From the Magazine
Hollywood 2017 Issue

When Michael Crichton Reigned over Pop Culture, from ER to Jurassic Park

When Michael Crichton died at 66, he was the master of writing, directing, and producing the scientific thriller. Now, with Crichton’s Westworld reincarnated as an HBO hit, Sam Kashner remembers the entertainment giant.

MAKING PREHISTORY Michael Crichton at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in 2004.

By Blake Little/Contour/Getty Images.

Imagine. An amusement park where you can be hunted by a velociraptor—make that two velociraptors—or step gingerly over the tail of a sleeping T. rex, like the characters do in Jurassic Park. Or be dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as in Sphere, or ride atop a fast-moving train in Victorian England, as in The Great Train Robbery. Or be shuttled on a fast-moving gurney, like the patients in ER.

Welcome to Crichton World, which continues to flourish even after Michael Crichton’s death from cancer, in 2008, at the age of 66, after a staggeringly prodigious career as a writer and director of science-based thrillers.

There has never been anyone quite like him in the history of the movies. In his lifetime Michael Crichton wrote 18 major novels, most of them best-sellers, including The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, Congo, Disclosure, and Sphere. His books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, and 13 of his novels were made into major films, many of them huge financial successes (the Jurassic Parkjuggernaut alone has earned more than $3.5 billion worldwide). He also directed seven films (including Westworld, Coma, The Great Train Robbery)—all of this making Crichton rich beyond the fantasies of most writers.

He also created video games and the long-running TV show ER. In 1995 he achieved a breathtaking pop-cultural moment when he had the nation’s No. 1 best-selling book (The Lost World), the No. 1 movie (Congo), and the No. 1 TV show (ER), a trifecta he repeated in 1996 with Airframe, Twister, and ER. No one has topped that—not Stephen King, not John Grisham, not J. K. Rowling. At the height of his career, Crichton was reportedly earning $100 million a year. His cultural ubiquity was such that a New Yorker cartoon showed a woman in a bookstore asking, “What can you recommend that’s not by Michael Crichton?”

Early on, Crichton segued into films, writing screenplays and directing, admitting that once he had started down that road it was hard to return to the lonely ordeal of writing novels. He found uncanny success in television with ER, based on a screenplay, Code Blue, written about his experiences as a student at Harvard Medical School and years later developed for television with Steven Spielberg.

He was immensely tall. Six feet nine inches tall. So tall that it was often a problem for him, beginning at age 13, when he was already over six feet, weighed a skeletal 125 pounds, and was routinely hounded by bullies. So tall that he often felt like an outsider, an alien, an Ivy League oddball, but tall enough that he could see beyond the horizon before anyone else. Spielberg said that Crichton was the tallest man he had ever met, and naturally that impressive height—whatever its drawbacks—gave him a certain added authority on the sets of the seven films he directed.

TALL ORDERS Crichton in 1970. Inset, with Steven Spielberg during the filming of 1993’s Jurassic Park.

Large photograph by Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Inset by Murray Close/mptvimages.com.

George Clooney, who credits his long and distinguished career to his breakout role in ER, said that “Michael was always referred to as a Renaissance man. That’s because he was so good at so many things. Doctor. Writer. Director. And he was a stunning six-foot-nine figure. He would walk in the room and all the rest of us mortals felt somewhat inadequate. It was something you had to see. He could reduce giant stars and brilliant directors to little kids looking up to this gentle giant.”

His intellect was just as intimidating, and his scientific curiosity certainly made an impression on Hollywood. “He was a stone-cold genius,” said Michael Douglas, who starred in Coma and Disclosure. “He really was a gentle giant, very shy but intimidating. This guy was off the charts as far as intellect was concerned.”

Crichton began his directing career with Westworld. If you haven’t watched either the 1973 film, starring Richard Benjamin, Yul Brynner, and James Brolin, or the new cable incarnation on HBO, starring Anthony Hopkins, Ed Harris, and Evan Rachel Wood, it’s about a vacation theme park peopled by animatronic creatures so perfect that you can’t readily tell them apart from humans. Their role is to allow paying guests to act out any fantasy they wish, including sex, murder, and mayhem, in one of three realms—the Wild West, the Roman Empire, and Medieval Europe.

When a relentless black-clad gunslinger menacingly played by Yul Brynner stops following the encoded script and begins killing guests, revenge of the machine ensues. One of the show-runners of the new HBO series, Jonathan Nolan (brother of Memento and Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan), told Rolling Stone he remembered being terrified as a child by Brynner in the 1973 film.

Richard Benjamin reminisced about being cast as Peter Martin, the out-of-his-depth guest in Westworld who is pursued by the gunslinger. “Paula [the actress Paula Prentiss, Benjamin’s wife] and I were in New York, and we got a phone call from [famed talent agent] Sue Mengers saying, ‘There’s a movie called Westworld, and I think you should do it,’ ” he explained. “ ‘It’s Michael Crichton—he’s brilliant,’ and she hung up the phone.”

Although Westworld was the first feature film Crichton directed, Benjamin felt that “he knew exactly what he was doing. It went very smoothly and easily, and he was, you know, this quiet presence, but in total command. The theme—Don’t trust technology; it’ll go crazy—ran throughout his work.”

That was indeed Crichton’s idée fixe: our scientific and technological creations—whether highly sophisticated A.I. or DNA-cloned dinosaurs—will slip from our control and try to destroy us. It seems that as a culture we are catching up to Michael Crichton’s dark view of scientifically enhanced life.

Dragon Teeth

Crichton’s novel Dragon Teeth will be published in May by Harper and is being adapted for a six-hour television series, to air on the National Geographic Channel. Co-written by screenwriter Graham Yost (Band of Brothers, The Pacific) for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, the series features two of the great dinosaur-bone hunters of the late 19th century, Edwin Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Yost calls their relationship “the greatest scientific rivalry of all time.”

Yost never actually met Michael Crichton, but they spoke at length on the phone in 2001, when Amblin considered making a sequel to Twister. “The idea was there would be a swarm of tornadoes that would hit Chicago,” recalled Yost, “so we were kicking that around, but then there was 9/11, and I said, I don’t think anybody wants to see buildings falling down.”

Crichton with James Brolin, Yul Brynner, and Richard Benjamin on the set of Westworld.

Large photograph from MGM/Crichton Sun Archive; Digital Colorization by Impact Digital; Inset from MGM/ The Neal Peters Collection.

Dragon Teeth is “a big adventure story with science at the heart,” Yost explained, “and that in many ways sums up a lot of Crichton’s work. The difference is there isn’t necessarily a dark sort of turn. There’s no dinosaur eating the patrons. There is the sense of these two men, Cope and Marsh, and how their rivalry deforms them. And how William Johnson”—a fictional character Crichton created to tell the story—“has to navigate between them and find his own life.”

It’s easy to see William Johnson as a stand-in for the author: he’s an Ivy League student, aware of his entitlement. It wouldn’t be the first time Crichton wrote a version of himself into his novels and screenplays. Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park is Crichton-like in some ways: a tall, much-married intellectual, specializing in chaos theory. He also speaks the movie’s theme, reflecting Crichton’s opinion about scientific meddling: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” And in ER, the character played by Noah Wyle has certain Crichton-like attributes, so much so that during the run of the show Wyle drummed up the courage to ask the author if, indeed, he was playing a version of Michael Crichton. Wyle explained, “I just assumed, since he wrote it in 1974, after he finished his [time] as a medical student, and my character was finishing his third-year rotation and doing his internship in the E.R., [that] I was playing Michael. And when I broached that to him, he kind of smiled and said that he felt he was a composite of all of the characters. Burst my bubble!”

Despite Crichton’s vague demurral, Wyle admitted that he used Crichton “as a bit of a prototype for the character—the idea of this really smart guy choosing to put himself in less than savory circumstances, both for his education but also to test his mettle.”

The Spielberg Collaboration

Kathleen Kennedy—co-founder of Amblin Entertainment in 1982 and now president of Lucasfilm—who produced Jurassic Park, Congo, Twister, and others, explained, “I always say Michael Crichton [wrote] science fact, not science fiction. He was deeply interested in what was going on with technology and scientific experiments, but he always seemed to find a way to make complex ideas very accessible because he found a way to talk about them through big entertainment.”

When asked about Crichton’s enormous output, Kennedy answered, “He was incredibly driven. I think more of it just came from this insatiable desire to understand these complex ideas and where technology was going, where medicine was going, or science was headed.”

Spielberg noted that “Michael brought credibility to incredible subject matter. He was a master builder of a scientific logic to keep the science fiction grounded so it could be believed by people all over the world. And I had not met anybody who had ever done that before. And he did it over and over again in a lot of films and books. I’ve always believed that the more incredible your stories, the more credible the science has to be.”

Spielberg recalled that he was beginning a seven-year contract as a television director for Universal when he first met Crichton, after being asked to give the author a tour of Universal Studios. Crichton had just sold The Andromeda Strain to Universal.

“I remember I did all the talking because Michael hardly said a word,” Spielberg recalled. “He was very shy, he was very reticent to get into a conversation, but he seemed to be taking everything in, and he seemed to be acting with interest at everything I was pointing out to him, like Lana Turner’s dressing room or Alfred Hitchcock’s office or Western Street, where they made [the television series] Wagon Train. And he was agog the whole day that we spent together, and we often talked about it when we became engaged in a professional collaboration.”

They became friends, and one day Crichton called Spielberg and said, “I want you to read a first draft of something I’ve written, kind of about myself when I wanted to be a doctor.” It was the 150-page Code Bluescreenplay, and Spielberg loved it and committed to directing it. “I mean, you couldn’t catch your breath trying to keep up with him when you were blazing through the pages [of his screenplays and books]. . . When he [later] co-wrote Twister for me, I probably read that script in an hour, and I’m a slow reader, and I was blazing through it.

“Michael and I started working on the re-writes,” Spielberg recalled, “and I didn’t know much about medicine, except—well, I knew as much about medicine as any hypochondriac knows, which is often more than the doctors. And Michael respected how much I knew about medicine, based on my fear of everything that could go wrong.”

Over lunch, Spielberg asked what else he was working on, and Crichton said “he couldn’t tell me, it was a secret project, but I kind of wouldn’t let it go. And after a couple of days, Michael, swearing me to secrecy, said, ‘O.K., it’s a book about dinosaurs and DNA.’ And that’s all he would tell me. And I wouldn’t give it up, so I finally got him after several weeks to tell me pretty much the whole story. When he finished telling me, I committed to direct it . . . . I probably had one of the best times of my career directing that script.”

Crichton with Sean Connery on the set of 1979’s The Great Train Robbery (right), working on the same film with Donald Sutherland and Connery (left).

Photographs from MGM/Crichton Sun Archive; Digital Colorization by Impact Digital (left).

The Archives

The late writer’s vast archive is examined and catalogued in a house that Crichton owned in Santa Monica. In the kitchen is a large photograph of Alfred Hitchcock autographed to Crichton, in the living room a display of Crichton’s books, posters for the movies, advertisements for the books, the Time magazine cover from September 1995, and a script for ER, signed by members of the cast, preserved in a Plexiglas frame.

In a large room next to the kitchen, the writer’s widow, Sherri Alexander Crichton, and two assistants had laid out on three long tables samples of her late husband’s letters, original scripts, postcards, and manuscripts. White cotton gloves were available in case we wanted to handle any of the material.

Sherri, a graceful former model, first met Crichton a year after she’d moved to Los Angeles from New York when a friend of his set them up on a date. “Sherri, you guys have so much in common,” the friend encouraged her. “I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You’re both tall.’ ” (She is five feet eleven.) Sherri expected to have many more years with her husband, but, tragically, he died three years into the marriage, leaving her alone and six months pregnant with their son, John Michael, and the archives of his vast empire. (Michael Crichton also has a daughter in her late 20s, by his fourth wife.)

“The archive was always very important to me,” she said, “because if it didn’t get preserved now it was never going to get preserved. Life passes on. Michael’s books would hopefully still be in print, but maybe not, if there’s not someone there who cares, advocating for them.

“Michael always charted everything,” she added. “This year he did this; this year he did that. There are some like Dragon Teeth that are fully formed, pure Crichton. Then there are pieces that are just ideas.” So we take a look at Crichton’s idea files, which fill five cabinet drawers and which are in the process of being organized and scanned. The sheer range of his interests is dizzying: anthropology, astrology, bacteria, Bali, bats, biochemistry, breeding, cancer, chaos, cloning, computer hackers, criminal investigation, Degas, dinosaurs, DNA, dreams, Eastern European politics, electric cars, evolution, gene patents, hypnosis, language, medicine, opera, parenting, photos, plants, population control, voodoo, sharks, solar systems, sleep.

Crichton applied the scientific method even to his decision to become a writer. Sherri recounted that, when starting out, Crichton “researched and discovered that there were only 200 writers in America who were making a living out of writing. But there were 6,000 students graduated as doctors. He was being very pragmatic about it. That’s when he decided to become a doctor and went undercover as a writer.”

His first novels, paperback pulp thrillers written while at Harvard Medical School, were published under two pseudonyms: John Lange (John was Crichton’s first name, which he didn’t use, and Andrew Lang was a collector of Victorian fairy tales) and Jeffrey Hudson (a dwarf at the court of Charles I who also happened to be a great adventurer—a kind of fun-house mirror image of Crichton himself).

Yet, for a writer with so many interests who wrote so many books, Crichton rarely talked or wrote about himself. A notable exception is Travels, his 1988 collection of nonfiction pieces, where you glimpse his insecurities, his self-doubt, his occasional feelings of being a freak due to his height, and his intellect. You see his anger and hurt over his domineering and often competitive father, John Crichton, a New York journalist and executive working for Advertising Age.

Michael was flourishing in the 1970s, living in Los Angeles and rich as Croesus, but he was haunted by memories of a childhood traumatized by his father’s abuse. Crichton sought to rid himself of those memories and come to terms—even forgiveness—with the ghost of his father.

In Travels, Crichton recounts immersing himself in the world of psychic phenomena, which he approached with an open and critical mind; he tells several tales of derring-do, such as climbing to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, meeting the Semai tribe in Pahang, and diving on a dangerous wreck off Bonaire, near the coast of Venezuela. Perhaps that’s why he greatly admired another grand adventurer, Sean Connery—the best James Bond ever, whom Crichton directed in The Great Train Robbery. He was among Crichton’s closest friends from his life in the movies.

Sherri pulled out a carefully numbered box with photographs from the set of The Great Train Robbery. One was of Sean Connery sitting atop one of the movie’s specially built Victorian railcars, with Crichton tenderly removing a cinder from the actor’s eye. Connery appeared in the movie about “10 or 15 years” after he finished playing Bond, Crichton explained in his commentary, recorded in 1996, that accompanies the DVD of The Great Train Robbery. He considered Connery “one of the few real international movie stars who is able to also be a character. Psychoreally ended [Tony Perkins’s] working life. He could never play anything but a crazy person again, really,” whereas Sean Connery, Crichton felt, “has very carefully enlarged the scope of his work [since Bond]. He’s a very skilled actor, and not entirely recognized for his ability.”

In one of his interviews with PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, Crichton described his admiration for Connery: “I think of him as a complete person. He has his adult side and his childish side, his male and his female side. He has everything . . . . He has this wonderful spirit . . . . He’s one of the few people in the world that I would say is delightful.” (When contacted by V.F. for an interview, Connery said that, regretfully, he was not up to it.)

Michael Crichton, in 2000.

By Jonathan Exley/Contour/Getty Images.

The Controversies

One needs only to look at the sheer number of books and movie tickets sold to get an idea of how popular—even beloved—Crichton was throughout his 40-year career. But there was controversy as well, in the wake of three novels that took on heat-generating topics: Disclosure(feminism and sexual harassment), Rising Sun (Japanese corporate domination of technology), and State of Fear (global warming). The last takes a jaded look at the politics of climate-change science and has as its villains a group of environmental activists. He got hate mail after State of Fear was published to mostly negative reviews.

“He was ready for the ridicule; he was ready for the conversation,” said Sherri, when asked about why Crichton tackled this subject in the way that he did. “He challenged science and the models.”

Spielberg believes that when the book was written the science wasn’t as settled as it is now, and what Crichton was really arguing for was a less emotional approach to the topic. When the book came out, “people were not talking about global warming. And I think Michael was trying to shake things up and get people to listen, and I think he had to go out on a limb to get people to pay attention.”

On Charlie Rose’s show, Crichton described environmentalism as a kind of religion and argued for a coolheaded approach to the subject. When asked about the writer’s conservative views in this area, Charlie Rose said, “I would hope that Michael would look at the world today and say, Whatever I did in terms of creating that piece, we’re living in a different world, and I see more evidence—and it is one of the great challenges in our world that I see now. At least I hope he would say that.”

Paul Lazarus, producer of the original Westworld and Crichton’s closest friend during his early years in Hollywood, and currently on the faculty of Santa Fe University of Art & Design, recalled a long discussion he had with Crichton about the issue. He remembers telling him, “Michael, you’re on the wrong side of history on this one.”

‘There were two obituaries that appeared in The New York Times following Michael’s death,” recalled Lazarus. “One was on the obituary page, which gave a straightforward account of his life, and then he got one on the literary page, which took him to task for not writing profound novels . . . and I thought, How terribly unfair. He was a popularizer along the lines of Isaac Asimov. You look at Jurassic Park. I remember a few pages on string theory, and thinking, Oh, I finally understand it. But I didn’t understand it at all—his genius was making you think you understood.”

The New York Times had written, “As a writer he was a kind of cyborg, tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered entertainment systems. No one—except possibly Mr. Crichton himself—ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.”

Actually, Crichton never did confuse his novels with great literature. He knew he was not a writer’s writer. He told Charlie Rose, “My experience is of not being very gifted at writing, and of having to try really hard, to work very hard at what I do, to put in long hours and to concentrate on it . . . . I don’t feel in any way that I have natural abilities in this, and I just work hard. This is something I wanted to do—I wanted to be a writer, and I’m very happy to be doing it.”

Crichton insisted that his books and movies were built upon “pre-existing literary forms,” which he would study before embarking on his own reiteration, going about it scientifically. Congo owed a debt to Sir H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and The Andromeda Strainto H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankenstein was a model for the Terminal Man. Crichton’s 1976 novel, Eaters of the Dead, owes a debt to Beowulf.

“I think that gnawed at Michael a little bit,” said author Max Byrd, a longtime friend of Crichton’s from their undergraduate days at Harvard, “that if you were popular you can’t be very good . . . . Michael kept talking about Charles Dickens—Dickens was both popular and good. It vexed him when people would just say, ‘Well, a pop writer or a pop scientist.’ He knew the subjects; he knew the subjects he went into better than just ‘pop.’ ”

Distinguished editor Robert Gottlieb worked on Crichton’s novels while at Alfred A. Knopf. In his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, excerpted in the September 2016 issue of V.F., Gottlieb recalls, “Michael had a strong background in science. And he had a keen eye, or nose, for cutting-edge areas of science—and, later, sociology—that could be used as material for thrillers while cleverly popularizing the hard stuff for the general public. You got a lesson while you were being scared. What Michael wasn’t was a very good writer. The Andromeda Strain was a terrific concept, but . . . eventually I concluded that he couldn’t write about people because they just didn’t interest him.” Gottlieb adds, “Michael, for all his weaknesses as a writer, was unquestionably the best of his techno breed, and easily deserved his tremendous success.”

Still, Crichton was plagued by feelings that his books all fell short of the mark. “I’ve never worked on anything, either a book or a movie, without, in some really deep way, feeling disappointed in myself—feeling that I missed it,” he admitted in his Great Train Robbery commentary.

He felt the same way about the movies he directed: “The filmmaker thinks that he’s making one picture, the production unit thinks they’remaking another picture, and then you run it in front of an audience and it becomes their picture.” At the end of the commentary comes this confession from a man of such extraordinary accomplishments: “The feeling I have working on a picture inevitably is when you see it put together, you just want to go out and kill yourself . . . . Whenever you start a movie, you have the most wonderful idea in your head. It’s just magical, and glowing, and fantastic. And then, as you’re shooting it, there’s a continuous addressing of practical problems—people get sick, things break down, it’s raining, it’s too bright, it’s too dark, it’s too early, it’s too late. And then at the end you see it all together and it’s just a movie. That’s all. The wonderful quality that was in your head isn’t there. It’s evaporated. Instead it’s just this rather mundane experience and you’ve failed. You have absolutely failed. So you go make another movie, and you hope you’ll get it the next time.”

But Charlie Rose felt that Crichton “had this really remarkable ability to see the gathering force of an idea and then write to it. I think Michael understood that that criticism would be there. I don’t think he thought he was creating great literature. I think he saw himself as someone who was finding a way to tell stories about his own curiosity, and it happened to be very entertaining to other people.”

“He left a huge legacy,” says Spielberg. “Michael had a special imagination different from most other writers’. And I think that he’s got a lot of unhatched eggs, you know, and rather than let them sit around and fossilize like amber, we’d like to get those stories out to the world while they’re still fresh.” In addition to Dragon Teeth, Spielberg is adapting for film two other posthumously published novels by Crichton, Pirate Latitudes and Micro.

Paul Lazarus noticed that at the end of Crichton’s life he finally came to wear his success and his fame lightly. “He also became much more comfortable around people,” Lazarus says. “You would see him on the morning talk shows or being interviewed—he was smiling. He was easy with them. That’s not who he was initially.”

During Crichton’s last summer, Lazarus invited him to address a handful of film students he had brought to U.C.L.A. “Michael,” he remembers saying, “you’re not looking very well,” and his friend answered, “Well, I’m really very sick.” But he insisted on going to the class. And he stayed for more than three hours answering questions. According to Lazarus, he was wonderful, with that sneakily shy sense of humor.

Charlie Rose summed up the feeling that has remained with many of Crichton’s admirers: “Among the 25 people I’ve enjoyed most, he’s high on the list. He was a great storyteller. I miss him.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the director of Rising Sun. Philip Kaufman directed the film.