Jurassic Park

• 1. Introduction

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  Jurassic Park, the 1993 film directed by Steven Spielberg, came with an unusual house rule. On set, Spielberg banned the words "monster" and "creature" and told the crew to call the dinosaurs "animals" instead. The story takes place on Isla Nublar, a fictional island near Costa Rica. There, the wealthy businessman John Hammond has opened a theme park filled with dinosaurs brought back from extinction. Then industrial sabotage cripples the park's power and security systems, and a small group of visitors must fight to survive and escape.

  The film grew out of a novel by Michael Crichton, and Crichton shared the screenplay credit with David Koepp. Getting from the page to the screen took a fixed-price rights deal, a relay of writers, and a hurricane. It also took a decision about how to build animals that no living person had ever seen. How did the book change on its way to the cinema, who was chosen to play its scientists, and how were its dinosaurs made believable?

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• 2. A Fixed Price

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  Michael Crichton's agent was Michael Ovitz at Creative Artists Agency, and the agency encouraged a bidding war over the film rights. Crichton had hoped to avoid exactly that. Years earlier, a bidding war over his novel Congo had dragged on, and Congo did not reach the screen until 1995. For Jurassic Park he named a fixed price of $1.5 million. His main concern was that a film actually get made, and he cared less about collecting the highest offer.

  Steven Spielberg heard about the manuscript in May 1990, while he and Crichton were discussing a screenplay that would become the television series ER. Spielberg had been fascinated by dinosaurs all his life and had long admired the work of Ray Harryhausen. After reading the galleys, he committed to directing. He praised the book for giving "a really credible look at how dinosaurs might someday be brought back alongside modern mankind". Spielberg later recalled that Crichton had privately promised him the book, even as the agency invited other bids.

  Four studios put in bids, and each came with a director attached. Warner Bros. offered Tim Burton, Columbia Pictures offered Richard Donner, and 20th Century Fox offered Joe Dante. Crichton spoke with every one of them and then endorsed Spielberg, calling the project "a very difficult picture". Universal Pictures, which also backed Spielberg, acquired the rights on the 15th of May 1990. That was less than a week after they went on sale and six months before the novel appeared in print. The film was announced on the 25th of May 1990.

  James Cameron revealed in 2012 that he had tried to buy the rights too. He learned that Spielberg had secured them just a few hours earlier. Cameron said his version would have been "much nastier", and he compared it with his 1986 film Aliens. After watching the finished film, he decided he had not been the right director, and he commended Spielberg for making something children could enjoy. Dante also praised the result, though he disagreed with turning Hammond into more of a protagonist.

  Spielberg had his own way of describing the assignment. He said he was "really just trying to make a good sequel to Jaws, on land". He also pointed to the 1933 film King Kong as the "high-water mark" for special effects, and he wanted to imagine what a King Kong of today would look like.

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• 3. Rewriting the Novel

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  Crichton was offered a further $500,000 to adapt his own book, and he had mixed feelings about taking the job. By his own account he was weary of the whole subject, tired of Malcolm, tired of Grant, and even tired of the dinosaurs. Yet he felt he understood the dimensions of the story. He finished a first draft on the 7th of September 1990 and said nobody was happy with it, because it jumped to action instead of building toward it. At Spielberg's suggestion he rewrote the script in 40-page increments. He delivered the last 80 pages on the 19th of January 1991.

  Crichton had warned Spielberg from the start that he would only trim the story to a budgetable size. After that, he said, Spielberg would want someone else to polish the characters. He remarked that writers rarely volunteer to be replaced. Production designer Rick Carter then reworked Crichton's revised draft, and several key elements of the finished film began with his edits. Among them were Hammond recruiting Grant and Sattler and the development of Hammond's character arc.

  Malia Scotch Marmo was reading the novel on the set of Hook when Kathleen Kennedy told her about the adaptation. She started writing in October 1991 and chose to begin from scratch. She gave Grant some of Malcolm's traits, removed Malcolm from the story, and added a romance between Grant and Sattler. To stress the folly of trying to control nature, she showed jungle plants creeping into the unfinished visitor center. Her version ended with Hammond staying on the island and drowning in a puddle, while a mosquito landed on his arm. She sent Spielberg 15 pages at a time and reworked them to his taste. She finished on the 14th of March 1992. Spielberg read the draft twice and was dissatisfied, and she received no screen credit.

  Universal president Casey Silver then recommended David Koepp, who had co-written Death Becomes Her. Koepp read the novel four times before writing and held off on reading earlier drafts until his own was done. Only two sequences were mandatory, the Tyrannosaurus attack on a tour vehicle and the raptors in the kitchen. Spielberg told him to ignore what technology could manage. To avoid pages of scientific exposition, Spielberg proposed a short animated film for the park's visitors, inspired by the 1957 television special Hemo the Magnificent. Koepp named its cartoon narrator Mr. DNA after Spielberg jokingly used the name.

  Koepp found Ian Malcolm hard to write, because the character's dialogue leaned on math and chaos theory. He also folded Malcolm into Grant, just as Scotch Marmo had. Malcolm returned at Spielberg's insistence after Jeff Goldblum auditioned and was judged perfect. Koepp then made him funnier and modeled Hammond on Walt Disney, with a motive centered on entertaining people. One scene, in which Sattler and Hammond discuss the park over ice cream, was rewritten 27 times, even during filming. Koepp kept the Tyrannosaurus offscreen before its breakout, as in Jaws, so the violence was implied before it was seen. When Crichton saw the final draft, he said it differed drastically from his own but fit the way he thought.

  The film could hold only about 10-20% of the book, by Crichton's estimate. Spielberg described his method as boiling the novel down to his seven or eight favorite scenes. The violence was toned down too. Crichton had made the book gory to force readers to take the dinosaurs seriously, and he felt the animals' appearance on screen did that work without gore. A river raft chase was cut because Koepp saw it as an obligatory tour past every dinosaur. He also noted that, in the early 1990s, computer graphics struggled with water, and a swimming Tyrannosaurus was a bridge too far. Hammond was softened from a ruthless, greedy businessman into a sympathetic showman. The ages of Tim and Lex were switched so Spielberg could work with the younger Joseph Mazzello. Ed Regis, the park's public relations chief, was removed, and his cowardice passed to Donald Gennaro. Dodgson's employer, Biosyn, lost its name in the film and only appeared by name in the 2022 film Jurassic World Dominion.

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• 4. Casting Without Stars

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  Spielberg wanted "good, solid actors who weren't going to charge outrageous prices", because so much of the money was earmarked for dinosaurs. He said he did not want to spend three to five million dollars apiece on actors. Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss were considered for Alan Grant but judged too expensive. William Hurt, Harrison Ford and Tim Robbins turned the role down, and it went to Sam Neill. The film's total cost is itself disputed, with some sources saying $63 million and Spielberg saying $56 million.

  Laura Dern became Ellie Sattler after Robin Wright and Juliette Binoche declined. Embeth Davidtz, Gwyneth Paltrow and Helen Hunt had also auditioned. Spielberg first gathered a group of young actresses, but Scotch Marmo felt they were ingenues who would not be believable as a scientist, and she suggested Dern. Casting director Janet Hirshenson thought Jeff Goldblum was right for Ian Malcolm after reading the novel. Jim Carrey also auditioned and was "terrific, too", she said, but everyone quickly loved the idea of Goldblum.

  Richard Attenborough hesitated over playing John Hammond, since it was his first acting role in 14 years. Spielberg won him over by telling him, "I can't see anyone else playing it but you". Sean Connery, who had worked with Crichton on The First Great Train Robbery, was also a top choice, but his fee was too high. Neill, Dern, Goldblum and Attenborough all joined late, with only a few weeks to prepare. Neill said he had not read the book and knew nothing about it until, within weeks, he was working with Spielberg. The start of filming was pushed back a month to fit his schedule.

  The young roles had their own stories. Ariana Richards, cast as Lex, said she was asked only to scream in her audition. Spielberg's sleeping wife woke on the couch and ran down the hallway to check that the children were all right. Christina Ricci also auditioned for Lex. Joseph Mazzello had been judged too young for Hook, so Spielberg promised they would work together later and then cast him as Tim.

  Other choices came from small connections. Whoopi Goldberg pointed Hirshenson toward Samuel L. Jackson's performance in Jungle Fever, and Jackson auditioned for Ray Arnold. Spielberg and Hirshenson were instantly impressed. Spielberg picked Wayne Knight as Dennis Nedry after seeing him in Basic Instinct. BD Wong played Dr. Henry Wu and was disappointed by how small the part was next to the novel, which he believed came from racism. Richard Kiley, who voiced the tour guide in the book, voiced it in the film as well, and James Earl Jones was also considered for the voice.

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• 5. Building the Park

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  Production designer Rick Carter did not want the park to look like a row of bright, shallow commercial buildings. He pointed out that, if finished, it might become exactly that, but on film it would feel hollow. "This is, after all, not Disneyland," he said. He drew on building styles characteristic of Costa Rica. The visitor center's exterior was loosely based on a Jerusalem temple, and its interior carried skeletons and a mural by the artist Doug Henderson.

  Set designer Lauren Cory built the control room with reference to computer environments at several theme parks and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It held a wall-mounted screen measuring 6 x 8 ft and numerous computers lent by Apple, Silicon Graphics, Supermac Technologies and Thinking Machines Corporation. Together they were worth over $1.7 million. Jurassic Park was the first film to show computer screens running in real time on camera. Earlier films had to insert screens in post-production because CRT monitors displayed badly on film. The crew solved that by dropping the screens' refresh rate to 48 hertz.

  The novel's tour vehicles were electric Toyota Land Cruisers. Spielberg instead struck a deal with the Ford Motor Company, which supplied seven Ford Explorers. They received a custom paint job and a plexiglass roof. The cars were meant to look autonomous and ran along a track that did not actually work. Industrial Light & Magic and the veteran customizer George Barris modified them so that drivers hidden in the trunk could steer, using cameras mounted on the front. George Barris also customized the Jeep Wranglers used by the park workers.

  Smaller props carried their own decisions. The container in which Nedry smuggles dinosaur embryos is disguised as shaving cream. The script named no brand, so art director John Bell browsed a drug store and chose Barbasol for its distinctive design. The production skipped a costume designer and instead used costume supervisors from Hook, who picked ready-to-wear clothes from various retailers. Malcolm's all-black look came from the novel, and Goldblum added a black leather jacket. Hammond wore all white, meant to suggest a religious figure or deity. The contrast was intended to set Malcolm, as a symbol of Crichton's cynicism, against Hammond as a symbol of Spielberg's optimism.

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• 6. Hurricane and Soundstages

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  Costa Rica was briefly considered as a location, but the shoot would have fallen in its rainy season. Puerto Rico was taken seriously as well, until Spielberg settled on Kauai, Hawaii. He credited his age. At twenty-six, he said, he might have gone somewhere really rugged, but at forty-five he liked the idea of a nice Hawaiian hotel with room service and a pool. After 25 months of pre-production, filming began on the 24th of August 1992 at Olokele Canyon. Mānāwaiopuna Falls, used for the helicopter arrivals, became commonly known as Jurassic Falls. The visitor center's 60 ft facade was built at the Valley House Plantation Estate.

  The tall fences at Olokele Canyon were among the hardest jobs for the crew. They stood 24 ft high, and the longest stretch ran over 200 ft. Special effects supervisor Michael Lantieri said the crew hauled steel up the canyon, drilled holes as for telephone poles, poured concrete, and strung cables. More than 6 mi of cable went into them. Lantieri called it an enormous job for very little payoff, since viewers would simply see a fence.

  On the 11th of September 1992, the last scheduled day on Kauai, Hurricane Iniki passed directly over the island. The cast and crew learned of it too late and sheltered in their hotel. Spielberg and a small crew went outside to capture brief footage of the storm, and that footage was used for the storm that hits Isla Nublar. The Gallimimus herd scene had to move to Kualoa Ranch on Oahu, whose high cliffs looked better than the empty plain first planned. The hurricane also cost Ray Arnold his planned onscreen death, so he dies offscreen in the final film.

  By the 15th of September 1992, the production had moved to California, mostly to sound stages at Universal. On Stage 24 the crew built an industrial kitchen for the raptor chase, inspired by the Overlook Hotel kitchen in The Shining. Its reflective surfaces forced cinematographer Dean Cundey to hide lights behind black cloths. For the sequence where Grant helps Tim out of a falling vehicle, the crew built a 50 ft steel tree. Spielberg wanted it to look three times taller, so each of its three sides was dressed to look like a different stretch of the drop.

  The Tyrannosaurus breakout was filmed on Stage 16 at Warner Bros., starting on the 27th of October 1992, because Universal had no stage large enough. Rain machines and mud made the shoot wet for everyone. The animatronic soaked up water until it began to shake, and crew members dried it with shammies between takes. It was too heavy to move, so the crew shifted the set around it instead. During the vehicle attack, the animatronic hit the plexiglass roof harder than intended and lost a tooth. The tooth was so hard to reinsert that Spielberg kept shooting, which is why the dinosaur is missing one on screen.

  Spielberg shot the whole sequence at ground level so viewers would see the animal from the characters' point of view. A glass of water on a dashboard ripples as the dinosaur approaches. The idea came from Spielberg listening to Earth, Wind & Fire in his car and feeling the bass vibrate. Lantieri worked out the effect the night before by placing a glass of water on his guitar. The next morning, guitar strings were run through the car and plucked by a man on the floor. On the cliff above the wrecked vehicle, Koepp worried that viewers would question why a cliff suddenly appeared. Spielberg pointed at the giant robot and said no one would notice anything else.

  That footage changed the ending. The script originally killed the Tyrannosaurus early, but Spielberg decided it was the real star of the film. He rewrote the finale so it returns to face the raptors in the visitor center and unintentionally saves the humans. The animatronic was too heavy for that set, so the ending dinosaur was digitally rendered. The film wrapped on the 30th of November 1992, under budget and 12 days ahead of schedule. According to assistant director John T. Kretchmer, the last scene was a retake of Hammond meeting Grant and Sattler. Spielberg usually used no more than seven takes, but he did this one about sixteen times because he loved making the film and did not want to stop.

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• 7. Animals, Not Monsters

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  Paleontologist Jack Horner advised the production so the dinosaurs would match what scientists knew at the time. He strongly supported the theory that dinosaurs evolved into birds, an idea not widely accepted then. After Horner complained that flicking tongues were implausible, they were removed from the raptors in early animatics. His suggestion for a replacement was a kitchen door window fogging as a raptor breathes on it, which signaled warm-blooded animals. Horner accepted some artistic license, noting that where evidence was thin, Spielberg went with whatever made the best movie. The title is slightly misleading too. Only Brachiosaurus and Dilophosaurus in the film lived in the Jurassic period, and the others came later in the Cretaceous.

  Spielberg wanted full-scale dinosaurs on set as much as possible instead of relying on stop motion, which earlier dinosaur films had used. He considered the ride designer Bob Gurr, who had built a giant mechanical King Kong for Universal Studios Hollywood, but decided life-sized robots from him would be too expensive and unconvincing. Dinamation and Jim Henson's Creature Shop were also considered. He finally turned to Stan Winston, whose work on the Alien Queen in Aliens had impressed him. Winston had once declined to work on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and regretted it. So he agreed to build animatronic dinosaurs without knowing whether his team could do it, even though Universal had not yet greenlit the film.

  Winston's artist Mark "Crash" McCreery spent about a year making dinosaur sketches with scientific accuracy in mind, which impressed Universal. The look of the animals drew most strongly on the paleoartist John Gurche. Animatronics were built of the Brachiosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, plus a Velociraptor hatchling. Winston's crew first made fifth-scale models, cut them into cross-sections, and enlarged each section to full size in plywood, fiberglass, Roma clay and hardware cloth. They mounted these on a robotic frame, finished the sculpting, and fitted latex skin. Because Winston's crew had to operate the animatronics during filming, they were classified as actors and joined the Screen Actors Guild.

  Phil Tippett, who had made stop-motion dinosaurs for earlier projects, was hired early to create wide shots in go motion, a variation on stop motion. Spielberg found the results unsatisfactory for a live-action feature. He wanted a stampede of herds, and Dennis Muren of Industrial Light & Magic thought computer graphics could handle it after the breakthrough on Terminator 2. Animator Steve Williams went further. He admitted he secretly began building Tyrannosaurus bones in the computer, scanning a skeleton's schematics at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and animating a walk cycle. Fellow animator Mark Dippé had pushed Muren for months to consider large-scale computer graphics.

  Winston's fifth-scale Tyrannosaurus was scanned by Cyberware, and the data was fitted over Williams's skeleton. The digital animal impressed Spielberg so much that he dropped go motion for full-body shots. He compared the test to "watching our future unfolding on the TV screen, so authentic I couldn't believe my eyes". Tippett saw it and declared, "I think I'm extinct." Spielberg put the line into the script. Grant, amazed by the living dinosaurs, tells Sattler, "We're out of a job," and Malcolm replies, "Don't you mean extinct?"

  Tippett had assembled a 30-person crew for the go-motion work, and Spielberg did not want to lose his expertise. Muren convinced the reluctant Tippett, who disliked computers, to stay as an advisor on anatomy and movement. His animatics also guided the action sequences and Winston's animatronics. Muren noted that these were the first generation of computer animators, struggling with hardware and software limits that made the work painfully slow. Tippett and the ILM team spent roughly a month learning each other's fields.

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• 8. Release and Legacy

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  Spielberg supervised post-production in Poland, where he was filming Schindler's List at the same time. The two films were linked. Sid Sheinberg, president of Universal's parent company at the time, had approved Schindler's List only on the condition that Spielberg make Jurassic Park first. To show off the film's sound design, which blended various animal noises into the dinosaur voices, Spielberg invested in creating DTS, a company specializing in digital surround sound formats. Post-production lasted until May 1993.

  A $65 million marketing campaign promoted the film, including licensing deals with over 100 companies. Jurassic Park premiered on the 9th of June 1993 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. It opened across the United States two days later. The film was a blockbuster and grossed over $914 million worldwide in its original run. That passed Spielberg's own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and made it the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic arrived in 1997.

  Critics praised the special effects, the sound design, the action sequences, John Williams's score and Spielberg's direction. The film won 20 awards, three of them Academy Awards for visual effects and sound design. After its 20th anniversary re-release in 2013, it became the oldest film to pass $1 billion in ticket sales and the 17th overall to do so. Many critics and industry professionals have called it one of the greatest films ever made. Its use of computer-generated imagery is widely seen as a turning point for the visual effects techniques of modern cinema.

  The film spawned a multimedia franchise with six sequels, video games, theme park attractions, comic books and merchandise. In 2018 the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

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