Fan Fare
Entertainment behind the scenes
How the ‘Contagion’ virus was born
By Peter Christian Hall The opinions expressed are his own.
The most riveting player in Contagion, the star-laden thriller about a global pandemic, is a virus — the so-called MEV-1 paramyxovirus that an American businesswoman spreads from Hong Kong to Minneapolis in the movie’s opening sequence. The bug that emerged from years of brainstorming by top scientific and creative minds has itself become an overnight superstar.
Contagion’s proprietary serial killer — the offspring of related viral strains from a bat and a pig — started out its scripted life as a souped-up avian influenza. “Flu seemed the worst-case pandemic to talk about,” says Laurie Garrett, an emerging-disease expert and bestselling author (The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust) who in 2008 began working closely with screenwriter Scott Z. Burns on at least 30 script drafts.
“A tremendous amount of work went into coming up with a very detailed scenario about how all the elements around the world would respond if we had a truly virulent 1918-type flu.” The Great Pandemic that accompanied World War I infected more than half a billion people and killed well over 50 million, most of them aged 16 to 40.
When nature surprised Garrett and Burns with the 2009 swine flu pandemic, they quickly realized Novel H1N1 wasn’t going to be virulent enough to hold the public’s interest in “a flu movie.”
Garrett, who had covered the 2003 SARS epidemic in China, urged Burns to refocus on so-called zoonotic viruses that cross directly between people and animals, as the bubonic plague and West Nile Virus did and which SARS is believed to have done. Microbial crossovers can occur when people disrupt a natural environment and come into close contact with animals that carry viruses to which humans have no immunity.
“Scott and I talked a lot about bats and the deeply profound stress on local bat populations,” says Garrett. “They are the great pollinators. Fruit bats are so stressed by the combination of apparent rising temperatures in the upper canopy of the rain forest and human encroachment that they are increasingly going into human areas in search of food. They’re starving, basically–and passing ancient viruses, via either their saliva [when they feed] or their urine.” Viral crossover can take place when their fluids come into contact with food being consumed by pigs or humans.
Terminator soldiers on in animated “machinima” series
After a lower than expected opening for action movie “Terminator Salvation,” the studio behind the film is soldiering on, like a Terminator robot on the warpath, with the release of an animated series that uses graphics from a video game to tell a story, in a technique called machinima.
Warner Bros. said that its “Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series” is the first long-form dramatic machinima series produced by a major studio. The creators used the “Terminator Salvation” video game to make the animated series.
The six-part animated series was produced in association with McG, the director of the movie. It follows the adventures of Blair Williams, a resistance fighter who was played by Moon Bloodgood in the movie and voices her character in the machinima series. It follows how Blair joined the human resistance against Terminator robots that unleash destruction on planet Earth.
From the studio’s perspective, a machinima series is a cheap way to make new content to support a film. McG noted that the machinima technique allows creators to show things that would be “cost-prohibitive or even impossible on a set.”
That said, McG and Warner Bros. spared few expenses in making “Terminator Salvation.” The film reportedly cost about $180 million to make, but since opening on Thursday the movie has earned $65.3 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to final figures on Tuesday from tracking firm Box Office Mojo. Industry forecasts had expected the movie to open in the $70 million range, so the opening was likely to disappoint some backers of the movie.
The Terminator machinima series is available at iTunes, Amazon Video on Demand, Xbox Live and the Sony PlayStation Network.
Photo Credit 1: Warner Bros. (Image from “Terminator Salvation: The Machinima Series”)
Clearly the best fiction reflects our reality directly – thanks to Hall for insight here. I now look forward to the film. I am scared already. And I am intrigued by the title of Halls forthcoming book.