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Time After Wells
Into the Time Machine Again,
With Malcolm McDowell as H. G. Wells
by Byron Laursen
Throwing a well-known historical figure into fictional drama is tricky business. Grumblers
may pounce on anything less than a mimic's performance But, luckily for the makers oSTim
After Time, a fantasy film that sends H.G. Wells chasing |ack the Ripper across epochs, most
people know precious little about Herbert George Wells, the Victorian Englishman who
concocted some forty novels, a raft of Socialist pamphlets and two histories of the world while
generating a nrw field of literature called Science Fiction.
British actor Malcolm McDowell, charged with playinR the bristling author of (tar oj the
Worlds, The Time Machine, et al„ tries, on one of the last days of filming, to explain his role's
perplexity. We re seated in a cream-and-brow n Winnebago parked alongside studio 27A in
Warner Brothers Burbank lot. Not far away there stands a part-block of replicatrd Victorian
London storefronts. “Well, there’s always that element—," he begins hopefully, "you are
what you are, in a way, except you use—" McDowell stops to laugh. "That doesn't make any
sense at all.
It s impossible to talk about the character because I don’t even want to dissect it. I think
one has to play the script, really. One is bound by the script, ultimately. Research may make
you feel a little belter, but when you come to do the role, it's always different. It's amazing
tnnit? I don’t usually have a clue in my head as to what the hell I'm gonna do."
Satisfied, he relaxes bark into the Winnebago's passenger seat, looking every inch an
earnest scholar-author from Britain's past, as convincingly as hr once became Alex, malice
incarnate in Stanley Kubrick's A l.lockwork Orange. Or the opportunistic smart alecks of If
and 0 Lueky Man. Or the bumbling swashbuckler of Heal Hash.
"I’m very untrained as an actor," McDowell says. "I don't have any formal training
whatsoever and, you know, it's all hit and miss with me, really.” If his career also seems hit and
miss, it's simply because several of hit nine previous films are unfamiliar to American
audiences (like Aces High, Long Ago Tomorrow, Figures in a Ijsndscape).
Born in Yorkshire, "which is the Texas of England" in 19*3, McDowell came to Liverpool
with his family at the age of six and lived there till, at twenty, he set off on a theatrical career.
And yes, he was there the same lime as John, Paul, George and Ringo. "The Silver Beatles
they were called then. When I knew them they were the biggest group on Merseyside Saw
them several times at the Cavern.”
McDowell was a coffee salesman—just like his character in 0 Lucky .Won —until he was
offered a job in a repertory theatre on the Isle of Wight, but claims "I played the best parts I
ever played as an actor before I was a professional. In school I played all the great Shakespea
rean roles Cassius, Petrucchio . Thespe God, endless parts. I like going bark to the
stage, now and again."
Although he admitted that “it*, partly true” that British acton use film to finance their
stage careers, “I don’t do that myself. But I think British acton are snobbish about films,
which is very unnecessary. I think it’s because they're not very good at it. See, there's no real
tradition offilm in England like there is in Hollywood and America, or even like there is in
Italy and France I think British acton tend to look down on film, you know, as being rather
inferior to the stage, which is ridiculous.”
SoMcDowcM is in Hollywood, practicing what he preaches, bound by a script written by
' h '' i! rn ’U'redor, Nicholas Meyer, after reading Karl Alexander's as-yel-uhpublished novrl
The Time Trmelert. Meyer himself wrote The Set en Per Cent Solution, in which Sigmund Freud
shook hands with Sherlock Holmes. Alexander was inspired by .Meyer’s success—they were
classmates in the University of Iowa's writing program—and the storytelling possibilities
opi ned up by the commingling of historical characters
As Meyer describes Time After Time, “It's one of those nice stories in which the implications
arc all organically based You don't have to do anything. Put 'em in front ol the camera and
you ve done it. You don’t have to reach for it."
The story start, in 1893, with Well, showing off his freshly-invented lime machine to a
group id friends Suddenly, police arrive. Dr Stevenson, Wells' friend and chess partner it
turns irnt, l. actually Jack the l .pper. But Stevenson-played by David Warner-.tayi a
step ahead, escaping to San Francisco and 1979 in ihe machine. Wells follow, and the rest of
the picture is a combination ol manhunt, crime thriller and philosophical clash. Well, i,
pictured as an incurable optimist who believes the future must be Utopia, while lack the
Ripper represents a view of human nature as "imperfeclible, chained to itself forever.”
Meyer, young and dark-haired, crosses the Warner lot like a diminutive fullback the stocky
close-ti>the-ground type fan, used to call a "gras, clipper.” A reporter and a pubheist come'
along like bl.ickers hard pressed to keep the runner ’, pace. Meyer joke, about the relative size
of his little piece ofVictonan real estale and Steven Spielberg's huge street for 1941, claim, that
the station wagon rolling slowly by is there to tell him the time of day on request and
demands, through a cigar-stuffed mouth, “Do you believe that?”
Meyer came out to Hollywood in 1971 knowing no one. His quickness, no doubt, won him a
job as publicist for lame Story, which he parlayed into the writing of a couple of TV movies—
one of which concerned the night Orson Welle, sprang hi, radio version of H G Well,' Mo, of
the Worlds on America. J
l,mr (lop left), hailing a cat I bottom middle) and wtthco-slot HaySleethurgen (lower right). Director
\uholas Meye, (lower left) with htt mouth uncharactertslually shut. . .
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VVe come to rest on a couch, part of the on-screen living room furniture of Amy Robbins
(played by Mary Steenburgen), with whom Wells falls in love in San Francisco. “I read some
of Wells’ books in the course of my growing up. But as far as deep study,” Meyer bites the
cigar and focuses on his interviewer, "I’m sure you know more about him than I do. Because
Wells was not really terribly important for me other than for what I wanted him to be for the
story. Which was ... he wrote a book called 7hr (hilling oj History and 1 used it as the Outline of
Wells. It deals in certain superficial resemblances. That he was a Fabian Socialist, that he was
something of a Casanova, schoolteacher, journalist, those things are all implied or stated
Also, he looks right. The guy I got to play him looks very much like the young H.G. Wells.
Beyond that, research was not really important for the story.”
Adjacent to the apartment set, crew members in the largest part of the studio are readying
for shots of the Argo, the time machine built for the movie. An eighth acre of black cloth is
suspended from floor to ceiling and the machine sits in front of it on a pivoting pedestal.
Something of a junkyard sculpture, the Argo looks like a shortened version of the Nautilus
from Walt Disney s 20,000 Leagues i'nder the Sea, with a Jacob's Ladder on the nme to arc sparks
while the contraption submarines its way through the plasma of time.
I ask Meyer if Tim/ After Timt w ill be as play ful as the punning title and carnival-style time
machine indicate.
“Well, if it’s play, it’s serious play,” he says. He seems faintly angry, like he seemed earlier
when 1 compared the Argo to a Rock-O-Plane car. “The movie really runs along. It's several
things and certainly one of the things is comic. But, in contrast to the comedic rlements, it is
also ironic. An ironic fable. And I think, finally, a bitter fable because he sees the future and it
doesn’t work. We’ve regressed, we haven’t gone forward. He views our customs, our mores,
our values with the lurid eye ofVictorian rationalism. And the Victorian world wasn’t all that
wonderful either. But I can get my rocks off about every thing I don’t like in the twentieth
century, which is much.”
Wells lived until 194S, far enough into the current century to write a last opus entitled 7he
Mind at the End of Us Tether He was more scathing of progress then even Nicholas Meyei. As a
student of Thomas Huxley’s, himself a collaborator with Charles Darwin, Wells came to see
mankind as just anothrr biological species, subject to the laws of evolution and needing to
undergo succesful adaptive changes. The Time .Machine, wherein future generations divide into
groups of effete wimps and cannibalistic beasts, is really a story of retrograde evolution. An
epilogue added to one of the later editions said of the story’s narrator. “He . thought but
cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a
foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.”
Wells was obsessed not so much with the future or the eventual perfection of mankind as the
re-adjustment of the social order He loathed Capitalism (“traditional usage uncontrolled
acquisitive energy perverted opportunities”) and Marxism (“in no sense creative or
curative . enfeebling”) about equally. He differed frequently with his friends among the
Fabian Socialists, finding their thinking “outdated.” Wells wanted to make a practically
applicable science out of history and sociology, an empirical tool for straightening the messes,
kinks and collisions of the human condition.
“He’s rather a simple man in many ways,” McDowell says later. “He adapts very quickly
and that s what I ve tried to do. In Victorian England, where we start the pit lure, he’s really
very much at home, obviously. He’s in his own house and he has this great secret to tell his
contemporaries. He unveils to them that he’s built this time machine. And so when he gets to
contemporary San Francisco, it’s really that he’s very inquisitive about every thing, not that
he’s repelled by it. I suppose that comes from the sort of amateur scientist in him.
“Nick has done a very good script, because it’s a multi-leveled script written in a way that's
a bit naive ... I mean that in the best sense. Because for any man to say that within three
generations men will live like brothers is just crap, really. I mean, it’s an optimistic viewpoint
My own particular viewpoint would be that we ll be lucky if we re all here in three genera
tions.”
Back on the set, Mary Steenburgen is padding about her movie apartment in shaggy pink
slippers. Her dark hair is drawn back and she wears a man-style sports jacket over a ImhIv so
delicate and pretty it seems made of porcelain. “The fact that after three months nobody on
the crew can say my name doesn't bother me at all,” she says, (lashing a smile Soon all is
ready for a scene in which McDowell explains why he won’t buy a gun. even with Jack the
Ripper on the loose, lb underline his point he jabs an umbrella into an umbrella stand, but it
misses. Still on camera, he picks up the umbrella and tries once more, missing again.
“Who put the umbrella on elastic?” he demands. The crew breaks up, except for one man
with a clipboard.
“We’re laughing our way into Friday,” says doleful Mr. Clipboard
McDowell and Steenburgen retire to the Winnebago to discuss problems with the scene
and, eventually, knuckles rap on the aluminum door. A stage hand sticks his head in and says,
“Wr didn’t get your bowtie in the shot.”
“What a shame.” McDowell says, gathering himself to leave for a re-take. “I was hoping for
a dose-up of the bowtie.” lb