A Nobel Prize-winning biochemist spends thirty years trying to clone his dead wife Lucy. In his backyard shed. Using equipment stolen from the university.

CREATOR (1985) features Peter O'Toole at the precise frequency of charismatic, warm-hearted, slightly deranged luminosity that he occupied for most of the 1980s, the same frequency as My Favorite Year and The Stunt Man.

Lorimar Productions paid $500,000 for the rights to Jeremy Leven's novel in 1980. Jonathan Demme was attached to direct. Leven wrote multiple drafts. None of them were greenlit. The rights reverted to Leven.

Two years later, Czech director Ivan Passer read it, loved it, and got it made. Passer was the director of Cutter's Way, one of the great overlooked American films of 1981.

The cast around O'Toole includes Vincent Spano, Mariel Hemingway, Virginia Madsen in one of her early roles, and David Ogden Stiers as the antagonist who exists to be wrong about everything. Leven adapted his own novel and later wrote and directed Don Juan DeMarco.

Creator was shot over thirteen weeks in Los Angeles and Santa Rosa, California.

The film was not a significant commercial success and has largely been forgotten. It's worth reconsideration - as an earnest meditation on grief, and for O'Toole's tender, eccentric performance.