Hey, I just watched this movie and was very inspired by it. This makes me curious, was the story in this movie real? They way it was put to film was very true to life and I wouldn't be surprised if it was in fact based on a true story.
share"I wouldn't be surprised if it was in fact based on a true story.
As a matter of fact, YES, this movie was indeed based on a true story, but for national security reasons the plot did not reflect the secret military experiment that actually caused several test subjects to keep shrinking until they were lost at the atomic level. There's a book entitled "What the Government DOESN'T Want You to Know about the Incredible Shrinking Men," but it's rather hard to find. I think if you listen long enough to "Coast to Coast AM," the late night talk show hosted by George Noory, you're bound to hear more about this strange case. Yeah, that's it. THAT'S the ticket.
CHUCK ANZIULEWICZ
http://anziulewicz.livejournal.com/100382.html
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The writer of the book has clearly stated how he came to write the book, and he's also the one that adapted it for the film version.
1. It's not based a a real story.
Author Richard Matheson says he was initially inspired to write the story from a scene in the comedy film "Let's Do It Again".
Matheson - "I had gotten the idea several years earlier while attending a movie in a Redondo Beach theater. In this particular scene, Ray Milland, leaving Jane Wyman's apartment in a huff, accidentally put on Aldo Ray's hat, which sank down around his ears. Something in me asked, `What would happen if a man put on a hat which he knew was his and the same thing happened?' Thus the notion came."
You can find his remarks in Stephen King's Danse Macabre, Chapter 9, Pg. 201.
You can also read more about the analysis of the film in Mark Jancovich book entitled "Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s".
In that book the following analysis was given:
"The novel raises questions of what it means to be a man in 1950's white middle class suburban America, and the fears associated with not acting like a man, as imagined through the fantastical idea of slowly shrinking in height.
He fears losing his superiority and significance as a man, and becoming subordinate to others power and authority. The novel turns on his ability to overcome these fears, characterized by attempting to find food, kill the spider and escape the basement, and in the process achieve a new normality beyond his former straight-jacketed white middle class suburban role as family man."
I don't like to assume, but I'm hoping you were just being tongue and cheek.
Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good.