James Gunn - The Immortals

James Gunns The Immortals is elegant, innovativeand chilling. Gunnstake on immortality is simple enough, yet mythicits all in the blood.

More blood.

Mutated blood.

With the right blood, you can live forever

A man is born who is resistant to the disease of aging, and anyone withenough money on this Earth wants to know where he is, where his childrenare

Because they could be tickets to immortality. Rich old men hankering forlife everlasting. For the blood is the life

I dont know about you, but all that scares the bejesus out of me. Weveseen it before, of course; its now the core of one of the great themesof imaginative literature, the vampire. One difference here isthat it is not the upper class monster who conveys an unwanteddeathlessness on a hapless commoner, but the hapless and elusivecommoner who carries the highly desired trait.

James Gunn does it as straight science fiction, with a strong scientificunderpinning. Very convincing. Clinical, medical noir. They should filmit in black and white.

And that makes The Immortals a classic.

Greg Bear

Story ideas come at unexpected times and develop in unexpected ways, andsometimes have lives of their own.

The idea for The Immortals came to me during my second stint as afull-time writer. The first was a twelve-month period back in 194849after I had given up the idea of becoming a playwright and then ofbecoming a radio writer. I sold several stories (the first ten under thepseudonym of Edwin James) but not enough to live on and decided toreturn to the University of Kansas to get a masters degree in English.Two years later I took a job as an editor for Western Printing &Lithographing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. It publishedpaperback books and Disney comics for Dell and Little Golden Books forSimon and Schuster. I was supposed to create a science-fiction line. Butwhen I attended my first World Science Fiction Convention (and my firstconvention of any kind) in Chicago in 1952 and learned from my agent,Frederik Pohl, that he had sold four stories for me, I decided to returnto full-time writing.

Halfway through that period of about two and a half years, I came upwith the idea for The Immortals. Science fictions appeal is its senseof wonder, its series of what-ifs? One day I began wondering about howhumanity might actually achieve immortality. Those ideas are startingpoints, they develop into stories through research. Some creatures, Ifound, never die from natural causes. Another source suggested thatpeople age because our circulatory system is inefficient; it doesntprovide food for the cells when they need it, or remove the by-productsof oxidation. What would happen if someone were born with a bettercirculatory system? And what if that improvement were capable of beingtransmitted to someone else through a blood transfusion? And what if therejuvenating power might reside in a blood protein like the gammaglobulins that provide passive immunity against infection when they areinjected into other people (such as pregnant women, so that they dontcatch German measles)? Then the rejuvenation itself might be onlytemporary, lasting only about thirty to forty-five days, like thepassive immunity conferred by gamma globulins. Those were the what-ifsthat set off a process of story creation.

I sat down and wrote New Blood, which my agent sent to JohnCampbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction. It was published inthe November 1955 issue. By then I had finished the second story in theseries Donor. Campbell wasnt interested in more stories aboutimmortal blood, so I sold it to Startling Stories; it was scheduledfor publication in the winter issue of 1955but the fall issue was thelast (Startling Stories wasnt the only magazine I helped kill). Iresold it to Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, where it appearedin the November 1960 issue.

By the time New Blood was published, I had moved my family from KansasCity back to Lawrence, Kansas, and had been asked to teach a couple ofsections of English composition at the University of Kansas. Before thesemester was over, I was invited to become managing editor of theUniversitys Alumni Magazine. I made a deal with the university towork only three weeks a month during the summers so I could use thefourth for writing. During the first summer I wrote Medic, which BobMills published in the July 1957 issue of Venture Science Fiction asNot So Great an Enemy. The second summer I wrote The Immortals,which Fred Pohl published in Star Science Fiction #4 in 1958.

By that time, Bantam Books had launched its science fiction line. I hadalready sold them Station in Space and The Joy Makers. The thirdbook Dick Roberts accepted was The Immortals. It was published in1962.

On the other side of the continent, Robert Specht, an aspiringscreenwriter, was working in the Los Angeles office of BantamBooks. Each month a stack of paperback books arrived from the EastCoast; one month Specht picked The Immortals to take home with himand, he later told me, decided immediately that he wanted to make itinto a movie.

Four years later he was story editor for Everett Chambers on the PeytonPlace television series, and he persuaded Chambers to go in with him toobtain the film and television rights to The Immortals. They contactedmy agent, who by then was Harry Altshuler (Fred Pohl had gone out of theagenting business). We agreed upon a two-year option with modestpayments every six months. I got three checks but the fourth never came.I wrote Bob Specht, who said that Chambers had dropped out, that he hadtried the novel on every producer, director, and major actor inHollywood without success, but that some new possibilities had openedup. We agreed upon a new contract thatto everyones surpriseactuallydeveloped into a film.

ABC had decided that it would make its own television films rather thanrenting them from Hollywood and use them on what it called the ABC-TVMovie of the Week. Suddenly TV scripts were in demand, and Bob Spechtsold Paramount on The Immortals. It was filmed in the spring of 1969as The Immortal, featuring Christopher George, Barry Sullivan, RalphBellamy, Carol Lynley, and Jessica Walter, directed by Joseph Sargent,and broadcast the following September. It was scheduled to be the firstfilm in the new ABC series, but at the last moment was edged out bySeven in Darkness with Milton Berle.

Apparently the film rated well (It ranked fourth in theeighty-city Nielsens, Bob told me later), although, to be sure, thefilm had changed the focus from the social change created by the realityof immortality for a few to a chase story in which Christopher Georgewas pursued by rich and powerful aging people lusting for his blood. ABCdecided to commission an hour-long series, also called The Immortal,for the following year. Only Christopher George was carried over fromthe film (Bob Specht didnt even get considered for story editor), andABC decided to play the series for adventure instead of science fiction.But I wont go into that.

During the interim Bob Specht called and said that ABC wanted anovelization of the screenplay to promote the series. I was offeredone-third of the royalties and said, Go ahead. At the last minute Iwas phoned by Bantam to say that it couldnt find a writer to do thenovelization, so I wrote it myself. It may have been the only time thatthe author of a novel wrote the novelization of the script (our directorof Special Collections called it cruel and unusual punishment). Myconsolation is that it was easy money: I wrote it in six days so that itcould be published before the series started in September 1970.

Flash forward about twenty-five years. Some interesting things happenedin the interim: Bantam Books reprinted the novel in 1968 and PocketBooks in 1979, and it got translated into Italian, Japanese, German,Portuguese, and French, and reprinted in Great Britain. But then, in themid-1990s I got a telephone call from a woman who said she was callingfrom Disney Pictures and was looking for the person who owned thefeature film rights to