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(1913–1999). American writer.
Film based on his work: The Time Machine: The
Journey Back (Clyde Lucas 1993); The Time Machine (Simon Wells
2002).
After contributing forgettable, and properly forgotten, novels like
Dark Dominion and Occam's Razor to science fiction literature,
Duncan threw himself into writing for the screen in the late 1950s, doing
his part to bring the golden age of science fiction film to an inglorious
end. His stories and scripts suggest that he found his first assignment—scripting the American version of Inoshiro HONDA's
Rodan—far more enlightening than anything he had encountered
in the written literature. Although I will admit to harboring a peculiar
fondness for The Black Scorpion, that is undoubtedly due to the
charming slobber dripping from the giant insect's mouth (courtesy of Willis
O'BRIEN), not any nuances in Duncan and Robert Blees's script; and the
detached head of The Thing That Wouldn't Die is good for a few
laughs, at least on first viewing. But you will search long and hard to
find any genuinely appreciative commentaries on these films or The
Monster That Challenged the World, Monster on the Campus and
The Leech Woman, for they are witless assemblages of horror-film
clichés, stale cautionary tales suggesting that "how to write a science
fiction film" is one of those things that Man Is Not Meant to Know.
With this woeful track record, it is hard to see why George PAL
thought Duncan was the ideal writer to adapt H. G. WELLS's
The Time Machine to the screen, but he initially tried very hard
to do justice to its author. His original script, which I have read, reflected
some attentiveness to Wells and his philosophy during its scenes of the
Time Traveller in the near future, when he incredulously and bitterly
observes London during World War I, World War II, and (in 1967) World
War III. But Duncan could not deal intelligently with the novel's main
sequence, reducing Wells's Eloi to emblems of human sloth and lack of
ambition who must be schooled by the Time Traveller in the manly arts
of hand-to-hand combat so that they can defeat the bestial Morlocks and,
one must suppose, eventually launch their own World War IV. In those frenetic
scenes of the Eloi discovering how much fun it is to clobber Morlocks,
one observes source material not only being butchered, but betrayed as
well. Ironically, since later film versions of The Time Machine,
officially or not, always seem to betray Duncan's influence, this horrid
script will likely stand as his most enduring achievement.
Apparently finding it difficult to obtain further film work, Duncan
moved into television, writing an early episode of The Outer Limits,
"The Human Factor," a routine story of mind exchange unenlivened by added
images of an irrelevant monster; understandably, he was not invited to
write another episode. As his final film assignment, he played some ill-defined
role in the transformation of Jerome BIXBY and
Otto Klement's interesting story into Harry Kleiner's vapid screenplay
for Fantastic Voyage; then, until his death in 1999, he lived in
obscurity, the dark dominion of writers who never rise above the ordinary.
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