The Starlost as a movie??
by Doc on Jan.02, 2001, under Movies
While combing the net for info on the mostly forgotten Canadian series The Starlost (see this web site for a definitive description), I happened across this little tidbit – Sony Pictures is working on a movie version…
Update (1/2): Videos are available from [aml]…they are listed as Special Order (4-6 weeks), and are $13.99 each. Simply do a search for “The Starlost”.
Dating myself: As a kid, I remembered a Sci-Fi show my father and I would watch. I didn’t remember much about it, except for some cheesy special effects – I was only 5 at the time. There weren’t many episodes (16 were shown), and I never saw it again. Of course, even the most obscure show lives on somewhere on the ‘net.
The Starlost has a very interesting history. I’ll leave it to this wonderfully descriptive web site for the details. Suffice it to say it was conceived and created by Harlan Ellison and had Ben Bova a technical advisor, and Douglas Trumbull (2001: A Space Odyssey) as Executive Producer. But then the TV execs got hold of it and the major names quit.
Harlan took his original script, and with Edward Bryant turned it into the novel Phoenix Without Ashes. Now it seems Phoenix will become a movie, produced by Sony Pictures under the name Generation Ship, with Rob Bowman (The X-Files) directing. When is up in the air, since Bowman is scheduled to do Reign of Fire.
And the whole reason I was looking was I was thinking what someone like JMS could have done with the original premise…
In brief: The Ark is a massive 200-mile-long space ship fleeing the (unexplained) destruction of Earth three hundred years from now. It contains around 500,000 survivors, representing various cultures and housed in 50-mile-diameter biospheres, each a self-contained community, hoping to find a new planet to colonize.
A 100 years after launch, a mysterious accident kills the crew and damages the Ark, now hurtling uncontrolled and on a collision course with a star. The biospheres are automatically cut off from each other.
500 years later, most everyone has forgotten that they are aboard a spaceship, until one man finds the door and escapes, learning the possible fate of the Ark and seeks to save it from destruction.
If you read the Bible on the web site, you’ll see that Harlan had a vision of a “television novel” (where have I heard that before?) with a defined conclusion that explains what happened to Earth, the crew, etc.
Man, I want this turned back into a TV show, but in the right hands…
Update (1/2): Videos are available from [aml]…they are listed as Special Order (4-6 weeks), and are $13.99 each. Simply do a search for “The Starlost”.