Dinosaurs, DNA, writer's block, and Hollywood blockbusters.
What could be better?
Hello listeners.
My name is Will Jauquet.
Welcome to episode 6 of I'll Probably Delete This, where we learn about the story behind
successful books, including today's episode, about the book that launched Hollywood's
biggest dinosaur movie franchise.
At 3 a.m., Michael Ovitz turned the last page of the manuscript.
As he looked out on the hills of Brentwood, his head was still swirling with thoughts
of prehistoric DNA and velociraptors.
His friend had done it.
This was the best thing he'd written in more than 10 years.
Ovitz admired Michael Crichton's creative genius.
Ovitz might not have the same kind of creativity, but he could identify it.
No one was better than Crichton at explaining cutting-edge science and weaving it into a
story.
And this manuscript was full of science, cloning, DNA, dinosaurs, and chaos theory.
Ovitz was sure that this story had gotten his friend out of his rut.
He also thought it would be a hit, a hit book, and with the right people, a hit movie.
Ovitz thought he knew just the right person for the movie, but it could wait until daylight.
He needed some sleep, but not too much because he wanted to act fast.
Join me now as we learn about Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton's blockbuster novel, and
how Crichton went from failed idea and writer's block to successful novel and blockbuster
movie.
That book led to many movies in the Jurassic Park franchise.
The latest, Jurassic World Rebirth, comes out July 2nd.
Michael Ovitz, the Hollywood superagent and Crichton's friend, said that Crichton was
the smartest person he'd ever met.
Crichton was a bit of a phenom.
He published his first book at age 23 and 10 books before he turned 28.
That is impressive in and of itself, but even more impressive is that he wrote most of those
books while in school.
He wrote them under a pseudonym as a way to pay his way through Harvard Medical School.
He wrote under that pseudonym because he was writing cheap mass market paperback novels,
and he didn't want his classmates or professors to take him less seriously or think he wasn't
committed to medical school.
But things changed.
He learned that he didn't like med school and didn't want to be a doctor.
At various points in his time at Harvard Medical School, Harvard's psychiatrist persuaded him
to stick it out longer, telling him to give it more time, or he would like clinical practice
or he was almost done, so he might as well finish.
But while still in med school, Crichton wrote Andromeda Strain under his own name and not a pseudonym.
The story was about a dangerous microorganism from space.
Alfred A. Knopf published the book in hardback, and it hit the bestsellers list in 1969.
Crichton was ready to get out of medicine.
After graduation, Crichton moved to LA to focus on writing and trying to break into
Hollywood as a writer and a director.
And he found success, both writing novels and writing movies, and did some directing too.
By the late 80s, though, he was stuck.
He was stuck and he was depressed.
He was trying to write, but couldn't come up with anything.
He had only written two novels in ten years.
The last novel had been three years before.
He hadn't written a movie in even longer.
And this is from the same guy who cranked out two thrillers a year while in med school.
Michael Ovitz was both Crichton's friend and agent.
Ovitz met him regularly and tried to push and cajole him to write either a book or a
screenplay.
He brought him ideas.
He even brought him really bad ideas, thinking they would motivate him to write something
better.
But the cajoling didn't work.
Ovitz and his Creative Artists Agency (CAA) told people around Hollywood that Crichton
was deeply involved in an original project and that was why he wasn't working.
But the truth was that Crichton was depressed and had writer's block.
He couldn't find an idea he wanted to work on.
In the early 1980s, Crichton had played with a story about dinosaurs.
He had tried a screenplay that focused on a researcher who was cloning a pterodactyl,
but he couldn't get that story to work.
He also didn't want to follow a trend.
Dinosaurs were very popular and so he wanted to wait until the popularity died down.
His idea also included an amusement park, which also concerned him.
It concerned him because it was too close to Westworld, a movie he had written and directed
in 1973.
That movie, like the more recent HBO reboot, involved visiting an adult amusement park
filled with human-looking robots.
For dinosaurs, he thought that even in a world where someone could use DNA to create and
clone a dinosaur, it would still be very expensive.
There would be no practical reason to make one, and because there would be no practical
reason to recreate a dinosaur, the purpose would have to be for entertainment, hence
the amusement park.
So he shelved his initial story ideas, thinking he might come back to it after dinosaur fever
faded.
But other ideas didn't fill the void.
Finally, at a regular weekly lunch with Ovitz, after weeks and months of cajoling, Crichton
said he did have this idea about dinosaurs that he had had for a while.
It was almost 10 years after he first started working on it, but interest in dinosaurs had
never faded.
Crichton gave Ovitz the broad outline of the story.
He said he had an idea about a group of three people who visit a dinosaur amusement park
on an island off the coast of Costa Rica.
Two characters were younger, and one was older.
After getting a description, Ovitz's reaction was, I like dinosaurs.
My young son likes dinosaurs.
And even my 70-year-old father likes dinosaurs.
You have to write this.
The two of them then spent the next three hours talking about the science behind the
idea, about paleontology and DNA, about cloning and the current science of cloning and its
ability to breed prehistoric animals.
Note that this is six years before scientists would clone Dolly the sheep, sort of the famous
marker that hit the press and entered into public consciousness.
Crichton dove into this resurrected idea and came up with a draft, but his early beta
readers all hated the draft.
He went through additional ones.
They hated those too.
Despite my earlier description of Crichton, he would deny that he was a phenom when it
came to writing.
He would instead have said that he didn't have any special talent as a writer, but had
to work really hard at it.
He revised his novel again, and again the beta readers hated it.
It wasn't the science of cloning they struggled with, or his insertion of chaos theory or
descriptions of dinosaurs.
One reader suggested changing the focus to adults and not the kids.
What Crichton realized was adults were just as fascinated by dinosaurs and wanted to see
themselves in the book, something they had trouble doing with his earlier drafts.
Five months after that lunch, where they talked about his idea, Crichton called Ovitz
to tell him, I'm sending you a draft of the book that we talked about.
Ovitz was always a whirlwind of activity, and his work ethic was unmatched.
As an agent, he regularly made 250 calls a day.
He was building CAA to be the biggest and most powerful talent agency Hollywood had
ever seen.
Taking three hours at a lunch to talk science ideas, or spending his evening uninterrupted
reading a draft of a book, was no small thing for Ovitz.
Ovitz left work early to read his friend's manuscript.
He sat down to read the typed manuscript at six that evening, and kept turning the pages
until he finished the book around three a.m.
After some sleep, Ovitz moved fast.
He called Crichton at seven a.m. and told him, this is the best thing you've written
in years.
He said, this will be a great book, and it will make a great movie if we can get the
right people to make it.
Ovitz's wheels were turning, and he told Crichton that the only director for this movie is Steven
Spielberg.
He said this even though Spielberg was one of the only important Hollywood directors
who was not a CAA client.
Ovitz feared that anyone else would screw it up.
Ovitz called Spielberg at nine a.m. that same morning to tell him that he was sending over
a manuscript for him to look at, and said, if it's all right with you, I'm going to
call your wife to ask her permission for you to read through this tonight.
He did this because Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, were very protective of family
time, and Steven generally didn't read scripts at night.
Spielberg agreed, and his wife agreed.
In an effort to create urgency, Ovitz gave Spielberg two days to read the manuscript.
It didn't even take 24 hours.
Spielberg called Ovitz back at 7.30 a.m. the next day, and said, this knocked my socks
off.
I'm making this movie.
Ovitz packaged up the movie.
Crichton would write the screenplay.
Spielberg would direct.
Ovitz lined up funding, and he made an agreement with Universal to distribute it.
He did all of this more than six months before Knopf published the book.
This packaging of a movie project was an innovation of CAA.
In this case, they found the story from Crichton, had the script writer, again, Crichton.
They would add somebody later to help Crichton, and they had the director, Steven Spielberg,
all before any studio was involved.
This type of packaging, packaging up a project, increased the odds that a movie would get
made, and increased the bargaining power of the creative talent, the actors and the directors
and the writers.
Publishing house Alfred A. Knopf released Jurassic Park in late 1990 with an initial
print run of 150,000 hardcover books.
It was on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list for 12 weeks, and according to Publishers
Weekly, was the 18th bestselling novel for that year for 1990.
The book also made the New York Times bestseller list in December of 1990, and stayed on that
list for 13 weeks, clawing its way up from number 12 on the list to number six.
These were good hardcover sales, but nothing amazing.
It is really the release of the movie that turbocharges sales, and mostly through sales
of paperback.
I remember reading it in paperback in the early 90s, around the time of the release
of the movie.
Jurassic Park sells many more copies in paperback than it did in hardcover.
Universal released the movie in 1993, and by the end of the year, the book had sold
9 million copies, a huge number.
By 1999, the book had sold more than 12 million copies, and gone through 100 reprintings.
Total book sales were impressive, but the movie did even better.
It became the highest-grossing movie ever to that point, earning just under a billion
dollars.
The movie's popularity drove book sales.
The rest of Crichton's other books all became big paperback sellers after the Jurassic Park
movie came out.
Crichton did write a sequel to Jurassic Park, the only sequel he would write to any of his
books.
While Crichton stopped at two dinosaur books, Hollywood, however, has kept the movies coming.
Jurassic World Rebirth, which comes out July 2, is Hollywood's seventh movie in the Jurassic
Park franchise.
For the postscript, I have two things I want to touch on, pulled from interviews that Michael
Crichton did with Charlie Rose.
Before we get there, in watching those interviews, really any interview with him, it's easy to
see just how much he can tower over people even while he's sitting down.
Crichton was 6'9".
He also comes across as reserved and pretty thoughtful.
Alright, so let's get to point one.
This shows up on Charlie Rose, but also in various articles.
In the time that he was working on Jurassic Park, both the book and the screenplay for
the movie, Hollywood scouts and friends would ask Crichton what he was working on.
Crichton's response was, I'm writing the most expensive movie ever made.
Crichton said it as a joke, but he had a point.
What Spielberg did in the first Jurassic Park movie had never been done before.
Like in CGI dinosaurs that look realistic, was a real stretch in movie making.
And even 30 years later, they hold up.
The movie holds up, and it holds up well.
Point number two.
Rose asked Crichton about the parts of writing that gave him the most pleasure or satisfaction.
And for Crichton, it was coming up with the idea and doing the research.
He loved to read scientific papers and really think about their implications, their near-term
implications.
That often with each book, there was a set of questions he was interested in and questions
he was working through.
It was only after he had answered them for himself, did he sit down and try to write
a story, to weave them into a story.
And it was the writing a good story that was really the hard part for him.
For our bibliography today, much of the story from this episode is from Michael Ovitz's
perspective.
And that's because a good part of it was taken from Michael Ovitz's memoir called
Who Is Michael Ovitz?
That book was published in 2018 by Portfolio, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House.
If you are interested in behind-the-scenes stories in Hollywood, the egos, personalities,
and the deals that get made and those that don't, you will find the book really compelling.
And Ovitz himself is a pretty interesting character.
The second book informed discussion of Crichton's early years.
And mostly that discussion comes from his kind of pseudo travel memoir.
And that memoir was titled Travels.
It's by Michael Crichton.
And it was published in 1988 by Knopf.
Crichton wrote it before he wrote Jurassic Park.
Travels is mostly a collection of stories.
Some are focused on his time in medical school.
Some are international travel.
And many are on his exploration of things like psychic phenomena.
On the last point, he's curious about whether any of it is real.
And he largely remains skeptical but unsure and accepts that there may be phenomena that
are beyond sort of the current understanding of science.
Join me next time for another episode of I'll Probably Delete This, where we'll explore
more stories of publishing, storytellers, and their stories.
Next up, we'll cover kind of a contemporary of Crichton.
We're going to cover James Patterson's first big hit, including the changes he made to
his writing and to marketing to make it a success.
So look forward to that one next week.
Happy reading.
Thanks, everybody.