The first sighting came in cinemas in summer: a trailer that ran in July,
before the movie Transformers. Since subjected to more online analysis than
a Baudrillard text in a post-structuralism doctoral class, it begins with
what looks like rough home-movie video footage of a surprise party in a New
York loft for a young man named Rob. The shaky handheld camera skirts round
the party, where various good-looking people in their mid- twenties chat
about Rob, who is about to leave for Japan.
The party is thrown into sudden chaos when the lights go out and a loud noise
is heard. Someone shouts, “It sounded like an animal.” On a television set,
a newsflash says that there may have been an earthquake in lower Manhattan.
The camera follows as the people from the party head up to the roof of the
building to get a better look.
Suddenly, there’s an animalistic roar, then a huge fireball explosion across
the New York skyline. The partygoers panic, and the camera follows as they
rush down to the street. Someone shouts, “What is it? Is it coming this
way?” “I saw it,” someone else shouts. “It’s a lion! It’s huge!” he seems to
scream.
As more explosions are seen, and tall buildings start collapsing — eerily
reminiscent of footage of street views of the collapse of the Twin Towers on
September 11, 2001 — an enormous object comes hurtling through the air,
crashing in a trail of sparks on the street where people from the party and
others have gathered. The huge thing comes to rest just beside them. It’s
the head of the Statue of Liberty, lying smashed and on its side, its cheeks
shockingly gouged. As the trailer draws to a close, a couple of lines flash
up: “From producer JJ Abrams. In theatres 1-18-08.” The mystery only
deepened when audiences realised that there seemed to be no title for the
movie.
Perhaps the biggest clue is the name of the producer. Abrams is not just the
director of Mission: Impossible III, but the creator of the cult television
series Alias and Lost, the latter specialising in mysterious monsters that
lurk in the undergrowth. . . or do they? He is now directing the new Star
Trek movie. But how, many people wondered,
in a media world in which whole movies are leaked onto the internet before
they have been released in cinemas, could Paramount and Abrams have kept
something this big this secret?
Even the Hollywood trade press had been kept in the dark, although, in early
July, both The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reported that the film was
shooting in New York, that it was being made with a cast of unknowns, and
that, despite the awesome scenes shown in the trailer, it was apparently
being made on the modest budget of $30m.
It was being directed by Matt Reeves, who had made just one film before, 11
years earlier, a small comedy called The Pallbearer, starring Gwyneth Paltrow,
although he had directed episodes of the television series Felicity, which
Abrams produced. The Hollywood Reporter also said: “The casting process was
just as mysterious. No scripts or even scene pages were sent out; agents who
were contacted were simply asked if their client wanted to be in the movie
or not”.
“We weren’t exactly clear about the characters we were playing when we signed
on,” Lizzie Caplan, who plays a character called Marlena, later said. “The
producers sat us down, and we auditioned with scenes that aren’t in the
movie. Some were from Alias, and some had been written specifically for the
audition. And they were all very misleading.” Even when the film was
shooting, the actors weren’t allowed to keep any pages from the script.
Every day, the producers would swap new pages for old. The pages were bright
red, and all were watermarked, to stop anyone from copying or leaking them.
Over the next few weeks, as internet excitement ramped up, even the title of
the film remained a mystery. Although Variety had reported that it was
Cloverfield, that seemed weirdly dissonant with the apparent subject matter
of the film: an attack on New York by something huge and destructive,
possibly an enormous lion. And Abrams fans pointed out that Cloverfield was
the name of a street in Santa Monica where the producer was believed to own
an office building. So it was surely a cover.
The speculation spread far and wide, and grew ever more convoluted, a tribute
to the nerdily precise sleuthing skills of the core internet community. In
early August, a story appeared in an obscure Australian newspaper suggesting
that, although various titles for the film had been considered, including
Monstrous, Rampage and Voltron, “the latest news is that it’s going to be
called Overnight”. Some unbelievably diligent and obsessed fan had discovered
that a trademark for the title Overnight had been registered by a lawyer
named Lori N Boatright, on July 18, 2007, to a company called Group One and
Jackoway Tyerman Wertheimer. Boatright was, apparently, the same lawyer who
had registered the trademarks for Bad Robot, Abrams’s production company. It
turned out that Boatright had also registered trademarks for Slusho!, which
seemed to be some kind of new Japanese frozen soft drink, and for a Slusho! marketing
slogan: “Slusho! You can’t drink just six!” Was Slusho! somehow related to
Cloverfield, or whatever the film was called? That theory gained currency
when reports surfaced that the film might even be called Slusho!
Digging deeper, the sleuths found that Slusho! appeared to be owned by a large
Japanese conglomerate, the Tagruato Corporation. Tagruato has a very
sophisticated website, under the banner: “Exploring our world. Ensuring your
future.” The corporation, whose CEO is one Ganu Yoshida, based in
Marunouchi, Tokyo, calls itself “a collective of top scientists, engineers
and businessmen committed to leading our investors and the whole of mankind
into the future”. Is that benign or deeply scary, people debated? Among its
other operations, Tagruato says it has “14 drilling rigs strategically
positioned around the globe, each a billion-dollar marvel of modern
engineering” drilling into the deepest oceans. The site divulges that the
origin of the company “goes back to 1945, when our creator, Kantaro
Tagruato, founded a mining company in Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s
large islands. Tagruato, who had emigrated to Japan from Polynesia with his
family as a young boy, started the company with dreams of ‘holding earth’s
energy in my fist’.” And, carrying on the ocean-depths connection, The
Slusho! website describes the soft drink as containing a unique “deep-sea
ingredient”. . .
