Something strange is happening at Boston Memorial Hospital. A surprising number of healthy patients, undergoing routine operations, are turning up as anesthesia-induced coma victims. When one of the brain-dead patients turns out to be the best friend of Dr. Susan Wheeler (Genevieve Bujold), the physician conducts her own investigation into the case, uncovering a sinister plot that implicates the hospital's chief anesthesiologist (Richard Widmark) in a black market organ transplant operation. A clever hybrid combining the conspiracy thriller with a hospital soap opera, Coma (1978) plays like a contemporary Nancy Drew mystery with a distinctly feminist heroine, one who isn't afraid to challenge the male chain of command at her job or risk her life in physically perilous situations (like a daring escape on the top of a speeding ambulance!). The film is also guaranteed to make you paranoid about hospitals and who isn't already?

Based on the best-selling novel by Robin Cook, a former doctor, Coma was adapted for the screen and directed by Michael Crichton, who, like Cook, had a background in medicine. But after receiving his M.D. degree from the Harvard Medical School, he decided to become a full-time writer of fiction. As a student, Crichton had already published several novels under an alias, John Lange, but it wasn't until he started using his own name on novels like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man that Crichton emerged as a best-selling author. In 1972, he made his directorial debut with the TV movie Binary (based on his own novel) and followed it up with Westworld (1973), his first Hollywood feature and a cult science fiction favorite. Coma was his third film as a director and, in an interview with Ralph Appelbaum for Millimeter magazine, Crichton described what attracted him to the project: "This is a story that contains many elements of reality: the fear people have of surgery, the fear of dying at the hands of your doctor, phobias about hospitals. Those are very real fears, and so to exaggerate them would not be much fun. My idea was to put the picture together in such a way that the fears are put in a safe prospective, and can be enjoyed as scares, without awakening deeper and more real anxieties."

Coma is justly famous for several chilling sequences but the one that stays with most people is the eerie scene at the Jefferson Institute where comatose patients hang suspended by wires in a sterile holding room. According to Crichton in the Millimeter interview, "It was technically very complicated because the people could only hang for six minutes...You see, the suspension was actually only from the hips and neck. But because you had to act like you were suspended by wires everywhere, a great strain was put on the back...We had special tables built that were on jacks - like car jacks - and people would sit on these tables in between shots; and then they would be hung, and the tables would be rolled down and moved out...I think we used sixteen real people and fifteen dummies...But most of what the camera sees is real people." One of the suspended bodies is Tom Selleck, who would later work with Crichton (but this time as the leading actor) in the sci-fi fantasy, Runaway (1984). Another actor in the Coma cast who was just on the verge of fame was Michael Douglas who would go on to make a much stronger impression the following year in The China Syndrome (1979) and eventually achieved superstar status in the mid-eighties with the release of Romancing the Stone (1984), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Wall Street (1987). And here's an odd bit of trivia; Crichton once wrote several novels under the pseudonym "Michael Douglas," a combination of his first name and his brother's.

When Coma opened commercially, it proved to be a box office success and garnered Genevieve Bujold some of the best notices of her career. Andrew Sarris, in his Village Voice review, wrote "For once, Genevieve Bujold is perfectly cast...The movie is gothic from the word go, and, fortunately, Bujold, as a dominating female protagonist, is spunky and zesty enough to make the whole enterprise work as harmless, escapist entertainment." The only negative press the film received was a well-publicized lawsuit filed against the producers of Coma by Los Angeles writer Ted Berkic who claimed his 1967 book, Reincarnation, Inc., was used without his knowledge.

Producer: Martin Erlichman
Director: Michael Crichton
Screenplay: Michael Crichton, based on the novel by Robin Cook
Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper
Editing: David Bretherton
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cast: Genevieve Bujold (Dr. Susan Wheeler), Michael Douglas (Dr. Mark Bellows), Elizabeth Ashley (Mrs. Emerson), Rip Torn (Dr. George), Richard Widmark (Dr. Harris), Lois Chiles (Nancy Greenly), Hari Rhodes (Dr. Morelind), Tom Selleck (Sean Murphy).
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by Jeff Stafford