A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future by Michael J. Fox

Author:Michael J. Fox [Fox, Michael J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: cookie429, Extratorrents, Kat, Autobiography
ISBN: 9781401323868
Amazon: 1401323863
Barnesnoble: 1401323863
Goodreads: 7558692
Publisher: Hyperion
Published: 2010-04-01T10:00:00+00:00

Geography

Courses include human geography, physical geography, earth systems science, environmental studies, and geology. Students develop an awareness of earth phenomena and the role these play in people’s lives.

“WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE.”

My father used to say that all the time, and I easily dismissed it as Dadspeak, something I was meant to nod at in apparent agreement, so as not to provoke him to expound upon it further. Years later, it made a great deal of sense to me. However, I have now added a slight variation to that aphorism: “Wherever you go, there it is.” The succinct summation of both of these thoughts is that wherever you travel, you have to adapt to your new surroundings. They won’t adapt to you.

Back in 1987, shooting the Vietnam drama Casualties of War with Sean Penn and director Brian DePalma, I had the privilege of witnessing how a particular part of the planet—in this case the Southeast Asian island of Phuket, Thailand—resisted the attempts of a big budget Hollywood crew to transform it into anything other than what nature, climate, geology, botany, and biology intended it to be. In fact, all the crew was trying to do was make the place into another version of itself. Let me explain.

We had a series of nighttime jungle-combat scenes to film. Understandably, the difficulty of running camera-dolly tracks through the rain forest, along with a plethora of other practical issues, made it impossible for our crew to work in the actual jungle. So, Brian and his technicians went to plan B. The idea was to approximate a jungle in a large barren area that once was wooded, but had long since been dedicated to some kind of gravel mining—a quarry of sorts. They picked a parcel of land on the edge of a series of cliffs. Into these cliffs they had dug a network of tunnels, or half tunnels, exposed to Brian’s cameras. The bonus was that Brian could get frighteningly atmospheric shots of Viet Cong crawling, weapons ready, through the tunnels beneath the jungle floor, then pan up slowly to find American GIs patrolling unawares. To create this illusion, set decorators brought in hundreds of potted trees and plants and dug a small pond, all covering approximately an acre or so. Shortly after the new greenscape was in place, Brian and cast were able to rehearse scenes to be shot a few weeks later.

What happened next provided a lesson in “wherever you go, there it is.” The surrounding flora and fauna quickly responded to our changes to the environment by reclaiming it. They subsumed it, overtook it. As if it were nothing more than a giant petri dish, the seasonal rains and sweltering humidity acted upon the “set,” fomenting a riot of uncontained growth. Birds filled the canopy. Snakes moved in after them. Plants that only a few weeks before had been mere vestigial shoots poking their way through the forest floor now grew tendrils several meters long, which crept atop the soil

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