George
Pal’s 1960 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Time
Machine is considered a classic. It featured Rod Taylor’s first leading man
performance and won an Oscar for best special effects. However, if I had
realized the kind of cult following the film still claims, I would have pushed
harder for a backlist promotion for the fifty-fifth anniversary last year (it’s
a long story, with no pay-off). It all comes down to the machine itself.
Several fans have lovingly reproduced life-sized facsimiles, but nobody can
match the perfectionist details of animator Rob Niosi. However, if you really
want to make a functional time travel vehicle, physicist Ron Mallet is the man
you need to talk to. Their complimentary obsessions are explored in Jay Cheel’s
How to Build a Time Machine (trailer here), which screens
during DOC NYC 2016.
Niosi
had been fascinated with the George Pal film and distinctive prop, ever since
he saw the film at the theater where his father worked as an usher. The fifty-some
intervening years were clearly good to Niosi. He now lives in an old
Hollywood-style mansion and can afford to have custom parts hand-crafted out
brass and copper rather than the wood and tin used for the original.
Niosi
seems to enjoy the building process so much, he may never finish his time
machine. In contrast, Mallet would dearly love to build a functional time
machine. Like Niosi, he takes inspiration from the George Pal film and the
original novella, but he is motivated by the tragic early loss of his beloved
father. Mallet focused his research on black holes, because their time-warping
characteristics definitely applied to his long-term goal, but it was a more academically
respectable manifestation of extreme theoretical physics.
Frankly,
Mallet makes a shockingly convincing case some kind of time travel might be
possible. Of course, he is building on the work of eccentrics like Albert
Einstein. Yet, rather poignantly, he concludes it will most likely not allow
him to visit with his father, as he hoped.
In
fact, Mallet emerges as quite a sad, tragic figure, albeit a brilliant one. On
the other hand, Niosi seems like a bit of loon, but a relatively well-adjusted
one, who brings good business to various pipe-bending and metal-dying
facilities. If he enjoys tinkering with his time machine than he should just
have at it.
