Until last week, the only movie I’d seen that consisted of nothing but one long conversation was My Dinner With Andre, which I saw forty years ago. But this past Thursday I watched a movie made in 2007 called The Man from Earth. It opens with a man who appears to be in his mid-30s loading his pickup truck in preparation for a move. Within moments some cars pull up and he’s joined by a group of colleagues at the college where he’s been working as a professor for the past ten years. They were dismayed when he ducked out early from the going-away party they’d arranged in his honor and decided that if we wasn’t going to stay for his party, they would bring the party to him.
The professor, John Oldman, invites them into his small cabin — reluctantly, it appears — where everyone makes themselves comfortable and starts talking. Topic A is why the hell John is leaving. He’s about to make tenure, he’s on track to chair his department, and his students love him. Why leave now?
At first, John demurs. From time to time he just gets itchy to move on, he explains. But they persist and he finally relents. “I’ve never done this before,” he says, “so let’s see how it goes.” He then proceeds to tell them a fantastic story — that he is older than he appears. Much older. In fact, he says, he’s been alive for 14,000 years.
They don’t believe him, of course, but can’t tell whether he believes what he’s telling them or is just pulling their collective legs. As the conversation continues and John calmly and earnestly sticks to his story, it becomes clear that while there’s nothing he can say to prove he’s telling the truth, there’s nothing the others can come up with to prove he isn’t. As John describes his long life’s journey, his story becomes even more astonishing, and his colleagues’ reactions range from alarm to anger.
I can’t say more without revealing spoilers. Suffice it to say I found the movie engaging and intriguing. My friend Doug, who watched it as soon as I told him about it, thought it was like watching an extended episode of The Twilight Zone.
But as compelling as the movie is, its backstory is perhaps even more interesting. It was written by Jerome Bixby, whose name I didn’t recognize but whose credits are impressive. He wrote the short story on which The Twilight Zone episode “It’s a Good Life” is based. That’s the one in which Billy Mumy plays a spoiled boy with extraordinary powers who inflicts horrible punishments on anyone in his small community who displeases him. Bixby also wrote “Mirror, Mirror,” the episode of the original Star Trek series in which Kirk and members of his crew change places with their doppelgängers from an alternate universe in which the Federation is an evil empire.
Bixby wrote The Man From Earth in 1998 as he literally lay on his deathbed, dictating notes and dialog to his son Emerson, who scribbled them down on hospital napkins and any other paper he could find. After his father died, Emerson Bixby set about seeing whether he could get the movie made. After a circuitous journey it was finally produced in 2007, with the filming done in just seven-and-a-half days.
No one in the cast is an A-list actor, but you’ve likely seen several of them before. One of the least well-known is David Lee Smith, who plays John Oldman, a deliberate casting decision to help audiences suspend disbelief that his character might indeed by as old as he says he is.
I learned all of this background about the movie from a “Making of” documentary and other extras that were included on the DVD, which I obtained through Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. But the film is also available on Amazon Prime Video and can no doubt be streamed elsewhere as well. If you liked The Twilight Zone, you’ll probably enjoy this movie. Give it a try.
Oh, and there’s a sequel, The Man From Earth: Holocene, which was made ten years after the original and which I plan to watch next.