Planet of the Apes and Social Dynamics
I am preparing for a “Faith and Film” course I will be co-teaching for Salt Lake Theological Seminary this summer, and one of the films I will be using is The Planet of the Apes (1968). I am reviewing various materials connected with it, and one of the resources I looked at again recently was the two-disc collector’s edition which has special features including various commentary by those associated with the film. I was intrigued by one of the comments made by Charleton Heston as he recalled how the actors would behave between takes and during lunch while their makeup was still in place. He recalls that those playing chimpanzees would gather together, as would the orangutans and gorillas. Heston concludes his remarks by saying something to the effect that “I don’t know why that happened, but it did.”
