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(Eugene Luther Gore Vidal 1925-2012). American writer and actor.
Acted in:
Ritual in Transfigured Time (short) (Maya Deren 1946); Gattaca
(Andrew NICCOL 1997).
Films
based on his works: Visit to a Small Planet (Norman Taurog 1960).
Vidal had little interest in science fiction;
it was merely one of many tools that he might pick up if it seemed suitable to
his needs at the moment. His most significant contributions to the genre took
the form of several novels that were either too strange (Duluth [1983], The
Smithsonian Institution [1998]) or too controversial (Messiah
[1954], Kalki [1978], Live from Golgotha [1998]) to inspire any
film adaptations. But his energetic work for television, film, and the stage
during the 1950s and 1960s did include a few items that are relevant to this
encyclopedia.
While his adaptations of Henry James's The
Turn of the Screw and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
were doubtless more than competent, his most significant television script was
an original story, 'Visit to a Small Planet,' later the basis for a
Broadway play and film. Though very much a product, and a reflection, of the
concerns of the 1950s, it is an amusing enough satire about an alien visitor to
Earth who almost provokes a nuclear war, concluding with the familiar conceit
that this amazingly advanced being is, according to his fellow aliens, merely
an overgrown child. Unfortunately, it was decided to turn this property into a
vehicle for farcical comedian Jerry LEWIS, resulting in a silly film that did
not do justice to his vision (the fate, Vidal found, of almost all film
adaptations of his works). Having signed up to work as a screenwriter for MGM,
and not enjoying the experience at all, he agreed to make some uncredited
contributions to the screenplay of the Biblical epic Ben-Hur if the
company would prematurely end his contract; striving to make this chore
enjoyable, he notoriously endeavored to work a gay subtext into the story
without the knowledge of its conservative star, Charlton
HESTON. He then wrote a play about presidential politics, The
Best Man, which can be regarded as science fiction because its fictional
presidents and officeholders are presumably residents of a near-future, or
alternate, America, and this led to the 1964 film which is by far the finest
adaptation of any of his works, featuring a stellar cast handled well by
director Franklin SCHAFFNER. Thankfully, my focus on science fiction films does
not require me to address any of its considerably less admirable successors,
such as the execrable Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Caligula
(1979).
By the time he reached the age of retirement,
he had lost interest in striving one more time to write a screenplay that might
actually engender a decent film, but he launched a new career as an actor,
specializing in roles as cold, arrogant authority figures that required Vidal
to do little more than play himself. He did this well enough to win a
competition with none other than Sir Alec
GUINNESS
to play a haughty professor in With Honors (1994), and he was
equally impressive in a smaller part as an executive in Andrew NICCOL's
futuristic Gattaca. But unlike another elderly neophyte who once
excelled as a haughty professor, John Houseman, Vidal garnered no awards for
his performances, and his acting jobs remained few and far between. Considering
the string of disasters that had earlier constituted his career in film, Gore
Vidal surely did not find this surprising.
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