Black Hole Joker

Black Hole Joker
No, not this. The actual image is a lot less...obvious.
We’ve seen a lot of marketing gimmicks in our time covering all things pop culture, but we gotta say— you’re wild for this one, NASA . Presumably to get everyone even more hyped for society’s looming self-immolation, astronomers have just released humanity’s first ever glimpse at the incomprehensible terror that is the supermassive black hole around which the entirety of our Milky Way galaxy orbits. Get hyped, y’all!
Have you seen the picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy? The image of Sagittarius A* (inset) was taken by @EHTelescope . Now see it in context with support from our @ChandraXray , Swift and NuSTAR observatories. Here's what the colors mean: https://t.co/Qkt3Qu3v1r pic.twitter.com/BONW7QZhsu
Hot damn! Just look at that thing... well, not so much “look” at it, since the black hole dubbed Sagittarius A* isn’t technically visible to our pathetic human eyes, seeing as how not even light itself escapes the celestial phenomenon’s cruel grip. But look at its low-res effects on the universe around it!
“Light escaping from the hot gas swirling around the black hole appears to us as the bright ring,” professor of astrophysics Feryal Özel told NBC News this morning, going on to explain,“Light that is too close to the black hole—close enough to be swallowed by it—eventually crosses its horizon and leaves behind just the dark void in the center.” A bit on the nose, Prof. Özel, but you’ll get no argument from us.
According to researchers’ estimates, Sagittarius A* is located approximately 27,000 lightyears away from Earth, and is about 4 million times more massive than our own Sun. The news was first revealed earlier today in a special edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters , and is actually only the second actual image of a black hole ever taken.
What’s more, this is apparently the first visual confirmation that it is indeed a black hole that lies in the center of our galaxy. Although this theory has been widely accepted for some time, the new image provides incontrovertible evidence to support it. Great job, everyone involved. We’ll do our best to enjoy this before life imitates the art you provided us today.
Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com
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Forty years later, Gary Nelson, along with actors Joseph Bottoms and the late Robert Forster, look back at Disney's big-budget space adventure 'The Black Hole'
“ A journey that begins where everything ends…” That was the tagline on the poster for The Black Hole , Disney’s $20 million sci-fi gamble in the post- Star Wars game, essentially spelling out its reality in the marketplace in 1979.
With its starfield setting, stormtrooper-like sentries, swashbuckling laser battles and high-end special effects work — not to mention saturated merchandising by the Disney machine — The Black Hole was clearly a response to the 1977 George Lucas juggernaut and was destined for direct comparisons when it arrived in theaters two-and-a-half years later.
Moreover, the film was Disney’s challenge to demonstrate that it could compete with a new breed of technically proficient blockbuster entertainment, despite operating more with old-school techniques and resources.
What the Mouse House ultimately delivered, however, was more akin to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in outer space with throwback trappings: an uneven mix of Gothic drama, kiddie adventure, clunky dialogue and characters, cool-but-derivative robot designs and retro-styled rockets amid a very colorful palette, a wonderfully moody John Barry score, and spectacular visuals thanks to signature animation techniques and ingenious, matte-based special effects.
And despite the studio’s efforts to eschew its traditional branding with an edgier film that would also appeal to a more mature audience (it was the first-ever Disney film to flaunt a PG rating), it still resonated as good old-fashioned Walt Disney entertainment — albeit with a serious atmosphere of dread and darkness and topped with an unexpectedly mind-blowing, off-the-rails ending.
“We deliberately went after the PG rating, just to get away from the G rating,” director Gary Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter . “At first we didn’t know exactly what would make it PG. So we decided that we would say that it was ‘too intense for younger audiences.’ Plus, ‘damns’ and ‘hells’ never appeared in Disney films until The Black Hole .”
“It’s a little more of an adult kind of movie,” said Robert Forster, who played one of the film’s heroes, Captain Dan Holland. “It splits the difference, I’m sure.”
“It was my idea to remove the Disney logo for the picture and use Buena Vista Productions,” Nelson said. “Up to that point, all Disney films were sort of directed for a younger audience, and I didn’t want older people — anybody over 18 — to stay away from the theater if they thought it was just a typical Disney film.”
That was Ron Miller’s sentiment and directive. The producer of the film and president of the studio (who also happened to be the son-in-law of Walt Disney) was angling to broaden the appeal of Disney movies, make them less predictable and usher the studio into a new direction that would include more innovative filmmaking (such as the computer graphics-driven TRON in ’82), the creation of The Disney Channel and the establishment of more mature fare under its Touchstone Pictures banner, starting with Ron Howard’s Splash in 1984.
Initially positioned as an Irwin Allen-style disaster movie in space called Space Station One from writers Bob Barbash and Richard Landau , The Black Hole went through years of development with a variety of different creatives, dating back to February of 1974.
“They never could get a handle on it,” recalled Nelson. “It got kicked around, and they went through a series of writings and rewrites and they gave up on it. And then when there was such great interest in Star Wars , they brought it back out and looked at it.”
Nelson was a Disney director in good standing, having helmed Freaky Friday and The Boy Who Talked to Badgers atop a solid career in episodic series television. The journeyman director had worked on a miniseries, Westerns, cop shows and comedies, including Gilligan’s Island , Get Smart and F Troop . Miller approached the veteran director to take a crack at creating the studio’s first PG film, and Nelson immediately passed on it. “It’s not for me. I don’t like it. It’s not very good,” he said. But Miller was persistent.
“He said, ‘Would you like to meet with Peter Ellenshaw, our production designer and head of the matte department? He’s done some renderings of some of the spaceships and things like that,’” said Nelson. “I met with Peter, and he took me up to his office and showed me these incredible paintings that he had done for the movie, and I fell in love with them. And I said, ‘Well shit, if this is what it’s going to be like, count me in.’”
First thing first, Nelson took a hatchet to the script, which had been re-titled Space Probe One . “It was a similar kind of a thing about a spacecraft that had been captured out in space and was hanging around a black hole, but on board were all the typical Disney characters, the families — it was like a city up there, and they were all in danger of being destroyed by the black hole and they had to be rescued. And I thought, ‘What is all this bullshit?’ So we threw all that out.”
The final screenplay by Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook, re-titled The Black Hole, cut the excessive characters and zeroed in on the crew of the deep-space craft U.S.S. Palomino (casting Forster as Captain Holland; Joseph Bottoms as Lt. Charlie Pizer; Yvette Mimieux as Dr. Kate McCrae; Ernest Borgnine as journalist Harry Booth; Anthony Perkins as Dr. Alex Durant; and the voice of Roddy McDowall as the helpful robot V.I.N.CENT). The craft stumbles upon a huge ghost ship balancing precariously on the rim of a massive, swirling black hole: The Cygnus, believed to be lost in space. Occupied by drone workers and a robot sentry army, including the menacing, red guard robot Maximilian, the Cygnus is captained by the mysterious and unpredictable Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), who intends to fly his ship directly into the mouth of the maelstrom.
“The only person that I could really feel would be right for the part of Reinhardt was Maximilian Schell, and Ron Miller agreed,” said Nelson. “He was so imposing. Good looking. Dark. Magnetic.”
“Maximilian Schell, man, that was a great casting decision,” said Bottoms. “I really connected with Schell. Looking at him, I thought to myself, ‘I look like him. He looks like me. There’s something about this guy.’”
Nelson’s pal Arthur Hiller warned him that Schell could be a “monster” on the set, but he was determined to land the tempestuous actor. Schell required him to trek out to Vienna, where he was directing Tales from the Vienna Woods , for a face-to-face meeting. Once Nelson arrived, Schell pulled a bait-and-switch and suggested that the production cast Jason Robards as Reinhardt instead.
“Stanley Kubrick had just told him of this miniseries he’d seen with Robards,” explained Nelson. “Schell said, ‘By the way, have you seen it? It’s called called Washington: Behind Closed Doors .’ I thought he was jerking me off. I said, ‘Yes, I not only saw it, I directed it.’ And his face was the most honest shock I’ve seen on a person. You couldn’t direct him any better. And he grabbed me, threw his arms around me and gave me a great big fucking kiss on the mouth and said, ‘I will do your movie.’ And that was it.”
Nelson explained that Schell had a couple of caveats: “He wanted to bring his film with him that he just finished, and his editor, to California. And during his downtime he wanted to have use of a cutting room on the lot where he could continue to edit his movie. Which we agreed to, of course.”
Perhaps best known for his dramatic turn in Medium Cool ten years prior, Robert Forster had carved out a consistent career on both the big and small screen when his phone rang to be part of The Black Hole.
“My agent at the time called and said, ‘I’ve got a picture for you and it’s The Black Hole , and it was extraordinary — 20,000 Leagues out in space. Holy moly,” recalled Forster. “It’s some real big players in it — Ernest Borgnine was a big player, Maximilian Schell was big, Tony Perkins was big, and Yvette Mimieux was certainly very well known — and here I am. I was probably 11 or 12 when I read the Jules Verne story, and when I realized that I was going to do the space version of that, wow! You know, there are moments when you’re an actor and you get to play something extraordinary, and that was a big one.”
Bottoms, the middle child of the three Bottoms brothers (between Tim and Sam) who were making waves in the biz in the ‘70s, was in demand after appearing in the Holocaust miniseries and playing a circumnavigating sailor in The Dove , for which he earned a Golden Globe for new star of the year – actor.
“They had a list of people they were looking at, probably all the usual suspects that Disney had in their films over the years in my age group,” remembered Bottoms. “I do recall sitting with Gary and Ron at the Mouse Factory, at the executive offices upstairs, a happy, cheery place. And I thought, ‘I can do this. You guys have a commissary, right? How cool is that?’ Then I thought, ‘Oh, the fun of working on something I could share — should I ever have children, I would have made a Disney movie. And it’s science fiction. That’s awesome.’”
For the role of Kate McCrae, who shares a telepathic connection with the robot V.I.N.CENT, Nelson revealed that he initially thought of casting a pre- Alien Sigourney Weaver, but said the head of the casting department countered, “Oh my god, with a name like Sigourney Weaver, we don’t want her.” So they turned to Summer of ’42 star Jennifer O’Neill. But her signature long, beautiful hair became a problem.
“We shot one day, I think it was a test or something, she was in zero gravity,” remembered Nelson. “She had this long hair down to the center of her back, she was always very proud of it — it actually made her career with hair products and everything — and I looked and I said, ‘This is not working. You have to cut your hair.’ And she said, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘You’re gonna have to because that’s what I want, and it’s right for the movie too.’ And so she finally agreed. And so she brought her personal hairstylist, Vidal Sassoon, to the studio.”
Nelson continued, “They went up to her dressing room and started cutting her hair one inch at the time, and having a glass of wine, then cutting another inch, and having another glass of wine. And by the time they were finished, it was pretty short and she was looped.”
“I was sitting there when it happened,” said Bottoms with a laugh. “When she agreed to get her hair cut, that’s when I remember the order went out, like, ‘Could somebody get me a glass of wine?’ They would cut more and more, and they kept bringing it up and up, and then they decided to put a little bit of color to lighten some streaks. And you can see Vidal and everyone was concerned.”
Nelson reported that after the disaster haircut session, “She got in her car to drive home, and she got into an accident on Sunset Boulevard and ended up in the hospital. So we had to recast, and we cast Yvette Mimieux the next day. So all that trauma and everything, getting her hair cut, was for naught. It was a kind of a shame.”
Bottoms speculated, “I always wondered with Jennifer, why they just didn’t say, ‘Are you opposed to a wig?’ Why did they ever put her through that?”
Of course Mimieux, who had her own sci-fi street cred coming from George Pal’s The Time Machine two decades earlier, had to undergo the same treatment.
“Yvette Mimieux started out as a long-haired, beautiful blonde woman,” said Forster. “In space, her long hair would be flying all over the place and would not be appropriate, so she got a haircut and then she became a beautiful short-haired woman in outer space.”
Principal photography on The Black Hole started on Oct. 11, 1978 and ran until April 20 of the following year. As production got underway, there was certainly a lot of buzz around the film happening on the Disney lot in Burbank.
“It was my idea to put a DO NOT ENTER sign on the soundstage,” said Nelson. “Nobody was allowed without a pass. We had a guard there 24 hours a day. We didn’t want anybody to know what we were doing. Trying to keep it a mystery. And not leak out that maybe we didn’t really have a good movie, you know?”
“The entire show was pretty tight,” remembered Bottoms. “The AD’s had storyboard books that they’d refer to and go shot by shot. They had a plan. They ne
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