Inconceivable! (Hugo Cinema 1988)

This blog post is the thirty-first in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.  

Confusion about program item locations, registration difficulties, and a convention committee that seemed to lurch from crisis to crisis. These are some of the reasons that the 1988 World Science Fiction Convention is remembered as a largely shambolic affair. Held in New Orleans on the weekend of September 1, it was described by Locus Magazine as “easily the most disorganized large-scale Worldcon ever held.”

The Metropolitan Auditorium in New Orleans
where the 1988 Hugo Awards took place has
lain vacant and in shambles since 2005.
(Image via NOLA.com)

The lineup to get into the Hugo Awards ceremony was also a mess, but once fans got inside the festivities were actually pretty entertaining. Toastmaster Mike Resnick had the audience roaring with laughter, and Gardner Dozois’ acceptance speech for his first Hugo Award was lauded as heartfelt and moving.

Not a single Best Dramatic Presentation finalist appears to have been in attendance for the ceremony, leaving Resnick to announce the award fairly quickly, hand the trophy to publicist Terry Erdman (who hadn’t even worked on the movie), and then move on.

Hugo voters had been enthusiastic in their support for The Princess Bride, with more votes being cast for the Best Dramatic winner than anything in any other category. With 493 votes, it eclipsed its nearest competitor Robocop, which garnered only 276 first-place votes.

The 1988 shortlist is a mixed bag. On top of Princess Bride and Robocop, there was Star Trek The Next Generation’s pilot episode “Encounter at Farpoint,” Arnold Schwarzenegger's Predator, and George Miller’s Witches of Eastwick. Two of these probably didn’t deserve to make the cut, but it’s difficult to think of other movies from that year deserving inclusion instead.

Perhaps the British anti-war low budget movie Friendship’s Death might have warranted inclusion on the ballot, or the classic Anime Neo Tokyo. Inner-Space, Batteries Not Included, and Spaceballs all have their adherents, but any of these would likely have been a marginal call. Harry and the Hendersons also came out that year.

It would be fair to say genre cinema was in a post-Star Wars lull. As unbelievable as it may seem in retrospect, there was not a single science fiction or fantasy film among the Top-5 highest grossing movies of the Hugo-eligible year. This had not happened in more than a decade, and has not happened since.

In fact, the highest-grossing science fiction or fantasy movie of 1987 was the mostly-mundane Witches of Eastwick, which earned $63 million and eighth in the box office rankings for the year (behind the mediocre Richard Dreyfuss cop comedy Stakeout).

David Foster Wallace dismissed Witches of Eastwick
author John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.”
(Image via New Statesman)

The Witches of Eastwick probably should not have been considered for a Hugo Award. It’s barely fantasy, and is a meandering and irritating movie. Based on a novel by Couples author John Updike, and brought to the screen by Mad Max director George Miller, it portrays three single women (Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Cher) who are seduced by a stranger who might be the Devil (Jack Nicholson). Each of the three women are portrayed as missing something in their lives, and the audience is supposed to accept that Nicholson’s devil has the power to change that. Insultingly, to the characters, each of them essentially gives up their career and artistic aspirations as soon as they’re with him. John Updike may have his admirers, but to us the portrayals of women and LGBTQ people in his works have aged extremely poorly, and Witches of Eastwick is no exception. There is also a tonal mismatch between the source material, the directorial vision, and the energy brought to the screen by the stars. As a reviewer in Variety Magazine noted, “Miller seems to become impatient with the material and tries to hike it up a notch toward the end with some inappropriate special effects.”

The Predator is probably not the best his planet has
to offer. The scorpion-faced alien is just a half-rate
nepo kid trying to pretend that he’s formidable
and worthy of his father’s affection.
(Image via Newsweek)

Released on the exact same day that summer, Predator is a well-constructed and highly quotable pulp adventure action movie featuring one of the best-designed alien creatures of that era’s cinema. The almost all-male cast is muscle-bound and somewhat cliched, with action beats interspersed with bro-handshakes between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. But while Predator is on its surface a testosterone-fuelled jungle romp about heroic American soldiers put into conflict with a deadly alien who hunts them, it is often pointed out that the movie can be read as a condemnation of American trophy hunters who take high-tech weaponry with them on African safaris where they hunt whatever animals they can put their sights on. It’s a savvier movie than it’s often given credit for, and was a worthy Hugo finalist. As an interesting aside, as far as we can tell, Predator director John McTiernan is the first Hugo-winner to serve time in prison.

Probably the most anticipated science fiction event of the year had been on the small screen, as Star Trek launched The Next Generation — and earned a Hugo nomination in the process. Although the series would eventually become a classic, and possibly the most popular iteration of the franchise, it got off to a very rough start. The pilot episode “Encounter At Farpoint” is a fairly clunky two hours of television, with two plots that seem to work at cross purposes. On one side, the Enterprise D and its new captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stuart) gets accosted by a malevolent god-like being, while on the surface of a nearby planet half of the crew are trying to solve the mystery of how a city got built fairly rapidly. It’s rough around the edges, and occasionally very clunky in terms of dialogue. Whether or not this deserved to be on the Hugo shortlist probably depends on your affection for The Next Generation, but we would suggest “Hide and Q,” which aired on November 23 of that year, would have been a better pick.

However, two works on the shortlist — and indeed in that entire year — stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Given the militarization of police over the past three decades, the increasing corporate dominance of

It may be of fannish interest to note that in 1987,
Forrest J. Ackerman played the President of Earth
in the movie Amazon Women On The Moon.
(Image via Letterboxd)

America’s legal system, and the lack of accountability among those in power, Robocop’s grim satire seems more timely now than when it first hit cinemas. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, it’s an over-the-top social commentary peppered with immersive and organic worldbuilding and intense non-diagetic inserts. Depicting a near-future Detroit where the police force is being privatized, the movie follows a detective named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller). Murphy is killed and then brought back to life as a cyborg who must avenge his own murder. But the story is so much more than that, tackling the dehumanization of labour and the alienation of late-capitalism. The movie is occasionally witty, sometimes disturbing, and structurally perfect. Details introduced in the first act (e.g., the way Alex Murphy holsters his gun) are relevant to in the denouement (e.g. the reveal of who Robocop is), Some members of our cinema club argued that this is the most incisive and relevant science fiction movie made in the entire decade, as the movie offers brutal social commentary presented in an innovative manner.

Studios had struggled to market The Princess Bride, and as “Inconceivable!” as it might be now, the movie was widely regarded as a box-office disappointment. Opening on barely 800 screens, it hadn’t even cracked $30 million, and wouldn’t be popularly regarded as a significant movie for several more years. So the fact that fandom chose it as their favourite indicates that the Worldcon community was ahead of the curve. Told as a metafictional narrative read by a grandfather to his sick grandson, the movie follows a farm boy named Westley (Cary Elwes) on a quest to rescue his true love Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright). For at least one member of our cinema club, Princess Bride remains her “favourite movie of all time,” but some others found the delivery a touch too saccharine and the whimsy to be forced.

Although some of us still wish a more purely science fictional movie like Robocop could have won the Hugo that year, it’s difficult to quibble with the overwhelming vote of the 1988 Worldcon attendees. The Princess Bride was the film that represented the tastes of fandom voters that year. Considering the fact that it remains a cult favourite in the broader public, it’s probably the right pick for the award.