The attitude to spoilers appeared to be rather different in 1979, if magazine coverage of Moonraker, Alien and more are anything to go by…
NB: The following contains spoilers for Moonraker and Alien. The irony is not lost on us.
It’s amazing what you can find just by browsing through old magazines: they’re a time capsule of information, cultural tastes and changing attitudes. And if a 1979 issue of Cinefantastique is anything to go by, they also give an idea of how entertainment writers used to handle the concept of plot spoilers.
A quarterly publication that specialised in sci-fi, fantasy and horror, Cinefantastique found itself in the middle of a vintage period for genre film at the end of the 1970s. The seismic impact of 1977’s Star Wars saw film studios clamour to release space-related films of their own, including 20th Century Fox’s Alien and EON’s rushed-into-production James Bond sequel, Moonraker.
The spring 1979 edition of Cinefantastique came out just as these movies (and more besides) were being released – Alien and Moonraker made their debuts in May and June respectively. Despite this, the magazine was rather relaxed about giving away some pivotal plot details.
For one piece, journalist Frederic Albert Levy sat down with Michael Lonsdale, the actor who played Moonraker’s wonderfully droll villain, Hugo Drax. About halfway through the interview, Lonsdale is asked, point blank, “How does Drax die?”
If this question came up in an interview with a Bond actor today, a publicist would probably step in and cut the conversation short. Or the actor, having had it drummed into them that discussions of plot details are off-limits, would politely change the subject. Instead, Lonsdale gave an equally direct answer: “He is shot by one of those special Bond darts and thrown out of the satellite.”
It’s equally revealing that Cinefantastique published the response as-is; again, a 21st century outlet would almost certainly cut Lonsdale’s answer before it went into print.
The same magazine is equally casual in its coverage of Alien. In a brief article which includes quotes from the reliably irascible screenwriter Dan O’Bannon (“If all you know about science fiction is Star Wars, then all you can possibly do is rewrite Star Wars”), the sci-fi horror’s plot is discussed in detail from beginning to end. It discusses actor John Hurt’s encounter with a facehugger, the specific way a spore it lays gestates in his body and erupts from his chest, and how it grows into a humanoid xenomorph and starts killing everybody. It also discloses that a crewmember is revealed to be an android when his head’s knocked off, and that Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, survives to the final reel and encounters the monster again in an escape vessel.
Read more: Alien | The birth and mysterious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
The detailed plot description appears to be based on an early synopsis, since the article even spoils moments that aren’t in the finished film. There’s mention of Tom Skerritt’s Dallas being “encased in a cocoon” and begging “for someone to kill him” – a scene that was famously shot but cut because director Ridley Scott felt that it interrupted the final act’s pace.
The feature’s description of Ripley’s final battle is also markedly different. To quote:
“While the creature examines an animal specimen, Weaver stabs it in the back, its potent, searing blood melting through the ship’s floor. Somehow, the creature is sucked out of the shuttle (a la Goldfinger), yet manages to attach itself to the outer hull. When it commences to eat its way back inside, Weaver applies the ship’s rear thrusters and burns it to a crisp.”
If this was indeed what was in consideration at one stage, it was likely cut due to budgetary constraints; a similarly grisly fate was once planned for Veronica Cartrwright’s character, but this too was dropped.
Elsewhere in the same magazine, a somewhat belated – and scathing – review of John Carpenter’s Halloween describes most of the murders and the climax in detail. A review of Philip Kaufman’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers remake, although wonderfully written (“the death of love in a moment of sleep…”) is similarly revealing, right down to a brief description of its jolt of an ending.
Another feature suggests that, while journalists were fine about revealing plot points in new or yet-to-be-released films, at least one movie studio had tried to keep story details out of the public eye. Paramount Pictures’ 1979 eco-horror Prophecy, directed by John Frankenheimer, was said to have been shot under “a blanket of secrecy,” with its plot a “closely guarded secret” and even its title only announced close to release – it was instead filmed under the working title, The Windsor Project.
Paramount’s secretiveness didn’t appear to be to generate an element of surprise for audiences, however, but rather to avoid rival studios from stealing the same premise. (Roger Corman, for example, rushed Death Race 2000 into production when he learned about Rollerball; Corman’s low-budget dystopia beat the latter to cinemas by several weeks in 1975.)
It’s possible that this edition of Cinefantastique was published just before the public’s attitude to spoilers began to gradually change, in fact. At the time it came out, Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back had begun filming, and its plot – or at least a key element in it – was famously a jealously guarded secret. Creator George Lucas ensured his big story reveal wasn’t in the script, and that only he, director Irvin Kershner and actor Mark Hamill knew about it. (Darth Vader actor David Prowse may have let the cat out of the bag early, but coverage of his ill-advised blabbing was largely confined to local newspapers.)
The air of secrecy surrounding Empire, and the hugely positive response which greeted it, turned Star Wars from a phenomenally successful 1970s movie into an ongoing franchise worth billions. And it’s perhaps there, with The Empire Strikes Back’s increased stakes, cliffhanger ending and sensational plot twist, that a more reverent attitude to spoilers first began.
In the internet age, particularly as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has grown into a pop cultural behemoth, writers and audiences alike have become increasingly sensitive to spoiling films’ plot points. By now, films are protected by embargoes; previews of TV shows are often accompanied by guidelines over what can be discussed in a review and what can’t; actors and filmmakers, closely watched by publicists, are now well-versed in keeping secrets. Today, there’s a kind of etiquette around spoilers – hence the little line in bold at the top of articles such as this.
Whether we’ve collectively become too spoiler-averse or not, we’ll leave it up to you, dear readers, to decide. But as mentioned above, it’s certainly hard to imagine an actor in a franchise movie like Moonraker talking so openly about his character’s death today. Amazon MGM is said to be working on the next Bond movie as these words are being typed; if whoever’s cast as that film’s villain were to give away its ending to a journalist, they’d likely have one of the biggest corporations on the planet bearing down on them within days…
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