86 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • DECEMBER 2017 86 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 86 LONGISLANDPRESS.CO M • SEPTEMBER 201-----------TUTU111
By ANNIE WILKINSON
In the 1950s, there were three
fuzzy, black-and-white TV channels.
Direct-dial phones, credit
cards, iContraptions and computers
didn’t exist.
It was this low-tech suburbia that
produced Michael Crichton and his
popular predictions of technological
disasters.
Although he died from cancer in
2008 at age 66, Crichton’s popularity
continues. Jurassic Park
spawned five films; the next debuts
in June 2018. A Swiss collector paid
$100,000 for the crate housing the
movie’s velociraptor. Crichton’s
novels are in film and TV development.
And an ankylosaur, Crichtonsaurus
bohlini, bears his name.
The screenwriter, director, producer,
anthropologist, professor, and
physician — a true Renaissance
man — focused on monsters running
amok. Did his upbringing fuel
such scenarios?
“I Was the Weird Kid”
He was born John Michael Crichton
in 1942 in Chicago. In 1948, the
family moved to Roslyn Heights
and he attended Green Vale and
East Hills Elementary. In 1996, he
revisited Roslyn High, reminiscing
with Newsday about childhood:
Nobody feared being murdered.
There was no known drug use.
Child abuse wasn’t discussed.
Children walked to school and rode
bikes.
But paradise was imperfect. Crichton
recalled home as “a pretty crazy
house with lots of turmoil and
yelling and screaming.”
His mother, a homemaker, took the
kids to museums and libraries. His
father, a journalist and executive
editor of Advertising Age, was a demanding
“first-rate son of a bitch,”
Crichton said. Although they
fought, the ad man provided inspiration.
By third grade, Michael was
writing plays. He loved movies, but
they were forbidden. His parents
relented with art films and movies
by Alfred Hitchcock, Crichton’s
first hero.
“The older I get, the more it
seems that Hitchcock is the major
influence,” Crichton recalled. No
surprise there: Hitch loved trapping
reluctant heroes in majestic
settings, pursued by out-of-control
powers.
“Big Mike” was 6 feet 7 inches tall
by age 13. “I was the weird kid who
wrote extra assignments….tall and
gangly and awkward and I needed
to escape,” he said.
Excelling at varsity basketball, he
set three MVP records. He was an
A student, the school paper news
editor, a Latin scholar, and Harvard
bound.
“A Colossally Talented Guy”
Former Harvard Crimson editorial
chair Robert W. Gordon said that
“he was relatively understated….
It was only later on that many of us
learned about many of the amazing
different things he was doing at the
time. He was a colossally talented
guy.”
Crichton possessed a prescience
about computers, completing
his thesis on an IBM mainframe
computer that occupied an entire
building. He wrote programming
manuals and computer games. He
explored ethics regarding robotics
and genetic engineering.
Majoring in anthropology, he
wanted to be a journalist. But after
earning C-minuses in English,
disillusioned, Crichton decided on
medical school. He graduated Harvard
in 1964 summa cum laude.
To offset Harvard Medical School
tuition, he wrote spy novels under a
pen name. His first, A Case of Need,
won a Mystery Writers of America
Edgar award.
Graduating as an M.D. in 1969,
he wrote full time; that year, his
runaway-virus novel The Andromeda
Strain was published under
Crichton’s name. Universal Studios
bought the novel and a young TV
director, Steven Spielberg, guided
him around the set.
Crichton directed Coma, Westworld
and The Great Train Robbery, and
wrote novels including best-sellers
Sphere and Congo. Many became
films, earning him tens of millions
of dollars annually. TV’s ER and
the movie Westworld revolutionized
computer and camera effects.
New Life For Dinosaurs
On hearing about Crichton’s dinosaur
theme park idea, Spielberg
committed to direct. The Jurassic
Park films have earned $3.5 billion
worldwide.
But insecurity plagued Crichton;
much-married and divorced, he
wrote incessantly. He told Charlie
Rose, “My experience is of not
being very gifted at writing, and of
having to try really hard.”
Crichton wrote Jurassic Park six
years before the first successful
sheep cloning. Today, ironically,
Harvard Medical School Genetics
Professor Dr. George M. Church is
using genome sequencing to resurrect
the extinct woolly mammoth.
What would Crichton the future
forecaster think of de-extinction?
He might quote from Jurassic Park,
“Your scientists were so preoccupied
with whether or not they could
that they didn’t stop to think if they
should.”
REAR VIEW
Future forecaster
Michael Crichton: Roslyn Heights’ Renaissance man
Michael Crichton giving a lecture at Harvard University.