Amidst the chaos of the most historic presidential election in modern history, many people may remain unaware that America has lost one of its most successful and brilliant novelists. On Tuesday, November 4th, acclaimed writer Michael Crichton passed away from lung cancer.
He is probably best known as the author of the novel “Jurassic Park,” but he has a writing and film directing career that spans five decades. His books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, and are mainly fast-paced action stories that have strong undertones of science and medical technology, as well as things like time travel and future history.
During his long career, he has been an accomplished film producer, film director, television producer, and medical doctor.
Crichton was born in 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Roslyn, New York. He studied briefly at Harvard University, but left after some disillusionment with their academic standards. His father was a journalist and always encouraged him to write, but after a year in Europe, he returned to the states and attended medical school in Boston. After graduation, he gave up the medical profession and returned to his true love, writing novels.
Steven Spielberg - one of Michael Crichton's first friends in the film industry.
After giving up medicine, Crichton moved to Hollywood in the early 1970s and pursued a career in the entertainment industry. One of his first contacts with the film production world was a tour of Universal Studios. Universal was producing the film adaptation of one of his books, The Andromeda Strain (1971), so Universal assigned an inexperienced young director named Steven Spielberg to give him a tour of the studio.
In 1970, Crichton had an idea for a movie that he wanted to call E.W.: Emergency Ward. It was a script for a full length film and for nearly 20 years no one was interested in producing it. Finally, in 1989, Spielberg contacted him and expressed interest in making the movie.
It was about to get made, but then Spielberg read Crichton’s book “Jurassic Park,” and decided to drop E.W. and make Jurassic Park instead. During the film’s production, someone else at Amblin Entertainment read the E.W. script and thought that it might be better as a television series. “E.R.” was first broadcast in September 1994, it remains on the air and is now in its 15th season.
Crichton started directing movies based on his books in the early 1970s, and got his first big break with the science fiction western Westworld (1973), but he was also the author of The Andromeda Strain, Congo, Disclosure, Rising Sun, The Terminal Man, Timeline, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Sphere, among others. Since the late 1960s,he has published almost 30 novels, including “Eaters of the Dead,” which was made into the movie The 13th Warrior (1999).
Despite Crichton’s extensive work in the realm of fantasy, he is highly critical of leaps of scientific logic, and has gone so far as to say that the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is not science, since it is based on the Drake Equation (which basically is meant to allow scientists to estimate the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations in our galaxy), which cannot be tested. “Therefore SETI is not science,” Crichton says, “but unquestionably a religion.”
Michael Crichton inspired people to see the world through new eyes, and is remembered by those who knew him as a devoted husband, a loving father, and a good friend. He died at age 66, and he is survived by his wife Sherri and his daughter Taylor.
