Monday, March 4, 2024

In Praise of Progress: Futuretech Film Productions

                                 

                        "We make the films of the future, today."


Futuretech was founded by disgraced, would be movie mogul, Bernard Feeney, who in 1970, was fired from his high position at ABC Pictures for green lighting the grandiose musical biopic, 31 DAYS: THE WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON STORY (1970).  A critical and commercial failure that was pulled from theaters quicker than its subjects time in office.  

The loss of Feeney's job at ABC Pictures was a forgone conclusion, and he now found himself a pariah.  His friends in the film industry turned their backs on him, trying to avoid the stench of a dead man walking.

After a year of reflection, psychiatric counseling, and intense shock treatment, Feeney had a renewed hunger to return to the movie world, but the distance in time did not help and no studio would even offer a menial position to prove himself.  Feeney was a gadget buff, who would always be ahead of the curve on new technological wonders.  He was one of the first people to own a phone answering machine, a pocket-sized calculator, and one of those big foam hands.  He was intrigued by the computer revolution that he knew was on the horizon.  

When things were looking dark for any type of movie business return, Feeney met James Rembrandt, a technological wunderkind who built his own computers, word processors, and bird feeders.  Rembrandt also wanted to get his foot in the door of movie production, and in 1971 the two men formed Futuretech Film Productions.  

Futuretech would use Rembrandt's computers which were specially built, programmed and developed to handle every aspect of the movie making process.  From script to screen, with data fed to the machines from Feeney, Futuretech Film Productions would truly lead the way for the motion picture industry to enter a new dawn of movie production. 

Rembrandt developed numerous machines and computers to do the work of what would typically be the domain of dozens of hired workers.  The Script-Tomatron 2000 could write an entire screenplay in one hour.  The Locale-Locator could scout thousands of possible filming locations in minutes, the BudgetMaster could devise a concise budget and the Best Boy Finder lived up to its name and could find the best, Best Boy, to work on the film.




  

When all was said and done, Futuretech had over one-hundred completed scripts . . . None were ever produced.  Bernard Feeney left the movie business for good.

James Rembrandt rechristened the Script-Tomatron 2000, as the Nantucket 2000 and reprogrammed it to create dirty limericks.


There was a little-known precursor to the Script-Tomatron 2000 which dated back to 1961, The Script-O-Meter.






The idea of the Script-O-Meter was hatched and cultivated over a series of clandestine meetings, including at least one at the infamous Bohemian Grove.  Big wigs with the major film companies concocted a plan to invent a script machine, in order to circumvent working with temperamental human screenwriters.  Hiring the brilliant minds of those who had worked on the atomic bomb and early computer systems, future NASA scientists, the brainchild of the reservoir tip and the sharp wits behind the first underground revolving restaurant chain, Merry Go Under Ground.  





The Script-O-Meter had its preliminary test runs in the fall of 1962, but these proved to be a major disappointment, as no matter the information that was plugged into its file card system, the resulting scripts would turn out to be versions of THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938).  The Script-O Meter would go back the drawing board for a few years, but the project was shut down in 1963.





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