“This new pueblo was called Century City,” the journalist explains, riding down Avenue of the Stars to a movie shooting “in the middle of all that concrete, steel, and glass.” He’s out west from Chicago covering “the new Black awareness in Hollywood.” One of his interview subjects, a reasonably successful TV actor, is filming a weird production. “Some people,” the reporter continues, “Or, rather, I should say some things were running across a piece of open pavement, making strange noises and firing guns.”
That scene comes from The Hollow and the Human, the 1976 novel Hari Rhodes published after playing a crucial role in 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, a truly spectacular film about gun-toting people-things. Rhodes was there when the fourth installment filmed in Century City. The business and shopping district was a fresh argument for urban progress, and a sprawl’s dream of a skyline. Conquest saw a nightmare. In the pale open-air superblocks of “North America – 1991,” apes are humanity’s abused servants. Gorillas in red jumpsuits, chimpanzees in green, orangutans yellow: A traffic-light coalition of the damned. Most people wear black. Cops rock jackboots and Star Destroyer hats.
This town makes Ape City look like a summer camp. Remember, the original Planet of the Apes was expensive enough to construct its own sad future on 20th Century Fox’s lush ranch. That was up in the Santa Monica Mountains, not far from where Fox sprouted a Welsh village for 1941’s How Green Was My Valley. (We used to build things in this country; we used to build countries.) Valley starred Roddy McDowall as a boy caught up in a miners’ strike. Conquest throws him into another labor dispute, and the negotiations involve bullets and kerosene. Between the films, cash-depleted Fox sold away much of its studio lot. The most delicious chronicles blame the land deal on Cleopatra, a money pit featuring McDowall as a leader the history books call Caesar.
The real estate became Century City. So Conquest stares at its own studio’s ruins, carving a brutal society from the brutalist architecture. It also draws inspiration from the previous decade’s movements, uprisings, civil disobedience, and state-sponsored counterreactions. Was race always this saga’s underlying, accidental subject? Let’s tread carefully. Simian imagery has long been racist shorthand. In The Bridge Over the River Kwai, which Pierre Boulle wrote before his Apes source novel, British soldiers label their Japanese adversaries “apes” and “monkeys dressed up as men.” Necessary to remember, of course, Kwai’s worst man is British. Boulle’s Apes worried more about stagnation than oppression, but he did wonder how awful it would be for apes to treat humans as badly as humans treat apes. Paul Dehn’s Conquest script turns that inversion diagonal. These humans treat apes as badly as humans treat other humans.
It's 20 years since Escape’s quadruple-fatality ending. An American governor gets introduced as “His Excellency.” Cigarettes are healthy and boring. There are mandatory curfews, an Orwellian intercom. A virus killed all dogs and cats, so humans have adopted primates as replacement pets, and now enslaved them. The apes clean, deliver packages, shine shoes, bus tables. They are beaten, conditioned, imprisoned. They have made life so easy for the people who hate them, and they have had the fuck enough.
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