men we love: remembering Michael Crighton

My parents wouldn’t let me watch “Jurassic Park” when it came out. Too scary. We saw it on VHS a few years later, on a 14” tv the night we moved into our new house, less than ideal viewing conditions. Over the last year I’ve watched it twice - once on Blu-ray, once on a 40” flat screen in HD - and it’s hard to believe it was filmed in 1992. Thanks to Steven Spielberg, the mind-blowingly awesome animatronic dinosaurs beat a lot of recent computer effects (digitally remastered “Star Wars” I’m looking at you), but it took author Michael Crighton’s bestselling original novel to bring them, literally, to life. Crighton dreamed of a world where the impossible is not only possible, it’s an amusement park.

Crighton’s reasonably feasible plot in which dinosaur DNA is extracted from insects trapped in amber stemmed from his impressive academic career. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1964, and earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1969. Also impressive: he proved a professor was intentionally giving him low marks by turning in a paper plagarized from George Orwell (he got a B-). He went on to write a slew of books and a number of films. He earned an Emmy, a Peabody, and has a genus of dinosaur named in his honor (Crightonosaurus).

Crighton died November 4 at age 66 from a private battle with cancer. He is survived by his wife Sherri and daughter Taylor.

It’s hard to honor someone I never knew much about. But “Jurassic Park” and its sequels instilled me with the belief that science is only limited by our imaginations (and failsafe measures will probably fail). So tonight I’m making a plate of dinosaur shaped Fun Nuggets (with ketchup!) and watching a marathon of the best dinosaur films of all time. Here’s to you, Michael Crighton, I’ll raise my glass every time the velociraptors chase down the paleontologists in that field of tall grass in “The Lost World.“

If you don’t have time to watch “Jurassic Park” or any of Crighton’s other films (I also dig the uber-scary “Sphere” and the epic “The 13th Warrior”), check out this clip of Crighton speaking on nature as religion: