The Master of Disaster
Celebrating the works of Irwin Allen
Industry News Item
Today marks the first day of CES 2024, the consumer electronics-focused trade show where companies of all sizes trek to Las Vegas to show off their newest tech wares and try to grab at least a few seconds of the news cycle. What can we expect this year from the film and television (mostly television) front?
One of the items being announced by TV makers LG and Samsung are transparent televisions. This has been the realm of demos going back several years (I myself have seen one demoed in person at an E3 many, many years ago) and while Samsung’s tech is still in the demo stage LG swears that their 77-in Signature OLED T will go on sale sometime in 2024. It’ll probably be very expensive and by at least one account it doesn’t perform as well as a regular OLED so mark this down as something very rich people will indulge in.
Speaking of Samsung, they showed off a mobile projector named Ballie, which is mobile not so much in the “small enough to easily move around” sense but in the “it has wheels and can move around on its own” sense. About the size of a bowling ball, this is primarily a robot with smart home capabilities more so than a dedicated projector, but hey, it’s CES! Let’s get wild.
Sony is continuing to not make any television related announcements at CES this year, instead opting to have their own event later in the year, but they did show off more of their Afeela electric car they are building with Honda, so maybe that’ll have a PS5 built-in and a free copy of the next Ghostbusters?*
And finally, as per their want, Apple (a habitual CES non-attendee) announced that their Vision Pro headset will go on sale starting February 2nd, so if you’re in the market for a mixed-reality headset that can create a virtual theater environment for you to watch Ted Lasso on and you’ve got $3,499 to spend (more if you are like me and millions of other humans who need glasses to see), better preorder that shit on January 19th.
Let’s (Literally) Rock & Roll
In the history of television, one man stands alone with his capacity to capture the fantastic, the amazing, and above all else, create disasters the likes of which have never been seen on both television sets and the silver screen. I speak, of course, of the incomparable producer and director Irwin Allen.
Born Irwin Cohen, Allen started his career** in both print and radio before producing his first television show Hollywood Merry-Go-Round, a celebrity panel show featuring future The Tonight Show host Steve Allen (no relation) as the announcer. Irwin Allen then moved into film at RKO, producing a noir and a couple of comedies before directing his first film, the documentary The Sea Around Us (1953), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Not a bad start for the ol’ bean. It’s with this film that Allen began to develop some of his techniques, using largely stock footage and focusing on ‘action’ sequences (much as one can in a nature documentary).
He left RKO for Warner Brothers where he would direct another documentary, The Animal World (1956), which included Allen’s first foray into the fantastic with the inclusion of a stop-motion dinosaur sequence created by the legendary Ray Harryhausen. He would follow this up with his first scripted film The Story of Mankind (1957), a romp through various points of human history with a frame story where The Great Court of Outer Space is tasked with deciding whether or not to intervine when humanity creates a larger, more devastating atomic weapon, with ‘Mr. Scratch’ (nee Satan) acting as prosecutor and ‘The Spirit of Mankind’ acting as the defense. Quite a frame story you got there. Billed as having an all-star cast playing various historical figures, in reality most of the actors only worked for a single day earning $2000 (almost $22K in today’s money) and the majority of the film’s content being stock footage and recycled scenes from previous WB films.
20th Century Fox was the next stop on Allen’s studio tour, and one of the films he made there would later become his initial foray into scripted television. Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) is a fantastical disaster film where the crew of a submarine must transverse the globe to make it to a specific point where they will fire nuclear missiles at the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt that had caught fire and was heating up the earth. And you thought The Story of Mankind was out there.
If I seem like I’m picking on Irwin Allen, I’m not. I find a number of his films (particularly The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno) to be very entertaining and prime examples of the visual spectacle Hollywood films can be. For my money though, it’s Allen’s contribution in bringing high concept ideas to a television series budget that stands out even more.
The series version of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), the original Lost in Space (1965-68), The Time Tunnel (1966-67) and Land of the Giants (1968-70) are all prime examples of the Allen formula:
Blend of sci-fi and action? Check
Frequent use of miniatures, or in the case of Land of the Giants, oversized props? Check
At least one of the main cast is a cowardly villain who nevertheless is kept about by the rest of the characters? Check
Extremely frequent use of the “Irwin Allen rock-and-roll”? Check!
Explanation of this last point - the “Irwin Allen rock-and-roll”, also known as the “Star Trek shake” or simply, the “screen shake” is where the camera would be tilted back and forth while the cast would FLING themselves across the set to simulate the set actually moving. Of course, only the cast would move, no freestanding or smaller objects are flung around. Infamously Allen himself would be on set hitting a bucket with each shake to alert them when to move. While modern audiences likely find this amusing (as do I), it’s such a creative and low-tech way to simulate action in a way that serves the plot and the universe of the show. I wish more television these days could have a good time like this.
After the run of this quartet of series Allen continued to produce disaster films for both theaters and television movie-of-the-week, and while studios in the late 70’s and early 80s felt that the disaster film had run its course and was losing favor with audiences it was a string of back-to-back-to-back box office failures from 1978-80 that effectively put an end to Allen’s career. He produced a few more films in the early 80s, and had licensed the television rights to a number of Marvel characters including Daredevil but those projects were never made. Ill health forced Allen into retirement in 1986 and he died of a heart attack in 1991. Younger audiences are mostly unaware of the work of Irwin Allen but for my generation and especially the ones prior to mine, the Master of Disaster was a ready source of fantastical, sci-fi driven epic storytelling, even if it was on a budget.
Go Watch This!
Lost in Space (1965-68) - The original iconic sci-fi series, Lost in Space ran for three seasons on CBS, the first season in black & white with a more serious tone, the rest in that super saturated 1960s color and with the camp turned up to 11. Let’s face it, we all just want to see young Will Robinson, the cowardly Dr. Zachary Smith, and the dulcet-toned Robot meet goofy aliens week after week. Plus those contrived cliffhangers are amazing. This was my go-to 10am show during the summer or when I was home sick growing up. Never fear, Smith is here! Available on Hulu, for purchase from digital storefronts and on physical media
The Towering Inferno (1974) - starring Paul Newman and Steve McQueen and featuring an all-star cast (including OJ Simpson!) this is one of Allen’s best disaster flicks. As you might have surmised it is set in an extremely tall skyscraper that, due to the cheapness of its construction materials, catches fire while a grand gala is being held on the top floor. My first ever film class was an elective I took in 8th grade, and the teacher (whose name I unfortunately do not remember) showed this film as one of his selections of fine cinema.*** It was in this class that I first started considering film and television as a career, so I’ll always think fondly of this film being part of my first step of my professional life. Available to buy/rent on digital storefronts and physical media
Thanks for reading!
*I’m actually very excited for the next installment in the Ghostbusters franchise. As a kid one year for Halloween I dressed up like Egon and had the proton pack, ghost trap, the whole nine yards. Shit was amazing.
**Apparently prior to his print and radio career, Allen spent a brief stint as a carnival barker, which is so apropos to how his films and television series were often marketed
***The teacher also solicited suggestions for which film to watch during the end of the semester so I brought in Young Frankenstein on VHS and somehow convinced the class and the teacher that it would be totally appropriate for a class of 8th graders to watch it; the teacher said okay as long as everyone swore not to tell their parents