Talk:Silent Running

Soundtrack

The article states that "an LP record (LP-81072) was released on Decca DL7-9188, and was later reissued etc". Which is the catalogue number? LP-81072 or DL7-9188? What do the two numbers mean? -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 12:57, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

A google search for either "LP-81072" or "DL7-9188" will lead you to the answer to your question (Originally released as Decca DL7-9188, later available on reissue by Varese Sarabande. LP-81072). [1] Hope that helps. SpikeJones (talk) 15:49, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Why has reference to the 65daysofstatic alternate soundtrack Silent Running (album) been removed? If the album is notable enough for its own page, surely it's notable that it was written for this film as an alternate soundtrack? When it was allowed on, there were references as well [2] 62.31.250.115 (talk) 09:33, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

I believe it was deleted as non-notable and self-promoting, a quite reasonable decision. However, since the band does have a Wiki-article, I think that makes it notable enough. I have removed the self-promotion from the item, and moved it out of the "soundtrack" section into another section, since it has nothing to do with the movie's actual soundtrack. Beyond My Ken (talk) 09:51, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Drones

"The drones - a concept that initially inspired Trumbull to write the treatment for Silent Running - were the subject of much speculation when the film was released. Everyone was trying to figure out how he managed to create these life-like machines. "I've even had professional special effects people look at the pictures and say, 'You must have done that with pneumatics, or hydraulics, or some kind of offstage control,'" Trumbull told Cinefantastique in 1972. The truth is, he had robot costumes made out of plastic, operated from the inside by several young amputees whose bodies ended below the waist. Trumbull got the idea from a character in Tod Browning's classic Freaks (1932) who walked using only his arms and hands." http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=18660&rss=mrqe —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.47.138.122 (talk) 03:40, 5 February 2011 (UTC)

Today Trumbull addressed this at a public lecture. He asserted the drones were based upon the person Johnny Eck -- not the character he played in Freaks. He did however illustrate this with a frame from the film, possibly the easiest image of Eck to obtain. MartinSFSA (talk) 15:10, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

The drones were clearly models for ArtooDeetoo in Star Wars. Should this not be mentioned? MrDemeanour (talk) 16:34, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

Only if you can cite an independent relialbe source for this. - SummerPhD^v2.0 14:42, 6 April 2019 (UTC)

No one actually explains how the drones work. How could they walk by amputees whose bodies end below that waist? They waddle when they walk but where does the balance come from? 151.203.70.159 (talk) 20:58, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I didn't realize I wasn't logged in. I am 151.203.70.159 Philhal451 (talk) 21:02, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

As I recall from a vaguely remembered "Making Of" show, the amputee actors were walking on their hands, inside the drones "legs."

Also in some of the static scenes like the poker game, there was a hole cut in the floor so another actor could operate the drone.

Note that one of the drones has a longer body than the others, presumably to accommodate the actor's size. Cptbutton (talk) 13:26, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

American Airlines

Didn't American Airlines object to their name being used in the movie, given that they are depicted as an evil corporation responsible for the destruction of the last bits of Earth nature? S_peakF_ree ^(talk) 12:55, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

No. Pan Am (Pan-American) was getting so much attention (because of 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)), American took what it could get. They weren't seen as evil, merely a business decision. American Airlines of course is still flying even if in financial distress. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 18:30, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

I thought it was the President of the United States who ordered the destruction of the domes, so that the government would no longer be spending taxpayer money to tie up the commercially-owned assets of American Airlines. Only a politician would make a limited-view decision thinking only of his reelection, while sacrificing the Earth's future to people elected after he leaves office!!! GBC (talk) 00:48, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Reference

The PDF in reference nr. 6 (AFI's 10 Top 10 Ballot) is password-protected.

File:Making of Silent Running Drone.jpg Nominated for speedy Deletion

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Berkshire communcation voice

Joseph Campanella is the voice between Valley Forge and Berkshire. 143.232.210.38 (talk) 18:29, 18 July 2012 (UTC)

Nationality

WP:MOSFILM states that a film's nationality should be included in the lead section. WP:CITELEAD states that sources are not always required for the lead section if the relevant information is already included in the article. As Silent Running is quite obviously an American film (listed by the AFI, made by Universal Studios, etc) there is no contentious issue of the film's nationality. The AllRovi link also clearly notes its nationality. According to Wikipedia policies, no further citation is needed to clarify the film's nationality. 88.110.251.59 (talk) 20:11, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

ISFDB listing

@MarnetteD: I didn't edit the external link because the previous one wasn't working (it worked just fine for me), but because it was linking to the author's bibliography at ISFDB. This error likely wasn't noticed by whoever added the link because the author only has the one book on the database. But it still left the reader having to click three times to get to the target page. If you like, we can compromise by having the link go to the page for the work itself, using the {{isfdb title}} template. This will give:

• Silent Running title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

That still makes the reader click twice to get through to the target page, which is a bit unnecessary given that the book was never re-published. Then again, the film's 50th anniversary is just a few years away, so maybe linking to the title page is the better approach in the long run.

Are you okay with me making this change? NewYorkActuary (talk) 20:57, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Oh you did the right thing NewYorkActuary. My first edit was a mistake made because I didn't properly check what you had done - then I tried 4 different things (using the show preview which I sometimes forget to do - heehee) and couldn't get it to work. I would prefer the link go directly to the target page so readers don't have to hunt for it and if the EL template doesn't make that possible then that is just the way things go. Thanks for doing things right and my apologies for messing with it. Another 50th anniversary for something I saw in the theaters originally - jeepers I'm feeling old :-) Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 21:31, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Only a million dollars

I'm fairly sure a bootleg copy of the making of documentary on Youtube isn't a good enough source to include in the article but for what it is worth: starting at 3m30 Mike Gruskoff says "... we only had a million dollars to make it with ..." youtu.be/9xtsNdLj1F4?t=208 Douglas Trumbull |Silent Running (1972) the making of. Maybe someone can find another source that mentions the budget or maybe the making of itself can be refenced as a film or episode reference. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 02:14, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

The making of Silent Running documentary has an IMDB page which should be enough to make an episode reference and it was inlcuded on the 2002 DVD so equally a reference could be made to that. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 14:04, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

You seem to have progressed very rapidly from not wanting to base an edit on a bootleg copy to not having a problem with it. - SummerPhD^v2.0 16:25, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Please discuss the issue. I cannot improve based on a source I have not seen. I cannot/will not change a cite from an IMDb source to a documentary that I have not seen, based on a sentence fragment provided by an anonymous user who claims to have extracted it from a bootleg. - SummerPhD^v2.0 16:44, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

It exists as a standalone documentary, and was well regarded enough to appear on the DVD. It wouldn't have been okay to include the Youtube link and I didn't. I don't claim that IMDB is a reliable source on every details but that is no reason to never link it or to not use it even as an indication something exists.

In any case I've found a better link, the website of the people who made silent running documentary. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 16:49, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

I understand that the documentary exists. I am also aware of an unofficial cuts of it that have been circulating. (The version I saw some years ago was a bad recording of a showing of the documentary, intercut with other material from long after the fact. A work of love, no doubt, but not reliable.) If someone has the actual documentary, citing that documentary is fine. My underlying concern is that we are misinterpreting material.

While the $1 million figure is widely circulated (on fansites, blogs, forums and such), the more reliable the source, the more hedging is involved. The best sources say that the film was one of five made "semi-independently" by new directors "for $1 million or less". Reliable sources tend to give variants of this or state more generically that the film was "low budget" or produced "on a shoestring".

That the producer states he had "only $1 million to work with" (or something similar) tells me the assumption he was working on; the film was being made for $1 million or less. Between that point and the finished product, there is a lot of territory. Certainly the budget drove many decisions: filming location on the Valley Forge, hanger standing in for dome, etc. What the final tally ended up being is what is normally quoted as a film's budget (reporting the amount actually spent, not budgeted, as the "budget").

I don't know what the final tally on this film was. Maybe it was $1 million. Maybe the producer knew $1 million was the cap and wound up at $900,000. Maybe the studio was pleased with dailies and "found" more money for post-production and re-shoots. I don't know. I just want us to be accurately representing the sources we have, rather than assumptions (however widely made or with even the best of intentions) that might or might not be accurate. - SummerPhD^v2.0 17:46, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

We can go down the rabbit hole about production budgets, we can talk about gross spend, net spend, tax write-offs and rebates, even spending on marketing, costs of prints and advertising. Then we can do it all again because Hollywood Accounting. I understand there are reason to be skeptical of the claimed costs of every film, not just this one.

The producer is on record as saying the film cost a million dollars. That's better than we have for a lot of wikipedia film articles (most often a figure from Box Office Mojo, that came from who knows where, and sometimes if your lucky a claim from Variety or the LA Times). I quoted directly from the source, but perhaps a longer quote would be better.

Narrator introduces the documentary and says a few things about film making. A person is shown on screen:

I'm Mike Gruskoff producer of Silent Running. Making a film like Silent Running is an enormous undertaking because we only had a million dollars to make it with. We needed to modify the aircraft carrier to look like a space freighter. We needed the robotic section of the film, but it is like a military operation, if you want to call it that. The most important thing is getting good people and letting them make their own decisions. 

The text of the production section could be changed to include some of the direct quote from producer Michael Gruskoff so that readers can better understand the figure might not be exact to the dollar but again, as much as you can trust any other movie. I'm more than happy for you to write additional prose in the article body to give context but I'm only saying we should include budget information that would be good enough for any other film article. I was interested to learn that the film was made for relatively little money (far less than 2001 A Space Odyssey) and a figure even if not perfect gives context to the Production section which already mentions the limited budget forced them to make changes. So lets find a way to present the information that serves readers best. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 19:41, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Legacy

There might be enough sources to create a section about the Legacy and influence of this film. Duncan Jones director of Moon and Andrew Stanton director of Wall-E are both on record citing Silent Running as an influence. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 13:34, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

Oh, now I see the article effectively had a section covering a lot of the legacy already but instead of trying to find sources and improving it or at least keeping any of the better parts, some deletionist with a chainsaw removed all of it. -- 109.76.150.183 (talk) 19:03, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

In popular culture

Dialogue appears in Photosynthesis theme from the 2006 album World Of Sleepers of the ambient electronic band Carbon Based Lifeforms. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.128.98.139 (talk) 10:06, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Re-use

The shots of the ship with the biodomes was reused in a promotional video for the 1973 TV series The Starlost, including a shot of one of the drones ambling around. However, these shots bear no resemblance to the "Earthship Ark" that appeared consistently from the first episode onward of the 16-episode series. GBC (talk) 00:51, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Name change?

IMO this article should be moved to "Silent Running (film)" and the disambig page "Silent running (diambig)" should be moved to just "Silent running" and that list becoming the primary topic. Not sure of this, so I'm not bothering with a Requested Move. I will if other people think it's worthwhile.

I don't think the film is the primary subject for this string. It's a 50 year old film (although it is a classic). I'm thinking that the submarines ref is probably as notable as the film, or near and then you also have other meanings.

• Google (regular search) favors the film, very much so. Of the first 20 results, all 20 are for the film (3 of those are selling it). (The next 10 is only 6-4 in favor of the film, but the non-film 4 are not subjects of articles.)
• Google Books top 20 has 4 for the film 6 for submarines, 10 for other. (There aren't a lot of uses of the term in Google Books, and some of the lower part of the top 20 get a bit into the weeds, like "to create the most silent running motor, do such-and-such...".
• Google Ngrams puts "Silent Running" and "silent running" pretty close to tied. By far most of the "Silent Running" references are probably to the film, but not all -- there are some books with that name. Effectively all of the "silent running" refs are not to the film, since there's no actual silent running or reference to it in the film I'm pretty sure (and you can add in "Silent running", which has a much lower incidence, to that). Here is the Google Ngram. As you can see, the term was (relatively) hugely popular around WWII, more than any time since. Since the film came out, it's had maybe a slight edge over the non-fully-capitalized version. Except since 2010; don't know why, could be an artifact. Anyway, the area under the curves is what mostly matters IMO.
• Google Scholar top 20 gives 6 for the film, 3 for submarines, 11 for other. (About half or so of those are just straight use of the words -- "silent running motor" etc., while about half are article titles and so forth.)
• On the Jstor top 20, eight are to Bruce Dern: A Memoir. I think its fair to treat that as a single reference, which gives 7 for the film, 2 for submarines, 4 for other.
• Google Trends is not going to help here, as the terms are identical except for capitalization. Too bad.

Can't think of anywhere else to get data. So, I dunno. All in all looks somewhat close to a tie, which would mean the menu (disambig) would be the primary topic. It depends on how much you weigh regular google search results.

(Then there's some things that only matter a tiny bit; to the tiny extent they do matter, they favor what I'm proposing. The disambig page does have two other entries (a song and band), plus four unlinked songs that devolve to bluelinked album articles. (Not counting two more entries linked to the film and one to the submarine concept, and there's also a pointer to the film Run Silent, Run Deep which I'd guess a non-zero number of searchers are looking for.) But very few people are searching for these things I figure. Also, I'm pretty sure that "silent running" as a phrase was inserted into the language during that big WWII section you see on the Ngram, and most of the non-submarine uses occur because of that. According to the AFI, "The working title of this film was Running Silent. As noted by Filmfacts, the title Silent Running refers to a nautical term describing a submarine..." But really, who cares? We only care what people are searching for, not etymologies.) Herostratus (talk) 19:39, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Based on the principle of least astonishment I'd prefer to have something substantial at the main name Silent Running and I do not think having a Disambig page there instead would be an improve. Better to please some of the people some of the time than compromise and add an extra step for everyone by dumping them at a Disambig page. -- 109.79.164.242 (talk) 21:10, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Meaning of title?

As I write this, several days after the death of the film's director, Douglas Trumbull, the movie is getting some renewed attention. The article could use a mention as to why its title is "Silent Running," which is more associated with the operation of a submarine. I haven't seen the movie in decades. If someone knows there a scene where, while escaping, the dome spaceship has to go silent to avoid detection, please add a sentence somewhere, either the plot or intro. 5Q5|^✉ 12:27, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

I haven't seen it recently either, but Lowell deliberately steers the ship into Saturn's rings in the hope that the other ships will assume it was destroyed and not bother looking for it. Presumably he also shuts down all exterior transmissions. As it turns out, they do come looking for the ship and find it. Cptbutton (talk) 04:14, 12 February 2023 (UTC)

More items

Information that I find lacking from this article and which I'd like to know more about:

• the buggies/carts/ATVs the astronauts race around in on the Valley Forge
• the suits and the patches the astronauts are wearing

Maybe someone could provide, it would be much appreciated. Thank you, Maikel (talk) 10:30, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

I was going to say they were Amphicats, but a bit of web research shows that they aren't, because the movie buggies have four wheels, while Amphicats have six wheels. I found some stuff on a web search that claims they were specially built for the movie and destroyed after filming. Cptbutton (talk) 05:38, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Dating

AFAIK no date for the action of the film are given onscreen - written or verbal. Thus, no date should be placed in the plot section. If Trumball intended it to be set in 2001 as a tribute to Kubrick's film then that could be placed in the production section but it needs a proper reference - not an unsourced parenthetical. MarnetteD|Talk 01:07, 14 January 2023‎ (UTC)

Reason for Earth's Deforestation.

The reason for Earth's deforestation is explained by Dern's character during an argument with the other crew members "Because nobody cares.". If that's enough for the movie it should be enough for the article. This being an "eco film" real harmful human activities continuing are expected to cause such deforestation. For the article to assert the cause is "unspecified" is untrue, and undermines the theme of the film, and lets man off the hook. We are causing it more surely than any unspecified disaster, and it's not too late to stop it. Wikipidians will argue against including it. But the dialog states "Because nobody cares.", and that should be enough. 2600:8807:5400:600:D0B2:3983:9366:1A8B (talk) 03:47, 23 April 2024 (UTC)