Trailer
Plot summary
Earth is overcrowded, and its people depend on the food research carried out at remote stations. Saturn 3, on a moon near Saturn, is one of them, staffed by two scientists: Adam and Alex, who are lovers and live there with their dog, Sally. Alex was born in space and has never seen Earth, and what she knows of it comes from Adam. A cargo ship delivers Captain Benson, who says the station is behind schedule; he has come to assemble Hector, a powerful robot of the Demigod series, programmed through a link implanted in Benson's spine and built around human brain tissue. Benson tells Alex he wants her, and calls Adam obsolete.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Saturn 3 (1980)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the male lead in Saturn 3, the first choices were Sean Connery and Michael Caine, but both turned the part down and Kirk Douglas accepted; Harvey Keitel was cast at a fee of $90,000.
- Harvey Keitel refused to take part in post-production looping, so his voice as Captain Benson was dubbed over by British actor Roy Dotrice, who adopted a mid-Atlantic accent for the performance. Director Stanley Donen wanted Benson to have an upper-class veneer to seem more threatening.
- Stanley Donen decided he had to be on set with John Barry during Saturn 3, but Donen says Barry refused and quit the project. Donen insisted there was no question of Barry being fired.
- Lew Grade read the script for Saturn 3 while on a plane with Farrah Fawcett, gave it to her, and agreed to make the movie when the plane landed.
SPOILER
Lew Grade objected to the subject matter of two filmed scenes, a dream sequence in which Adam and Alex kill Benson and a scene of Hector ripping apart Benson's body, and they were cut along with others, bringing the running time down to 87 minutes.- Martin Amis's novel Money, written after he scripted Saturn 3, bases its main character John Self in part on John Barry and its aging film star Lorne Guyland on Kirk Douglas; the novel's disaster-wracked production mirrors Saturn 3's.
- Saturn 3 was pre-sold to NBC for $4 million, which helped minimise its losses, but it was still a financial disappointment and contributed to the collapse of Lew Grade's filmmaking operations.
