Famous Monsters #162/April 1980
"deep inside The Black Hole"

No author credited

All errors (typographic, spelling, and grammatical) are those of the original article. -DW

things looking black

Roy Disney asked his brother Walt to come to his office on an urgent matter. It was 1940 and customary in those days for Roy to visit Walt at the studio when the news was good. So when Walt entered his brother's office he knew the news was going to be bad.

Roy explained that all the profits made from their first feature-length cartoon, SNOW WHITE & THE 7 DWARFS, had been eaten by the making of PINOCCHIO, BAMBI, and FANTASIA. Roy thought Walt would really be concerned, maybe shocked, when he told him that they were in debt $4 1/2 million. Walt just laughed. "I was just thinking back," he managed to say thru his laughter. "Do you remember when we couldn't borrow $1000? And now we owe $4 1/2 million! I think that's quite an improvement!"

disney is dizzying

THE BLACK HOLE, released at Xmas, is the biggest investment the Disney organization has ever made in a single film...$17.5 million!

But gambling has never been anything new to the company, especially to Walt Disney. He bet that sound movies were going to be more than a fad in 1928 when he put everything he had into a cartoon called STEAMBOAT WILLIE which made it the first sound cartoon. His FLOWERS & TREES was the first Technicolor cartoon. Disney was forever putting his money & energy into new ways of improving his product, even when he was told by everyone, including his friends, that what he was trying to do was a waste of time.

from snow white to coal black

SNOW WHITE was the first feature length cartoon. Walt felt that something extra should be added so the multi-plane process was invented - paintings on several different layers of glass. He experimented with the process in a Silly Symphony titled THE OLD MILL and won an Academy Award. And in the early 50s, when most studios feared television, Walt Disney saw the new entertainment medium as a good way to promote his own theatrical releases. On 8 December 1954 the Disneyland TV show presented OPERATION UNDERSEA, which, under the guise of a documentary, was nothing more than an extended trailer for 20,000 THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA.

experiment in black

Now, feeling that Walt Disney Productions has been limiting the appeal of their motion pictures to children, the company has produced a major science fiction adventure aimed more at the STAR WARS/CLOSE ENCOUNTERS crowd. Unlike previous Disney films, the title of the the film, THE BLACK HOLE, is more prominent than the words "A Walt Disney Production", and it is rated PG. (A recent re-release of the 1950 TREASURE ISLAND had been given a PG rating until some of the violence was edited out.

Walt Disney's son-in-law, Ron Miller, producer of THE BLACK HOLE, explains what the company hopes to accomplish: "...We've tried to make THE BLACK HOLE - I hate to use the work 'sophisticated', because it's not - but we've tried to make our picture just that much more appealing to all ages."

The screenplay is by Jeb Rosenbrook and Gerry Day, with Rosebrook credited with the original story. Actually, since it's conception, the script has gone through 6 re-writes. At one time the producer of ISLAND AT THE TOP OF THE WORLD was developing the project which, at that time, had been conceived by Bob Barbash & Richard Landau. Unfortunately Hibler passed away and the project was shelved. The release of STAR WARS brought new urgency back to THE BLACK HOLE and it was assigned to director John Hough who had already worked for Disney on the fantasy feature ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN. Before that he directed the supernatural thriller THE LENGEND OF HELL HOUSE, based on the novel by Richard (THE SHRINKING MAN) Matheson, which, incidentally, was James H, Nicholson's last feature. (Nicholson was the founder of American-International Pictures, the company responsible for many sci-fi & horror pictures including I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF, BURN, WITCH, BURN, and the Roger Corman/Edgar Allen Poe series, most of them starring Vincent Price.) Hough also directed the vampire shocker, TWINS OF EVIL.

One thing after another delayed production of THE BLACK HOLE and eventually Hough was forced to leave the project for other commitments.

he sent back "black"!

In late November 1977 the script was sent to Gary Nelson who had just completed the whacky comedy fantasy, FREAKY FRIDAY. He read the script and sent it back saying he wasn't interested. Eventually he was persuaded to take the job but only after he was shown the miniatures & some production illustrations. "It was the concept," explained Nelson, "the look of the film, plus the uniqueness of all the hardware we're using that convinced me to do it."

Movie critic Charles Champlin says that THE BLACK HOLE "...is billed as a showcase for the studio's special effects wizards led by artist Peter Ellenshaw,"

in league with black holes

When Walt Disney made 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA he decided that a more important line-up of stars was needed. So he hired Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas & Peter Lorre for the principals. Likewise, with THE BLACK HOLE, an impressive cast has been assembled. Maximilian Schell is Reinhardt, Robert Forster is Capt. Holland, Joseph Bottoms is First Officer Pizer and Yvette Mimieux is Dr. McCrae. Ernest Borgnine is also is the cast.

Briefly (for posterity) the story concerns the crew of the Palomino, traveling thru deep space for 5 years, in search of some evidence of alien life. With their mission almost at an end, they discover the lost starship Cygnus, thought lost. But the ship's commander, Hans Reinhardt, has no desire to be rescued. For he has designed the Cygnus, operated by dozens of robots, expressly for the purpose of entering a giant collapsar, the largest black hole ever encountered.

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Famous Monsters #162/April 1980"deep inside The Black Hole"