Khan's wrath transformed Hollywood in 1982

Though it seems like a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Barbenheimer phenomenon burst into the conventional wisdom about summer blockbusters last July: dark Academy darling meets Day-Glo feminist satire, cultural event meets marketing machine. The gonzo strategy of competing studios releasing tonally opposite works on the same date has transformed the economics of moviegoing in the streaming age.

In his scathing book “The Future Is Now,” Chris Nashawaty looks back to the summer of 1982, when Hollywood invested heavily in an emerging science fiction audience. He details the debut of eight films—“ET,” “Tron,” “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Blade Runner,” “Poltergeist,” “The Thing” and “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior”—that became the paradigm Barbenheimer challenged. It’s a history of business and society wrapped in an irresistible ensemble of auteurs, shapeshifting monsters, a dystopian vigilante and a stuffed alien—the perfect nonfiction read for the beach.

After the runaway success of George Lucas’s “Star Wars” in 1977, Hollywood could no longer ignore the demographics. Nashawaty unpacks the myths behind each film. With a few exceptions—the gifted screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who wrote “ET,” and the volatile Sean Young, Harrison Ford’s co-star in “Blade Runner,” the auteur’s cast is all male; they move like a pack of wolves, producers, directors and suits ready to swoop. As his many interviews show, strong creative bonds were forged as unprecedented visuals were captured on film.

Here, top directors, Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, “populists who happen to have a gift for the Midas gift” mingle with strangers: set designers, matte painters and stuntmen. (Arnold Schwarzenegger steals the show in every scene he appears in.) In some cases, crews literally broke the law during filming, but crowds flocked to multiplexes and ticket sales soared.

A former critic for Entertainment Weekly, Nashawaty writes with the pace of an Olympic sprinter and the panache of a seasoned magazine writer; the jokes are funny! The puns are funny! even when he sometimes overdoes a comparison. He observes that “Road Warrior” “would take the form of a great vehicular orgy choreographed as skillfully as a Busby Berkeley musical, pumped up to the speed of a cheap trucker.”

But he never compromises substance for style; the book examines boardroom deals and technical innovations from inception to opening night. He revels in artistic language while following the money, illuminating the intuitive games of producers like the late Dino De Laurentiis, “who saw dollar signs where others saw stop signs.”

With its macho men and story-rich world, “The Future Was Now” brings to life a crucial chapter in Hollywood’s evolution, a two-month period that elevated science fiction from a fringe genre to the industry’s hot center. It also has caveats to today's aspiring filmmakers, as well as adjacent cultural businesses, including publishing.

As Nashawaty puts it, “A single successful bet, or an unexpectedly huge blockbuster left for dead by a rival studio, could mean the difference between total industry domination and an instant regime change that results in a group of hapless executives carrying boxes through the studio's security gates for the last time.”

Hamilton Cain, who also writes reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Future Was Now: Madmen, Rebels, and the 1982 Sci-Fi Epic

By: Chris Nashawaty.

Editor: Flatiron, 304 pages, $29.99.