Byron Haskin

On the occasion of his 111th birthday, we revisit this SF-oriented profile written for the late, lamented original Scifipedia website.

While Byron Haskin worked in many genres during his four decades as a director, dating back to the silent era, he is best known for his work with producer George Pal on The War of the Worlds (1953), The Naked Jungle (1954), Conquest of Space (1955), and The Power (1968).  He also contributed to the seminal SF series The Outer Limits in various capacities, some uncredited.

From 1922 to 1937, Haskin was primarily a cinematographer, with occasional directorial credits, and in the second phase of his career, through 1944, he worked mainly in special effects.  He was nominated for four consecutive Oscars in that category, after winning the 1939 technical achievement award for the development and application of the triple head background projector.

So, Haskin was ideal for the effects-heavy War of the Worlds, with Barré Lyndon’s script updating H.G. Wells’s novel to the present, and Gene Barry as the scientist coping with invading Martians.  Ironically, Gordon Jennings won an Oscar for his effects; War was also nominated for its film editing and sound recording, as well as earning the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Based on Carl Stephenson’s classic tale “Leiningen vs. the Ants,” The Naked Jungle was not SF but still required copious effects, as Leiningen (Charlton Heston) takes on the marabunta (army ants) threatening to overwhelm his Brazilian plantation.  Screenwriters Philip Yordan and Ranald MacDougall added a love interest, in the form of Eleanor Parker as his mail-order bride.

Conquest of Space was the last Haskin/Pal collaboration for more than a decade, and its problems were legendary.  The four credited screenwriters—with Lyndon, Yordan, and George Worthing Yates providing the adaptation, and James O’Hanlon the script—were unable to craft a satisfactory cinematic narrative out of the nonfiction book by Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley.

“There was a personal story introduced into this thing, which was utterly incredible,” as Haskin told Joe Adamson in his interview for a Directors Guild of America Oral History.  “The personal story and the technical story—oil and water.  We had Werner Von Braun on the set all the time…as a technical advisor.  He kept it straight, but I don’t know—it’s a mish-mash thing.”

Equally unsatisfying was From the Earth to the Moon (1958), based on the Jules Verne novel and its sequel, Round the Moon.  Although keeping the period setting that The War of the Worlds lacked, the script by Robert Blees and James Leicester was slow and implausible, while the Victorian spacecraft—piloted by Joseph Cotten and George Sanders—was utterly outlandish.

More highly respected today, Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) was a space-age version of the Daniel Defoe classic, scripted by John C. Higgins (who reportedly jettisoned most of Ib Melchior’s monster-filled treatment).  The barren landscape of Death Valley stood in for Mars, with its skies turned red by optical effects, and Paul Mantee starred as the marooned astronaut.

Haskin then segued into television, and called The Outer Limits the climax of his small-screen career.  “I was aide to Joe Stefano, the producer, and also directed half a dozen of them…. I was in charge of designing the monsters.  A great deal of the inner planning of the show was in my hands.  I supervised the special effects, which were very important,” as he told Joe Adamson.

Although he worked closely with the effects team at Project Unlimited (e.g., Wah Chang, Gene Warren, Tim Baar, Jim Danforth), Haskin took no credit for that aspect of his involvement with the show.  His best-known episode as a director was Harlan Ellison’s “Demon With a Glass Hand,” with Robert Culp (see “Culp Ability”) as a time-traveling robot trying to save humankind from alien invaders.

A victim of friction between Pal and MGM, The Power was Haskin’s final feature before he retired, with George Hamilton as a scientist trying to identify the telekinetic superman who is killing off his colleagues one by one.  Adapted from Frank M. Robinson’s novel by John Gay, it was a critical and commercial failure on its release, but has steadily grown in stature since then.