Word: crichtons
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...boundary between science and science fiction -- in that twilight area where the imaginative sleuthing of paleontology meets the storytelling craft of filmmaking -- lies Jurassic Park. The technicians working with director Steven Spielberg on the film version of Michael Crichton's best seller spared no effort or expense to make the story's dinosaurs as accurate as current knowledge permitted. Dinosaur fans from youth, they cared about getting it right. But on a movie screen, footnotes are not allowed. "We were trying to be credible," co-producer Kathleen Kennedy says. "But we were also making a movie...
...they took a little artistic license. Velociraptor, as described in the literature and in Crichton's novel, was a creature no more than five or six feet tall. But because the speedy, ferocious raptors are the story's star villains, the Spielberg team decided to make them half again as large. The choice was scientifically defensible, since so few specimens had been found that generalizations were hard to come by. Anyway, what did books know? Then a surprising thing happened. In Utah, paleontologists found bones of a real raptor, and it was the size of the movie's beast...
...Crichton's novel, eccentric zillionaire John Hammond funds a project to clone dinosaur DNA taken from bloodsucking insects that were trapped in ancient amber to "bring them back alive, so to speak." The experiment's success goads Hammond to exploit the made-from-concentrate behemoths for profit. He hatches the dinosaurs on a Central American island and builds a theme park around them. Before the scheduled opening, a few guests -- including craggy paleontologist Alan Grant, lissome paleobotanist Ellie Sattler and Hammond's two young grandchildren -- come to Jurassic Park for a sneak preview. Then things go spectacularly wrong. The novel...
...book and the movie, which stars Sam Neill and Laura Dern, are essentially theme-park rides -- say, EPCOT Center's Universe of Energy, the one with the Audio-Animatronic dinosaurs -- which Crichton has given a cunning tweak. The novel is also a dark musing on the hubris that can infect science and capitalism in the heady, dicey enterprise of cloning DNA. The biotechnologist thinks he is God; the businessman dreams he is Croesus...
Also on hand was Jack Horner, curator of paleontology at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and Crichton's model for the book's hero -- though Horner wryly notes that Alan Grant is "better funded." He advised on every creature feature, from head (they often lost teeth) to foot (when they walked, the heel, not the toe, hit the ground first.) "They have detail inside the T. rex's mouth that no one has ever seen. It's a guess -- a best guess. And a lot of adults will be surprised that dinosaurs don't drag their tails...