How to Create Your Own Jurassic Park Part II: Lessons from the Film

a writer’s guide to expanding Michael Crichton’s iconic story

In Part I of this series, I provided lessons from Michael Crichton’s groundbreaking novel Jurassic Park about how to expand his story. In this part, I take a close look at the billion dollar film that firmly established the Jurassic Park franchise in the popular imagination—for better or for worse.

For me, the book Jurassic Park still represents a peak experience in my love of literature, but the 1993 film Jurassic Park was a shocking realization about the ability of a screen adaption to betray its source material. The novel is a challenging thriller for adults while the movie is a light playground ride for children, with all the nuance of a teeter-totter.

And I am not the only one who thought this. Roger Ebert wrote that the film “quickly turns into a standard monster movie, with screaming victims fleeing from roaring dinosaurs.”

Terrence Rafferty, writing in The New Yorker, panned it as “just a creature feature on amphetamines.”

Other reviewers could not help be bedazzled. Janet Maslin of The New York Times, wrote “[i]t becomes less crisp on screen than it was on the page, with much of the enjoyable jargon either mumbled confusingly or otherwise thrown away.” But she added that

[e]ven while capturing the imagination of its audience, this film lays the groundwork for the theme-park rides, sequels and souvenirs that insure the “Jurassic Park” experience will live on. And on. And on.

Lesson 1. Don’t overwrite the story.

The 1993 film suffered from overwriting. Crichton sold the film rights to Spielberg for $1.5 million because he preferred to ensure the movie would actually be made instead of getting lost in the Hollywood system. The story would likely have sold for much more if had entered a bidding war.

Tim Burton had also been courted as a filmmaker (what a film that would have made!) but Spielberg bought the rights too quickly for anyone to develop an alternate vision of the film. So it is pointless to lament what might have been.

Crichton didn’t want to write the script, but at Spielberg’s insistence, he produced a streamlined draft that cut out much of the technobabble of the book and thrust the characters immediately onto the island.

“Nobody was happy with it at all,” Crichton would explain, “but Steven was great about it and he was really good at identifying what was wrong… I had gone right to the action and it didn’t work.” [1]

Crichton then wrote the script in 40 page increments, which Spielberg would approve or modify. To add more nuance to the script, Spielberg hired screenwriter Scotch Marmo. She merged the character Alan Grant with Ian Malcolm and she layered the film with texture by adding lush jungle imagery and vines pushing through the walls, mirroring the intrinsic wildness of the dinosaurs themselves. But Spielberg again expressed his dissatisfaction and hired David Koepp to write the final script. By this time, the script was becoming more and more unrecognizable from the novel.

Lesson 2. The humans don’t need to evolve.

Both screenwriters felt the characters in the novel were underdeveloped for the big screen. According to Koepp:

There was a general feeling that Grant and Ellie weren’t quite interesting enough personally and that we ought to think about how this experience was going to affect them as people, not just as scientists. [2]

In the novel, Ellie Sattler is Grant’s gifted graduate student and she is engaged to be married to a doctor in Chicago. There is no romantic tension between the two, only mutual respect.

Koepp tried to enrich the characters by developing a romantic relationship between Sattler (played by Laura Dern) and Grant (Sam Neill) that can only be fully realized if Grant overcomes his dislike of children. Grant survives his adventures with Hammond’s grandchildren and learns to appreciate kids. Sattler can now presumably have her children, and the relationship will be consummated.

Koepp also tamed the character of Hammond, a greedy, self-aggrandizing businessman in the novel, into an ice cream-licking Kris Kringle who reminisces about the flea circus he peddled as a young man.

Again, the screenwriters felt that the characters are what mattered and that the audience needed to watch them evolve and change in some way. This is a mistaken interpretation of the story. The dinosaurs themselves are central to Jurassic Park and not the humans, who are mere condiments for the Jurassic feast. People didn’t pay to watch the actress Fay Wray in King Kong, but the king himself.

This does not mean that the characters can’t react or learn, or even display acts of heroism, but there’s no need to stuff in a false emotional undercurrent. Fear is a primal enough emotion to keep your audience interested.

Lesson 3. Know your limits.

Jurassic Park was created just as computer generated images (CGI) were catching up with puppetry. The ability to craft dinosaurs of that size and scale only became possible during the shooting of the film—and it was considered a risk to rely on computers. Spielberg chose puppetry for close-up shots and CGI for wide shots, or combined the two as appropriate, something which had not effectively been done before.

Jurassic Park was an extremely difficult film to make and too ambitious to honor the original story. It’s likely that only Spielberg’s muscle in the industry helped realize Crichton’s book into a movie. It’s entirely possible that another director would never have created the film at all, or delivered an even shabbier production.

Know your limits. If you become overly ambitious in your story like the film, it will only detract from the underlying experience.

Lesson 4. Use the dinosaurs to create moments of awe and wonder.

There are moments of grandeur in Spielberg’s film. Certain scenes are breathtaking: the first sight of the apatosaurs across a shimmering lake, the mud-splattered T-rex attack on the Ford Explorers, and the viscous spitting of the dilophosaur. Each of these scenes lingers in your memory.

Love him or hate him, Spielberg is a master of awe. Study these scenes closely to help give your story that cinematic magic.

Lesson 5. Don’t dumb down the story, explain it better.

The novel Jurassic Park demands patience and intelligence. Crichton does not talk down to you, but asks that you sift through Ian Malcolm’s verbose rants about chaos theory, or plow through geneticist Henry Wu’s discussion of lysine dependency. Jurassic Park may be beach reading, but it is beach reading of the highest order, meant to entertain and enlighten.

The screenwriters of Jurassic Park, on the other hand, were delighted to have come up with the concept of “Mr. DNA”, a mascot that explains highly complex genetic engineering to the audience in a few minutes of screen time. But Mr. DNA comes across as annoying and irrelevant, making the biogenetics laboratory seem like a playpen.

Even children are capable of understanding a complex story. If the story is too confusing to explain, then you probably don’t understand it yourself. Your audience will know when you pander to them.

Closing Lesson. Crichton did the hard work already.

Crichton fully imagined a mysterious new world with texture and layers that will continue to excite audiences for years to come. Choose your version of the franchise (the novel, film, or video games), recognize its parameters, and create your story within them. There is plenty of untapped material to work with on Isla Nublar, from underground tunnels and caves to six-foot-long dragonflies. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. This one was honed by a master.

Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of Nigerians in Space, a thriller about a lunar geologist from Africa, out now from Unnamed Press.

Notes

[1] Don Shay and Jody Duncan, The Making of Jurassic Park. New York: Ballantine, 1993.
[2] Id.

This piece first appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction.