The Movies

by George Gauthier

Chapter 6

Dinosaurs

After its gay-themed remake of "The Blue Lagoon", Franklin Dyson's studio Palimpsest Pictures geared up for its dinosaur picture.

Now we were aiming for the maximum scientific verisimilitude, which would be a considerable departure from previous movies where dinosaurs supposedly survived into modern times, whether on a lost continent, in a fog shrouded valley in Antarctica, or atop an inaccessible plateau in South America, often with cavemen anachronistically thrown into the mix. We were not going to go that well-traveled route. So no lost continents, no islands hidden inside a permanent fog bank, no magnetic vortex far off the sea lanes, nor any nonsense about a hollow earth. Nor would we have heretofore unknown monsters rising from the "vasty deep" into the modern world as in "It Came from Beneath the Sea" or "Cloverfield".

Nor would our prehistoric monsters emerge from a glacier, freed from polar ice by the heat of an atomic bomb test as in the "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" a popcorn flick whose title was never explained, and which never made any sense, even to the kids in the audience. Simple arithmetic tells us that no place in the oceans is anywhere near that deep. Twenty-thousand fathoms is about twenty-three miles. The bottom of the deepest ocean trench is only seven miles down.

[There are six feet to one fathom, which is two yards. A mile is one-thousand seven-hundred and sixty yards or eight-hundred eighty fathoms, so in yards 40,000 / 1760 or in fathoms 20,000 / 880 = 23 miles.]

A very fine movie of the genre it was, and Ray Harryhausen's Rhedosaurus as welcome change from overly familiar movie dinosaurs like the T Rex. I've watched the movie many times, but any other title would have been better than the one they chose. Adding insult to injury, that lame title likely inspired, if that is the word for it, a cheap rip-off called "The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues", another title in conflict with physical reality. Ten-thousand leagues twice the distance of the circumference of the planet, an impossible distance for a monster which anyway stayed in exactly the same place the whole movie. No stop-motion animation. The silly monster was just a diver in a tricked up rubber suit.

Though we drew inspiration and some stock footage from it, we were not doing a remake of "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth". Highly enjoyable though that movie was, what with a young protagonist running around in a loincloth so tiny that you wondered why he had not been arrested on set. Alas the spoilsports of the rating system forced the scenes where the sexy actor was entirely nude to be cut from the original theatrical release in the United States. To ensure a "G" rating they cut scenes where he and the blond bimbo made love in a cave, another of skinny-dipping in a lake, and a third of them on the beac where he relieves her of her clothing. (The three nude scenes have finally been been released on Blu-ray and on DVD-R and not before time.)

With Ray Harryhausen busy on another project the production turned to another talented stop-motion animator who made the dinosaurs believable. Another plus was that the cavemen did not speak English. They had their own language, one with only twenty-seven words, a language created for the movie and kept ultra simple to make it possible for the audience to figure out what was said without subtitles.

The only criticism you could make of it was that the world these dinosaurs ruled the world was inhabited by humans, always one of the most regrettable tropes in movies. By contrast although our movie would also put humans and dinosaurs together, we would be sending modern humans via a time machine back to the Cretaceous period to observe dinosaur behavior.

Admittedly time travel itself is hard to swallow and not just for the possible paradoxes it creates. Consider that the age when dinosaurs flourished is not only sixty-five million years in the past, it lies gazillions of miles away, back along the twisted track which our planet took through space. Earth not only revolves around our sun in its yearly orbit, the entire solar system itself revolves around a massive black hole in the galactic center. In turn the Milky Way galaxy is gravitationally locked with its local group of galaxies which are heading at tremendous speed toward something called the Great Attractor.

When you add physical distance to remoteness in time the very idea of time travel becomes problematic. How can you make it scientifically plausible? Nearly instant displacement in space-time by a machine would surely require impossible accuracy and incredibly huge energies. Of course, our script will simply dismiss this concern by observing that when traveling in time, mere distance was irrelevant since the journey bypasses the intervening space much like passing through a black hole. In the movies, unless you invoke magic, for the sake of verisimilitude you need a halfway plausible scientific sounding rationale. For our picture we invoked a portal to the past via a time machine.

Dyson's take on dinosaurs was in large part inspired by a novel called "The Shores of Kansas". The title derives from the fact that during those distant times and for some thirty million years the middle of this continent was covered by a large inland sea which split North America into two landmasses. The author was a writer you probably have never heard of named Robert Chilson. His concept was original: no machine and no magic as we would understand it.

Instead it seems that Chilson's hero the he was one of sixty or so gifted humans who simply had the talent for time travel so ESP not magic nor machine. With self-hypnosis to help him concentrate, he visualized his destination in time and emerged, that is the only word for it, in the past.

Chilson's protagonist hero goes back to the Cretaceous Period during the Age of the Dinosaurs for scientific study but also hunts them down and kills them armed only with a battle axe. How? He Although an expert hunter with gun or bow, the hero of the novel needed a weapon which would not require ammunition. Besides a bow and arrow would never stop a monster like a T Rex. So his chosen weapon was a double bladed battle axe with a dagger point on top so he could thrust as well as chop and slash. It was tailor-made to his specifications. Though based on medieval designs it was far stronger thanks to modern alloys. As a sidearm, he carried a kukri. Its bent blade was good at chopping, cutting, or stabbing.

Besides his bladed weapons carried in scabbards on his belt, he packed a small bow and a few arrows, not for defense but only to take small game for the pot. Against dinosaurs he relied on his agility as a warm-blooded mammal to out fox the saurians by dodging their lunges and darting around trees and rocks or scrambling up cliffs or through clefts between boulders. He kept it up until the dinosaur became overheated from the sustained effort of the chase and collapsed from heat stroke. After which he delivered the coup de grace to his downed foe with the axe. He even chopped one head off and carried it home in his arms to be mounted as a souvenir.

Producer Martin Ginsburg explained how like Chilson's hero the characters would journey to the age of the dinosaurs not to hunt, but for the sake of science, their job being to bring back sketches, plant seeds and cuttings, and even the eggs of interesting species. Above all they were to observe and record dinosaur behavior directly, something which in the past could only be surmised imperfectly from fossil evidence. The real drama in the movie starts when the boys get stranded in the past. As the producer explained it:

"The precision needed to open portals is the reason our time travelers will find themselves stranded for several years when gravitic radiation from a supernova disturbs the cosmic flux (a homage to Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" where the portals were doors to extra-solar planets rather than to the past). A time portal has to open not only at a precise time and location in interstellar space, but also at the same exact latitude as at departure or must somehow cope with the differnce, otherwise the spinning globe the landed on would be rotating too slow or too fast to match the rotational speed at the latitude of departure. The equator rotates at a thousand miles an hour. At the poles the rotational speed drops to zero."

"Now that is a lot of exposition to get across to an audience, so we will have a professor explain this to our chrononauts in bite size pieces early in the picture. Once they appreciate the vastness to deep space and time, our audience will accept the plot gimmick which strands the boys in the past."

"So you're calling them chrononauts on the parallel with astronauts?"

"Yes, they are voyagers through time, though unlike the poorly chosen term astronaut for space travel largely restricted to near earth orbit. Humanity has not yet traveled through interstellar space to other solar systems or even to other planets in our own solar but only to the Moon, a mere quarter of a million miles away. So hardly journeys to the stars."

"Some plot development, maybe a flash flood, will see our young heroes lose their clothes though they will hang on to their weaponry. It would be so much easier to explain their nudity if we did a remake of "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth". We simply have our young cavemen, cave twinks really, running around buck naked from the very first frame simply because, that far back in prehistoric times, clothing had not yet been invented."

That quip brought much rolling of eyes and shaking of heads, though we had to admit it was a clever rationale.

The Vasquez Rocks

In the dinosaur movie Kyle and I played the chrononauts, as we travelers in time were called, young men who wind up stranded in the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. Originally sent through time to study the behavior of living dinosaurs, we graduate students wound up spending most of our time and energy trying just to survive, having lost most of our equipment and all of our clothing in a flash flood which ripped through our camp. All we could salvage was our weapons: steel axes and kukris and a sling fortuitously hung in a tree. Our team originally consisted of three explorers till our third was taken by a river monster, a gigantic crocodile sixty feet if it was an inch.

The early scenes of the movie explained the mechanism of time travel and why it had to be done the way it was portrayed. The equipment of the chrononauts had to be fully biodegradable. The Time Directorate dared not risk discovery of automatic weapons or electronics in geological strata. By contrast to on site exploration, it was so very easy for astronomers to take pictures of ancient skies by simply sticking their telescopes just a foot into the past while the rest of the apparatus and the astronomers themselves stayed safely in the present.

Another point made during the first act was the paradoxical fact that the more remote the past, the easier it was for an investigator to reach that era. When your target was closer to the present, the focus was harder to maintain. That meant that no one was going back closer to the present than the Pleistocene Epoch, certainly not to historic times to witness major turning points in human history like the Crucifixion, something Christians might hope to confirm or Muslims and Unbelievers would like to refute. Then there are those who would attempt to reverse the verdict of history by preventing the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar or themselves slay the likes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao in the crib. The inability to reach the historic past eliminated the temptation to meddle with human history.

In our telling on screen the past is less mutable to changes introduced by time travelers than in some imaginings in the movies or science fiction. So no butterfly effect like the one in Ray Bradbury story where a tourist to the Jurassic steps on a butterfly and upon return finds the future, his present, profoundly different. No, our model was like the rings of ripples from a rock thrown into a pond which diminish into insignificance as they spread.

The time travel machine built by the prop department looked about as realistic as you could expect. The computers had real displays unlike the lame panels of blinking lights in computers in so many old movies. To make the opening look otherworldly the borders of the portal CGI gave them a pulsating shimmer.

Kyle and I were photographed for a training montage, showing us getting into shape, learning survival techniques, navigating without maps or GPS, first aid, and the use of our weapons. We could not bring digital cameras to take photos only old fashioned box cameras made of degradable materials. We could record most of our observations on paper with indelible pencil, no ball point pens allowed. The notebooks used the same tough thin paper that Bibles were printed on.

For location shooting we went to the dramatically slanted formations at the Vasquez Rocks in Agua Dulce, California which have been the background for hundreds of movie and television productions including the clash between Captain Kirk and the alien Gorn (Star Trek episode 'Arena' 1967) and also in "Flame of Araby" with Maureen O'Hara and Jeff Chandler. In our picture, it was the scene of a fight to the death between two graduate students and a rampaging Tyrannosaurus Rex. The two protagonists were played by myself and Kyle Kavanaugh.

Of course, the T. Rex wasn't really there. For the location shoot, an actor stood in for the dinosaur. Dressed in a light-weight motion capture suit, stamping and even roaring on cue to get in the mood, he held up a pole with a green beach ball tacked to the end to represent the position of the head of the monster. All of that would be digitally edited out later and the monster substituted in post production.

Meanwhile the cameras captured images of us two actors, one a stunning blond boy the other a cute redhead, scampering nude among the rocks. This was the hallmark of the Naked Prey series which became notorious for the skimpy and mostly non-existent costumes of its principal cast.

It took imagination to see the scene as the director expected it to look when finished in post-production. Two slightly built youths against a carnivore as massive as a bush elephant but with a rangier build. The boys' youth and nudity emphasized their vulnerability. It initially looked like an unequal match. The monster, when it was finally realized in CGI, would be a giant, forty-two feet long and thirteen feet high at the hips, all muscle, teeth, and ferocity, while the cavemen, cave twinks really, were but slender nude youths, not that much over five foot tall, armed with only bladed weapons. They would have to rely on their wits instead of main strength to win this contest, their only hope being to turn the creature's own size and ferocity against it.

Their agility as well as their wits came into play and were up to the job. Human beings are hard to run down. We are small and quick and nimble creatures, able to jink and dodge and change directions on a dime. Humans can climb trees, run along limbs, or clamber up rock faces. Natural long distance runners, humans have the kind of endurance and cardiovascular fitness which puts many other animals to shame. It is not very well known, but in a very long race, say over several days, a man will outrun a horse.

I and my red-haired ally, portrayed by my real life lover Kyle Kavanaugh, were tag teaming the monster, continually tormenting and teasing it, keeping it confused and not knowing which way to turn or which boy it should attack. Shouting to each other to coordinate our moves, we lead it this way and that, each hunter ducking into cover when he could, safe spots reconnoitered beforehand around our chosen killing ground.

No sooner would one hunter drop from sight that the other would pop out of his hole to sling rocks at the killer beast, and shout and taunt the dinosaur and lure it into abandoning a fruitless pursuit, then turn and lumber off after the second boy. After dodging and jinking a while, the second boy would go to ground in a cave or hole. Then it was the first boy's turn to torment the beast. The idea was to keep the beast furious, confused, and in constant motion. Of course the script called for any number of close calls as when its tail swung viciously and caught and swept me into a ravine fortunately too deep for him to get to me, one of the stunts which I left to a professional.

The key to the hunters' strategy was that human beings regulate their body temperature by perspiration and exhaling water vapor. As a reptile, a cold blooded creature, the saurian could not regulate its body temperature that way. Kept constantly active, sooner or later, the beast would keel over from sunstroke, thanks to the heat built up by its exertions as well as that absorbed through its hide from the bright sun overhead.

Then the hunters finish it off with their axes or their spears. The spears were solid wood, made locally, with fire-hardened points. A thrust into the eye of a downed saurian could reach its brain. That was what the script called for anyway. My role was to thrust my spear straight into the brain while my ally used his axe to chop the back into the neck to cut the spinal cord. Between us, we two kids would slay the mighty carnivore then slice off the finer cuts of meat, leaving the carcass to scavengers. Cooking and feasting on the carnivore's flesh -- that was turn about for you.

This was one of the early scenes in the movie to establish the credibility of the two callow youths as wily hunters, capable of taking care of themselves as they crossed a landscape populated by giant saurians. After this successful combat, the audience would appreciate that speed, agility, and sheer cleverness could indeed make human beings a match for the giant beasts, despite the physical mismatch.

[OK, maybe possible theoretically but if I were somehow really in that predicament I was hide rather than hunt. Just saying.]

Kyle and I were perfect for our roles, both of us cute twinks, slightly built beardless youths, physical poetry in motion. They were doing several slo-mo montages just to show off our athleticism and raw animal appeal. Although we were short, our bodies were well proportioned and incredibly toned, taut and trim with killer abs and all-over tans and no trace of a tan line. From our tiny red nipples to deeply indented navels, to narrow hips framing surprisingly ample manhoods for boys slight in build, Kyle and I were real beauties. The sheen of sweat on our skin made us shine in the bright sun, our wiry physiques a vision of youthful male concupiscence.

As for good looks, I was the preternaturally beautiful blond, much prettier than any boy had any right to be, with delicate features, a straight nose and high cheekbones framing large green eyes with hair the color of straw. Kyle was no slouch either in the looks department. Incredibly handsome, he had red hair, blue eyes, and a lightly freckled face as befits a fine looking Irish lad. Both of us were glabrous, that is without body hair.

"All right kids. Let's break for a late lunch." director Jim Nichols called out. "I know I've been running you ragged with all these takes, but I needed to get this big action scene just right. If we have to come back for a reshoot, it will cost a fortune, and I will have studio execs sticking their noses in our operation."

Kyle handed our weaponry over to the prop man, and we sank gratefully into chairs marked with our names set under the shade of a canopy. Our weary bodies dripped with sweat. It beaded up on their foreheads and dropped off the ends of their noses and slid in runnels down our torsos, filling and overflowing our navels. Since all our scenes were in the nude, we saw no point in slipping into robes or even shorts between takes. Well into our third week of filming, we were getting used to running around nude on location in front of everyone. Kyle bent forward to dislodge a pebble jammed between two toes then leaned back, wiping the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm and said.

"I just wish humanity would finally get global warming under control. I felt like I would pass out from the heat during that last take."

"Me too. It's really brutal out there in the midday sun. No wonder the sweat is just pouring off us. Good thing we are skinny enough to shed the heat load. Still I am glad we got the chance to climb all the way to the top, jammed toes, scrapes, and all. It was worth it. There we were the kings of the mountain!"

"I'll go along with that myself, but I'm not sure your Tarzan yell and chest beating were entirely in character for a budding scientist." he said with heavy irony.

"That was entirely for me to decide, Mr. Junior Scientist. Remember who is getting top billing in this picture."

Our banter was typical of young men who are at ease in each other's company, confidant their remarks would be taken as the gentle joshing intended.

First Aid

A young grip came over with a pitcher of lemonade and plastic cups and put them on the low table between us. Even superbly fit human beings can get sunstroke, and the producer was taking no chances with his young stars. The staff had orders to keep us hydrated. This beverage had extra electrolytes in it, like a sports drink, but otherwise it was honest lemonade, with a cut lemon floating among the ice cubes for flavor.

"Thanks, Phil" Kyle told the young assistant. "This is just the thing to cool us down, but don't forget Ed, our T. Rex over there" he added pointing to the overheated motion capture actor who had sunk down on a nearby rock in the shade, blowing heavily from his exertions.

Suddenly Ed's eyes rolled up and he slumped to the ground unconscious, his body trembling. We three reached him first and saw that the man's skin was flushed and dry and hot to the touch, which was diagnostic of his condition. It wasn't just heat exhaustion but potentially fatal heat stroke.

[With heat exhaustion the skin is wet and flushed, not hot and dry and pale as with heat stroke.]

I yelled "Medic" which brought our aid man Dylan Reed running. Dylan had served as an Army medic eight years earlier in the Sandbox.

Before he reached us Phil grabbed the pitcher of lemonade, brought it over and poured its contents on the prostrate man's head while I grabbed a five gallon water can and upended it, guiding the stream of water from the spout all over Ed's prostrate body. Dragged the ice chest to the man's side, Kyle stuffed handfuls of ice cubes and cans of ice-cold sodas into the man's wet clothing including up his pants legs, and pressed more ice to his head with a towel. Thanks to our training in first aid, we knew that ice and water were the most effective way to absorb the body's excess heat and get its core body temperature down into the safe zone, else the proteins of the brain might literally cook and unravel inside the skull, a grisly fate indeed.

When the aid man reached us and saw what we had done he nodded his approval then took the man's vitals and called for an ambulance. Our quick thinking may well have kept him from dying then and there, but he really belonged in a hospital till he was fully out of danger.

That mishap cost the production an afternoon's shoot, but it reminded everyone that accidents can happen in any location, even one so familiar and close by as the Vasquez Rocks. As partial compensation, a cameraman got fine footage for the 'Making Of' video showing Kyle giving first aid to the stunt man by packing ice all around him. The footage caught the nude boy from the rear, kneeling on the ground, butt cheeks resting on bare feet, his lithe torso bent over, ribs and spinal bumps prominent as he worked to save the man's life. I myself himself was filmed from the front, standing over the man, the heavy water can held high, the musculature of my arms and shoulders and belly straining with the weight to direct the stream of water over him.

After that incident the crew really warmed up to what were still a pair of fledgling actors. During our first days on location, the veteran crew had felt a little funny making a picture with two young co-stars in their early twenties who were not only openly gay but lovers in real life. Also, after the first act, we lads went in front of the cameras stark naked for every scene and usually stayed nude all day on location, during breaks or for lunch, donning shorts, shirts, and flip flops only after a shower at the end of the day's filming.

Even before the incident with the stunt man, we had been generally accepted and liked. Neither of us had gone Hollywood or tried to put on airs. We were not about to let success and good fortune go to our heads. Every morning at seven-thirty, we arrived punctually on the set, driving up in Kyle's five year old coupe. No fancy wheels for us. We listened to the director tell us what he wanted us to do, then we did it, hitting our marks and saying our lines.

After some of the insufferable young bastards the crew had had to work with in the past, it was a pleasure for them to work with Kyle and myself. We were the genuine article: no attitude, no drugs, no tantrums, and no entourage either to get in the way.

Anyone could see that we were a pair of decent kids, even if we seemed to have trouble keeping our pants on in public or our hands off each other. Well we were young or youthful in my case, this was our time, and our juices were flowing.

As for myself, I was gratified that the incidents and emergencies which arose around me have lately found me saving lives rather than fighting enemies, as with the kid I put up the tree to keep him safe from the pit bull, the passengers on the bus, and now Ed our stunt man. And just the other day I helped get a toddler out of the back seat of an overheated car parked at a commercial strip. I walked up to three passersby clustered around an SUV. They explained that they could not locate the mother in the drug store or liquor store by the car and were trying to break the window.

Now if they had been motorists, they could have taken a tire iron or a steering wheel lock to the window. Being on foot that was not possible. So I unwound the sling from around my waist, inserted a musket ball in the pouch, and swung it at the driver's side window in front, shattering it. That let a good samaritan reach inside, undo the locks, and carry the child into the shade.

I left immediately not waiting for first responders. I later saw on TV that the mother was charged with child endangerment for leaving her child in the car on a sunny day while she went to the beauty parlor. Some people! My minor role in the rescue was caught on surveillance cameras but no one sought me out, which was fine by me. All I had done was break a window, normally considered an act of vandalism.

As for our motion picture, two naked twinks fighting dinosaurs with edged weapons was a definite first for the movies. The audience response was highly favorable and plans were laid to re-release the pictures the following year for showings on the big screen at selected movie theaters. You really needed a big screen to appreciate the spectacle.

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