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Michael Crichton (born October 23, 1942) is an American author, film producer,
film director, and television producer. His books sold over 150 million copies
worlds wide, and among his best-known works are techno-thriller novels, films and
television programs. His works are usually based on the action genre and heavily
feature technology. Many of his future history novels have medical or scientific
underpinnings, reflecting his medical training and science background.
Crichton was born in Chicago, Illinois, to John Henderson Crichton and Zula Miller
Crichton, and raised in Roslyn, Long Island, New York. Crichton has two sisters,
Kimberly and Catherine, and a younger brother, Douglas.
He attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as an undergraduate,
graduating summa cum laude in 1964. Crichton was also initiated into the Phi Beta
Kappa Society. He went on to become the Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellow from
1964 to 1965 and Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge
in the United Kingdom in 1965. He graduated from Harvard Medical School, obtaining
an M.D. in 1969, and did post-doctoral fellowship study at the Jonas Salk Institute
for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, from 1969 to 1970. In 1988, he was
Visiting Writer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While in medical
school, he wrote novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson. A Case
of Need, written under the latter pseudonym, won the 1969 Edgar Award for Best
Novel. He also co-authored Dealing with his younger brother Douglas under the
shared pen name Michael Douglas. The back cover of that book contains a picture of
Michael and Douglas at a very young age taken by their mother.
His two pen names were both created to reflect his above-average height. According
to his own words, he was about 2.06 meters (6 feet 9 inches) tall in 1997. Lange
means "tall one" in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a famous
17th century dwarf in the court of Queen Consort Henrietta Maria of England.
Crichton has admitted to having once, during his undergraduate study, plagiarized a
work by George Orwell and submitted it as his own. According to Crichton the paper
was received by his professor with a mark of "B−". Crichton has claimed that the
plagiarism was not intended to defraud the school, but rather as an experiment.
Crichton believed that the professor in question had been intentionally giving him
abnormally low marks, and so as an experiment Crichton informed another professor
of his idea and submitted Orwell's paper as his own.
Crichton has been married five times and divorced four times. He has been married
to Suzanna Childs, Joan Radam (1965-1970), Kathy St. Johns (1978-1980) and
Anne-Marie Martin, the mother of his only child, daughter Taylor. Crichton is
currently married to Sherri Alexander.
 Literary
techniques
Crichton's works are frequently cautionary in that his plots often portray
scientific advancements going awry, commonly resulting in worst-case scenarios. A
notable recurring theme in Crichton's plots is the pathological failure of complex
systems and their safeguards, whether biological ("Jurassic Park"),
military/organizational ("The Andromeda Strain") or cybernetic ("Westworld"). This
theme of the inevitable breakdown of "perfect" systems and the failure of
"fail-safe measures" can be seen strongly in the poster for Westworld (slogan:
"Where nothing can possibly go worng .." (sic) ) and in the discussion of chaos
theory in Jurassic Park.
Contrary to certain perceptions, Crichton is not anti-technology. Although his
works often portray scientists and engineers as arrogant and closed-minded to the
potential threat a technology represents, there is always a well-educated author
surrogate who states that failures are simply part of the scientific process and
one should simply maintain a state of awareness and preparation for their
inevitable occurrence.
The use of author surrogate has been a feature of Crichton's writings since the
beginning of his career. In A Case of Need, one of his pseudonymous whodunit
stories, Crichton used first-person narrative to portray the hero, a Bostonian
pathologist, who is running against the clock to clear a friend's name from medical
malpractice in a girl's death from a hack job abortion.
That book was written in 1968, nearly five years before the Supreme Court's
landmark decision that legalized abortion nationwide in the United States, Roe v.
Wade (1973). It took the hero about 160 pages to find the chief suspect, an
underground abortionist, who was created to be the author surrogate. Then, Crichton
gave that character three pages to justify his illegal practice.
Some of Crichton's fiction uses a literary technique called false document. For
example, Eaters of the Dead is a fabricated recreation of the Old English epic
Beowulf in the form of a scholarly translation of Ahmad ibn Fadlan's 10th century
manuscript. Other novels, such as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park,
incorporate fictionalized scientific documents in the form of diagrams, computer
output, deoxyribonucleic acid sequences, footnotes and bibliography. However, some
of his novels actually include authentic published scientific works to illustrate
his point, as can be seen in The Terminal Man and the more recent State of
Fear.
Movies and
television
Crichton has written and directed several motion pictures:
Year Title Notes
1972 Pursuit A TV movie
1973 Westworld
1978 Coma
1979 The Great Train Robbery Directed/ wrote screenplay
1981 Looker
1984 Runaway
1989 Physical Evidence
1993 Jurassic Park co-wrote screenplay
1994 ER Creator/Writer/Executive Producer
1996 Twister co-wrote screenplay
Pursuit is a TV movie written and directed by Crichton that is based on his novel
Binary.
Westworld was the first feature film that used 2D computer-generated imagery (CGI)
and the first use of 3D CGI was in its sequel, Futureworld (1976), which featured a
computer-generated hand and face created by then University of Utah graduate
students Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke.
Crichton directed the film Coma, adapted from a Robin Cook novel. There are other
similarities in terms of genre and the fact that both Cook and Crichton are
physicians, are of similar age, and write about similar subjects.
Many of his novels have been filmed by others:
Year Title Filmmaker/Director
1971 The Andromeda Strain Robert Wise
1972 Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues Paul
Williams
1972 The Carey Treatment (A Case of Need) Blake Edwards
1974 The Terminal Man Mike Hodges
1993 Rising Sun Philip Kaufman
1993 Jurassic Park Steven Spielberg
1994 Disclosure Barry Levinson
1995 Congo Frank Marshall
1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park Steven Spielberg
1998 Sphere Barry Levinson
1999 The 13th Warrior (Eaters of the Dead) John McTiernan
2003 Timeline Richard Donner
He has written the screenplay for the movies Extreme Close Up (1973) and Twister
(1996) (the latter co-written with Anne-Marie Martin, his wife at the time).
Crichton is also the creator and executive producer of the television drama ER. In
December 1994, he achieved the unique distinction of having the #1 movie (Jurassic
Park), the #1 TV show (ER), and the #1 book (Disclosure, atop the paperback list).
Crichton has written only three episodes of ER:
Episode 1-1: "24 Hours"
Episode 1-2: "Day One"
Episode 1-3: "Going Home"
Computer
games
Amazon is a graphical text adventure game created by Michael
Crichton and produced by John Wells under Trillium Corp. Amazon was released
in the United States in 1984 and it runs on Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64,
and the DOS systems. Amazon was considered by some to be a breakthrough in the
way it updated text adventure games by adding color graphics and music. It
sold more than 100,000 copies, making it a significant commercial success at
the time.
In 1999, Crichton founded Timeline Computer Entertainment with David Smith. Despite
signing a multi-title publishing deal with Eidos Interactive, only one game was
ever published, Timeline. Released on 8 December 2000 for the PC, the game received
poor reviews and sold poorly.
Awards
Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, 1969 (A Case of
Need; written as Jeffrey Hudson)
Association of American Medical Writers Award, 1970 (Five Patients)
Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture
Screenplay, 1980 (The Great Train Robbery)
The American Association of Petroleum Geologists Journalism Award, 2006 (State of
Fear)
A dinosaur, Crichtonsaurus bohlini, was named after him in honor of Jurassic
Park.
Crichton was named to the list of the "Fifty Most Beautiful People" by People
magazine, 1992
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Michael
Crichton - Manifesting Generator - Biography
