Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth

I'm going back to the old standby of movie/television show reviews for Thursday and Friday's posts. I've tried to choose some somewhat obscure favorites to tantalize you fine readers. I say tried because the weather here is finally becoming downright nice, never mind pleasant, and I really don't expect anything I post to really be able to vie with anyone's attention span when lovely weather beckons. Still, the sun goes down at some point and a good movie or show can be just the ticket. 

Aaaanyway, to kick off I'm going to babble a bit about one of my new favorite flicks that's a bit obscure though it was released in '07. It's an interesting film partly because it's main method of distribution prior to its appearance on Netflix instant and on DVD (I think its even on BD now but I really don't see why) on Amazon etc. was via peer to peer torrent based file sharing. That's right, the movie was basically pirated and passed around but get this, instead of getting upset the creators and producers thanked fans for sharing it and solicited donations. It's fair to say it was a successful distribution method since, as noted, it's now reached a much wider and more profitable audience. There is an interesting entry for it on Tv tropes beware that it's spoilery although they do hide major spoilers.

John likes it by the fire

This film is, as the title of this blog states, Jerome Bixby's The Man from Earth, or The Man from Earth. 

The film opens with a man loading goods into a pickup truck. Soon other characters arrive and tease him about leaving a party and so on. Turns out the man loading the truck is named John Oldman and is a professor that is retiring/quitting his job to pursue other interests but with very little notice to his colleagues and no real explanation of his flight or where he's going. His companions tease and cajole and finally call him out on the mystery. This is where it gets interesting.

DETOUR

I'll digress for a moment to warn the potential viewer about the quality of the film stock. For whatever reason they opted to use film or cameras or something that rendered the picture extremely grainy. The soundtrack is crisp and clear, the dialogue likewise and the set and location (yes just one of each really this is more like a play than a movie) are quite nice and yet...so, so grainy. So, if you can't stand poor picture quality (can't blame you if you do I despise bad audio or poorly leveled audio, y'know where the action is five billion times louder than the dialogue?) you may want to go in cautiously. 

END DETOUR

John admits that the reason he's leaving (now don't laugh this actually works quite well in the movie) is that he's a 14,000 year old Magdalanian caveman and people  around him are now beginning to notice that he isn't aging. Now he doesn't just blurt that out, he leads into it via the whole, 'what would you say if' schtick and presents it as more of a thought experiment than a reality before he launches into a spiel about how he had a chance to sail with Columbus but was still a little concerned about falling off the world. Yeah.

John being moody while his companions discuss him in the background

What follows is his autobiography while his friends (anthropologists, biologist, etc) try to reason out the logic of the claim, they even call in another character, a psychiatrist/psychologist (he states he's one but another characters refers to him as the other) to see if John has completely lost it. They discuss historical events he was part of, people he knew, and people he was.

The logic is pretty decent though the bit about the flat Earth bothered me as the Greeks were fully aware that the Earth was round. Still, as John says, "One man, one perspective" when asked about great historical events he was nowhere near when they occurred, meaning, he may've had a pulse at the time but wasn't necessarily on the scene. So I'll take that to mean he missed out on that bit of ancient Greek wisdom, or hell might've forgotten it, after all presumably he only has a normal human being's memory banks to work with. They do a good job of touching on and elaborating on the practicalities and questions most people who've pondered literal human immortality have likely wondered about.

The gang arrives spoiling John's plans

Now, about the writing. D'yeah know who Jerome Bixby is? No? Well then. This is his wikipedia entry but to save you the trouble of clicking I present a tasty excerpt (unfortunately he passed away 1998 The Man from Earth was his last work finished on his deathbed): 

"His best-known television works include two Star Trek: The Original Series episodes: 1967's "Mirror, Mirror", which introduced the series' concept of the "Mirror Universe"; and 1969's "Requiem for Methuselah", about "Flint", a 6,000-year-old man. But his short story "It's a Good Life" (1953), adapted as a teleplay for The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling, is arguably his most generally known work to reach the small screen. It was popular enough to be revisited in the 1983 Twilight Zone film, and famous enough to be parodied in the Simpsons Halloween 1991 episode "Treehouse of Horror II". His 1968 Star Trek episode "Day of the Dove" is also much respected by fans of science fiction. Bixby also conceived and co-wrote the story for the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, Bantam Books obtained the rights for a paperback novelization based on the screenplay and approached Isaac Asimov to write it.


Bixby wrote the original screenplay for 1958's It! The Terror from Beyond Space, which was the inspiration for 1979's Alien. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seventh season (1999) Mirror Universe episode, "The Emperor's New Cloak", is dedicated to Bixby's memory.


Jerome Bixby's last work, a screenplay The Man From Earth, was conceived in the early 1960s and completed on his deathbed in April 1998. In 2007, Jerome Bixby's The Man From Earth (as it is now called) was turned into an independent motion picture executively produced by his son Emerson Bixby, directed by Richard Schenkman and starring David Lee Smith, William Katt, Richard Riehle, Tony Todd, Annika Peterson, Alexis Thorpe, Ellen Crawford and John Billingsley."

So, really now, with talent, skill, and experience like that to back it up it's small wonder the darn thing is so well written and compelling. Remember it's basically a half dozen or so academics drinking whiskey and pondering shit in a cabin. Seriously, that's it, and it's still a great movie, a real brain twister that leaves you (me) kind of wondering/hoping if there might not be a John or Jane Oldman out there somewhere. The performances as well are decent though the fella playing John comes across as a hair over actory in one or two bits.

Behold, the trailer:

 And apparently at least one performance of the film-as-a-play has been done which makes me giddy, I'd love to see a local group perform it, I think the story and such would be fascinating to see live. Here's a trailer for a play production of it, thus proving such productions exist: