Jurassic Park spared no expense — and John Hammond (Richard Attenborough). Steven Spielberg’s 1993 adaptation of author Michael Crichton’s novel sees the InGen CEO and co-founder “spare no expense” in hiring three experts — paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Stern), and chaotician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) — to sign off on his island, Isla Nublar. It’s the site of Jurassic Park, a theme park and zoo where the main attractions are dinosaurs cloned from paleo-DNA.
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But when disgruntled Jurassic Park computer technician Dennis Nedry’s (Wayne Knight) sabotage causes the island’s facilities to shut down, freeing the dinosaurs to once more roam the Earth the island off the coast of Costa Rica, Nedry, lawyer Donald Gennaro (Martin Ferrero), game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck), and chain-smoking chief engineer Ray Arnold (Samuel L. Jackson) all become casualties of a park preview gone wrong.
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Hammond (who spared almost no expense except for his technician) survives, and ultimately escapes the island with his grandchildren Lex (Ariana Richards) and Tim (Joseph Mazzello). He then returns in the sequel, 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which opens with a pack of Compsognathus attacking a young girl on Isla Sorna, a sister island 87 miles southeast of Nublar.
The girl survives, but later in the movie, dino-hunter Dieter Stark (Peter Stormare) isn’t as fortunate when he encounters the “compys.”
Life, uh, finds a way
It’s a fate inspired by Crichton’s original Jurassic Park novel, where Hammond dies when he’s swarmed by a pack of Procompsognathus (the book’s equivalent of the compys).
In the chapter “Hammond II,” Hammond has broken his ankle after falling down a hillside while en route to his bungalow. The 76-year-old tries and fails to climb the hill, only to hear the chitters of the chicken-sized scavengers that prey on crippled animals. The venomous bites of the compys overwhelm Hammond, and he dies feeling only a “slight pain” as the dinosaurs bite into his neck.
David Koepp, screenwriter of 1993’s Jurassic Park, referenced Hammond’s original fate in the latest issue of Empire Magazine. The issue, commemorating the 50th anniversary of another Spielberg movie based on a novel about a man-eating creature — 1975’s Jaws — draws a comparison to author Peter Benchley’s novel. The movie dropped a novel subplot about Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the movie) having an affair with police chief Martin Brody’s (Roy Scheider) before being killed by the shark.
“Those sound like the sort of choices you need to make when you adapt a novel,” Koepp told Empire. “With Jurassic Park, the novel’s a bit darker than the film. The Richard Attenborough character [Hammond] dies in the book, eaten by his creations. And it just seemed like a downer.”
“We kinda like this guy; can’t he just learn his lesson?” Koepp said. “And that sounds like a similar choice [in Jaws]. You don’t need an affair. You have a great white shark. That’s a lot to work with.”
The Jurassic Park movie also softened Attenborough’s Hammond, who is more dismissive of the park’s employees and the deaths of workmen. In The Lost World novel, Malcolm remembers the late Hammond as a “hustler” whose only true talent was “making money.”
Koepp also penned new movie Jurassic World Rebirth, which stomps into theaters July 2.
