Los Angeles Times article bemoaning the hardships of well-heeled, fashion-conscious women, Mankiewicz’s wife spoke of feeling

guilty about flashing her finds in front of the housekeeper who cleans the Westside town house she shares with her husband. “I have racks for shoes and boxes. I will turn around the boxes that are particularly expensive when she comes,” she said, explaining that she turns the side marked with the price toward the wall of the closet so it doesn’t show. “I know she’s having a tough time — she told me. You can’t have an $800 box of shoes showing.”

That is what passes for good manners, charitable action, and noble sacrifice in today’s Hollywood.

Mankiewicz was recently fired from a disastrous year-long stint co-helming the former Siskel & Ebert show At the Movies, and has since taken up blogging at The Huffington Post in addition to his TCM duties. “Growing up in Washington, D.C.,” he says, “politics and sports were always a lot more important than movies. They still are, for that matter.” When pressed to name a film that has changed his life, he answers, “Hey, I love movies, but let’s not get carried away! I don’t think one has changed my life.” These comments alone should have disqualified him from ever being hired as a featured host at TCM.

With every snide put-down and sneaky swipe against movie-loving conservatives, a universally admired television treasure becomes a little less so. Ben Mankiewicz seems destined to continue to alienate a full half of the channel’s audience, one needless insult at a time, until they quit the whole business in disgust and retreat to their Netflix queues. The TCM brass, presumably a bit more concerned with gauche ratings than the hired help, would be wise to heed the warning of the literary critic Francis Jeffrey, who wrote almost two centuries ago that, “Goodwill, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.”

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America.

For years, organizations like Code Pink, A.N.S.W.E.R., and MEChA have inflicted lunatic be-ins on a horrified public, the collective psychedelic derangement of which makes The Rocky Horror Picture Show look like A Room With a View. But then Freedom’s Watch arrived on the scene — let’s call them Code Red, White and Blue — and they came determined to honor our troops, damn the cost. In August of ‘07, they first attempted to buy ad-time on major networks to run commercials supporting the war in Iraq. While Fox and CNN broadcast them without issue, NBC and its sister networks deemed them too controversial, which is liberal Pig Latin for too partisan, too outside the mainstream — in a word, too conservative. At the time, Freedom’s Watch president Bradley A. Blakeman wrote a polite letter to NBC, pointing out that the network has a long record of accepting ads from nakedly progressive groups without the slightest qualm.

(The Bob Hope display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, Ohio.)

He might also have added, “That plaintive whining sound you hear is Bob Hope spinning in his grave.” As Hollywood’s most beloved wartime icon, the British-born comedian spent a half-century enriching NBC’s coffers while praising our military at every turn. His 1970 and ‘71 Christmas Specials, filmed on the ground in Vietnam, still rank among the most-watched television shows of all-time. But save for an impressive schiltron of American flags displayed on holidays, Hope’s legacy long ago faded from 30 Rockefeller Plaza. In the end, the network’s wingtipped, Armani-clad Brahmins never deigned to answer Blakeman’s letter, quietly consigning his request for ad-time to the good ol’ circular filing cabinet, one with a metaphorical temperature edging dangerously close to Ray Bradbury’s dystopian 451 degrees.

Then in December of ‘07, Freedom’s Watch tried again with a pair of innocuous commercials that, to this viewer, soothed and fortified like exquisite mouthfuls of Mom’s home cooking. These new spots depicted people from all walks of life offering simple, heartfelt benedictions to our troops, and while their aura of optimism recalled Reagan’s “It’s Morning in America” ads, the underlying message was, by any reasonable standard, universal. Judge for yourself:

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Astoundingly, these too were rejected by a sober-faced NBC. The problem this time? Including FW’s web address on the tail-end of each ad, an act which apparently violated the network’s Standards and Practices.

Standards and Practices…boy, that’s rich. In recent years, NBC’s practices have famously included living the high life at the expense of the companies they cover, as well as manufacturing stories on everything from anti-Muslim hate crimes to exploding cars. In the process, they’ve degenerated from a once-proud news bastion into the peacock battalion of America’s fifth column, force-feeding viewers doom-and-gloom propaganda slickly masqueraded as unbiased news. Running a sincere message of hope in a time of war would indeed appear to go against everything they stand for these days, although — who knows? — it might help them reverse their agonizing slide into their lowest news ratings in over twenty years.

Freedom’s Watch president Blakeman promptly fired off a new letter of protest, but few believed he’d have better luck than last time — that is, until storm clouds started to form on the public-relations horizon. Cruising the conservative blogosphere in the days following the rejection, I could sense astonishment quickly hardening into genuine outrage. In forum after forum, the network began getting an earful from Americans with friends and family in the armed services. Soon the cacophony had grown to the point where NBC announced that it was reversing course and amending its (allow me to gird myself to say the words with a straight face) Standards and Practices.

And so, just like that, Freedom’s Watch won. Not an election or a court case, but merely the simple right to buy, at great expense, the time with which to say “thank you” to our heroic fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, friends and spouses fighting and dying in faraway lands. This confrontation proved instructive. As Robert Avrech’s Memorial Day post here at Big Hollywood showed, conservatives often pine for the olden days when America was largely united on patriotic matters. It seems possible to at least partially resurrect that (semi-mythical) time, but only if we insist on more from our shared broadcast media than the desiccated “standards and practices” of a corrupt liberal thugocracy.

During that holiday season of 2007, the NBC show with the most cultural buzz was Heroes, a sleeper hit about ordinary people mysteriously imbued with comic-book superpowers. It’s nice to know that — courtesy of Freedom’s Watch — America’s real-life heroes were honored on NBC during that Christmas as well. Granted, we only got it in precious little windows of thirty seconds each, but it was a start on the long road toward cultural recovery and renewal.

Freedom’s Watch was a victim of the collapsing economy of 2008, and there will be no new Christmas commercials from them thanking our troops. But one imagines that in December of 2007, somewhere in the heavens, Bob Hope cracked a smile at all of the people who twisted NBC’s corporate arm and said, “Thanks for the Memory.”

Those conservatives pining for a bit of that ol’ time patriotism can buy Bob Hope: The Vietnam Years (1964-1972).