Movie Period Pieces and Time Travel Tales

Posted by Barry M. Grey Nov 28, 2008

One of the things that movies do best is transport people to places either long gone, vastly changed or yet to come.

I reflected on this again recently after seeing Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, which tells the true story of a boy’s kidnapping in 1928 Los Angeles. Changeling's Views of L.A.

Eastwood’s cinematographer Tom Stern re-creates 1928 L.A by masterfully alternating a palate of black-and-white, pastels (making some shots resemble vintage picture postcards) and full-blown color.

His L.A. skyline, dominated by the iconic, then-new City Hall, plops viewers smack in the middle of a bygone era most people know only from history and coffee table books.

The effect for someone like me, whose curiosity about my adoptive hometown is insatiable, is staggering.

Similarly, Sir Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin beautifully re-creates L.A. from the 1910s onward. In one unforgettable sequence staged and shot in an outlying Southern California desert area, the Charlie Chaplin Studio itself is lovingly re-created to appear as it did when it opened in 1918.

L.A. Confidential does for the 1950s what Changeling and Chaplin did for earlier eras. Titanic Painstakingly Re-created

Similarly, James Cameron’s Titanic -- the biggest moneymaker in movie history -- recreates the luxury liner down to the smallest detail. Sure, teenagers loved Leo and Kate’s onboard romance. But I drooled over the set design and art direction, sensing I was sharing exactly what passengers and crew saw and experienced on that tragic maiden voyage.

Cameron’s 2003 IMAX documentary Ghosts of the Abyss explores the actual Titanic’s remains. In it, Cameron dissolves from a mirror in the wreckage to the exact same mirror re-created in Titanic the movie.

I had chills for days. Time-Travel in Fiction

I’m a nut for time-travel stories, too. Among my favorite novels is the obscure Screenplay, by the late MacDonald Harris. In it, the hero follows his mysterious house tenant on an urban hike through present-day Los Angeles. They eventually enter a boarded-up movie theater in neighboring Culver City. The hero follows his strange tenant up onto the stage, and eventually through the tattered movie screen itself – and straight into 1924 Culver City and the MGM lot. (That same lot today is home to Sony Pictures.)

They land in a surreal, silent movie world that looks real but isn’t, one featuring disembodied laughter of unseen witnesses (translation: movie audiences) and eerie fade-outs which prevent anything more salacious than an innocent kiss.

It’s a great read, full of surprises.

Author Jack Finney’s series of books and short stories about time travel – including Time and Again and the sequel From Time to Time – are among the best in the genre.

In fact, I doubt it’s coincidence that in 1980’s time travel movie romance, Somewhere in Time, screenwriter Richard Matheson named one of the characters Finney. Nice touch. Time-Travel in Hollywood

For most of its own history, Hollywood itself has been pulling people out of their seats and transporting them to other times.

1925’s The Lost World enabled its filmmakers the opportunity to develop the stop-frame technology they used to make the remarkable King Kong a few years later. Crude by today’s standards, The Lost World amazed silent era audiences with images of dinosaurs doing battle in a swampy earth setting. (It’s no coincidence the Spielberg sequel is titled The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The director has a well-known appreciation of movie history.)

1960’s The Time Machine, based on the book by H.G. Wells, was director George Pal’s smartly conceived and executed film offering glimpses of a Victorian inventor traveling to the 1960s and eventually to the distant future. (I will confess I did not see the 2002 remake.) Roman Polanski's The Pianist

Roman Polanski’s brilliant Oscar-winning The Pianist has a stunning moment of re-created horror. Emerging from years of hiding in Warsaw during World War II, the protagonist wanders through a city utterly destroyed by the Nazis. The pull-back shot of Adrien Brody (as the real-life Wladyslaw Szpilman) staggering through the rubble of the city is among the most shattering anti-war arguments ever put to film.

Perhaps my favorite TV time-travel tale is The Odyssey of Flight 33, from the original Twilight Zone series. In this 1961 episode, a jetliner fighting bad weather passes through a time warp, transporting it first to 1939 Manhattan – where the signature buildings of that year’s World’s Fair beckon – and then to prehistoric times, where the hapless crew and passengers witness dinosaurs casually grazing on Manhattan Island.

A more recent – and more dazzling – TV example involves the History Channel documentary Life After People. The simple premise: what if humans vanished overnight? The effects-driven special are simply amazing, as we see what would become of our homes, our cities, even our domesticated pets.

Time-travel films and TV shows offer us the chance to see what was – and perhaps will be. But even without the supernatural element of time-travel, movies depicting life in other eras of human existence are irresistible for anyone who ever wondered what it was like on their own street, their city, their world, before they were born or long after they’re gone.