Toomorrow (film)

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Toomorrow
"Toomorrow" (1970).jpg
Original UK quad poster
Directed by Val Guest
Written byVal Guest
Produced by
Starring
Cinematography Dick Bush
Edited by
Music by
Production
company
Lowndes Productions Limited
Distributed by Rank Organization
Release date
  • 27 August 1970 (1970-08-27)
Running time
95 minutes
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish

Toomorrow is a 1970 British science fiction musical film directed and written by Val Guest and starring Olivia Newton-John. [1] [2]

Contents

Plot

"John Williams" is an alien Alphoid, who has adopted human form and lived on earth for millennia. Galactic Control instructs him to investigate a strange vibration they have detected coming from planet Earth. The sound is being produced by Olivia and her pop band "Toomorrow", from sonic vibrations emitted by their special amplifier, a "tonaliser". Williams abducts the group and has them entertain the Alphoid population on his home planet. When the group returns to Earth, Olivia wakes up and remembers a strange dream.

Cast

Production

James Bond film producer Harry Saltzman entered into a three-picture deal with Don Kirshner. [3] Kirshner had been the initial producer of the musical output from the Monkees. However, according to director Val Guest, Kirshner and Saltzman grew to loathe each other during the increasingly troubled production. [4]

Saltzman hired novelist David Benedictus to write the first draft, but after 30 pages neither Saltzman nor Guest felt it was working. Guest conceded that it was "very well written, but a little bit too 'high-faluting'". Saltzman advised Guest to write a new script. However, unbeknownst to Guest, Saltzman never informed Benedictus. Only during production did Benedictus learn that a new script had been commissioned. [5]

Guest says casting Olivia Newton-John was Saltzman's idea.

I was very taken with Livy [Olivia], I thought she had everything going for her in this fresh bubbly way; she was worried about filming, but she got into it pretty soon. [Don] Kirshner wanted Livy to have a love scene in it and Harry came to tell me about this and I spoke to Livy and she went berserk! She didn’t want a love scene, it wasn’t that sort of a picture and “No I can’t.” In fact she burst into tears about it... She was very unhappy about it and finally, we never did the love scene. But all through it was quite obvious that Livy was going places because she was bubbling, bouncy, was quite a looker, it was obvious that she [was as] cute as a button, was going places. [6]

Guest said in an interview: "That was Harry Saltzman’s great idea. That was the first space musical." [6]

Lawsuit

Guest had been working on the film for six months beyond the time specified for in his contract and still hadn't been paid, nor had anyone else who worked on the film. Saltzman didn't have the money nor did his company "Sweet Music" which was in Switzerland. Guest waited until after the film's premiere at the London Pavilion to obtain an injunction. The film could not be shown until Guest and the other people who worked on the film were paid. According to Guest in 1994, he still had not been paid and the injunction was still in effect. [7]

As a result, the film, which took about two years to make, was shown (in the London Pavilion, then a cinema) for only one week, then was shelved. Aside from isolated showings in the British forces cinemas during 1971 and early 1972 on British military bases along with a copy in a travelling cinema in Scotland, and one showing in Los Angeles in 2000, Toomorrow was not seen in public for over four decades.[ citation needed ]

Reception

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "Harry Saltzman's extravagance (wide-open sets and sub-2001 effects) and Don Kirshner's fixed conception of young people's tastes in entertainment ... combine to produce a glossy and empty-headed pop fantasy, as computerised as the Alphoids' soulless music. To avoid any comparisons with his previous creation, The Monkees , Kirshner's new supergroup of four includes a winsome starlet and a token negro. They appear as incompatible as one would expect, and are required to do little else than try to put conviction into lines like 'Hey! Any of you cats mind a groove? You got it', which crop up throughout. If this antiseptic crew had really dared to set foot on the stage of the Round House during a pop festival, dressed up like canaries and singing their cute songs of love and tears, they would have been booed, quite deservedly, off it again." [8]

Kine Weekly wrote: "The mixture of modern pop-scene with ultra-modern space-fiction has been entertainingly mingled and presented with speed and certain touches of adult humour that sophisticate the otherwise juvenile atmosphere. The whole affair has been conceived and directed in a happy mood and the Alphoids, with their magical powers, are an intriguing invention. The four young people who make up the group. Toomorrow, Olivia Newton-John, Benny Thomas, Vic Cooper and Karl Chambers, all have pleasing personalities and appearance and put over several numbers. Roy Dotrice lends distinctions to the role of John Williams, the humanised Alohoid, and Margaret Nolan has great fun with an Alphoid called Johnson who is detailed to pose as a dumb blonde." [9]

In a March 1971 edition of the British music magazine NME , Newton-John commented "Our film died a death and it was all a bit of a shambles. But it was a good experience". [10]

Variety wrote: "As a yarn it's pretty contrived, but as an excuse for some reasonably tuneful music and for a frolic it gets by. Dotrice as the space man is a suave emcee to the proceedings but it's not the thesp at his best. The Toomorrow group is fresh and cleancut, with girl warbler Olivia Newton-John being particularly promising as a screen potential. Tracey Crisp, Imogen Hassall and a flock of other shapely birds are around to adorn the screen and tangle up romantic sidelines." [11]

Writing in Filmink , Stephen Vagg called the film "a notorious flop". [12]

The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 2/5 stars, writing: "A lightweight musical fantasy, the contrived plot is sweetened enormously by some sophisticated humour, extravagant production design and expert direction by genre doyen Val Guest." [13]

Kim Newman wrote in Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems: "The psychedelically bizarre sci-fi content (cue expensive effects work from John Stears) is no more important to the pop musical hijinx than, say, the space ambassador business used in the earlier British sci-fi pop musical Gonks Go Beat . Toomorrow is really a weirdly middle-aged attempt to make a 'happening' youth film built around a cobbled-together-for-this-movie group, and as concerned with student protest sit-ins (remember them?) as saving the Alphoid race. ... Toomorrow is inoffensive and has nothing to say, but remains a fascinating relic from that period when hopeless entertainment industry squares were trying to get hip and hook the affluent but disaffected youth audience. Costumes, hairstyles, aliens, spaceships, disco lights and student décor provide acute visual reminders of those precise two weeks (in September 1970) when the film was in cinemas." [14]

Home media

Don Kirshner died in January 2011, and in March 2012 the movie was released on DVD in the UK by Pickwick having licensed the film from the estate of writer and director Val Guest. The DVD release was of low quality: it was sourced from an inferior video element and the audio is of marginal quality, with audio on one stereo channel only. In 2023 the film was released on DVD in the UK by Screenbound Pictures in an improved remastered version with mono sound in both right and left channels.

See also

References

  1. "Toomorrow". British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 18 March 2024.
  2. "Toomorrow". BFI. Archived from the original on 12 July 2012.
  3. Dietz, Lawrence (23 September 1968). "The Monkees' Man Invades the Kiddie Ghetto". New York . 1 (25): 46–47.
  4. Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2007). Film Talk: Directors at Work. Rutgers University Press. pp. 36–37. ISBN   9780813541471.
  5. Brosnan, John (1978). Future Tense: The Cinema of Science Fiction. Macdonald and Jane's. p. 192. ISBN   9780354042222.
  6. 1 2 Fowler, Roy (1988). "Interview with Val Guest". British Entertainment History Project.
  7. Weaver, Tom (2003). Double Feature Creature Attack: A Monster Merger of Two More Volumes of Classic Interviews (reprint ed.). McFarland & Company. p. 123. ISBN   9780786413669.
  8. "Toomorrow". The Monthly Film Bulletin . 37 (432): 190. 1 January 1970. ProQuest   1305828268.
  9. "Toomorrow". Kine Weekly . 634 (3281): 7. 29 August 1970. ProQuest   3127047714.
  10. Tobler, John (1992). NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1st ed.). London: Reed International Books Ltd. p. 224. ISBN   978-0600576020. CN 5585.
  11. "Toomorrow". Variety . 260 (5): 15. 16 September 1970. ProQuest   962888213.
  12. Vagg, Stephen (22 August 2025). "Forgotten British Film Studios: The Rank Organisation 1968-1977". Filmink. Retrieved 22 August 2025.
  13. Radio Times Guide to Films (18th ed.). London: Immediate Media Company. 2017. p. 949. ISBN   9780992936440.
  14. Newman, Kim (2022). "Toomorrow". In Upton, Julian (ed.). Offbeat: British Cinema's Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems (2nd ed.). Headpress. pp. 273–275. ISBN   9781909394933.