[The offices of the Fairly Big Movie Corporation, Hollywood, circa 1957. J.D. Hoffenhoff, top banana, sits at his desk puffing on several cigars. A script department minion cringes before him.]
J.D.: So tell me again what all this is about, Lou.
Minion: Well, boss, we had what you might call a kind of delegation of faculty members from great American universities.
J.D.: Hmm. Sounds like a loada intellectual pinkoes to me. What did they want?
Minion: Er, well, they had an idea for a film they thought we might want to make. They even got Jack Arnold and Bob Fresco to help them with the story for it.
J.D.: Hey, isn’t Jack Arnold the sci-fi movie guy? Didn’t he do Black Lagoon for Universal?
Minion: Yes indeed, boss, and he also did that big spider picture, and the one about the guy who shrinks. I think Fresco helped him with the spider film.
J.D.: Hmmm… they weren’t trying to pitch a sci-fi movie to you, were they?
Minion: Well, kinda, yes. But this one is a bit different to normal, maybe.
J.D.: Okay, let’s hear it.
Minion: Well, it’s called The Monolith Monsters and it opens – of course – with a voice-over talking about how rocks and meteorites and so on, you, know, bits and pieces of the universe, they’re all landing on Earth all the time.
J.D.: ‘Bits and pieces of the universe’? That line had better not be in the script.
Minion: Er, of course not.
J.D.: Hmmm. Need someone with gravitas to deliver that kind of a spiel. Is Orson free?
Minion: If he isn’t, we’ll find someone who sounds like him. Anyway, we see a meteorite heading for Earth and landing in the desert – it’ll be cheap, we can reuse footage from It Came From Outer Space or another movie like that. Anyway, shiny black rocks go everywhere…
J.D.: Shiny black rocks? Is that all? No aliens? No giant ants? No giant bean pods?
Minion: Guess not, boss. Anyway, we see a guy from the Department of the Interior driving around, and he stops and picks up one of the rocks, then takes it back to town. Then we do some character stuff, introduce some of the townspeople.
J.D.: All sounds a bit dull to me. How can we introduce some terror and excitement into this picture?
Minion: Um… well… how about if, nearly every time we see the black rocks, there’s a big da-da-DAAAAH sting on the soundtrack? Regardless of whether anything scary or exciting has happened yet.
J.D.: Could work. Do the rocks turn out to be eggs of horrible monsters?
Minion: No.
J.D.: Are the rocks the remains of strange alien creatures who want to conquer Earth?
Minion: No.
J.D.: Are the rocks Communist?
Minion: I don’t think so, sir. Well, there’s a windy night which means some water ends up spilling on the rocks, and something weird happens when geologist guy goes to look at them. When the hero finds him, geologist guy is weirdly dead, turned to stone, and his lab has been trashed –
J.D.: So geologist guy isn’t the hero? What’s the hero’s job?
Minion: He’s a different geologist. We’ve got Grant Williams pencilled in for him, he was the shrinking guy in that shrinking guy movie we were talking about. Meanwhile the love interest – we’re looking at Lola Albright – has taken a party of schoolkids into the desert and one of them brings back another chunk of the funny black rock. She tries washing it, and ends up dumping it into a tub of water, which starts bubbling.
J.D.: Is the fact that the rocks get all weird when they’re wet meant to be some kind of plot twist, or mystery? Because it’s coming across as a bit obvious the way you’re telling it.
Minion: I’m sure it’ll be better in the movie, boss. So, the little girl’s house also gets wrecked, covered in tons more black rock, and her parents are petrified. She’s also turning to stone, but slowly, so there’s a bit of tension.
J.D.: Also, you can’t kill a kid in a movie like this. So the rocks are –
Minion: They’re some form of silicon life which respond to getting wet by sucking all the silica from anything nearby, and using it to grow to an immense height – at which point they topple over, shatter, and the process begins again.
J.D.: I was going to ask if the rocks are bad, but I guess you’ve answered that. Hang on though – if the rocks are in the desert, they’re not really a danger, are they? I mean hero guy and his buddies can just take their sweet time going out to the desert and collecting them all. I mean, it’s not like there’s suddenly going to be torrential rain, or anything. So what happens next?
Minion: Er, well, there’s sudden torrential rain, and the giant spiky monoliths it creates bear down on the town. Can hero guy come up with a solution before the silicon rocks spread everywhere?
J.D.: Okay, I don’t need to hear the rest of it. Hmmm. You know, I’ve nothing against a sci-fi movie, but this one seems a bit – I don’t know – wilfully strange, somehow. How did those university guys get involved?
Minion: Ah, well – and just to clarify, sir, this next part is entirely fictitious – they kind of feel that quite a few disciplines haven’t had a fair crack of the whip in this Golden Age of Sci-Fi B-movies we’ve been living through. You know, astronomers and astrophysicists, atomic scientists, even entomologists and marine biologists, they’ve all had movies where they get to be the hero. And some of the other types of scientists are kind of seeking redress for that.
J.D.: So they want to do a movie where the hero is a geologist?
Minion: Seems like, sir. It’s not just that, though. As well as geology, the script makes a few shout-outs to meteorologists, too, during that sequence with the torrential rain, and later on – well, it seems like the faculty of civil engineering got wind of what was happening, and insisted that they –
J.D.: I get the idea. So you’ve got a wacky sci-fi monster movie where the actual monsters are piles of rocks and the day is saved by hitting things with a rock hammer, forecasting the weather and knowing how a dam is built? I guess it certainly has originality going for it. What are the special effects going to look like?
Minion: Er – good enough, boss, with luck.
J.D.: And who’s in line to direct it?
Minion: John Sherwood, sir. He says that if this movie isn’t a massive hit, he’ll give up directing entirely. So what do you think, boss? Do we go with The Monolith Monsters?
[A lengthy pause.]
J.D.: Nah. It sounds much more like Universal’s kind of thing.