Hollywood & Spine Archive: The Monsters at the Beginning, Middle and End of This Book

I really wish George Gipe had lived to do more than three novelizations. They were...weird. He seemed kinda weird, considering his resume. But not bad weird! The kind of weird that nicely complements a novelization to a really fun, beloved movie such as this. There are times I want more Gremlins media for adults, but let's be honest: nothing's ever gonna live up to those first two. Especially not at Warner Bros. Discovery. (originally published 12/2/2021)

Gremlins by George Gipe (based on the screenplay by Chris Columbus) (Avon, 1984)

The pitch: A suburban kid gets a mysterious creature for Christmas that comes with three rules - all of which are promptly broken, leading to a delicious horror-comedy romp.

The author: George Gipe (1933-1986) penned two scripts with no less than Carl Reiner and Steve Martin (1982's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and 1983's The Man with Two Brains) and kicked off a potential career as a blockbuster novelizer with Gremlins. He'd pen adaptations of Back to the Future and Explorers a year later, and tragically died of a bee sting a year after that, at 53 years old.

The lowdown: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes deems Gremlins "a minor classic," which I find pretty accurate. It may never get selected for the National Film Preservation Board's registry, but its knife-edge mix of screams and silliness is pretty striking. (Within weeks of its release, it was a legitimate footnote in film history: the Motion Picture Association of America introduced the PG-13 rating as a result of the gory effects in both this movie and that summer's Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.)

What's even more interesting is that Chris Columbus' script, in its earliest forms, tipped into full horror. Gizmo, the lovable Mogwai who unwillingly spawns a thousand much less cuddly brethren, broke the care-and-feeding rules in the original draft (no bright lights, no water, no eating after midnight) and became the devious lead gremlin Stripe. (Executive producer Steven Spielberg, no doubt inspired in some way by E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, cannily suggested Gizmo retain his cute ways for the finished film.) And that early, unfilmed version of Gremlins had a higher body count: Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) would have seen his mom killed by the creatures - her severed head bouncing down the stairs - and a local McDonald's would have seen the people of Kingston Falls turned into meals for the big-eared baddies.

Balance of tone is certainly a concern in novelizations, too - particularly George Gipe's short but notable body of work in the field. His Back to the Future had all the basic outlines of what made the 1985 sci-fi/comedy one of the most beloved films of all time, but without clearer visions of the film's aesthetic (or its star, who was very likely replaced while Gipe was writing), fans got a very alternative BTTF on the page. Fortunately, Gremlins hits a little closer to the mark, in part because Gipe's style and the final film share a certain sardonic darkness.

But there's a really odd undercurrent at play here, too. I can't prove it definitively - the author doesn't have any papers in libraries I'm aware of - but I get the sense that Gipe was a bit of a tinkerer. Like, to the point where the differences from film to book aren't just a by-product of the typical novelization process; they're calculated, authorial decisions that wouldn't necessarily make sense in a film and don't always work in prose either.

Gipe is likely solely responsible for the backstory we're given as to where Gizmo comes from: the Mogwai species was created by a wise intergalactic inventor named Mogturmen, with the intention of spreading peace and harmony. Unfortunately, in addition to the glitches inherent in the Mogwai's chemistry - aversion to sunlight, multiplication when wet, metamorphosis when eating after midnight - there was another flaw: most of them are complete assholes. (Gizmo is a "minority Mogwai," always cuddly and cheerful so long as he doesn't eat when he's not supposed to. As best as I can recall, none of this was relevant to what I saw of the Gremlins prequel cartoon that terrorized TVs in 2023.)

A lot of the character-building moments with Gizmo (and later, the rude Mogwai that sprout from his back when water gets spilled on him) are presented as weird, semi-philosophical conversations translated from their alien tongue. Stripe certainly comes off as calculating in the movie, but here he's prone to a lot of whinging about discovering his true potential and getting the eventual upper hand on Gizmo like the speech of a Bond villain. (It's established that these new Mogwai don't immediately know what make them stronger or weaker, and in fact one of them gets fried when it sneaks out one night and can't get back in before the sun rises.) It's an interesting way to fill pages, but I'm not sure it's an ideal reading experience.

Weirder still is Gipe's shuffleboard approach to supporting character moments, placing characters and dialogue where they never were in the movie and threatening to upset the dramatic balance. When Billy is introduced fretting over his broke-down car and being late for work, his neighbor Mr. Futterman (Dick Miller) offers a ride in his trusty snowplow; it's then, before Billy even knows who Gizmo is, that Futterman gives his speech about gremlins causing havoc on technology. (This scene in the book takes place before Billy's dad finds Gizmo - the first scene in the film. It's a choice.) When Billy attempts to woo his love interest Kate (Phoebe Cates) and discovers she doesn't celebrate Christmas, she immediately explains her motivations with that harrowing monologue Cates gives in the last third of the film, about her father's tragic death in a freak accident on December 25.

Gipe also places Kate and others closer to the action of the film; she knows about Gizmo not long after he starts multiplying - that's about midway through the story - and Billy's dad (Hoyt Axton), the inventor with a heart of gold, makes it to Kingston Falls during the gremlin rampage and partakes in the department store fight against Stripe. None of these changes are wrong, and some are even kind of fun (like an extra night of Mogwai mischief that causes Billy to miss a date with Kate, which to my knowledge was never planned for the film). But if you know the film forwards and backwards - and on the off-chance that you picked up Gipe's similar style in the Back to the Future novelization - you might get the sense that Gipe is trying to "fix" Gremlins, which wasn't broken to begin with!

Another one of Gipe's most annoying literary tendencies is having characters speak dialogue, often to themselves, that should be thoughts instead - Billy does this while figuring out where Stripe might be hiding when he escapes their house, to name just one example - or building word count by packing unnecessary extra lines like snowdrifts. (The back-and-forth that accompanies Billy and Kate escaping Dorry's Tavern or working to blow up a movie theater full of gremlins were particularly interminable.) Gipe could certainly be compelling in a pinch. (For instance, Billy's young friend Pete (Corey Feldman) is tasked with reminding his science teacher not to let the Mogwai he's studying eat after midnight. In a two-word chapter - "Pete forgot" - you get a laugh as well as some suspense over what is inevitably going to go down in that classroom.) But a lot of times he's creating a lot of shaggy weirdness where there doesn't need to be. Gremlins is already plenty weird on its own.

Look, I don't want Hollywood & Spine to be a laundry list of "the film does this, the book does this" - but I hope I'm bringing up some food for thought that adaptation is not simply padding or making a story longer for a 250-page book. Novelizations should still pack the kind of cohesion and continuity you'd want when spending an hour and a half or more watching the story.

The cutting room floor: Beyond the script revisions, Gremlins was also whittled down considerably from its original running time before it was loosed into theaters. The home video special features give this away, as did a preview cut director Joe Dante donated to the UCLA film library that was screened once more in New York in the 2010s. (I saw it and it was pretty neat!)

The main additional scenes, which are retained in the book, concern a conspiracy in Kingston Falls: Mrs. Deagle, the unkind rich harridan, is working with the bank and a chemical company to seize properties and build a factory in their place. (Her hilarious death at the hands of the gremlins stops that plot cold, of course - listen closely to news report toward the end of the film and you'll hear an offhand reference to this.) Kate is working diligently to drum up support to stop Deagle's plot, while staying one step ahead of her and Billy's slimeball bank manager boss Gerald (Judge Reinhold).

Gerald's comeuppance was ultimately deleted from the film but appears in the book as well: he locks himself in the bank vault to protect himself from the little creatures, ranting and raving all the while. Warner Bros. reportedly made Dante pick between Kate's tragic dead-dad monologue or this scene, which took place immediately after. (It was cut before previews but reinstated for television; the screen version, where Reinhold plays a kind of capitalist Colonel Kurtz instead of a loopy, shocked weirdo as in the book, is much funnier.)

A few other details in the book would have to be ironed out in the final film. Here, the gremlins outright kill Mr. Futterman with his snowplow instead of shake him up really badly. (This was also fixed by post-production ADR in that closing news report.) His death happens shortly after Billy tries to warn the police of the gremlin threat, only to be mocked mercilessly for the randomness of the Mogwai rules. (Their conversation is used almost verbatim in a scene from Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a film whose MAD magazine charms I cannot recommend enough.)

Props must also be given to a fun full-circle moment made possible by Rand Peltzer being present for Billy's climactic fight with Stripe in the department store. Rand distracts the lead gremlin with a well-timed (for once) squirt of shaving cream from his would-be invention, the Bathroom Buddy. (A fun aside: it didn't exactly play out this way in the book, but the first cut of the final battle with Stripe let Billy be the hero instead of Gizmo. Initially, the furry Mogwai pulls a chain that only opened part of the blinds that let the sunlight in, leaving Billy to somersault out of Stripe's line of gunfire and finish the job. Poor Zach Galligan got upstaged by a puppet!)

The last word: I don't want to suggest that George Gipe's take on Gremlins is not interesting. Ultimately, the Christmas miracle here is how the book's choices are an example of what makes novelizations so bizarre and fascinating. Modern Internet fan culture is besotted with plenty of takes amounting to how stories should've been told or changed - and as a book, Gremlins is a fine reminder that a fair amount of us don't really know how to do better than a filmmaker's own vision. But may authors keep trying in novelizations to come.