Planet of the Apes: Evolution, Supremacy, & the Death of Liberty

Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever*

This episode of Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever explores the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes, analyzing its transition from Pierre Boulle's no

Key takeaways

• The film is less an auteur-driven project and more a product of producer Arthur P. Jacobs' vision and promotional expertise.
• The production utilized significant 'Americanization,' using NASA logos to align the story with the 1960s space race.

Main topics

• Planet of the Apes (1968) analysis
• Book vs. Film adaptations

Notable quotes

Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape.

Conclusion

The episode provides a deep sociological reading of a sci-fi staple, p

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Security police. I'm Speaker 2 (0:01) in charge of this man. Speaker 1 (0:02) No longer, madam. He is now in the custody of the Ministry of Science. Speaker 4 (0:05) Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape. Speaker 3 (0:15) Hello and welcome to every single sci-fi film ever. I'm Aish Khan. Today we'll be talking about the 1968 film The Planet of the Apes, which was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, based on a book by Pierre Boulle. The film has a fantastic and unusual score by Jerry Goldsmith and phenomenal makeup by John Chambers, which won an Honorary Academy Award. Be warned as there are always spoilers ahead and possibly this time for the biggest and best twist ending in cinematic history. And with that, on to my wonderful guests. First up is John Wills, who's a professor of American media and culture at the University of Kent. He has written a lot about popular culture, including his latest book, Doomtown USA. Welcome back to the show, John. How are you? Speaker 2 (1:01) I'm good. Thanks for having me back on the show. Speaker 3 (1:03) Thank you. Wonderful. Joining John is Phil Nichols, who is Senior Consultant at the very Bradbury Centre at Indiana University. He is also formerly the Film and Television Course Leader at the University of Wolverhampton. Welcome back to the show, Phil. How are you doing? Speaker 1 (1:17) Very good, thanks. Wonderful. Good to be here. Thank Speaker 3 (1:20) you. So first of all, I wanted to jump into the fact that this is based on a book and there is a big departure from the book. Phil, can we talk a bit about the differences and whether they work or not? Speaker 1 (1:31) Sure. The book is... pretty much the film, except it's got this very strange framing story. Because when you first start reading the book, you're reading about Jyn and Phyllis. You don't know who they are, but they're in a spaceship. They retrieve something floating in space and they start reading it. And oh, it's Planet of the Apes. They've essentially found somebody's account of this strange planet. So there's this whole framing story. But within the story itself, you've also got... Kind of like a double ending, which you don't have in the film. In the book, the astronauts land on this planet, discover it's ruled by apes, figure out the secret of it, then travel back home. And when they get back to Earth, the Earth has also been taken over by apes. So it's like a Russian doll. You've got a story within a story within a story in the book, which makes it really very complicated and overly so, I think. Speaker 3 (2:30) Yeah, which is also the ending of the Tim Burton film that when they come back to Earth. Yeah, that's right. Speaker 1 (2:35) I Speaker 3 (2:36) understand the point they were kind of trying to get at. But what do you think, the film or the book in terms of how it wraps everything up? Speaker 1 (2:44) Oh, the film. It's so streamlined. It's so incredibly efficient in the way it conveys all the information. Speaker 3 (2:51) And Bull himself was apparently quite an anglophile. So he did have, you know. He was attracted to the Englishness of things, I suppose, is the way you describe that. But he was part of the Free France movement. So he was part of resistance in France during World War II. And he was captured during World War II and was held in a Hanoi prison for two years, but was told that he would be there for life doing hard labor. So apparently some of his experiences during that time also inform the book. I Speaker 1 (3:23) mean, I knew he'd been captured. I had not seen that there had been a suggestion that that influenced the book. But it does put it in a whole new perspective because a large part of the film and the book is the central character, the astronaut, having his world turned upside down. And instead of being the lord of creation, he's sort of the lowest of the low and he's treated variously as a slave, a pet, or just a beast that needs to be put in a zoo, basically. Speaker 3 (3:53) And can we talk a bit, you'd mentioned that this is not an auteur-led project. The producer Arthur P. Jacobs was instrumental in getting this film made. Now, he started his career in the 1940s as a courier at MGM and would go on to have a public relations firm which had clients including the Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, James Stewart and Gregory Peck. Phil, can we talk about this? Speaker 1 (4:17) Jacobs was primarily a publicist. He's called the producer of the film, and he was the one who initiated the project. But as you say, his background was entirely in publicity, so he knew people. And he latched onto this book very early, pretty soon after it was first published in, I think, 1962, 63, something like that. He thought he would make a film of it because it seemed a very good publicity stunt to make a film as this. And so he took it forward as a producer. And I suggest that this film is the opposite of an auteur movie because there is no one single controlling intelligence behind this. The closest you've got is Jacobs, but he is really just the basic concept man. He has to call in writers to develop the idea. And there's a succession of writers that come in. There's Rod Serling, there's Michael Wilson, there's John Kelly. There's a succession of directors attached to the project. Ultimately, there's no one person really driving this, except it's all filtered through Arthur P. Jacobs. But Jacobs was not very hands-on in terms of story or direction and that kind of thing. He was mainly concerned with publicity stunts. And he pulled off quite a few while the film was being made. Speaker 3 (5:45) Draw Speaker 1 (5:45) attention to it. Speaker 3 (5:47) And any examples of that? Speaker 1 (5:48) He would basically exaggerate everything that happened on location. So there's a scene where the astronauts are running away from some tumbling rocks. And they're not real rocks. They're polystyrene Hollywood rocks. But Jacobs put out this news story that a real boulder, a massive multi-ton boulder, fell within inches of them. Charlton Heston and nearly killed the cameraman. And none of it's true, but it's an exaggeration for publicity purposes. And because he had some photos that he could pair with that. I Speaker 3 (6:23) feel like I need to learn some of those skills for my podcast, but yeah, I'll look into that later. John, going on from that, from astronaut, from an American astronaut to becoming prey, can we talk about the beginning of Planet of the Apes? Speaker 2 (6:39) One of the things that takes hold of this project, I think, is pushing an American space mission identity of the picture. And the film becomes very much an Americanized story rather than really its origin point with Bull's story. And you can see that very much with the opening of the movie. NASA logos are very much present on the uniforms of the spaceship. This is clearly a US spaceship. It's not, you know, Earth or any sort of international effort. They are US astronauts in the space race going on, you know, an adventure. We should say that it's also suggesting that US technology at that time can go very, very quickly and move very fast because it's set in 1972. And already there's a sense that American astronauts will be able to spend six months in space and travel long distances, things like that. So it's full of kind of American, kind of a little bit of gung-ho kind of American space exploration messaging. And I think also we get that with Heston's lead character, Taylor. He's very much a very, quite a bullish American character, isn't he, right from the start. And I read that. Other people here in line for that role included John Way and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando. So they're looking for a big American kind of character to lead this movie. For me, I really like the opening of Titan of the Apes. I think it's a superb kind of beginning to a movie. I love how when you watch it, you get the view from the spaceship. by coming down to this mysterious planet. And you get a sense of kind of being in space a little bit, which at that time is part of, you know, everybody's really excited over what space will look like, what it will be like. And in a sense, this movie is trying to capture a little bit of that excitement and imagination, but then it throws it into a complete disaster and complete turmoil. And the astronauts... when they're coming in, when they actually land, they are in complete survival mode. And actually, I really like how at that time they're suffering and they're disorientated. And actually, there's a certain element of realism to this picture because you can see them struggling to open or close their dinghy. And it feels like this wilderness setting is really daunting to them. And that's exaggerated a bit by some of the filmmaking. So you have a sense of suddenly when the camera pans to the landscape, the music disappears and everything suddenly feels kind of alien and silent. And yet you've got these pictures whereby there's these tiny astronauts in a huge environment trying to just walk in a sense. So I think it's quite a magical opening. I think it's Heston's character, Taylor, who says this, but maybe not. They talk about space squashing man's ego and time wiped out everything you ever know. There's these huge, big statements that are thrown into these opening scenes. I think it's incredible, the kind of setup. I watched it with my son, who's 11. I think that really hooked him. He doesn't necessarily want to watch a big movie, but it really hooks you in, doesn't it? So I think that's great opening. Speaker 3 (10:31) Yeah, I can imagine as a child when I saw that, I would have been excited that there was one woman on board. But that didn't last long. No. Speaker 2 (10:41) Women Speaker 3 (10:41) are weak and they should not travel across. Yeah, there's Speaker 2 (10:46) some quite difficult gender things we can pick up if you want later on. Yeah, we'll do that a bit later on. Speaker 3 (10:52) But apparently the woman who was, so the corpse wasn't just a, whatever they make fake corpses out of. Mannequin. Yeah, it was makeup on an 83-year-old woman when Stuart on the initial rocket over dies. So yeah, they didn't just age up the young actress. Okay, let's talk a bit about this simian society that they end up finding. And let's start with John. Speaker 2 (11:15) World building, you know, incredible here. And we get a true kind of sense of an inverted world, an inverted society built around ape hierarchies. It's almost like the society stripped down to core elements. Like it's quite elemental, isn't it? You've got guns, you've got these three strata of apes. And everything's quite in a way minimal when organized, but that kind of strengthens its message for the audience. For me, the Simian Society, you know, you've got some issues of contest really, because you've got basically a kind of religion versus kind of science message that's completely, it's almost too dominant for me sometimes in this movie, but they're often just swapping between that. But we're also getting messages around the three groups, the gorillas, the orangutans, the chimpanzees. There's a kind of class issue as well. So there's lots there. And, you know, Taylor jumps into it. He's dragged, isn't he, literally into this world and gets caught up as almost this issue for them to work out their society around. He comes up as a test case for what do you believe? Do you believe scientific discovery? Do you believe in faith? What role should you play in society? He kind of opens all this up, cracks it open, and there's a lot of fear around that too. So yeah, I think it's really good at deconstructing some of the issues. that we grapple with for hundreds of years, as well as just like in the 1960s. Speaker 3 (13:07) And also, out of the astronauts that land, he is the most cynical. I suppose he's the biggest misanthrope out of the ones that land. Although he is proven right about how terrible humans are right at the end of the film. Speaker 1 (13:20) He is. But he gets treated as the definitive example of his. species, which he is not, and he's not comfortable with being cast in that role, but he finds himself having to defend his species. And when they're piecing together the archaeological evidence, they're sort of debating whether humans were ancestors of apes or whatever, but he's quietly piecing together all of the bits of the finds from the archaeological dig, and he's trying to figure out a story of what must have happened. to these primitive humans who had been on this planet before. And he finds things like a heart valve, a pair of glasses, dentures. So he comes up with this notion that, well, people must have been in a very decaying state before something caused them to die out and be