Playboy Interview: Michael Crichton

If you had met Michael Crichton three decades ago, you could easily have imagined a traditional future for him. A stellar student at the Harvard Medical School and armed with an impressive intellect, Crichton seemed headed for a life as a researcher or hospital administrator, the type of overachiever who would make his mark in science or public health. You never would have predicted the intense young med student would give up medicine and emerge as a dominant talent in fields of popular culture--a man who simultaneously topped all three key indicators of current American thought: the best-seller list, the box office tallies and the Nielsen ratings.

What's even more unlikely is that Crichton has done so not by pandering to mass tastes but by catering to uncounted multitudes who don't mind stretching their minds while being entertained.

Consider what Crichton has accomplished in publishing. Instead of writing cheesy, sex-filled potboilers that fill the best-seller racks, Crichton invented a genre aimed at smart readers. He elevated the basic thriller by setting it against a backdrop of important current issues--the Japanese juggernaut in "Rising Sun," sexual harassment in "Disclosure"--and creating books that were as informative as they were fun to read.

He's been no ordinary success in Hollywood, either. Some of the movies based on his books and screenplays, such as "Jurassic Park" and "Twister," have been tremendous box office successes. And the one TV show he created--"ER"--is arguably the smartest hour on TV ever to top the ratings.

Bouncing among books, movies and TV has worked well for Crichton. More than 100 million of his books have been printed, and his movies have grossed more than a billion dollars. In its 1998 survey of the wealthiest entertainers, "Forbes" put Crichton at number seven and mused that "he could probably sell the concepts in his head for a few hundred million dollars."

Part of Crichton's success stems from his knack for predicting trends and events and for honing in on hot issues with uncanny timing. "If you ever find in a publisher's catalog the announcement of an impending Crichton novel called 'Armageddon,' gather your loved ones and head for the hills," advised one journalist.

Crichton is best known for his "Jurassic Park," a work he began in 1984 and didn't complete until 1990. The book, about the re-creation of dinosaurs from DNA culled from mosquitoes preserved in amber, popularized the cloning controversy. After it was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, it became one of the highest-grossing films of all time, earning $912 million.

Then came the sequel, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which Spielberg also made into a movie. Crichton's most recent novel, 1996's "Airframe," is in part an indictment of airline deregulation and the resulting deterioration of maintenance and safety. In it, Crichton takes on the media--a subplot has journalists who cover a plane accident being less concerned about the veracity of their reporting than they are about the tidiness of their stories.

Crichton's eagerness to tackle controversial issues makes headlines, but it also generates criticism. "Jurassic Park" earned the ire of academics who claimed it was antiscience. Literary critics chide Crichton for his simplistic or two-dimensional characters, who get short shrift in favor of complicated plots and detailed situations.

Critics have been kinder to some of Crichton's other works, including his masterful study of Jasper Johns and a collection of autobiographical essays, "Travels." In the latter, Crichton describes his thrill-seeking past--he used to scuba dive, climb mountains (including a memorable hike up Mount Kilimanjaro) and swim with sharks. He was born in October 1942 in Chicago, half a mile from the hospital now used as the setting for "ER." He was the oldest of four children, and his relationship with his father, an executive editor at "Advertising Age," was often tense. As he writes in "Travels," "My father and I had not had an easy time together. We had never been the classic boy and his dad. As far as I was concerned, he was a first-rate son of a bitch."

When Crichton was in third grade, he wrote a nine-page play for a puppet show, which his father dismissed as the most clichéridden piece he had ever read. Undaunted, Crichton went on to publish his first article at the age of 14. In "The New York Times."

Crichton attended Roslyn High School in New York, where he was a Latin scholar, a student journalist and, already 6'7'', a basketball star. He still holds several records there.

He went to Harvard, where he planned to become a writer, but he says the English department was more interested in producing professors than cultivating writers. He switched to anthropology and took premed courses.

After graduating, Crichton spent a year lecturing in anthropology at Cambridge University before enrolling at Harvard Medical School. Until then he had been supported by his family, but he paid his way through medical school by writing thrillers under the pseudonyms Jeffery Hudson and John Lange. (The first was a pun on his height--which was now 6'9''; Hudson was a dwarf courtier in the service of Charles I.) "A Case of Need" by Jeffery Hudson won the 1968 Edgar award and was the first time Crichton addressed real-life events with what was to become his signature timeliness. The book is about abortion.

In 1969 Crichton published "The Andromeda Strain" under his own name while still in med school. He was paid $250,000 for the film rights. When he visited the movie set on the Universal Studios lot, a young director working there gave Crichton a tour: He was Steven Spielberg.

Two more thrillers followed in 1972 and 1973: The novel "The Terminal Man," in which an experimental surgical procedure goes awry, and the movie "Westworld," a science fiction story about a theme park of the future where tourists enact their fantasies. Crichton also later wrote and directed "The Great Train Robbery," which starred Sean Connery, who became a good friend.

Crichton has been married four times and has a ten-year-old daughter. In 1988 he married his current wife, Anne-Marie Martin, an actor and screenwriter who was his collaborator on the screenplay for "Twister." Crichton confesses that two of his previous wives made him see a psychotherapist, and he remains committed to therapy. It hasn't cured his workaholism, however; when Crichton is working, his wife has said, "It's like living with a body and Michael is somewhere else."

His work habits have paid off--Crichton is probably the highest-paid writer in America. A "Time" magazine cover story in 1995 touted him as "The Hit Man With the Golden Touch." He reportedly earned $10 million for the film rights to "Airframe" alone.

Despite his hectic schedule, Crichton found time to meet with Assistant Managing Editor John Rezek and Contributing Editor David Sheff for a rare interview. Here's their report:

"Crichton was concentrating on one of several current projects when we arrived at his Santa Monica office. (He has homes in Los Angeles, New York and Hawaii.) He was in postproduction for 'The 13th Warrior'--a movie due out this year that's based on his book 'Eaters of the Dead'--and he was getting ready to launch his own Web site, www.crichton-official.com.

"Though Crichton is famously tall, no one is quite prepared for just how tall he is. He greeted us looking freshly tanned from Hawaii, dressed in black trousers and a polo shirt, and led us through a labyrinth of small hallways that had the effect of making him seem even taller. You get the sense he seldom permits himself the luxury of straightening up.

"We talked in a bare office and, once settled in a desk chair, Crichton adopted an impressive physical concentration: He didn't fidget, he rarely moved though his face was always animated and expressive. He has a steady no-nonsense gaze and was once described as being 'affably diffident.' There were often long silences between our questions and his answers. Far from attempting to evade the questions, he was seeking the most difficult of responses: those that are simple, and responsible and honest."

[Q] Playboy: Your books often seem eerily prescient. How does it feel when they turn out to anticipate real-life events or trends?

[A] Crichton: It depends. People said Airframe was prescient when a United Airlines flight dropped 1000 feet over the Pacific. But there are a certain number of turbulence-related injuries every year, and that book was based on a couple of real incidents. The lesson: Wear your seat belt. When Twister came out in May of whatever year it was, all these tornadoes hit. Everyone said, "Isn't it amazing? He predicted it!" No, it's May--there are always hundreds of tornadoes. It's tornado season. On the other hand, certain things have surprised me. When I was working on The Great Train Robbery, I went into Victorian England, then an eccentric and obscure period to write about. At the time the book was published, the period had a revival. When I was writing Rising Sun, the Berlin Wall was coming down. Everyone was looking west; no one was looking east. People would ask what I was working on and I'd say, "Japan," and they'd ask, "Japan?" as if I had said "Sanskrit." But when the book came out it coincided with George Bush's trip to Japan and enormous interest in U.S.--Japanese relations because of the trade imbalance. I was as surprised as anybody else.

[Q] Playboy: How do you decide which political or social problems to tackle?

[A] Crichton: Certain issues just stay with me while others work themselves out. In the past, certain stories were fueled by my outrage, but then I would lose the outrage and wouldn't have the motor to do that project anymore. I'd outgrown it. Sometimes events bypass it. And sometimes somebody else does a project that makes the issues go away. Or at least I think, Well, that's been done, at least for now. I've been interested in doing something about political correctness, for instance. It gives me the creeps. But my sense is it's started to give a lot of people the creeps. I don't think I'll have to write about it. It will defeat itself because of its basic anti-American quality.

[Q] Playboy: In Disclosure, you took on sexual harassment. Some people feel it's a central issue in the Lewinsky--Clinton scandal. Do you agree?

[A] Crichton: Lewinsky certainly shows one thing I tried to address in Disclosure: the power of the victim. Feminists still don't acknowledge that the person who is sexually harassed has an enormous amount of power. Monica Lewinsky has shown she has quite a bit of power, hasn't she? Whether she ultimately brings down a president or not, this woman has proved that the so-called victim can be very powerful.

[Q] Playboy: Feminists would disagree.

[A] Crichton: The Clinton scandal has put the final nail in the coffin of feminism, which has been in drastic decline for several years. People aren't stupid. They see the inconsistency and hypocrisy: Brock Adams? Out! Robert Packwood? Out! Teddy Kennedy? In! Bill Clinton? In! It's what I have always thought: If you like me, I can do whatever I want. If you don't, you're going to trash me for trivialities. That's the way guys always thought it was, and feminists said, "No, it's not, there's a set of rules that apply to everyone." Guess what? It's not true.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as if you'd be delighted at the fall of feminism.

[A] Crichton: In the same way there are fashion victims in terms of clothing, there are fashion victims in terms of ideas, and there are still victims of feminism. A lot of children are victims of an era when women declared their independence from men, saying they no longer needed them: "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle." Women could do it by themselves. Well, the idea dovetailed rather nicely for a lot of young men who didn't want to be needed in the first place. They didn't want to be committed to a family just because they got a girl pregnant, for instance, so it was convenient when women were saying men weren't needed. The idea that men didn't want responsibility wasn't new, but suddenly women were saying, "Yeah, we don't need you!" and men were responding, "Great, goodbye," and they were on to the next conquest. But the kids who were left behind were victims of that fashion. There are many children raised without fathers and they have suffered.

[Q] Playboy: Should women return home and take care of the kids?

[A] Crichton: I'm not saying we should go back to the Fifties--as if we could. All I'm saying is that it's frivolous to pretend kids don't need to be raised. They do.

[Q] Playboy: Feminists attacked Disclosure, saying you trivialized sexual harassment by making the aggressor a woman and the victim a man, which is unlikely to be the case in real life.

[A] Crichton: I didn't know that it's a writer's obligation to do a typical story. The word is "novel." My reason for inverting this story was that inversion allows you to see the issue freshly. What inspired the book was the polarization occurring in this country. I'm always interested in what's not being talked about, and at the time everyone seemed to agree that the aggressor had all the power. I know things aren't so simple and aren't so clear. It's sex. And what's ever clear about sex?

[Q] Playboy: Is the country less concerned with sexual harassment than it was when you wrote Disclosure?

[A] Crichton: There will be a new wave because of Clinton. I expect that we'll see formal legislative changes and changes in social standards. But much of the hysteria has calmed down. I think it's because people see how absurd some of this is. I maintain that a lot of this play between people is human nature. You cannot keep people from telling dirty jokes, for example. It's just how we are. Fart jokes, ejaculation jokes--we're animals and we think they're funny. People are realizing that it's ridiculous to try to change the stuff that is in our genes. Men and women are different. People are starting to understand that all those gender-free toys and raising kids in a nonviolent, neutral way are a lot of baloney. When my daughter was three, she went to a birthday party held in an indoor gym. The parents drew a line down the middle of the room and divided the kids up and had what was, in effect, a snowball fight with Styrofoam balls. It provided the most persuasive evidence of gender difference I've seen. All the boys were throwing the balls, trying to kill each other, while the girls were running around and picking the balls up and putting them in baskets--cleaning up. These all were children of doctors and lawyers, all educated and aware and up-to-the-minute. You can try to change things, but parents find out that if you take away a boy's plastic gun, he'll use a stick. If you take away the stick, he'll use his finger.

[Q] Playboy: Are you concerned about Clinton's affair and his apparent lies?

[A] Crichton: Everybody has a sex life, a private life. But the time for Clinton to have handled it was back in January, when it came out. To let it go as long as he did is inexplicable. The statement he made when he finally admitted it was also inexplicable. An apology is not the time for an attack if the goal is to put the mess behind you. You say, "When I said I never had sex with that woman I wasn't telling the truth. When I let my wife go on NBC and say it was a right-wing conspiracy, that wasn't correct, either. I allowed her to make a fool of herself." You go right down the list. "When I had my advisors go out to defend me, it was wrong." That's how you end it. The guy can't do it. But what's most disturbing is the consistent pattern of incompetence in the day-to-day management of the office of the president of the U.S. Appointments don't get made, schedules aren't kept to, staff is either not getting good advice or not being held in line. The country doesn't look well run to me.

[Q] Playboy: You knew Rising Sun and Disclosure would get you into trouble. Do you enjoy controversy?

[A] Crichton: I knew that they were risky. I couldn't have written them earlier in my career. I couldn't afford to take the risk then. But the truth is that I never know what the response will be. I was surprised by the response to Rising Sun. I didn't expect to be called a racist.

[Q] Playboy: You were accused of perpetuating the stereotype that Japanese people are devious and inscrutable.

[A] Crichton: Yet I thought it was an economic book about the behavior of two nations; race wasn't relevant. I expected criticism, but about the economics. I expected to hear, "This guy doesn't know what he's talking about." Part of the controversy was simply that I addressed the issue. In the U.S. it was agreed there would be no criticism of Japan no matter what. That a popular novel made criticisms was seen as shocking, partly because there hadn't been anything like that for 40 years. My response was, "Wait a minute! In the world I come from, disagreement is a good thing. The American way is, 'Battle it out in the marketplace of ideas.'"

[Q] Playboy: Were you disappointed by the reaction?

[A] Crichton: At the deepest level, I trust the readers. They're perfectly able to understand what I'm talking about. I have less respect for the media. The first thing I read about the book was in Publishers Weekly, which said I had "reawakened the fears of the yellow peril." I thought, What? It said something about Fu Manchu, who, of course, was Chinese.

[Q] Playboy: How did the attacks affect you?

[A] Crichton: They were quite alarming and made me hesitant to do Disclosure. I thought, If there's anything that can bring me more flak than U.S.--Japanese relations, it's gender relations.

[Q] Playboy: And you weren't disappointed, presumably.

[A] Crichton: Definitely not. One thing I noticed when Disclosure came out was the tendency among certain types of guys to trash the book. I figured out exactly what they were doing. I thought, You're going to trash me because you want to get laid tonight. Many male reviewers attacked me, thinking their girlfriends were going to read their reviews. But I was talking about something that many people responded to. I was talking about the power of the victim and the vulnerability of the boss. I was trying to talk about the other side of the equation. I'm always trying to talk about the things that aren't being discussed.

[Q] Playboy: How happy are you with the movie versions of Disclosure and Rising Sun?

[A] Crichton: What I hope for is a good movie on its own terms--one that's interesting and exciting and works as a movie. Whether or not it's faithful to what I wrote is irrelevant--impossible. There is an inherent difference in the forms. If you take a screenplay, which is 120 pages on average, and convert it into prose, it would be about 40 pages. What happens in reverse is that a 400-page novel is condensed to a 40-page story. The overwhelming majority of what's in the book is gone. The only hope is that distillation, or abridgement, retains the essence of the book.

[Q] Playboy: Has that happened with yours?

[A] Crichton: I've had more luck than most people. I've often been pleased with the movies. Not always, but often.

[Q] Playboy: Some critics claim you write your novels with eventual movies too much in mind.

[A] Crichton: I've been accused of that all my life. I was accused of writing books with movies in mind even before any of my books were made into movies. But I see pictures in my head and I describe them; my way of writing is cinematic. It's just the way I work. Robert Louis Stevenson is phenomenally cinematic, and there weren't any movies at the time he was writing. If he wrote Treasure Island today, people would say, "He's writing with a movie in mind." The Lost World, in particular, was written with a movie in mind. That's why I wrote it.

[Q] Playboy: You once described people in Hollywood as "fabulously stupid," and the entertainment industry as "a business of idiots." Care to name names?

[A] Crichton: One of the stupidest people is the one who made that comment. The truth is, this is frequently a frustrating business. When I made that remark, I was thinking of a couple of people I had run up against. As I think of those people, I will stand by that comment. They are idiots beyond belief. They're famous to some degree, but I'm here to tell you they are truly idiots in the Molière sense: self-deluded, pompous nincompoops. The movie business in general is what you would expect in a high-visibility, high-paying, high-stakes industry. It tends to attract people who are smart, savvy, aggressive and ambitious. And while there are incredibly stupid people, there are brilliant ones, too, including the people I've worked with in recent years. I would happily work again with Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson.

[Q] Playboy: What do you see as the most striking change in how Hollywood does business?

[A] Crichton: The change that everyone used to talk about was the arrival of television and the migration out of movies of certain kinds of stories that went to TV. That's true, but by far the more powerful change has been the rise of VHS and now DVD. These are now the primary market, theatrical release is not. And so everything to do with theatrical release is actually intended to position yourself for the real market, which used to be the money comes from. Nobody knows what percentage, but at least 75 percent.

The industry is trying to make products that will have international appeal because of foreign support. Movies are no longer locally oriented, they're not locked to a particular time and place. They tend to be action-oriented because that's an international vocabulary in a sense. They tend to be big and splashy and full of special effects because that's easily and telegraphically marketable. And they tend to be sequels and remakes. In the last ten years, something like a quarter or a fifth of all movies are sequels and remakes, because the product is so expensive that anything that gives you an edge on penetration is worth it.

[Q] Playboy: Your real introduction to Hollywood came in the early Seventies, right after you sold The Andromeda Strain to Universal Pictures. Is it true you were given a tour of Universal Studios by Steven Spielberg?

[A] Crichton: Yes. He was charming then as now. I was fascinated by him. He had already embarked on a course of directing at a time when I was deciding whether I would be interested in doing so. He had a quality that he still has: a naive enthusiasm, a simple excitement. He is in no way naive or simple--he's an extremely sophisticated guy and very, very subtle--but a kind of youthful excitement often bubbles up out of him. It's contagious and attractive. It's hard not to be drawn to it.

[Q] Playboy: Spielberg says that you have the richest imagination of anybody he knows. Is there anything an imagination-challenged person can do to enhance his creativity?

[A] Crichton: I'm always thinking about how to use things. Even in the middle of a fight with your loved one, when she makes some terrible, lashing remark that cuts you to the quick, some part of me is going, Not bad, you know, I can use that one. That sort of constant, partial detachment means you are almost never fully absorbed in anything--some part of you is always watching, always noticing, always thinking, How can I use this? Does this fit with anything I'm thinking about?

[Q] Playboy: The movies you made with Spielberg, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, were based on successful but controversial books. You were accused of being antiscience. What do you say to that?

[A] Crichton: I've always been called anti-whatever. Anti-feminist, anti-Japan, antiscience. There's a long list. The science thing was said to me directly. People said that by expressing concerns about the negative impact of science and technology, I was fueling people's fears and diminishing the ability of science to progress. But that's baloney. If it were true that Jurassic Park is antiscience and impeding progress and people's interest in science, why are so many natural history museums in the U.S. now running shows called Jurassic Park or The Real Jurassic Park? They perceive that the effect of these stories is to arouse tremendous interest and enthusiasm--more than scientists are generally able to.

Besides, we live in a society that in many respects is a gigantic cheerleader for science and technology. None of these advances have been as good as they originally claimed to be. I'm old enough to remember a world without television. And I remember all the claims for television--about how it was going to produce universal education and there was going to be so much exposure to the world. Some of those claims have come true, but the overwhelming majority of the claims were just baloney. It's difficult now to make the claim that television is an educational medium. It's an advertising medium.

[Q] Playboy: In Jurassic Park, you looked at the potential hazards of DNA research. What's your view of cloning?

[A] Crichton: I think we're a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We've never caught up. When I was in medical school--30-odd years ago--people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren't going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or--or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims--some of whom were very young--who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific. But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, "pulling the plug" actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn't going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die--whether it's a legal or religious issue--and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren't being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us--in this case, by the pneumococcus.

This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you're knowledgeable about biotechnology, it's possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don't even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they're too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don't believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it's the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn't be checking my e-mail, because there's an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you'll get it. Well, I won't get it. I'm not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: "You've gone offline?" People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who's calling, and who cares?

[Q] Playboy: Did your interest in medical issues such as the right to die inspire you to create ER?

[A] Crichton: Sure it did. And I wanted to do a different kind of doctor show. When I was in school, everybody watched Dr. Kildare. Then came Marcus Welby. There was a conventional wisdom about how doctor shows were done, and I wanted to change that. Part of it was the style. Television had fallen into an artificially slow pace for financial reasons. If people talked slower, if you had long shots of somebody parking a car and then walking up to a house, it was less expensive; fewer script pages was cheaper. Television audiences slipped into this languor, this assumption that whatever they saw was going to be slower than their daily life. I wanted ER to go at a regular or faster speed than real life. We also broke other TV conventions, such as ending scenes on the thoughtful look of a person walking away, or whatever, Instead, we just cut. It was very effective. But another essential difference is that ER tells real stories. The most memorable episodes are based on real stories, and that was intended. The other thing is the level of quality in the show. Executive producer John Wells has been the person on the firing line since the early years of the show, and he has been phenomenally good at maintaining a level of quality that's breathtaking.

[Q] Playboy: How involved are you?

[A] Crichton: Not at all anymore. I was very involved in the first couple of years when they needed me. I talked to John about what I wanted to happen on the show generally, rather than episode by episode. But TV is demanding and time-consuming. It was taking too much time. The most painful moment for me was at the end of the second year. Every June they lay out the major story arcs for the coming year. I tried to go to as many of those sessions as I could. When I went that year, I felt like the writers were looking at me, going, "Who are you? What are you doing here?" I was hurt and offended and my ideas didn't really fit the group's anymore. But at some point I thought, They're right. It's their show now. They're the ones doing it minute to minute. They're in charge. My child has grown up and gone away. So I said, "God bless you" and I left.

[Q] Playboy: Why did you want to become a doctor?

[A] Crichton: When I was in college, I wanted to be a writer. But then I read that only 200 writers in America support themselves writing. I thought, That's an awfully small group. I didn't want to be a part-time writer with a day job--that didn't interest me. I either had to be one of those 200 people or forget it. So I decided to become a doctor. I was attracted to medicine partly because I thought I would be doing useful work, helping people--I would never have to wonder if the work was worthwhile. But many working physicians are not convinced at all. They have all kinds of doubts, which troubled me. I also found that I was at odds with the thrust of the profession at that time, which was highly scientific medicine: the physician as technician and the patient as a biological machine that was broken. I didn't find it appealing to work in that kind of setting.

[Q] Playboy: Is that when you went back to writing?

[A] Crichton: I had been writing to pay my way through medical school. I wrote paperback thrillers on vacations and weekends at a furious pace because the bills were due. I wrote under pseudonyms. In retrospect, it was wonderful training. Most of the problems beginning writers have dealing with their egos, deciding if what they're writing is good enough for them, didn't affect me at all. No one knew I was doing it. It wasn't under my own name. It was purely to make money to pay for my education. I wasn't trying to be innovative. I was trying to do something that would sell and not require rewrites or discussions, because I didn't have time. I mean I just had to write it, it had to be bought and published and I had to get the money and go back to my classes.

[Q] Playboy: One pseudonym you used was Jeffery Hudson, the name of a dwarf courtier to Charles I. Were you being ironic about your size?

[A] Crichton: I was. I thought it was funny. It seemed like an entertaining name.

[Q] Playboy: How much has being tall affected your life?

[A] Crichton: It's kind of startling to people and provokes comments. They used to say, "How's the weather up there?" or "Do you play basketball?" and "Gosh, you're tall!" They don't say it now. First of all, my height is no longer remarkable in a world with Magic Johnson and all those guys. And in addition, I'm somewhat recognized. People see me in an airport and you can tell that their brain is clicking: Wait a minute, who is that big guy? White guy, plays basketball, no, he's too old, hmmm, I know him from somewhere. Oh, yeah, he's the writer. But my height was a factor when I was younger. I was very tall very young. I was almost this height when I was 13, and so that was all mixed up with what was a difficult age anyway. Talk about an awkward time. I was really awkward.

[Q] Playboy: Your father was a journalist. Did you want to grow up to be a writer like your dad?

[A] Crichton: The fact that my father was a writer made being a writer seem normal, though I certainly didn't have a particular sense of following in his footsteps. The truth is, the origin of lifework is mysterious to me. I think it's in part accidental. But I'm also interested in the idea that there's a kind of destiny for the soul. In some ways it does seem like I'm genetically a writer, though I don't know how strongly to hold that view. I don't really believe most psychological explanations for why people are the way they are or why things turn out as they do. I think there's a lot more randomness in life. I disbelieve almost all Freudian ideas and most psychological theses. So all I can tell you is, yes, my father was a journalist, and, yes, it turned out I'm a writer, too.

[Q] Playboy: You don't like Freud and yet you've spent time in therapy. Do you care to explain?

[A] Crichton: There are a lot of therapies besides Freudian therapies. There has long been skepticism about Freudian concepts; I've never done therapy that was much influenced by Freud. Freudian thought now isn't much more than an academic function. It sits alongside Marxist thought, which resides only in the academy and no longer exists in the real world. I've been through many kinds of therapeutic interaction--partly because it's an interest of mine, partly because I've needed help. I think of it now as a useful resource. The therapist I have now tends to talk to me about things in an interesting way: "Do you really think you can finish the book in that period of time? Aren't you once again overestimating your capabilities?" For me, it's helpful to have a therapist who knows you a little and who can look at your behavior and make you stop and think. I also believe there are certain kinds of personal transformations or transitions you cannot make by yourself. It's like trying to bite your own teeth. You just can't see certain things about yourself without another person as a mirror. Some people say, "I have introspective capabilities and can see what's going on, and I don't need any help to change," but I think they are kidding themselves.

[Q] Playboy: How has therapy changed you?

[A] Crichton: The swell, open, wonderfully easygoing person I am now is a product of therapy [laughs]. I have changed in many ways. When I was young, I was emotionally cautious and constrained. I was pretty happy in an Ivy League environment where emotional signals were things like the kind of tie you wore. A guy who wore a yellow shirt was feeling daring. That was about as much emotional expression as I could tolerate. When I arrived in Hollywood, people were screaming and throwing things and shrieking. It was an eye-opener. We sure didn't do that where I came from in Boston. I realized it was going to be good for me to be here because I'd have to learn to yell and scream, too. I did, and therapy helped me do that. But the biggest change may have been getting over the idea that whatever interpersonal problems I had were another person's fault. For years, I thought such a swell person as I am wouldn't have any problems. If I was having problems, it was her fault. A lot of people feel that way. It's tough to recognize that you're contributing to your own difficulties, sometimes even causing them. What a shock. It was a shock to me.

[Q] Playboy: What about the trend toward quick pharmaceutical fixes such as Prozac and Viagra?

[A] Crichton: I think they are good for certain behavioral stuff. For some problems there is an underlying chemical problem. You can't treat diabetes with psychotherapy. A lot of depression is that way. The proliferation of increasingly subtle substances that work on the brain will put talk therapy in its place. We'll get better at knowing what can be treated by medication and by what requires talk therapy.

[Q] Playboy: But Viagra is being used by men and women as a recreational drug, not only by men who experience sexual dysfunction.

[A] Crichton: It's not possible to have a drug that won't be abused by some portion of the population. Antibiotics are abused. Food is abused. It's inevitable. Part of the problem with things like this is how much they're chattered about. We have a real chattering class now. Along with the explosion of lawyers, there's been an explosion of pundits. We ought to prune them. We could do with about ten percent of what we have. Each new change in society is instantly greeted by 10 billion opinions. I remember the immortal words of my first therapist, who used to nod quietly and say, "Time will tell." Time will tell.

[Q] Playboy: Along with therapy, you have said that becoming a parent changed you, that you no longer take the risks you took when you were younger. What risks were you talking about?

[A] Crichton: I behaved ridiculously when I was younger. I was living in Hollywood at a time when a variety of substances were available and I was certainly part of that world. I was very willing to take risks. In retrospect, deep-sea diving to 250 feet on compressed air is not daring, it's stupid. I look back on some of those incidents and think it's a miracle I survived. It's the luck of the draw. I had a passion for Porsches and I used to drive them really fast. I had a new Porsche and was driving on Mulholland Drive, a twisty road. I had locked something in my glove compartment, so I took the key out of the ignition and unlocked the glove compartment to get it. I didn't realize that on the new car, when you take the key out of the ignition, you lock the steering wheel. Fortunately, the wheels were pointing to the upward side of the cliff and I simply drove into the wall. If they had been pointing the other way, I would have gone right over. Just stupid. You play those things back in your mind.

[Q] Playboy: Do you miss the extremes?

[A] Crichton: I don't feel the need to test myself in that way. I feel responsible. It's very important that I be around for my kid. Kids who don't have parents are at a disadvantage. I have an obligation to be there and I take it seriously. Being a parent teaches you other things, too. Kids make you alive in a certain way that adults tend not to, and they bring in a phenomenal amount of chaos, which is beneficial once you get used to it. To me, being a parent is that weird balance of indulgence and discipline. It's also true that there are some unique factors about being an older parent. I am of the age where I could be my daughter's grandfather, and there are certain grandfatherly things about me that are part of our relationship. I'm no longer completely wound up in my career, trying to make it, for instance. I have done all that. If I had wanted to take time off when she was younger, I could have. And I did. I'm not struggling for financial resources in the same way that I might have been when I was younger.

[Q] Playboy: Have you thought about what you will tell your daughter about boys when she comes of age?

[A] Crichton: I watched a lot of my friends with their daughters. The kid would be in a stroller, gurgling, and the father would be saying, "Those goddamn boys. I know what those guys are going to want to do to her!" My reaction is to actually feel sorry for the guys. Look out for this one. She's going to cut a wide swath. There will be a trail of bleeding hearts behind her.

[Q] Playboy: What lessons have you learned about marriage?

[A] Crichton: I really don't consider myself a master in this area. I'm lucky to have the relationship that I have. I am also aware that relationships are breaking up around me all the time. It would be foolish for me to think that mine is less at risk than anybody else's. We live in a world of change, whether we like it or not. I have learned that marriage is really good for me. It is hard, but it's good for me. I've also learned that both people need to have a commitment; the minute one person doesn't want to be there, it gets difficult. You should want to spend a lot of your leisure time together, sharing the same interests. You may not see the person all week, but when Saturday rolls around, if she wants to go shopping and you want to go hiking, you may have a problem. There are also important basics: Are you substantially in agreement on child rearing? How do you approach religion? How important is education? Do you share those things that are often so deep that they're not even conscious? If not, it's tough.

[Q] Playboy: You contend that everyone has a range of skills, and we hear, for example, you're an excellent cook. Are you the best cook in your house?

[A] Crichton: In the early stages, what I most enjoyed was that I was able to do it at all. Also, I spend a lot of time in my head, and you can kind of float off into a purely fantasy existence. So I found it really beneficial to go to the supermarket and go, "Oh, my God, look what they're charging me for lettuce. Can you believe that? And it looks terrible, too--where are they getting this lettuce?" It was regular life.

[Q] Playboy: You've said you're a workaholic. Do you enjoy working nonstop?

[A] Crichton: Actually, I'm happiest with a lot of time off. It's not like I can't handle it. Years ago I would do a project every three years. Now the market is such that they want a novel every year. Since Jurassic, I've done a novel 18 months or so, which is the best I can do. But I do much better with periods of time off. I don't like how it is now--this back-to-back frenzy.

[Q] Playboy: Do you get your best ideas when you're working or when you're goofing off?

[A] Crichton: Definitely when I'm off. In fact, I'm concerned now that I don't have enough fallow time. I'm happier and my mind works in a different way when I don't have to do anything, when I can boogieboard in Hawaii or go hiking or just sit for weeks on end. When I work, I work compulsively. I always have. When I'm writing, I write seven days a week. I'll take a break only when my family rebels. "We haven't seen you for ten days. We need a day." The periods when I'm writing or making a movie are intense. I have no time to read and explore and let ideas drift in and out of my thoughts. I miss it and I'm very happy doing it for long periods of time.

[Q] Playboy: What's your workday like?

[A] Crichton: There is no normal day. My preferred time to work is in the morning. I find that being kind of sleepy is beneficial. It has always been true that my energy and my alertness peak in the morning.

[Q] Playboy: You wrote Twister with your wife. Would you collaborate again?

[A] Crichton: Yes--we talk about doing it again, but there is a danger. One needs the freedom to argue with a collaborator--to have strong disagreements. That can be difficult if you're going to see the person at dinner.

[Q] Playboy: You were sued for infringing on someone else's copyright with Twister. You won the lawsuit, but was it a difficult experience for you?

[A] Crichton: It was one of the most interesting and awful experiences I've ever had. I was talking to my wife about it afterward and we agreed that it was engaging, tense, dramatic and demanding. I'm sure it would have been a lot less interesting if we had lost, but as we looked back, we were just amazed by it. It was interesting to watch a court case like that go forward, far different from TV and the movies. It was like a verbal tennis match: If you hit this stroke, what will be hit back? We handily won the suit, but the media stuck with a theme it created at the beginning even when the theme no longer applied. They originally presented it as a David and Goliath story: The big guns, Crichton and Spielberg, have stolen from some poor little guy. At a certain point in the trial--not very far in--one of the local columnists asked, "What kind of a story is this if it's David versus Goliath and Goliath is going to win and deserves to?" It was a completely meritless case, but the media had this David and Goliath angle to deal with. They were disappointed that that angle had been taken away. It turned out that the plaintiff was a local fellow who was simply wrong and his attorneys were wrong. But no one wanted the angle to change, so the case continued to be reported as a David and Goliath story. Reporters wrote, "The big guys got away with it."

[Q] Playboy: Are there other downsides to your level of success?

[A] Crichton: Well, everything has a downside. But the significant question is, would you want to magically go back to a time when it wasn't there? No. Whatever the downsides are, they are not sufficient to make you regret what has happened.

[Q] Playboy: It has been written that you are the most highly remunerated writer ever.

[A] Crichton: I'm almost certain that that's not true.

[Q] Playboy: How do you spend your money? Has wealth changed you?

[A] Crichton: It has given me the freedom to choose the kinds of projects I want to work on. It's also given me the freedom to be unpopular. For example, I was aware I could get blasted for writing Rising Sun. But if I got blasted, if I were murdered, it would be OK because the previous book was Jurassic Park and it had done well. There is a freedom that comes from the successes, and I feel obliged to exercise it. Similarly, if you have worldly success, part of your obligation is to spread it around. It's interesting to see where you can have an impact. I'm certainly not a person of enormous resources, but I'm trying to find the things that I think are important that aren't getting funded and maybe won't get funded because they're not on other people's agendas. I'm very interested in education.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have a prescription for improving public education in the U.S.?

[A] Crichton: I'm a product of public education. I went to public schools until college, and I was very much an advocate of that system. But a few years ago, I went back to my high school. It's still a good high school. But on reflection, I realize that I actually attended a private school. My parents moved to a community where the taxes were higher because that's where the good schools were. We moved there to attend the schools. My parents paid additional money for me to go to those schools, and they felt they had a voice in them. If there was a bad teacher, that teacher was gone. There was no way the damn union was going to keep that from happening. It was a true community-based school. That's gone for the most part, but that's what is needed. It's human nature for parents to want a strong say in the education of their children. They should feel strongly about it. There are very good private schools, including those that are public schools in certain communities, and there are terrible schools about which people have no choice. I support vouchers for that reason. Competition makes schools better. The single largest obligation I have as a parent is to educate my child. That's the biggest thing I can do.

[Q] Playboy: You still hold some high school basketball records: most rebounds in a game, highest rebound average per game, highest shooting percentage in a season. Are those important to you?

[A] Crichton: One of the good things about sports--why kids ought to play sports and why we all like sports--is that sports aren't political or open to interpretation. You either perform or you don't. You win the match or you don't. It's not open to spin.

[Q] Playboy: While your books and movies certainly are. Have you become immune to criticism by now?

[A] Crichton: Pretty much. At least I don't read the critics. If I get praise, it doesn't make me feel very good. If I get criticism, I feel terrible. I just sink like a rock. These days the reviews don't tend to be about the work. They often seem to be about me. About me as a person. So I don't read them, though it takes a certain discipline not to read them.

[Q] Playboy: Are you aware of the criticisms, however? A common criticism of your writing is that it's formulaic.

[A] Crichton: It was always formula; I'm interested in formulas. From my earliest writing, I was interested in taking well-defined genres and doing something else with them--retaining the quality of the genre, whether a detective story, science fiction story, disaster story. That aspect of working within a defined framework has always been a challenge to me. Has it become more formula? I don't know. I do sometimes wish that I could publish a book under a pseudonym just to see how much of the reaction is to the text and how much of the reaction is to me as a known entity.

[Q] Playboy: Another criticism is that your characters are much less developed than your stories.

[A] Crichton: I hope that will change. When I was younger, I was interested in situations in which individual personality didn't matter. Once an oil spill starts, I don't think it matters who the president of Exxon is, whether he's a good or bad guy. The truth is, he can't do anything about it. I was interested in the oil spill itself. Like in Andromeda Strain, the only thing to do about a disaster is never to have it happen. Once it happens, almost everything you do is going to make it worse. In such stories, the personalities of the people don't matter. They tend to be stories about individuals who are powerless, who are caught up in the system in some way. They're kind of pessimistic, which is how I was for a long time. I don't necessarily want to do those stories anymore. First of all, I've done a lot of them. Second, I've become more interested in stories that seem to offer alternatives of action, depending on what kind of a person you're dealing with. They tend to be much smaller stories.

A lot of what I've done in the past has been misunderstood--at least from my standpoint. When I was writing Jurassic Park, I was in a tremendous panic. I thought, It's one thing to try to do a persuasive story about a satellite that comes down--we know there are satellites and one could theoretically come down. But in the case of Jurassic Park, I was going to try to convince readers and then viewers that dinosaurs reappear in the contemporary world. I was panicked that people would start to read it and go, "Forget it! No way!" All of my focus was there. Then I write the thing and everybody buys it without discussion. They buy that science brought back dinosaurs. And then they say, "Yeah, but the characters are no good." What do you mean the characters aren't good? This is a story in which dinosaurs are in the real world! Now you want believable characters? To complain about characters meant that they already bought the absurd premise.

[Q] Playboy: Who are your favorite writers?

[A] Crichton: When you're in this business there's a point after which you no longer read for pleasure. I don't read books or go to movies freely anymore. On one hand, there's some competitive sense. On the other, there's a professional interest in the technique or technical specifics, how an effect was achieved. It's just not possible for me to read a book or watch a movie without those things impinging.

[Q] Playboy:Travels was a completely different style of writing--personal, even confessional. Do you plan to do more of that type?

[A] Crichton: Yeah, because it was a great experience. It's a little more difficult now. In the past, if I wrote about relationships, they were relationships that were over. If I write about them now, they're going to be current relationships. I have to think: What is my wife going to think about this particular story? How is my daughter going to feel? Kids in her school are going to read this. Am I invading her privacy? Or can I even be responsive to those concerns? Isn't it my job to say the hell with it and just write what happened? It's a problem I have.

[Q] Playboy: What's your answer?

[A] Crichton: The answer is I don't know.

[Q] Playboy: In Travels, you visit alternative healers. Have you had any more psychic experiences?

[A] Crichton: No. When I'm finished with a particular problem, I'm finished with it for a while. Beyond the sense of completion, there's a kind of exhaustion, even revulsion. It's why it's tough to talk about novels after I've completed them; I've moved on.

[Q] Playboy: You once said that you feel like killing yourself after you complete a film. Now that you're in postproduction for your most recent movie, The 13th Warrior, are you feeling suicidal?

[A] Crichton: No, though I can feel that way after a project. While you're working on a movie there's something wonderful about it that's not yet defined. There are all these fantastic possibilities. When you see it all together, it's just a movie. Whether it's a good movie, a bad movie or a medium movie, it's just a movie. In the end, people will sit for a couple of hours, watch it and go home. I sit and work and write and direct and edit and agonize, but in the end it is what it is: just a movie, just a book.

I'm here to tell you they are truly idiots in the Molière sense: self-deluded, pompous nincompoops.