Ultimatum
(1981)
John's Thoughts
I'd been making elaborate Super-8 film productions beginning in the 4th grade for which my parent's garage became a movie set, usually the bridge of a starship or something like that. My friends and their parents were the cast members, and on two occasions I was the illustrious star, basically fulfilling Starship Captain or Moonbase Commander fantasies. Prior to Ultimatum, my two biggest productions were "Space Journey," a 20-minute adventure aboard a starship with curious walls made of bed sheets, and "Moonbase Incidents", a 25 minute adventure with upgraded cardboard, blinking lights, real uniforms and space effects. But then came Ultimatum.
I was a high school senior. My friend Bud Robertson and I decided, well, to make an hour-long epic science fiction film on Super-8mm. After writing the script, over the course of the next two years we built sets in his parents' three-car garage (my parents only had a single) and set out to make the film. We opened the garage doors and built walls around them thus making our "sound stage" even larger. The bridge of the evil starship, complete with blinking Christmas lights and view screens, as well as particle board sliding "Star Trek" doors accommodated 15 officers in full yellow make-up, three eyebrows and regalia that I designed. The film took months to shoot because we had to wait and see the footage after shooting on a set before it was torn down to build another. Building these sets took a couple weeks each time, and we had 14 to build. We also built a five-and-a-half-foot model of the alien battle cruiser complete with lights inside. It was sort of inspired by the Malmori battle cruiser in Battle Beyond the Stars. For all the space effects, we walled the garage with particle board that we painted black and splattered with white paint specs. We then hung the ship with black wire and moved the camera around it to give the appearance of moving. Sometimes we would have two people carry a wall of space concurrently with the camera so that the space appeared static as the ship moved by. Smaller models were built as well that moved on their own with string. Sometimes it looked great, other times a bit Flash Gordon-ish. The space looked a little more sane than Star Crash. What helped was the elaborate score edited together from a bunch of Goldsmith, Williams and Horner. Trevor Jones's Dark Crystal theme and Bernstein's beautiful theme from Heavy Metal provided the climactic emotions the film needed to get it's idealic message across.
The story was about an evil race coming to conquer earth via introduction of a virus that controls people. Two alien scientists that helped create the virus escape to earth first to help develop an antidote before the virus arrives. Countries band together to trick the mothership into abducting a space shuttle which is booby-trapped with the virus. Having the space shuttle pulled into a docking bay was a tricky effects sequence. Being the more idealistic one of the partnership, I pushed to have the film really plug it's "We're all one people" message. With the music and dissolving people of the world ala Michael Jackson's "Black or White", it's quite nauseating to see now. Despite all of its extravagance and spectacle, we were not that good at using an amateur Super-8 camera which we kept on auto-exposure. (I had a camera man for my previous films and should have for this one. Tripod -- what's that??) The film ended up looking a little murky, but pleased the 300 people we premiered it for.
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