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But is it a man hunt or a machine hunt? Is Harry Benson only the tragic victim of scientific arrogance or, as he says shortly after the operation, "a fallen man," precursor of a generation that may have no memory of what it was to have been human? Crichton does not indulge in such speculation. He is a scrupulous genre writer who is content to dress up old tales with new gadgetry. Andromeda Strain, for example, was in some sense a rewrite of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man is an update of Frankenstein. Can Dracula, or Wolfman in sheep's clothing, be far behind?
With his rosy, unlined face, he looks like a 15-year-old boy standing on a chair. But then Michael Crichton, M.D., ducks his 6 ft. 9 in. under the lintel of his office door and casually maneuvers a lovely young actress back into the Los Angeles sunshine. Just as casually he diagnoses the actress's problems. "She can't play a tough_ _ _ _. " The prescription? "I'll have to rewrite her part."
Dr. Crichton is learning the movie business. Right down to those hard-boiled comments as familiar on film sets as in the operating room. Not that he ever spent much time in surgery. At Harvard, Crichton used a pen more often than a scalpel. Before graduating he had published half a dozen paperback thrillers under the name of John Lange. He also researched Five Patients, his documentary about the workings of a large medical center. In 1968 A Case of Need won the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award. For that book —a swiftly plotted story biased in favor of abortion—Crichton used the name Jeffry Hudson, who was a dwarf in the court of Charles I.
A Case of Need, turned into a movie, is currently touring as The Carey Treatment. So is another Crichton novel, the recently released Dealing, a tale of the collegiate marijuana trade. The original novel, by "Michael Douglas," was actually a hasty collaboration between Crichton and his younger brother Douglas.
Novels, film scripts, and now directing, have naturally proved more profitable than medical practice. The film rights alone for The Terminal Man have brought Crichton $350,000 so far. Success steered him into psychoanalysis and broke up his five-year marriage. Although he walks with the slight stoop of a man concerned with not bumping his head, he seems to like towering over everyone else. On the L.A. party circuit, only the Lakers' Wilt Chamberlain could challenge this distinction. Crichton's tastes run to the sound and costly. He has a Mercedes-Benz sedan to replace a Porsche, which he found too cramping, and recently purchased a house designed by Richard Neutra.