Full Transcript
Do you have any idea the insane run that Michael Kiteon was on when he gave us Jurassic Park? Michael Kiteon, of course, is the author who wrote the book that the original film Jurassic Park was based on. And as this post says, he is the only author to in the same year have the number one best-selling book, a number one film at the box office, and the highest rated show on TV. And all three of those were three totally different things. This is not a case where he wrote a book and then the film drove sales of the book. The book was the sequel to Jurassic Park. The film was Congo and the TV show was ER. And here's the thing. If er is all that Michael Kryton had done, that alone would have made him a legend. At one point, this show was averaging more than 30 million viewers per episode watching it live. That show by itself generated $3 billion in revenue. And that's the thing nobody remembers him for. That's because the Jurassic Park film became the highest grossing film of all time. At this point, the franchises gross something like $7 billion. Then that next year, 1996, he would pull off that trifecta again with the TV show er the film Twister and the novel Airframe. And already some of you are like, "The Twisters franchise is his?" Yeah, he wrote the screenplay. Hey, you know that HBO show Westworld that some of us were obsessed with for a while? Also, Michael Kiteon, that was based on a 1973 film that he wrote and directed. Seriously, who else has had a comparable career? This guy graduated from Harvard Medical School. In 1992, People magazine ranked him as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. He started writing his books when he was still in college. And I think what he discovered when he was at Harvard was that you needed just enough science in your work to make people feel smart. Because the science in Jurassic Park is junk, but it feels real. Just real enough to be interesting. And I actually think that's what you don't get in the Jurassic World franchise. Because in the original Jurassic Park, every few minutes you get some new interesting science fact about the way predators hunt or how DNA works. where the modern films have all the spectacle and the action and the star power, but they don't have that extra little bit that makes you feel smart for watching it. But that's the kind of thing you only get from somebody that had this unique career, a legitimate academic who, while he was still at Harvard, decided he was going to dedicate his life to writing action adventure pulp.