THE SCIENCE OF HOLLYWOOD

And yet tickets are readily available for Sphere on the second night of its release at my local multiplex, where almost everything else is sold out (even As Good As It Gets, the bathetic Jack Nicholson movie that’s been around since Christmas). Somehow, other people managed to figure out ahead of time the truth it cost me $ 9 to uncover: Sphere is awful. It combines brain-numbing stupidity with deep pomposity in an unholy mix that says a great deal about the current state of Hollywood.

This is a movie that should never have been made, and never would have been were it not for the conversion of Michael Crichton into a brand name so powerful, even his detritus becomes the subject of a Hollywood bidding war. Crichton is a peculiar pop-culture figure, a gimmicky futurist who writes cautionary tales about the evils of science, a Buchananite who has become rich beyond imagining in an industry increasingly dependent on free international markets. A doctor by training, he howled against Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan at a Hollywood press conference before the premiere of ER in the summer of 1994.

He’s also a jack-of-all-trades, though incompetent at most of them. He has directed several movies, ranging from the stillborn (The First Great Train Robbery) to the painful (Looker, about a gun that hypnotizes you). The catalogue he produced for a Whitney Museum exhibition of Jasper Johns’s work is notoriously bad. His primary career is, of course, as a novelist, a trade he has been practicing for three decades now. But though Jurassic Park Space, Too Many Columns, Column 1 Invalid lengthand The Lost World made him enormously famous, he has remained a lousy storyteller. Almost invariably, his novels take the same form: They are “reports” on a calamitous event that unfolds over the course of a week — with one teacher character who understands the unfolding plot and guides the stick-figure protagonist (a stand-in for the reader) through a porous conspiracy.

So why is Crichton so successful? For one reason: He is an intellectual popularizer whose subject is high technology, something like a third-wave version of Will and Ariel Durant. He’s always a year or so ahead of the curve — which is to say, he takes notions and concepts floating around the Science Times section of the New York Times and figures out ways of turning them into melodrama. What made Jurassic Park so vivid, despite its lax plotting, was not the dinosaurs but Crichton’s portrayal of chaos theory. In the midst of Disclosure, his 1994 novel about the sexual harassment of a male executive, Crichton offered what was then the most convincing and vivid explanation of cyberspace. The novel’s story was largely developed through e- mail, which seemed very exciting and cutting-edge at the time. Rising Sun, his obscenely offensive 1992 novel about how sinister Orientals were taking over America, revolved around the possibility of manipulating and editing digitized images.

But it’s more entertaining to think about Crichton’s ideas than to see them executed on screen, as the disappointing depiction of cyberspace in the film version of Disclosure (also directed by Barry Levinson) proved. The talking gorillas he dreamed up in Congo were even worse. And now comes Sphere, universally considered his silliest book, full of black holes and time travel and killer jellyfish and mysterious aliens who grant humans magical powers — all of which would have seemed cliche-ridden when Rod Serling was producing The Twilight Zone back in the early 1960s.

Four scientists find themselves in a habitat on the ocean floor examining a spaceship. It turns out to be an American ship from the future, and in its payload is a big golden sphere.

The sphere grants the people who come close to it the power to make their dreams real. Now, why would an alien sphere allow itself to be brought to earth to give Sharon Stone the power to make manifest her fantasies? Never mind — eventually Dustin & Co. will join hands and wish to forget everything they’ve seen because mankind just isn’t ready for that sort of power. The End.

Rod Serling fancied himself an intellectual, and The Twilight Zone was at times like a secular sermon whose message was: “Be nice to people.” So, too, by dint of the fact that he actually reads some non-fiction, Crichton is Hollywood’s idea of a cutting-edge intellectual. After all, he’s a doctor and an art critic and a novelist and he’s very famous. Leave it to Barry Levinson — a once-amusing director now terminally afflicted with the desire to deliver stern lectures to the American people about how they watch too much television — to imagine that Sphere is actually a profound work about human nature.

Until Jurassic Park became a huge hit, Sphere had found its proper home in the remainder bins at the bookstore. When Crichton became a brand name, Hollywood sought desperately to capitalize on him, without ever asking the question: What’s at all interesting about a big alien sphere on the bottom of the ocean? And if this sphere is so powerful, why doesn’t it come bobbing to the surface like a big balloon?

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15. Actually, when I went to the movies last night and witnessed the horror of Sphere, I had wanted to see The Wedding Singer, a movie starring nobody special and directed by a novice but there wasn’t a ticket to be had. Tonight I did manage to get into The Wedding Singer, and again I was astonished to find that the crowds knew what they were doing: This exuberant, unassuming little movie is the best American comedy since Jerry Maguire.

I find my enthusiasm all the more astounding because the movie’s star is Adam Sandler, a Saturday Night Live alumnus whom I have always heartily detested. But Sandler is nothing short of wonderful in the title part, playing a nice kid from Jersey in his mid-twenties whose sole ambition is to start a family with his longtime girlfriend. Though he is a talented singer and songwriter, he would be happy to stay in Ridgewood performing before contented guests at banquets and receptions.

But when his girlfriend skips their wedding, Sandler’s world crumbles. At his first post-dumping gig, a wedding reception, he weeps his way through a mournful version of Madonna’s “Holiday” before bursting into a rendition of the J. Geils Band’s classic “Love Stinks” — and gets decked by the bride’s father at the finish. He is befriended by Drew Barrymore, who serves the food while he sings; she is marrying her longtime boyfriend and asks Sandler to help her prepare for her nuptials. This being a romantic comedy, complications ensue.

The Wedding Singer is set in 1985, which gives the movie a distinctive sound, look, and feel — director Frank Coraci and screenwriter Tim Herlihy evoke the 1980s with such affection and good humor that one is reminded what a high-spirited time those years really were. The Wedding Singer is knowing without being horribly ironic; the characters have ludicrous hairstyles and silly clothing, but they are given their due and not condescended to.

Sphere, which takes itself with deadly solemnity, was made because Hollywood was blinded by its own greed. The Wedding Singer, which is no more than an inspired jape, was made for love. And somehow, moviegoers knew this before they had ever seen either one.

Editor of the editorial pages of the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.