MAKING PREHISTORY Michael Crichton at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in 2004. By Blake Little/Contour/Getty Images.

Imagine. An amusement park where you can be hunted by a velociraptor—make that two velociraptors—or step gingerly over the tail of a sleeping T. rex, like the characters do in Jurassic Park. Or be dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as in Sphere, or ride atop a fast-moving train in Victorian England, as in The Great Train Robbery. Or be shuttled on a fast-moving gurney, like the patients in ER.

Welcome to Crichton World, which continues to flourish even after Michael Crichton’s death from cancer, in 2008, at the age of 66, after a staggeringly prodigious career as a writer and director of science-based thrillers.

There has never been anyone quite like him in the history of the movies. In his lifetime Michael Crichton wrote 18 major novels, most of them best-sellers, including The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, Congo, Disclosure, and Sphere. His books have sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, and 13 of his novels were made into major films, many of them huge financial successes (the Jurassic Parkjuggernaut alone has earned more than $3.5 billion worldwide). He also directed seven films (including Westworld, Coma, The Great Train Robbery)—all of this making Crichton rich beyond the fantasies of most writers.

He also created video games and the long-running TV show ER. In 1995 he achieved a breathtaking pop-cultural moment when he had the nation’s No. 1 best-selling book (The Lost World), the No. 1 movie (Congo), and the No. 1 TV show (ER), a trifecta he repeated in 1996 with Airframe, Twister, and ER. No one has topped that—not Stephen King, not John Grisham, not J. K. Rowling. At the height of his career, Crichton was reportedly earning $100 million a year. His cultural ubiquity was such that a New Yorker cartoon showed a woman in a bookstore asking, “What can you recommend that’s not by Michael Crichton?”

Early on, Crichton segued into films, writing screenplays and directing, admitting that once he had started down that road it was hard to return to the lonely ordeal of writing novels. He found uncanny success in television with ER, based on a screenplay, Code Blue, written about his experiences as a student at Harvard Medical School and years later developed for television with Steven Spielberg.

He was immensely tall. Six feet nine inches tall. So tall that it was often a problem for him, beginning at age 13, when he was already over six feet, weighed a skeletal 125 pounds, and was routinely hounded by bullies. So tall that he often felt like an outsider, an alien, an Ivy League oddball, but tall enough that he could see beyond the horizon before anyone else. Spielberg said that Crichton was the tallest man he had ever met, and naturally that impressive height—whatever its drawbacks—gave him a certain added authority on the sets of the seven films he directed.

TALL ORDERS Crichton in 1970. Inset, with Steven Spielberg during the filming of 1993’s Jurassic Park. Large photograph by Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Inset by Murray Close/mptvimages.com.

George Clooney, who credits his long and distinguished career to his breakout role in ER, said that “Michael was always referred to as a Renaissance man. That’s because he was so good at so many things. Doctor. Writer. Director. And he was a stunning six-foot-nine figure. He would walk in the room and all the rest of us mortals felt somewhat inadequate. It was something you had to see. He could reduce giant stars and brilliant directors to little kids looking up to this gentle giant.”

His intellect was just as intimidating, and his scientific curiosity certainly made an impression on Hollywood. “He was a stone-cold genius,” said Michael Douglas, who starred in Coma and Disclosure. “He really was a gentle giant, very shy but intimidating. This guy was off the charts as far as intellect was concerned.”