Soylndra, touted by President Obama to produce green jobs, goes belly up at a cost of $335 MILLION for U.S. taxpayers. Soylndra produced solar panels; eleven hundred California workers will lose their jobs. Soylndra is the third U.S. solar company to go broke in less than a month.
Can taxpayers recoop some of those lost stimulus millions?
How about converting part of the Soylndra property to a drive in theater lot. And show old classic pctures such as Soylent Green.
Instead of solar panels have the plant produce to “soylent green” food rations. For publicity, sell the soylent green food rations at the drive in along with candy and popcorn.
For humanitarian purposes and Obama’s penchant for “leading from the rear” the Obama government can buy and stock pile soylent green food rations for the next humanitarian war akin to Libya. Dropping green wafers from the sky is something any NATO plane can do without high level U.S. intelligence.
Remember the movie Soylent Green? With Obama at the helm of the economy that may be the future Obama seeks for America. Instead of exceptionalism of military, economic and cultural pre-eminence America’s future may be worse off that the most distressed areas of Africa where war and poverty are rampent.
DrCameronjackson@gmail.com
Soylent Green is a 1973 American science fiction film directed by Richard Fleischer. Starring Charlton Heston, the film overlays the police procedural and science fiction genres as it depicts the investigation into the brutal murder of a wealthy businessman in a dystopian future suffering from pollution, overpopulation, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate due to the greenhouse effect. Much of the population survives on processed food rations, including “soylent green”.
The film, which is loosely based upon the 1966 science fiction novel Make Room! Make Room!, by Harry Harrison, won the Nebula Award for Best Dramatic Presentation and the Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film in 1973.
In the year 2022, the population has grown to forty million people in New York City alone. Most housing is dilapidated and overcrowded, and the homeless fill the streets and line the fire escapes and stairways of buildings.
Food as we know it in present times is a rare and expensive commodity. Most of the world’s population survives on processed rations produced by the massive Soylent Corporation, including Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow, which are advertised as “high-energy vegetable concentrates.” The newest product is Soylent Green, a small green wafer which is advertised as being produced from “high-energy plankton.” It is much more nutritious and palatable than the red and yellow varieties, but, like most other food, it is in short supply, which often leads to food riots.
Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) is a New York City Police Department detective in the 14th Precinct who lives in a dilapidated, cramped one-room apartment with his aged friend and roommate, Solomon “Sol” Roth (Edward G. Robinson, in his last film). Roth is a ‘book,’ a former professor who searches through the now-disordered remnants of written records to help Thorn’s investigations. He tells Thorn about the time before the ecological disaster and population crisis, when real food was plentiful; however, Thorn is generally not interested in such stories, finding most of them too hard to believe.
Thorn is assigned to investigate the murder of William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotten). At the crime scene, he finds Simonson lying in a pool of blood after having been struck multiple times in the back of the head. Instead of looking for clues, the poorly paid detective helps himself to the wealthy man’s food, liquor, shower (with real hot water and soap), and books. He questions Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young), an attractive 21 year old concubine (euphemistically known as “furniture”) who comes with the apartment, and Simonson’s bodyguard, Tab Fielding (Chuck Connors), who claims that he was told to escort Shirl on a shopping trip when the attack took place.
Returning to his apartment, Thorn gives Roth the Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report, 2015 to 2019, a two-volume work which he took from Simonson’s apartment. Thorn returns to work and talks to his superior officer, Lieutenant Hatcher (Brock Peters), telling him that he suspects it may have been an assassination, since nothing was stolen from the apartment and the murder seemed professional. He finds it odd that the luxury apartment’s sophisticated alarm and monitoring electronics happened to be inoperative on the night of the murder, and his bodyguard just happened to be out of the apartment at the time.
After questioning the bodyguard’s ‘Furniture’, Thorn returns to his own apartment to eat a meal of the purloined food, where Roth tells him that Simonson was a member of the board of directors of the Soylent Corporation. When he presents Roth with a spoon of strawberry jam surreptitiously palmed from Fielding’s apartment, Roth tastes it and declares that Fielding’s “furniture” is eating some “$150 a jar” strawberry jam, which is an out-of-place luxury for the mistress of a bodyguard. Thorn returns to question Shirl again; she tells him that Simonson became deeply troubled in the days before his death, even taking her to church. Thorn later attempts to question the priest about Simonson’s confession, but the priest is almost catatonic with exhaustion and has a hard time remembering Simonson, even though such a rich man would have stood out among the impoverished people who normally frequent the church. When the priest remembers Simonson, he tells Thorn that the memory of what Simonson told him was haunting, and is unable to describe what Simonson said. Fielding later murders the priest, suspecting him of telling Thorn about Simonson’s confession, and ensuring there is no possibility of him telling anyone else. After Thorn begins uncovering evidence as to why Simonson was murdered, New York State’s Governor, Joseph Santini (Whit Bissell), who was once Simonson’s partner in a high-profile law firm and who is running for re-election (as shown in the campaign posters on such walls as that of Hatcher’s office), instructs Hatcher to close the investigation. However, Thorn continues his investigation into the murder. When Thorn is on riot duty during the distribution of rations, Simonson’s murderer is dispatched by the Soylent Corporation to kill him during an inevitable food riot, and fires several shots at Thorn, but then the attacker is crushed to death under the “scoop” of a riot control vehicle.
Roth examines Soylent’s oceanographic reports at the “Supreme Exchange,” a library and gathering place for fellow “books.” Roth and his fellows finally realize that the reports indicate a “horrible” truth which, despite reading it for themselves, they find nearly impossible to believe. The worldwide oceans have died and can no longer produce the plankton from which Soylent Green is officially said to be made. The leader of the Supreme Exchange tells Roth that they must have proof of what the Soylent Corporation is doing before they bring their findings to the Council of Nations (ostensibly, a reformed United Nations). Unable to live with what he has uncovered, Roth opts for assisted suicide at a government clinic in Madison Square Garden, which had been converted for mass euthanasia, a process referred to as “going home.” As Roth is dying, he listens to light classical music and watches video clips of Earth long ago when animal (sheep, deer and horses) and plant life were thriving and there was no pollution. Thorn forces the staff to allow him to see and talk to Roth. During Roth’s final moments, overcome with emotion, he tells Thorn the secret of Soylent Green, and begs him to follow his body to the processing center, and report back to the “Supreme Exchange.”
Thorn sneaks into the basement of the assisted suicide facility, where he sees corpses being loaded onto waste disposal trucks. He secretly hitches a ride on one, which is driven to a heavily guarded waste disposal plant. Once inside the plant, Thorn sees how the corpses are processed into Soylent Green wafers. Thorn escapes and heads for the “Supreme Exchange,” but is ambushed by Fielding and several other gunmen who are waiting for him. He retreats into a cathedral filled with homeless people. After a desperate fight through throngs of sleeping homeless, Thorn kills Fielding.
When police backup arrives, the seriously wounded and nearly hysterical Thorn confides to Hatcher the horrible secret behind Soylent Green, finally urging him to spread the word: “Soylent Green is PEOPLE!”
[edit]Cast
Charlton Heston as Thorn
Leigh Taylor-Young as Shirl
Chuck Connors as Fielding
Joseph Cotten as Simonson
Brock Peters as Hatcher
Paula Kelly as Martha
Edward G. Robinson as Sol Roth
Stephen Young as Gilbert
Mike Henry as Kulozik
Lincoln Kilpatrick as The Priest
Roy Jenson as Donovan
Leonard Stone as Charles
Whit Bissell as Santini
Celia Lovsky as The Exchange Leader
Dick Van Patten as Usher #1
[edit]Production
The screenplay was based on the 1966 Harrison novel Make Room! Make Room!, which is set in the year 1999 with the theme of overpopulation and overuse of resources leading to increasing poverty, food shortages, and social disorder as the next millennium approaches. Harrison was contractually prevented from having any control over the screenplay and kept from knowing during negotiations that it was MGM buying the film rights;[1] He discussed the adaptation in Omni’s Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies (1984, ISBN 0385192029; edited by Danny Peary),[1] noting that the “murder and chase sequences [and] the ‘furniture’ girls are not what the film is about — and are completely irrelevant” and answered his own rhetorical question “Am I pleased with the film? I would say fifty percent.”[1]
While the book refers to “soylent steaks”, it makes no reference to “Soylent Green”, the processed food rations depicted in the film. The book’s title was not used for the movie since it might have confused audiences into thinking it was a big-screen version of Make Room for Daddy.[2]
This was the 101st and last movie in which Edward G. Robinson appeared. He died from cancer twelve days after the shooting was done, on January 26, 1973. Heston was the only member of the crew that Robinson told (just before filming the scene of Robinson’s character’s death), knowing that this knowledge would deeply affect Heston, and therefore his playing of the scene.[3][4] Robinson had previously worked with Heston in The Ten Commandments (1956).
[edit]Music
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In the film, after the aged Roth learns the truth about Soylent Green, he decides he “has lived too long”, and states that he is “going home”. By this, he means that he is going to sign up for government-assisted suicide. When Roth arrives at the clinic, he is asked to select a lighting scheme and a type of music for the death chamber. Roth selects orange-hued lights and “light classical” music. When he goes to the death chamber, a selection of classical music (Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Grieg) plays through speakers, and films are projected on large screens. As Thorn arrives and gazes upon his dying friend, Dick Van Patten utters his famous line “It’s truly unfortunate that you missed the overture.”
The “going home” score in this part of the film was conducted by Gerald Fried and consists of the main themes from Symphony No. 6 (“Pathétique”) by Tchaikovsky, Symphony No. 6 (“Pastoral”) by Beethoven, and the Peer Gynt Suite (“Morning Mood” and “Ã…se’s Death”) by Edvard Grieg. As the music plays, scenes of majestic natural beauty are projected on film screens: “deer in woods, trees and leaves, sunsets beside the sea, birds flying overhead, rolling streams, mountains, fish and coral, sheep and horses, and lots and lots of flowers — from daffodils to dogwoods.” Amidst the music and the scenes of nature, Roth remembers the world as it once was. Yet, he cannot peacefully take his last breath as he is pained by the beauty lost and cannot stand the awfulness of the real world. Roth struggles to tell Thorn about the secret of “Soylent Green”, (muttering “The Corporation… they’re processing people”) urging him to “prove it” before taking his dying breath.
[edit]Critical response
Time called it “intermittently interesting”; they note that “Heston forsak[es] his granite stoicism for once” and assert the film “will be most remembered for the last appearance of Edward G. Robinson…In a rueful irony, his death scene, in which he is hygienically dispatched with the help of piped-in light classical music and movies of rich fields flashed before him on a towering screen, is the best in the film.”[5] New York Times critic A.H. Weiler wrote “Soylent Green projects essentially simple, muscular melodrama a good deal more effectively than it does the potential of man’s seemingly witless destruction of the earth’s resources”; Weiler concludes “Richard Fleischer’s direction stresses action, not nuances of meaning or characterization. Mr. Robinson is pitiably natural as the realistic, sensitive oldster facing the futility of living in dying surroundings. But Mr. Heston is simply a rough cop chasing standard bad guys. Their 21st-century New York occasionally is frightening but it is rarely convincingly real.”[6]
As of June 2011, Soylent Green has a 73% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 30 reviews.[7
