The concept of immortality is rich terrain for a writer's imagination. But late screenwriter Jerome Bixby couldn't have known just how personally he would embrace the extension of life beyond death.
Although he died in 1998, Bixby's final screenplay, "The Man From Earth," has been turned into a film by writer-director Richard Schenkman ("The Pompatus of Love"), and it will screen at Comic-Con on Saturday. It's a perfect venue for Bixby's brand of philosophical sci-fi.
A feature writer in the 1950s ("It! The Terror From Beyond Space"), Bixby gained acclaim in the 1960s for writing episodes of "The Twilight Zone," "Fantastic Voyage" and the original "Star Trek." His "Mirror, Mirror" teleplay, about an alternate reality for Spock and Co., solidified his legacy in "Trek" lore because the seminal idea became a recurring part of subsequent series spinoffs.
By the late '90s, he was in his mid-70s and felt mortality creeping in. So he finally began developing an idea he first had 50 years earlier about a thirtysomething college history professor named John Oldman who claims to friends and university colleagues that he is actually 14,000 years old.
As he lay dying, Bixby dictated the rest of the feature screenplay to his son, Emerson, a screenwriter himself ("Last Dance"). Emerson dutifully transcribed his father's ideas and, after his death, gave the script to Schenkman to direct on a $200,000 micro-budget. Anchor Bay Entertainment acquired the movie for distribution on DVD in the fall.
"The movie definitely provokes discussions, on a lot of levels," Schenkman says. "You just sit there and think, 'What would I ask him? If a guy I knew claimed to be 14,000 years old, and has met all these amazing people, what would I want to know?'
"It really gets you thinking about our place in the world, and what's come before us and what do we leave behind
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These will be sold with little problem
Speaking of what we leave behind, if you're in the market for a screenplay collectible you may want to swing by Joe Maddalena's Profiles in History auction booth at Comic-Con. (Actually, you don't have to be in San Diego -- you can bid via phone, fax or EBay Live Auctions.)
Maddalena's screenplay sales have included Marilyn Monroe's personal hand-annotated script from "The Seven Year Itch," written by Billy Wilder and George Axelrod ($69,000), Olivia de Havilland's "Gone With the Wind" presentation script (an Oscar winner written by Sidney Howard) from producer David O. Selznick ($40,000) and an original "Wizard of Oz" script, written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf ($25,000).
