Some of the foremost creators in genre storytelling have come together for a new special series called AMC Visionaries, which spotlights the industries they're most passionate about.
Robert Kirkman, Eli Roth and James Cameron (via satellite) gathered at the 2017 summer TV Critics' Association press tour to set up their various hour-long series segments. Each will be six episodes long, with Kirkman helming Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics, Cameron spearheading James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction and Roth heading the newly announced Eli Roth’s History of Horror (working title).
"Each one of us is coming at this from a really well-educated place," Kirkman said of what sets their educational series apart. "This is the kind of stuff that all three of us like to sit down and talk about this for fun, so to be given a platform where we can take a subject that we have, to a certain extent, dedicated our lives to and really shine a light on, to kind of show an audience what it is about these individual subjects that we absolutely love, it's us trying to bring people in and say, 'Look at this thing I love' ... It's us trying to say, 'Hey, this is what we see in this stuff and you should see that too.'"
Here are their words on why they're excited about this series and what they're looking to bring to audiences in the forthcoming segments, premiering in 2018:
Kirkman on comics: "There are elements to the stories that you think you know that we've uncovered different aspects of. Even our researchers found things that I hadn't heard about. I think if you are a diehard comic book fan, you're still going to get things from this show that you didn't know about. If you're just somebody that's heard of comic books and just wants to watch a show about the subject matter, there's just going to be way more that you'll get from this, but we've dug really deep for all of these episodes. There's a lot of unknown stuff out there that we've dug up."
Roth on horror: "The best horror has always reflected what's going on at the time: the fears of atomic radiation in the '50s, the racial tension in Night of the Living Dead, the post-Vietnam films of Wes Craven, all the stuff that George Romero saw in slasher films in the '80s, and what we tried to do in the post-9/11 era with the horror films of the 2000s, you can really see it now with Get Out. Get Out is a movie that gives everyone a safe context to talk about racial tension. ... It's fantastic when you really look back at the history of horror and what was going on in the world at the time, what stories really resonated."
Cameron on science fiction: "Not only do we live in a world that's been overtaken by a lot of science fiction ideas ... but science fiction is now a mainstream part of pop culture. Of course, I think that we all know the doors were blown open in that direction by Star Wars in 1977 and it's never backed off since. We want to go back through all the way back to John W. Campbell, the pulps of the '30s and the sort of golden age of science fiction in the '40s and '50s.
"Unfortunately, many of those have passed, but we still have a few with us, so we managed to get a few interviews with people like David Gerrold who wrote for Star Trek back in the '60s, D.C. Fontana. We'll also be interviewing writers like Neal Stephenson and some contemporary grandmasters, sci-fi writers about how they were influenced not only by the pop culture B-movies of the '50s, but also those sci-fi literature greats. We'll even take it all the way back to Wells and Verne and show where ideas like time travel, for example, came from."
Kirkman: "We're doing an episode about the creation of Wonder Woman, which is credited to William Moulton Marston. A lot of people don't know that he had a polygamous relationship with two women, and those two women are actually very instrumental in the creation of Wonder Woman, so we do kind of a deep dive on who they were as people and everything that inspired their lives and led to the creation of this character that's now a blockbuster movie that we're seeing this summer.
"We're also doing another episode called 'The Color of Comics' that kind of explores the history of black characters and the lack of black characters in the comic book industry, which touches on the creation of Black Panther and does a really cool focus on this company from the '90s called Milestone Comics that was founded by a group of African American comic book creators to create characters that appeal to them and represented them, because there was a very huge lack of representation for them in comics, even in the '90s."
Roth: "You wouldn't have had horror without Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. Going back through the history, what we want to do is have the show for the casual horror fan, but also go really, really deep. As we all know, we're losing these masters. They're disappearing every week. ... Our show will be done by subgenre. We're going to have 'this is vampires and this is slashers.' ... There were a lot of films that people don't know that were directed by women that were slasher films, that were there kind of comment, there were feminist movies, so that is absolutely part of the subgenres."
Cameron: "I think the role of women in science fiction has been varied. ... We're not going to do specific episodes [on that]; there are six episodes, and they are themed by space travel and dark futures and time travel, things like that, but throughout it, we want to have this kind of thread of analyzing the interaction between science fiction and society, not only how science fiction saved and evolved and manifested the anxieties of society, such as monster movies that emerged out of the fear and dystopian stories that emerged out of the fear of the Cold War period, but also how science fiction reflected changes in society and even anticipated it. It's a bit of a checkered story.
"Science fiction traditionally, back in the '30s and '40s, was a fiction primarily by and for men. The female writers often had to have noms de plum that sounded like male names. But then as you get into the '60s and the '70s, science fiction became the kind of forerunner in breaking down social barriers, whether it was around race or gender, the role of women in these future societies. I think some of the strongest women in film period are in science fiction movies. We still don't have enough female directors in general, let alone female filmmakers working in science fiction movies, but we certainly have a plethora of women writing great science fiction."
Cameron: "Part of my motivation for doing this series is to honor the roots of literary science fiction. ... The fact that it's blown up to the pop culture juggernaut that it is now, both in the scale of the movie and also the diversity of the themes, I think is pretty amazing. Hopefully with this series, we can close the loop. ... We're going to show you how to look back into the literary fiction that that came from. There's still great literary science fiction out there. Hopefully we can bridge that gap.
"The things that I was seeing in my head when I was a kid ... they're writ large up on the screen now in my work and everywhere I look around me, I see these ideas resonating, and they're resonating with our society now. The idea of an intelligent machine? That was completely fantastical back in the '50s and '60s, and now we're in a matter of 'not if, but when.'
"I'm excited by the idea of drilling down, in some cases into granular details, about where these ideas came from, and about how some of the great visionary filmmakers and series creators and whatnot drew on that because they all knew the references. For the most part, they all knew what they were drawing from, even if the fans didn't. This is a way to connect the dots and honor these writers and show creators, especially for a younger audience that loves science fiction, loves the imagery, loves the stories and the themes but doesn't necessarily know where they came from and where they evolved. Our realization in creating this series is this is not just about the history, this is not just about connecting it; this is about linking it to our lives and where society is going and how science fiction has resonated with society, sometimes even shaped our opinions and our ideas."
Additional AMC Visionaries segments will spotlight the history of video games, rap, Internet pioneers and martial arts.
Terri Schwartz is Editorial Producer at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.
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