How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombastic Ego

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

On September 19, 1964, Harlan Ellison invited a group of fans over to watch an episode of television

Although Harlan Ellison was denied a Hugo nod
for his Outer Limits episode "Soldier," it remains
an influential classic. In retrospect, its omission
from the Hugo ballot seems questionable.
(Image via UltimateActionMovies.com) 

he had written: The Outer Limits season premiere “Soldier.” Although Ellison had written a handful of television episodes in the preceding two years, only one of those had been science fiction (an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea that he’d regretted).

Ellison told his Los Angeles-based fandom peers that “Soldier” was a milestone in his quickly growing fame, and that it would advance the reputation of science fiction on television. It was an episode of which he was proud, and one that he would spend much of the year promoting to Hugo voters as being worthy of recognition.

“The tension from a high-pitched show (and a higher-pitched host) was terrific. And at the end I felt I had spent a valuable hour even though I’m not yet a TV-watcher,” Ron Ellik wrote in his fanzine Starspinke.

Although Ellison would later have a large collection of Hugos, in 1964-65 he had yet to receive even a single nomination, and was hungry for the recognition.

In the January 1965 progress report of that year’s Worldcon (which was to be held in London) the convention’s organizing committee announced that they would present Hugos in the categories that had been recognized at the previous year’s convention. And as it so happened, Best Dramatic Presentation had been omitted in 1964, due to a lack of interest.

So there was to be no Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award that year, and “Soldier” would be denied the nomination that Ellison believed he was due.

The young Harlan Ellison 
already had a reputation for
bombast and temper. 
(Image via ElpasoPost.com)

Well-known for his level head and cool demeanor, Ellison responded to the omission of this category with good grace. He contacted a number of fans across the Western United States, suggesting that the Worldcon be stripped of their right to hold the Hugo Awards, with the possibility that the awards would instead be handed out at a North American convention. He went so far as to call Worldcon chair Ella Parker at 5 a.m. one morning in late January, and told her that Ben Jason would not be sending the Hugo trophies to the UK convention (though this was easy to disprove, as Jason had quit being the manufacturer of the trophies two years previously).

“When [Harlan] did finally phone-me, I lost no time informing him of his colossal blunder and, in no uncertain terms, advised him to write a letter of apology,” Jason wrote.

Though he backed down from that attempt, Ellison was adamant that there should be a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1965, and encouraged other fans to write in nominations for the category … with the apparent belief that if the category was being considered that year, his Outer Limits episode would be a shoe-in.

But the 1965 Hugo Awards operated under a unique set of rules that have not been used since; as per the convention committee, the shortlist was created via “nomination by a panel of experts, selecting from suggestions offered by the membership at large.” In practice, this meant that no matter how many voters included “Soldier” on their nominating ballot, the Hugo Committee could omit it if they so chose.

In the final tally, this nominating committee chose to include only two names on the shortlist for the

At least one fan believed that
Disney classic Mary Poppins
deserved to be on the Hugo
ballot. We're inclined to agree.
(Image via EW.com)

Best Dramatic Presentation category in 1965; the only instance in any Hugo category of a shortlist that brief. As recorded in fanzines, it is clear that there were at least some nominating ballots submitted for “Soldier,” for Mary Poppins, and for The Last Man On Earth. But the Hugo Committee determined either that there weren’t sufficient nominations for these, or that the works listed weren’t appropriate for the Hugos.

It is a puzzling decision, particularly in light of one of the works they did include: The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao. Glacially directed by George Pal, and starring lilly-white Tony Randall as the racially stereotyped title character, it was agreed by most of our cinema club to be among the worst works ever shortlisted for a Hugo Award in any category. To compound the movie’s abhorrent racism, the dialogue spoon feeds the audience a series of simplistic moralist messages delivered with acting that is exceptionally exaggerated and broad. This is a movie that drips with condescension for its audience. The question of why The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao ended up on the Hugo shortlist remains baffling to us and leaves us wondering what Ellison’s emotional reaction might have been.

Best Dramatic Presentation was the last award handed out on the evening of August 29, 1965. “And we have a remaining category, for Best Drama. It goes to Dr. Strangelove,” presenter Robert Silverberg said. “We do not have Dr. Strangelove himself here to accept the award, but we do have Peter George who wrote the novel on which the movie was based.” 

The extent of George’s acceptance speech (as far as we are aware, the shortest Hugo acceptance speech on record) was: “Thank you very much. This is lovely.”

Dr. Strangelove author Peter George
accepts a Hugo Award in 1965.
Sadly, the author died of a self-inflicted
gunshot wound within the year. 
(Image via Fanac.org)

Dr. Strangelove is only marginally science fictional; the only element of the movie that is clearly speculative is the doomsday weapon, although there had long been a tradition of nuclear war fiction without any speculative technologies being considered for the Hugo — The Long Loud Silence by Wilson Tucker had been the runner-up for the very first Hugo Award in 1953. Still, for at least one of our bloggers this deficit of clearly science fictional elements in Dr. Strangelove was enough to bring into question whether it should have been recognized at all.

The shortlist from 1965 was probably too short, as there were numerous works that year whose omissions are puzzling. Matheson’s classic I Am Legend had been adapted as The Last Man On Earth, an effective and moody Hammer Horror movie starring Vincent Price. Later remade as The Omega Man, the original version hews more closely to the novel than later adaptations, and features a superb performance from Franca Bettoia who imbues her vampire character with enormous humanity. The intense loneliness conveyed in the movie is a more moving form of horror than any of the jump scares of Will Smith’s later I Am Legend.

We might also suggest that the Hugo shortlist might have done well to find room to honour The Earth Dies Screaming; a quirky low-budget British movie about an alien invasion. Despite its low budget, the film’s robots and zombies are often an effective storytelling device as the tension ratchets up. It’s difficult not to note the more economical pace of this low-budget movie, and how tightly edited it is, in comparison to the high-budget but soporific Seven Faces of Dr. Lao.

Overall, it is hard to question the decision of Hugo voters that year; Dr. Strangelove despite its paucity of obvious science fictional elements was the right work to recognize. The decisions of the nominating committee are less transparent (how did this committee work? What did they leave off and why?). Though some of us might have preferred to see Ellison’s “Soldier” receive the honour, as it was a far more science fictional story, his bad behaviour may have prevented him from snagging his first Hugo in 1965.

The Day That No Award Caught Fire (1963)

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

The Hugo Awards had already been in existence for a full decade, but until the night of Sunday

A movie about human activity causing the Earth
to slowly grow warmer? Must be science fiction!
(Image via Wikipedia)

September 1, 1963, they had remained an ad-hoc affair. On that evening, in the Congressional Room of the Statler Hilton in Washington, D.C., the World Science Fiction Society constitution was born.

In that first decade of the Hugo Awards, categories varied wildly. Only Best Novel, Best Short Story, Best Fanzine, Best Artist, and Best Prozine had been awarded more often than Best Dramatic Presentation. But still, the category remained the one that attracted the least interest. As far as we can tell from looking over the membership lists of the Worldcon, none of the nominees in this category attended the ceremony.

One major change in the rules that year was to make the Dramatic Presentation category format agnostic. No longer restricted to film or television, it was made explicitly clear that radio, audio recordings, or even stage productions might be eligible. Interestingly, this was an option that Hugo nominators wouldn’t make use of for another eight years.

There were four eligible Dramatic Presentations that received enough nominating votes to be considered for the Hugo in 1963, but due to an error only three of them appeared on the ballot. Night Of The Eagle (aka Burn, Witch, Burn) was omitted from the ballot by mistake.

It seems unlikely to us, though, that its inclusion on the ballot would have made a difference. Although adapted from Fritz Leiber’s novel Conjure Wife, and sharing the broad strokes of the central idea about an academic who struggles with his wife’s witchcraft, screenwriter Richard Matheson took significant liberties, particularly with the ending. In our estimation, the changes were for the worse, as they seem to negate the commentary about gender roles that seem to us to be integral to the story.

The acting and directing is surprisingly good, considering that the movie was helmed by Accapulco

Director Sydney Hayers parlayed
his Hugo shortlist appearance into
a directing gig on Galactica 1980.
(Image via Wikipedia) 

H.E.A.T. director Sydney Hayers. There’s a clever bit of continuity in which a skeptical professor has the words “I don’t believe” written on a chalkboard early in the movie, only to have the word “don’t” erased when he accidentally rubs his shoulder on the chalkboard near the end.

But there were several other — we would argue better — options on the ballot that year. Twilight Zone showed a significant return to form after an off year. Although the fourth season wouldn’t begin airing until January of 1963, the episodes that aired in 1962 went from strength to strength: To Serve Man, based on Damon Knight’s story of the same name, is deservedly one of the most well-remembered in the series, but there are many other hidden gems here. Little Girl Lost, written by Richard Matheson, is an excellent eerie little episode with a fantastic premise about falling between the cracks of the world. One of Rod Serling’s scripts The Little People is a tightly-paced story that seems almost certain to have helped inspire George R.R. Martin’s Hugo-winning The Sand Kings.

Most of the members of our discussion group would likely not have voted for the beguilingly beautiful but frustratingly befuddling Last Year At Marienbad, the French art movie whose opaque narrative structure and lack of linear storytelling have made it a classic amongst film scholars. It’s a movie that’s clearly worthy of respect and admiration, but it’s not particularly engaging for the casual viewer.

The stand-out of all the Hugo shortlisted dramatic presentations in 1963 was The Day The Earth Caught Fire, a British disaster movie that channeled the atomic fears of the day.

The story follows a journalist who slowly pieces together the fact that due to ill-considered government decisions, the world is getting hotter and soon will become uninhabitable. As he breaks the news about this global warming, various policymakers try to deny the facts even as weather patterns shift and catastrophic storms wreak havoc. Despite the implausibility of this scenario, the movie makes this “climate change” seem like a credible threat.

Director Val Guest earned his
only BATFA award for The
Day The Earth Caught Fire.
(Image via Pintrest)

This is one of the few movies that accurately captures the energy of a newsroom, and the bleak humour shared by journalists on the job. This is in part because it was partially filmed on-location in the offices of the Daily Express in London, and the actor cast as the newspaper’s editor had previously been the editor of the Express.

Director Val Guest — best known for his work on Quatermass — turned in his career-best directorial effort here, using location and lens choices to move the narrative between almost claustrophobic personal stories, and sweeping global events. The ending (which we won’t spoil) effectively drives home the urgency of the questions raised, and underscores how the movie remains disturbingly relevant to this day, particularly in light of global warming.

Our viewing group unanimously agreed that it is a legitimate shame that the film was denied the Hugo award. The fact that The Day The Earth Caught Fire did not win is more evidence of the lack of interest Dramatic Presentations garnered among Worldcon attendees.

It is a shame that voters chose not to recognize any of these options with a Hugo Award, but it is both a reflection of the attitude that science fiction fans had towards SF cinema at the time, as well as the lack of interest that Hollywood had in the Hugos.

Hugo Cinema Club: A Return To The Zone in '61

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

In 1960, the spectacle of director George Pal’s adaptation of The Time Machine wowed mainstream 

Season Guest of Honour 
Robert A. Heinlein at the 
convention (Image via Fanac)

audiences. At the time, it was one of the highest-budgeted science fiction movies ever made. The movie’s superb special effects had earned Gene Warren an Academy Award, and its prop design was echoed in films for decades.

It was widely expected to win the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award at Seacon, the 19th Worldcon held in Seattle, Washington on the Labour Day weekend of 1961.

Also on the shortlist for his second season of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling decided not to make the drive north to attend the awards ceremony, telling fans in Los Angeles that he expected The Time Machine to win the award.

There was a smattering of boos from the audience when they got to the Best Dramatic Presentation category of the Hugos, reflecting the continued disquiet about whether or not the Hugos should recognize film.

But there was some degree of surprise and laughter when presenter Harlan Ellison called up Bjo Trimble — “herself a resident of the Twilight Zone” — to accept a chrome rocketship trophy on behalf of Serling.

With the benefit of hindsight, we are very glad that The Time Machine did not win the award. On a simple storytelling level, this is arguably one of the least compelling works to have appeared on the Hugo 

Strong on style, weak on substance
The Time Machine is insufferably
narrated and glacially paced. 
(Image via Letterboxd)

shortlist.

Images from the movie are among the most recognizable images of classic science fiction cinema; the design work on the machine itself, the makeup of the morlocks, and numerous other details have stood the test of time. However, a movie is more than a series of well-made images, and The Time Machine is an uncompelling example of blockbuster cinema.

The script adapted from H.G. Wells’ novel is ham-handed, relying on a narration that offers redundant description of the action, and sluggish exposition. The glacial pace of this movie cannot be overstated. It opens with 20 minutes of irrelevant chatter between four upper-class men musing about politics. Almost two minutes of screen time is spent on the main character closing a door.

Worse than the pacing, The Time Machine side-steps Wells’ social criticisms of class and labour. Gone from this movie are the musings about the troglodytic Morlocks as avatars for the working class, as are the depiction of the feckless Eloi as being the descendants of a rich overclass. Instead, we are presented with a less challenging rewriting of the story to cast the Eloi-Morlock conflict as a clash between Russian Communism and American Freedom. The result is toothless and hollow.

By contrast, many of the qualifying episodes from Twilight Zone’s first and second season (those that aired in 1960) are influential genre classics: “The Eye of The Beholder,” “The Hitch-hiker,” and “Mirror Image” are all great pieces of well-constructed storytelling. When contrasted with The Time Machine, their elegant use of pacing and respect for the audience becomes even more apparent. Most of all, in this stretch of broadcast, the allegorical nature of Twilight Zone came into sharper focus: “The Monsters Are Due On

“Mr. Dingle The Strong” is a 
low point for Twilight Zone. It is 
sillier than even this image suggests.
(Image via TwilightZone.fandom.org)

Maple Street” may be the high water mark of the entire series as Serling ratchets up the tension slowly in a parable about xenophobia and paranoia. It is a master-class in television writing and acting that seems as relevant and timely today as it ever has “There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices...to be found only in the minds of men … And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone.”

But while the high points of Twilight Zone’s second year were exceptionally high, even as early as this second season, there were signs of inconsistency. There are enough duds like the repetitive “Mr. Bevis,” and the appallingly sexist “The Chaser,” to make us wonder whether the series as a whole deserved to be recognized as a whole. Certainly, it’s difficult to take the baseball-playing robot episode “The Mighty Casey” very seriously.

Had we been voting members of the 1961 Worldcon, we would have voted for Wolf Rilla’s Village Of The Damned. Faithfully adapted from John Wyndam’s The Midwich Cuckoos, the movie depicts a community’s reaction to an unusual group of 61 children who are all born simultaneously after an unexplained phenomenon. Over the course of nine years, it becomes clear that the Children are telepathic alien brood parasites who pose a threat to humanity. The child actors in the movie deserve special kudos for pulling off a relatively difficult set of roles. Martin Stephens, who was 10 at the time of filming, plays David Zellaby (the most prominent of the Children) with a malevolent calm.

American religious groups 
protested against Village of 
The Damned, because
impregnation by alien parasites
was too similar to virgin birth.
Not a joke.
(Image via YouTube) 

The production had been a tumultuous one; after the death of the actor who had been contracted for the lead role, and bowing to pressure from religious groups, MGM handed the project off to their small British wing. The movie was shot on a budget of £82,000 (about £900,000 accounting for inflation) and completed in just six weeks. Slated for a small number of showings in London in June, it became an unexpected hit by word-of-mouth, and was rushed to the United States that August.

A large part of the movie’s success can be attributed to the careful way that director Wolf Rilla develops the sense of menace. Nothing is ever over-explained, but rather small pieces of information are offered and the viewer is allowed to build their own conclusions. The denouement and resolution of the story are left as ethically ambiguous as the novel. It is a movie made with integrity and cleverness.

The Twilight Zone was a worthy winner of the 1961 Hugo Award, although with the benefit of hindsight it might have been nice for the awards to recognize a wider range of artists and creators rather than awarding a Hugo to the same show that won in 1960.

But at the very least, although Village Of The Damned didn’t win in 1961, the movie had the unique distinction of making a return appearance on the Hugo ballot the subsequent year…

Hugo Cinema Club: 1960 Gets In The Zone

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

Rod Serling believed
that his work would be
forgotten. Six decades
later, it most certainly
has not. 
(Image via NYTimes)

There is a long and storied tradition of the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation being presented in absentia. In fact, the winner being in attendance for the ceremony has by and large been the exception, rather than the rule.

In 1960, for example, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling seems to have been mostly unaware of the award until some two weeks later when a delegation of California-based fans who had just returned from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania visited the CBS offices to hand him a three-pound chrome rocketship on September 22.

The fans — including Bjo and John Trimble, Rick Sneary and Forrest J. Ackerman — were greeted warmly by the television legend, who had also earned his fourth Emmy that summer.

“[Serling] seemed sort of interested and taken by the idea,” Sneary wrote of the award presentation. “But he did not seem at all aware of fandom.”

The show had come close to cancellation just a few months earlier, so the critical praise, the multiple awards, and the resulting second season came as a vindication to the 35-year-old writer-producer.

Interviewed a decade later at Ithaca College about his preoccupations as a writer, Rod Serling talked about his “hunger to be young again, a desperate yearning to go back to where I came from.” This theme was overwhelmingly evident in his Hugo-winning first season of The Twilight Zone.

Whether it’s Gig Young walking through time to visit his childhood in “Walking Distance” (S1E5), or Ida Lupino obsessing over the movies of her youth in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” (S1E4), there is an undercurrent of nostalgia that pervades the work.

But interestingly, that nostalgia exists as a counterpoint to the modernity of the series. Watching The Twilight Zone alongside the other four works on that year’s Hugo shortlist, it becomes increasingly clear how far ahead of his time Twilight Zone-creator Rod Serling was. The scripts have a sprightly pace, they’re elegantly constructed parables with very little wasted time, and usually have satisfying narrative arcs. Comparing these episodes to those of Men Into Space (the other full TV season on the ballot) it feels hard to believe that the shows were airing in the same decade, let alone the same year.

There were only 12 episodes of Twilight Zone that were aired in 1959, and therefore eligible for

"Time Enough At Last," possibly
the most iconic episode of the
original Twilight Zone aired
on Nov. 20, 1959. 
(Image via shelf-awareness.com)

consideration in 1960. What is revelatory is realizing how many of those first twelve episodes of Twilight Zone are classics that are well-remembered today. Right from the pilot episode “Where Is Everybody”, the show plays with perception and keeps the viewer off balance. The very next episode, you’ve got a first-rate performance by Ed Wynn in a moralistic parable “One For The Angels” (S1E2) that regularly appears on lists of the great Twilight Zone episodes. Unforgettably, “Time Enough At Last” (S1E8) casts a long enough shadow over pop culture that it has been referenced by Modern Family, Powerpuff Girls, Walking Dead, Family Guy, and multiple times on the Simpsons. Previous Hugo-winner Richard Matheson's deft touch is evident on several of these. 

A few episodes are duds such as “The Lonely” (S1E7), and given the fact that the series was airing in the 1950s, there is a bit too much focus on heteronormative white male lead characters. The Twilight Zone is far from perfect, but it’s clearly the best work on the ballot in 1959.

Other shortlisted works

Allowed to nominate television programs for the first time, Hugo nominators almost entirely ignored the big screen, creating a shortlist with two full seasons, two individual episodes, and one theatrically released movie.

Of the other Hugo-shortlisted works, The World, The Flesh, And The Devil is the stand-out. A post-

Harry Belafonte is objectively
incredible in The World, The
Flesh & The Devil. 
(Image via NostalgiaCentral)

apocalyptic film terrific cast, the movie is notable for having a surprisingly progressive subtext on race. The black protagonist Ralph Burton (played by Harry Belafonte) survives a nuclear attack, and eventually ends up in a violent love triangle with a white man and white woman. The ending — which seems to indicate that they’ve resolved their differences, and are forming a polyamorous triad — is especially surprising considering the movie is seven decades old. The acting is stellar. It’s worth noting that this may be the first Hugo-shortlisted work with a non-white human protagonist.

The full first season of the short-lived TV show Men Into Space made its only appearance on the ballot. Given that it aired two years before Yuri Gagarin made his trip into orbit, the series gets a surprisingly large amount right about spaceflight, including the fact that it’s often very boring. Every time the writers of Men Into Space have a choice between telling an interesting story or providing stilted explanations of engineering, they opt for the latter. Although the series is deeply propagandistic (the end credits seem to list the involvement of every U.S. military office involved in spaceflight) it is refreshingly conciliatory towards the Soviet space program. Several major plot points involve co-operation with the Russians for the greater good of humanity. But by-and-large the series is of only historical interest, rather than something any of us would recommend to modern viewers looking for entertainment.

Murder and the Android, a television movie based on Alfred Bester’s Fondly Farenheit, has the distinction of being the most inaccessible of all professionally released Hugo-shortlisted works. The only extant copy resides in Los Angeles at the Paley Centre For Media, and for reasons ascribed to copyright (and perhaps more accurately copyright chill related to fair use) can only be viewed by those visiting the centre in person. Because of this, it is the one dramatic presentation that the authors of this blog have not watched. But critics of the time were extremely impressed by it, with Frederick Pohl describing it as “almost the only first-rate television play on a science fiction theme.” Perhaps one day, when its copyright term has finally expired, it will become widely available again.

Finally, the ballot included a TV movie adaptation of Henry James’ Turn Of The Screw. Although it was lauded at the time in the mainstream press, and featured Ingrid Bergman in the lead role, for the most part it feels listless and lifeless. Several scenes are melodramatic to the point of being excruciating to watch, but this may be a result of changing attitudes towards more naturalistic acting in the seven decades since the release of the movie. Still, we are glad that Turn Of The Screw didn’t win the Hugo.

With the benefit of hindsight, it would be hard to argue that Hugo voters got it wrong with Best Dramatic Presentation in 1960. The Twilight Zone has the most enduring value work on the shortlist, and it isn’t even close.

Addendum On The Evolving Hugo Rules

The Hugo Banquet at Pittcon.
(Image via Calisphere)

When The Twilight Zone won its first Hugo in 1960, the Hugo Awards remained informal in organization and format. Categories were ad-hoc, the physical trophy had yet to be standardized, nominations and voting eligibility were inconsistent. 

Late at night on September 4, after the Hugo Awards banquet in the grand ballroom of the Penn-Sheraton Hotel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a WSFS business meeting run by L. Sprague de Camp oversaw what is possibly the most significant overhaul of the Hugo Awards that ever occurred. The rocketship trophy that Ben Jackson had designed became the permanent standard, eligibility for nominating and voting on the Hugos became officially linked to membership in the Worldcon, and a committee led by Dirce Archer was struck to establish permanent awards categories.

Prior to 1960, there had never been a category called “Best Dramatic Presentation.” The previous two occasions on which dramatic works had been honoured, they’d been honoured with Hugos for “Best SF or Fantasy Movie” or “Outstanding Movie,” and the categories explicitly excluded television programs. With the standardization of categories later that year, the name “Best Dramatic Presentation” was here to stay.

In many ways, the 1960 Hugos were the last of the early Hugos, with a new chapter for the awards starting in 1961.

Hugo Cinema Club: The Best Of 1958

The Incredible Shrinking Man was the 
first movie honoured by the Hugo Awards.
(image via Empire Magazine)

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

By the late 1950s, science fiction cinema had developed a reputation for being the domain of B-movies. Shot quickly, on a cheap budget, and featuring mostly unknown actors, these movies appear to have aimed low and were a disappointment to serious science fiction fans. It was possibly to counteract this reputation that the organizing committee of Solacon (the 16th Worldcon) decided to introduce a Hugo Award for “Outstanding Science Fiction Motion Picture,” and promote movies that took the genre more seriously.

Author Charles Beamont, quoted in the September 1955 Science Fiction News, expressed a common opinion at the time among fans: “The correction of a single mistake — Hollywood’s mad insistence upon hiring writers who know nothing about science fiction, and care for it less, to write science fiction — might do wonders toward bringing about a renaissance.” Similar complaints litter almost every discussion of science fiction movies in fanzines in the 1950s.

Having Richard Matheson closely involved with a major motion picture adaptation of one of his books was therefore something that was welcomed by fandom. As the guest of honour for Solacon, Matheson was well-known, and it should be no surprise that a movie he’d crafted was worthy of winning the first award for what would later be known as Best Dramatic Presentation.

The Incredible Shrinking Man is head and shoulders above almost all other genre films released in 1957. The story is well told, nicely paced, and emotionally rich. The movie features an ordinary middle-class American named Scott Carey who begins to slowly shrink after being exposed to radiation. Though the premise might seem pulpy, Matheson’s writing draws in the audience, first with a tale of psychological turmoil as the protagonist’s normative privilege is stripped away, then later with an adventure movie in which he faces more physical threats. 

Brian Donlevy is the only actor to have
played Professor Quatermass twice. 
And he's excellent. 
(Image via hammerfilms.com)

One of the narrative arcs that highlights the strength of Matheson’s writing is Scott Carey’s relationship with his wife Louise. Before he starts shrinking, Scott and Louise seem to have a very positive, happy relationship — though she is to some degree depicted as subservient to him. Once he starts to decrease in size, he becomes increasingly controlling towards her and lashes out as his privilege metaphorically shrinks. This connection between diminishing privilege and reactionary anger is well observed, and still seems timely.

The Incredible Shrinking Man could be described as two stories stitched together; the first half of the movie is a story about Carey’s fraying relationships, while the second half is a pulp adventure story about survival. While this does create some pacing issues, both halves of the movie work on their own, and the result holds up well today.

The special effects in the second half of The Incredible Shrinking Man are particularly effective, and show attention to detail. Unlike several contemporaneous movies, these effects are used to tell a story, rather than the story being a vehicle on which to sell a visual spectacle. The ending is also remarkably grim — a fact that reportedly left 1950s audiences unsatisfied, but one that in our eyes helps make the movie relevant today.

With no shortlist to rely on, it’s difficult to know what other movies Hugo voters might have considered for the award in 1958. With the benefit of hindsight, we’d suggest Ray Harryhausen’s black-and-white movie 20 Million Miles To Earth might have warranted a nod. Only his second movie in charge of all special effects, 20 Million Miles To Earth was the first movie that was made entirely as a showcase for his work. Though the plot is thin — standard monster-movie fare — and the acting is uninspiring, the level of care put into the monster elevates the movie above many of its contemporaries.

Another film that may have been suitable for a Hugo shortlist that year would have been Quatermass 2,
the Hammer Films remake of the BBC serial from the previous year. One member of our viewing club did pick it as his favourite science fiction movie of 1957, and said he would vote for it ahead of Shrinking Man. Quatermass 2 is one of the better films to follow the Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers trope. It oozes tension as the protagonist Bernard Quatermass investigates the infiltration of the British government by alien forces. There’s a lot to love in this movie — particularly the acting and dialogue, but its inconsistent special effects and an incongruent slapstick ending are disappointing.

In some ways, the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award could not have been introduced at a better time than 1958: the movies that stood out from the pack that year show the medium moving forward, and helped introduce popular audiences to a new generation of science fiction writers, directors and special effects artists. 

The Hugo For Best Dramatic Presentation starts out on a high note. Not only does the winning movie stand the test of time, the award moves science fiction cinema forward.