Sunday, October 20, 2024
A Tribute to Roger Corman (1926-2024).
Sunday, October 6, 2024
The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Screaming Woman (1986).
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Antigonish (1899): or The Man Who Sold the World (1970).
Like I say, I can't really tell anyone how common this particular type of reading practice is. I just don't know how many others study the narratives they like in the same way that I do. So it's kind of useless to ask me if this is anything like part of a greater phenomenon of literary practice. All I can tell you beyond this point is that this is what happened to me when I had the good fortune to read first an old, forgotten poem (I guess you could call it a children's rhyme), followed by song, also old, this one dating back to the start of the 70s. The name of the poem was Antigonish. It's one of those titles that no one remembers, even while there's something memorable about it. The sort of thing you hear in passing, and then wonder why the word popped into your head later on. The almost limerick style composition was written and published in the year 1899 by a now obscure poet and educator named William Hughes Mearns. The song that helped me understand Mearns' poem was The Man Who Sold the World, by David Bowie. I'm sure that's a juxtaposition few if anyone reading this would be expected to make. I know I wasn't. For the longest time, this forgotten poem and the chart topping song were complete and separate entities in my mind. I ran across Mearns' work in a collection of children's verse in an illustrated primer book whose title I know forget, except that it was edited by Jack Prelutsky.
The Bowie song I ran across by seemingly pure chance one night while staying up late watching a now defunct VH1 programming block. It was an entire program or segment dedicated to music from the 70s, as I recall. Somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man and being introduced to the music of Leo Sayer for the first time (yeah, VH1 was dedicated to it's eclecticism back then) someone in a broadcast booth somewhere made the now wise choice to air an old live performance that Bowie gave of the song way back during a 1995 MTV concert special. It was one of those things where at the time it had no greater meaning than just a way to enjoy a few minutes before dozing off to sleep. It was the kind of thing I caught once or twice, enough anyway, so that the song got lodged in my head. The sort of tune that recalls itself to your conscious mind, and you sort of remember it as being kind of interesting, yet you still don't attach all that much importance to it. What changed that for me was running across that song again in connection with Mearns' bit of poetic doggerel. What I didn't expect to happen was for Bowie's lyrics to help inform the meaning of Mearns' little rhyme. The result wound up as something that was less a pair of unrelated verses, and more like a complete and greater poem told in two movements. That's how I'd like to look at each effort, as two parts of a greater whole.
I do this first because the ideas that came about from pairing the efforts of these two artists in my mind suggest a rich vein of thematic ore that is just too interesting not to share. Another reason for looking at these two poetic attempts together is because each of them seem to share the same genre. In many ways, the placing of Antigonish and The Man Who Sold the World together is to create the kind of narrative that is more or less perfect as we get into the Autumn Festival season. What we have here is a kind of ghost story that I don't think either Bowie or Mearns intended to write. Yet when you pair their efforts up, what you get is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I'd like to know it's meaning.Sunday, September 8, 2024
The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA, 1953).
Its a mistake to claim that UPA was the first ever animation studio to base its films off of pre-existing literary source material. That honor doesn't even belong to Walt Disney himself, but rather to former newspaper comics illustrator Winsor McCay, who has to count as the first published author to ever use the then new medium of animated pictures to bring his own Little Nemo comic strip to life. From there, of course, Walt would go on to draw from the sources of European folklore and the Brother's Grimm to create some of his most iconic works. In this sense, UPA wasn't even trying to play catch-up, so much as just continuing the game of Follow the Leader. What continues to make their efforts stand out from the pack was in the type of literary models they used for inspirations. UPA was the first studio to take the works of of modern writers such as James Thurber, popular contemporary music, or as in the case of today's offering, popular works of Gothic Fiction. They did all of this in an effort whose goals were twofold. First, they wanted to prove that they had what it took to get out of Walt's shadow. Second of all, Bosustow and Company knew that the way to do that was to prove to the audience that animation could be used to tell stories whose subject matter was more mature than the regular cartoon fair.
It was with this goal in mind that one day Scott and Gable appear to have been the ones to hit on the idea of taking the work of one of the great pioneers of Horror fiction, turning it into a theatrical animated short, and getting none other than Oscar winning actor James Mason to star and narrate in it. The result was a 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and it went like this.Sunday, August 25, 2024
The Power of the Sentence (1971).
Del Rey doesn't seem to have kept any close contact with this particular artist. He was one of the most prolific storytellers and anthologists back during the Silver and New Wave eras in the history of Science Fiction. His role as an editor made it essential that he keep in close contact with a long list of who's who in the field of Speculative Writing. For whatever reason, David Locke is the one name that no one ever seems to have bothered to keep track of. It's possible to know more about guys like Del Rey than it is this one obscure byline on a title page. Even the scant piece of information that Locke was once (still is?) a Fulbright scholar doesn't tell us much, as its an international program attached to numerous academic institutions. So any information about where Locke came from, what schools he went to, where he graduated from, or whether he maintained or continues in these academic settings would be so much guess work I might as well be creating a fictional character. The only true statement I can make about him is that he is a name that has all but vanished off the literary map. All that's left is his story about a very peculiar classroom lecture, and so I thought it might be interesting to look into it.
Sunday, August 11, 2024
Vanishing Point: Doctor of the Soul (1986).
The whole show was very much a textbook example of the successful follow-up from a parent program. Much the same way as the character of Frasier Crane was able to take on a life of his own after Cheers. In the case of the show under discussion today, Vanishing Point grew out of the success of a previous Canadian Broadcasting radio entry known as Nightfall. That earlier series was a classic example of the late-night Horror anthology. A version of Tales from the Crypt for the theater of the mind. It became enough of a ratings hit that eventually the CBC was ready to try and build a sister project. This one would share the same late night anthology format as Nightfall. Even some of its episodes would echo the previous entry in terms of genre and situation. However, it was made clear right away that this new project wouldn't just be imitating the same ideas. Instead, the new series was to be free to explore as much of the terrain of the fantastic as its writers wanted or felt they could get away with under a radio budget. In other words, it didn't always have to be straight-up Horror. Sometimes it could be Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, and even the occasional narratives delving into nothing more than slices of life. It was going to be less Tales from the Crypt and more Twilight Zone for radio, in other words.
The result is a series that really seemed determined to explore as much of the range of the theater of the mind as possible. It's an entry from this forgotten bit of Canadian broadcasting that I'd like to take a look at today. Tonight's play is written especially for radio by David Helwig and concerns one of the greatest conundrums that mankind continues to grapple with. So if you'll join us for tonight's journey into the unknown, I believe we're do for a most unusual appointment in a psychiatrist's office.
Sunday, July 28, 2024
Suspense: One Hundred in the Dark (1947).
For instance, I can remember a time when it seemed like J.R.R. Tolkien was everywhere. Not just confined to an out-of-the-way weblog as the typical thing you expect to find nowadays, either. I'm talking this guy was everywhere. This was true not just in terms of the breakout impact of the original Peter Jackson trilogy, either. Even before all that, right at the very turn of the 20th century into that of the 21st, it seemed as if Middle Earth was busy enjoying its own fan led pop culture renaissance. You had an endless treasure hoard of popular fan studies, and various scholarly critical texts about Professor T and his writings being placed on retail shelves not just all over the American continent, but also in places like Great Britain, France, India, you name it. In that sense it was a true international phenomena. A case of fans worldwide coming together to create a grassroots phenomenon that worked as a shared pop cultural treasure that was able to unite myriads of people the world over in the celebration of nothing more than just a very good piece of literary art. Are you kind of maybe starting to see what I mean when I talk about the difference between pop culture then from now? The major difference seems to rest on the fact that the former version of it truly was inclusive. This updated 2.0 model, however, just seems to exist for the sole purpose of creating a siloing effect on its users.
Forgive me for saying this, yet I don't think Tolkien's works would have stood a chance if this mainframe setup was in place way back when. He might have still had his fandoms. However, they would have been reduced to what they are now. Just a few scattered pieces of get togethers in chatrooms and the odd occasional blog post here and there, and none of it would have reached the fever pitch that would have allowed Jackson and the rest of his cast and crew to mount not just a successful but impactful showing as they wound up with. Of course, I'm sure others will argue that at least this setup would have meant that none of us would have to sit through the ongoing botch job that is The Rings of Power or whatever the Game of Thrones franchise has become. I can't help thinking that all of this later stuff is the result of pop culture becoming corporatized a bit too much for its own good, however. We seem to have stumbled upon a cautionary lesson in allowing our enthusiasms to get perhaps just a bit too popular. Maybe the real education here is to know when to guard the stories that matter from getting too out of hand. Whatever the case may be with all that, there are still some aspects of pop culture from the past that have a way of astounding you with their seeming resiliency.For instance, I am still amazed to learn that there are a great many fans out there of the broadcast medium or format known as Old Time Radio. I'm talking now about a very specific and identifiable period in the history of American entertainment. For those who may not have a clue what I'm talking about OTR (for short) is best described as pretty much the first major breakout media format in an era before television or the net. It belonged to an age when all of the world's news and entertainment was limited to to the contours of a small squat box with speakers in it wired to a transmitter powered often enough by what I can only describe as a variation of the electric light bulb. It often lit the box up right well enough whenever it was turned on and working to full capacity. However, the providing of light in a room wasn't the real purpose for this kind of fixture. It was there to make the box talk. That's how radio used to work in an pre-wireless era. Rather, let's say that most of our grandparents did have a form of wireless. There just wasn't a single scrap of anything digital about it. It was all analog.
The particular drama I'd like to share with you now comes from the days when the radio was king. That time was known as the format's Golden Age, when the Theater of the Mind served as America's idiot box of choice. What's stunning to learn is just how much from that period still survives in archive form, and how much of it has made its way in and onto the digital realm. It's seems that this easy availability is what accounts for the widespread awareness of a style of entertainment that doesn't even manage to get so much as a passing mention in the news anymore. It seems to be a testament to the power of online fandom that it can help resurrect the reputation of a long forgotten form of storytelling. With this in mind, I thought it would be fun to look into a sample offering from the Golden Age of Radio. It's an episode of an anthology series known only as Suspense. From what I can tell of this program, there might have been a time when it was the highest rated show on the airwaves. Whatever the case, tonight, we offer, for our listening audience the story of Owen Johnson's "One-Hundred in the Dark".
Sunday, July 14, 2024
Rudyard Kipling's Finest Story in the World (1891).
This fascination with how and why stories are made might be described as perhaps one of the guiding purposes of this blog. It's all tied up with this unshakable curiosity I have. The best way to describe it might be to form it in the shape of a series of questions. Why do stories exist? What makes them work so well when the writing is good? Also, what makes it all fail in various ways? In other words, I seem to be fascinated just as much with the craft and imaginative inspiration that fuels the art of writing every bit as I am with reading a good example of the finished literary product. To cut it all short, I seem to be a by now incurable bookworm. The kind of guy who takes the full ramifications of that title seriously and without a trace of irony. I suppose that in itself is ironic, yet it's just the way everything has turned out for me. And so here is this blog, and the fascination still remains. How do good stories get told? It's one of the considerations that powers the engine of this meager little site, and I'll probably still be asking it long after this article is no longer in my rearview mirror. Sometimes a reader like me gets lucky, and runs across an actual literary artist whose mind is caught up in the with the same fascination of where do the stories come from? One famous name who shares this enthusiasm was an author by the name of Rudyard Kipling, of The Jungle Book fame.
I've written about him once or twice on this blog. What's interesting about guys like Kipling is that there's a sense in which he can be said to conform to type. He's a problematic mind with an undeniable well of imaginative talent and creativity sharing the same mental office space with the kind of small-mindedness of, say, an H.P. Lovecraft. The key difference (however much or little this counts) is that Kipling never seems to have been as virulent in his opinions as Lovecraft, even going so far as to count the actual native inhabitants of both India and Arabia as among his closest friends. The result is one of those studies in contrast, a natural sense of humanism and empathy coexisting somehow within the politics of the British Raj. The result is this strange picture of the artist as a kind of borderline figure, someone with a foot in two opposed worlds, and always struggling with how to hold each in the proper balance. There's plenty worth talking about on that score, and maybe we'll have a chance to discuss it here as we go along. Right now, it is enough to repeat what I've said above. Kipling is unique in being one of the handful of artists who are just as much fascinated by why and how stories are told, just as much as he is interested in getting as much of the finished product on the page as far as possible.This topic of why and how stories are made held such a fascination for him, that it eventually resulted in one of those stories about the making of stories. The difference is the interesting twist that Kipling brings to the table when it comes to describing the writing process. I call it different, yet maybe that's not quite so much the right word. Perhaps when you put the writer's thoughts on the art of writing into the plainest life-size terms as possible, what you get is no more than the same thoughts of theorists like Coleridge and Jung. However, even if this is the case, it's the way in which Kipling describes the creative process, and most of all, the way he talks about where do the stories come from that makes for such an interesting idea to unpack. This, then, is Kipling's tale of "The Finest Story in the World".
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Edith Nesbit's Accidental Magic (1912).
In many ways, her own life reads like something of out of one of her own fairy tales. I've written a previous article on this author that goes into much greater depth on her life. Here, however, I'll have to settle for the truncated version of historic events. Edith's story is told simply enough, though. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who found herself turned into the protagonist of one of her own fairy tales. It all started one day in 1858, when this young child found herself born to parents in the Kennington district of Surrey, England. Together, they decided to call her Edith. Her father, John, was a prosperous agricultural chemist who had even managed to build a successful school dedicated to that same farming practice. The place was devoted to an Industrial Education, in other words. It meant that John Nesbit spent a great deal of his life teaching farmers from both the local and distant countrysides how to survive and thrive in the often merciless, cutthroat world of mid-Victorian era London. As a result, Edith's earliest experiences found the child surrounded by people from a majority working class backgrounds. Since her father was a diligent advocate for the rights of England's lower class citizens, the greatest legacy he seems to have left his daughter was a willingness to see herself as no more than an equal with the poorest citizen of the metropolis. Edith's education was lucky in that sense, anyway.
Her father may not have been able to help when it really counted, yet at least he was able to instill in her the idea that even the lowest classes of the UK had an inalienable dignity that meant they ought to be given a just and fair chance to better themselves and their situations. In that sense, much in the way of stories like this, her father was able to give his favorite daughter a gift. Also much in the vein of such folktales, this gift was never showy or extravagant, yet it wound up being among those talents that counted the most later on. Edith was able to remember the lessons she learned from her father's encounters with England's working classes, and she used the knowledge gained from these early memories to become something of a tireless champion for the poor and the worker's rights. Another gift given to Edith by her parents was that of the Victorian Childhood Nursery. This was the second great teacher in the child's life, and it was the one that gave Edith her future fame and glory.There is one big, long book to be written about the place of the Victorian Nursery in the development of the modern Fantasy genre and the stories that have gone on to become the guideposts and markers of its identity. Many chapters of this story have already been written in the form of various studies and master's theses. The best volumes out there to explore this topic still remain the same. They are Morton Cohen's landmark biography of Lewis Carroll, Roger Lancelyn Green's Tellers of Tales: Children's Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1968, and Stephen Prickett's simply titled, yet comprehensive book-length study, Victorian Fantasy. The best way to sum up a long yet fun story is to claim that Edith was the recipient of a collective gift. The birth of the middle class type household into which she was born saw the invention and rise of the Nursery as a childhood social institution. I'm not real sure its correct to describe these rooms that soon began to dot the landscape of both British and later American homes as a clear-cut example of the safe space. That's especially not true when writers like Edith, Mark Twain, and Edgar Allan Poe would go on to look back at their semi-shared time in those places as one of learning how to confront their fears of the dark. Instead, I subscribe idea that the parents thought they were giving their kids a safe space, however it just didn't turn out that way.Instead, what wound up happening is that it's like we sort of ended up carving out a kind of ballpark in which for the first time the Imagination was allowed to roam free and play in. It has to be remembered that nothing quite like this had ever existed before. Until the Nursery came along, while the novel and the reading public had begun to cement themselves as permanent aspects of modern life, it was all still a relatively new social construct. The first major publishing houses had just been set up in the 1730s and 40s during the last century by the likes of Robert Dodsley, and most of the fiction published tended to be in the Manners and Morals vein of Jane Austen, or else it was the first, halting attempts at building the first examples of the modern Gothic Ghost Story, with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, or the germ of the fantastic adventure yarn contained in the likes of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. These were all very much baby's first steps, rather than the full-fledged fantastic genres as we know them now. If authors like Scott and Dodsley were the ones to throw the ball into the playing pen, then it was kids like Edith, who grew up with this stuff in the Nursery to take the pitch and run with it. That's because the Nursery was where all the folklore of the old world came to have its new Victorian home.Since the Nursery was designed as a place for children like Edith to entertain themselves, that meant it had to be stockpiled with all the sorts of diversions that were thought to be fit for young adults. The good news for the likes of Nesbit, Kipling, and a young West Midlands lad with the peculiar yet lyrical name of Tolkien was that the adults in charge of the Nursery all seemed to agree that there was no harm in passing along to their young charges reprintings and chap books containing the content from storytellers like Aesop, Charles Perrault, and the Brother's Grimm. That's how a girl like Edith first made the acquaintance of Mother Goose and the denizens of fairyland as charted and cartographed by the likes of Spenser and Shakespeare. This growing trend of the Nursery as the place for childhood idylls was helped along in no small part by the first major translations of The Thousand and One Nights made for children's mass consumption. It made it possible for the YA of Queen Victoria's time to conceive of a visit to the Nursery as yet another chance to take journeys on magic carpets, or open enchanted casements onto a host of other worlds and adventures. This, then, was the second and most telling influence on Edith's childhood. It was enough to turn her into a lifelong fan of the Fantastic.
This initial fan girl crush soon turned into a lifetime professional occupation. As she came of age, Edith soon found herself transforming from just a dedicated enthusiast in the crowd to one of the artists performing for the audience. As she began to train her mind in the art of storytelling, she also began to discover how to take all of the folklore she'd devoured as a starstruck child and find an ideal modern form of creative expression for all of the old myths she used to love as a child. In doing this, she sort of wound up creating the parameters of the modern Fantasy genre as we now have it. A good way to gain a perspective on this achievement is with a simple formula. No Nesbit, no Tolkien and Middle Earth. Also no Neil Gaiman and practically everything he's ever done. None of their later efforts would have been possible if Edith didn't turn out to be the one creative voice that wound up plowing the original field in the first place. The main reason either of the two later names were able to succeed as well as they did was because Nesbit was the one who built the original ballpark for them to play in. In honor of her unrecognized achievement, I thought it might help to remind everyone of what she did by taking a look at one of her short stories for children. This one was a previous publication that was later added to a collection known as The Magic World, and Edith called it by the title of "Accidental Magic".
Sunday, June 16, 2024
Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion by Philippa Pearce (2001).
In the same way, though in a much lighter vein, it is possible to get a sense of the influences that helped mold Philippa Pearce into the writer she became. In her case, most of the shaping influences in her art can be traced back to her childhood, growing up in Great Shelford, near the River Cam, in Cambridgeshire, England. Her parent's were merchant millers, yet their occupation never got in the way of their daughter's education. A lot of that was conditioned by the location that Ernest and Gertrude Pearce decided to settle down and raise a family in, and which subsequently became the place of the artist's birth. If you follow the course of the River Cam long enough in a certain direction, it will take you both through and right past the iconic town and College which have taken their respective namesakes from the water source. It's one of those cases where, if you pay attention to the geography long enough, you can maybe begin to understand why sometimes even the children of the working class residents of the town dotted about the River could sometimes grow up with higher rates of literacy than elsewhere, and this includes Pearce herself, as well. All of which is to say that the first and biggest influence on Philippa as a child was the fact that she grew up within the shadows, environs, and confines of Cambridge University. As a result, she was something of a college town girl.
It makes sense, therefore, that spending most of her childhood within reach of one of the most iconic and greatest centers of learning in the world meant her formative years were spent in an atmosphere that was always being molded at some fundamental level by the demands and enticements of academia. It's no surprise, therefore, that growing up in such a collegiate setting would mean both an easy access to books, and eventual result of both an academic, as well as literary frame of mind on the part of the author. All available indications point to Philippa taking a somewhat natural interest in the world of Arts and Letters at an early age, no doubt shaped in large degree to the influence that Cambridge University and its administration was able to exert on the daily workings of life in her hometown. She was further assisted in this growing interest in the Realm of Letters by the fact that her parent's business as millers left them well off enough to send their daughter to Cambridge's Girton College. She was thus able to graduate with a successful degree in both English and History (web). It was this nurtured interest in Art and is relations to historical events which seems to have colored Philippa's work for the remainder of her days. Her fictions tend to coalesce around a number of themes and settings.In one sense, she's very much a writer concerned with the potential dramas of the domestic scene. The vast majority of her work takes place in the lower and middle class houses containing the types of families that she knew growing up. In this she shares a lot in common with Mark Twain. Both artists can be described as regional authors, or Writers of Place. Like Twain, in other words, Phillipa always seems to have been at her best when bringing the Cambridgeshire town and country settings she knew as a child to life on the printed page. Twain did the same thing with his boyhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Or, for that matter, in much the same way Tolkien did for the West Midlands country of his own Victorian/Edwardian youth. Philippa's stories tend to be a lot quieter in their focus on the domestic than either the rambunctious mischief of Twain, or the soaring epic qualities of Tolkien. However, that's not the same as saying that she was unfamiliar with the tropes of the Fantastic. While the domesticity of Cambridge country life might have been the author's main primary setting, much like the work of Stephen King, Pearce's backdrops were often the stage for various happenings and occurrences of the otherworldly variety. What's remarkable and somewhat gratifying to learn is just how much of these Fantasy elements took the form of the traditional Gothic framework.Also much like King, Philippa's stories concern the ways in which the hidden and sometimes troubled aspects of life can erupt into an otherwise normal setting in the form of the supernatural. The major difference between the two is that Pearce's approach to this same material tends to take a much more gentler guiding hand, for lack of a better word. A lot of this seems down to the fact that when it came time to find her niche in the world of letters, Phillipa somehow wound up settling on the venue of children's author as the mode that allowed the best possible expression of her own creative voice. Nor is there anything to complain about, really. Much like the work of R.L. Stine, or Bruce Coville (or closer to home, E. Nesbit and M.R. James), at her best Pearce's efforts can act as a very useful gateway entry to the wider world of Gothic fiction. She does this by manufacturing narratives of the ghostly and the whimsical that in some ways can almost be said to signal the future work of authors like Neil Gaiman. One such story is what we'll be looking at today. It's called "Mrs. Chamberlain's Reunion".
Sunday, June 2, 2024
Charles Beaumont's The Wages of Cynicism (1999).
Perhaps the biggest reason that most people are no longer familiar with the name and writings of Charles Beaumont is because his life was taken way too early by illness. What's remarkable about his career as an author is just how vast an amount of material he was able to churn out in such a short span of time. It all reads very much like how both his friends and favorable critics once observed. Beaumont always seemed to work as if some inner aspect of his personality knew that he was maybe never going to have all that long, so it was best to try and tap into the Imagination for all it was worth, and leave as great a mark on the world of the storytelling arts as he possibly could. In a way, it's just possible to claim that he's succeeded. You may no longer know Beaumont's name, though for the most part, you sure as hell can't escape the legacy he's left behind. It's no mistake to claim Chuck Beaumont as a writer with something of a pioneer status to his work. While the passage of time has rendered a lot of his writings as either obscure or too familiar sounding to be worth much comment, it helps to keep in mind that back when he was writing, Beaumont and his friends were busy finding what was then nothing less than a new and modern voice for tales of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy.
The kind of writings Beaumont was famous for are very much as described by author Christopher Conlon. "They have the power of fables: simple, direct, allegorical, they pull you in and hold you—but they teach you something too. They’re the kind of stories SF master Theodore Sturgeon called “wisdom fiction.” And while these particular tales are the work of completely different writers—Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), Charles Beaumont (“The Howling Man”), William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson (Logan’s Run)—they almost seem as if they might all have been hatched from a single brilliant, fantastically inventive imagination."This is no accident. For these men were, from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, part of a close-knit brotherhood of writers centered in the Los Angeles area that came to dominate not only printed SF and fantasy, but movies and TV as well—scripting between them many of the period’s best-known films (including most of the Roger Corman / Edgar Allan Poe movies), along with classic segments of Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond, and virtually every episode of The Twilight Zone. At its peak this association of creative artists also included, among others, Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Jerry Sohl, Ray Russell, and Harlan Ellison. These outstandingly gifted men were collectively referred to by several names, including “The Southern California School of Writers” and “The Green Hand” (after the Mafia’s “Black Hand”). But they were most commonly called, simply, “The Group.”
“It’s an astonishing story,” says Marc Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion. “Many of these writers would not have been nearly as creative without each other. It was genuinely a gestalt that made these people deeper, better—made them stretch to places they never would have gotten to without each other.” Group member William F. Nolan, whose film credits include Burnt Offerings and Trilogy of Terror, explains: “We’d talk plot, read stories we’d finished for opinions, talk about markets and what was selling and who was buying, discuss character development and structure, and, yes, we’d argue, but in a constructive way. We all helped each other…and inter-connected on projects.”
“Sometimes, of an evening,” Ray Bradbury has written, “Richard Matheson would toss up there merest dust fleck of a notion, which would bounce off William F. Nolan, knock against George Clayton Johnson, glance off me, and land in [Charles Beaumont’s] lap. ..Sometimes we all loved an idea so much we had to assign it to the writer present who showed the widest grin, the brightest cheeks, the most fiery eyes.” Direct collaborations between Group members were common. And no wonder. In those early days, most of them—particularly the “inner circle” of Nolan, Charles Beaumont, George Clayton Johnson, and novelist John Tomerlin—were men in their twenties who were just beginning their careers. They found strength, encouragement, and a sense of solidarity in the company of other struggling young writers. Because of the Group, says Nolan, “We were not alone; we had each other to fire us creatively, to bounce ideas around, to solve plot problems. It was the best kind of writing class that could ever be imagined.”
"But the closeness of the Group members went beyond the writing. According to Johnson (scriptwriter for Twilight Zone and Star Trek): “We knew each others’ wives, we went to each others’ houses, we shared holidays together, we went to movies and other things together…[We] would go out on the town and zoom around from place to place, stay out all damned hours. We’d just do anything you can think of. We’d go to strip joints to watch the strippers strip and be embarrassed to be there, but nonetheless whistling and whooping it up and trying to act like college kids…We’d go to nice restaurants like Musso and Frank’s or we’d end up at Barney’s Beanery. Or someplace along the beach. It hardly mattered.” The central members were as open to a carnival as they were to an art-house film. More than any particular activity, the joy was in each others’ company.
"And, most especially, the joy was in the company of one man—a lanky, charismatic young author of screenplays (The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao) and teleplays (Twilight Zone) as well as essays, short stories, and novels, who is described by Nolan as having been “the hub of the wheel,” the Group’s “electric center”: the vibrant, brilliant, and tragic Charles Beaumont (Conlon, California Sorcery, 1-3)". A lot of this will be familiar to older readers of the Club. For those who are new, however, a handy general guide to Beaumont and his life's work can be found here, at this link. I'd urge novice readers to start out with the article contained in the link above, and then come back here for further exploration when and if you feel like it. For those veteran readers who are already familiar with the material of Beaumont's life and writings, I kind of owe you a bit of gratitude. For whatever reason, my previous article on the obscure California Sorcerer has wound up becoming one of the most popular pages on this blog. For that reason, I think a bit of a reward is in order. That's why I've decided to revisit this particular well. Today, we'll take a look at one of the short stories Beaumont seems to have written yet never published within his lifetime. It's an unknown piece with the simple title of "The Wages of Cynicism".
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939).
It really does seem like from that moment on, my focus in life was on the world of the Arts. The Imagination and its ability to tell stories seems to have become one of the key guiding passions of my life. One of my main avenues for plugging into reality, if that makes any sense. Thanks to the efforts of Henson, and others like Spielberg and Don Bluth, I was granted the ability to be curious about how stories are made and what they all mean. It's a path I haven't really strayed from since. Looking back, I think the best part of getting hooked on all of this stuff was that was I never aware at any point that I was receiving a lesson. I was just having too much darn fun to bother with the notion that I might have been learning something at the same time. Looking back on it now, I've come to regard stumbling upon gifts like that as perhaps the best and truest way to teach any valuable subject to a person, no matter their age. Anyway, the point is that from that moment on, I was a student of film, and later books.
When I learned to read for myself it was like discovering yet another key to an unnoticed secret casement. The best way I can describe the value of becoming a bookworm is to say that it's like being able not just grasp or reach at least some kind of understanding of reality, it's also that for a moment or two, you're able to hold a potentially valuable aspect of it in your hands. I can't tell how much sense I must be making now. I'm also not so sure it matters. Those who know what its like to come under the spell of good storytelling will know what I mean. If a filmmaker like Henson was the gardener who planted the original seed in my mind, then it was later writers like Dr. Suess, Charles Schulze, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and J.R.R. Tolkien who taught me that the essence of stories all comes from the words on the page before it ever can or will exist anywhere else. So, to reiterate, I was a reader and a filmgoer to begin with. These twins aspects of a life must be kept in mind, because otherwise nothing I'm about to explain about the occasional hobby that grew out of this process will make sense. It's only with the full picture in place that you'll be able to understand what it's like to turn into a work of fiction. The way this latter half of my tale came about is natural enough if you're the kind of person who likes to read and watch a lot of stories. As I got older I began the normal process of growing up to be a discerning reader. Rather, let's say that I've gotten somewhat better at being able to tell a good work of narration from either the minor, or else just plain bad. What I think few people, even the professionals never bother to keep in mind, is that the Art of Writing is very much one big game of chance. I've heard the act of literary composition described as the same type of job as any other manual labor, like brick laying or architecture. I'm willing to admit a great deal of truth in that sentiment. What I think even the best authors seem to miss about this aspect of the trade is that their really describing no more than the Craft of their jobs. When it comes the actual capital-A Art of telling stories, then I'm afraid everyone is either a rookie or veteran Vegas gambler, and the house odds are always stacked against your favor. Good writing isn't just labor, it also involves a lot of dumb luck.
Another way to say it is that the best writing often winds up as one big game of Go Fish. The artist tries to turn their attention to the Imagination, and then just hopes and prays that something will happen. That a really creative idea will pop up into their head, like a flair sent up from the middle of a vast lake. I've read and studied this phenomenon enough to know that this is pretty the ultimate standard operating procedure for all writers. All are at the mercy of the Muse. The trouble with this method of operation is that when you get right down to it, all that the literary game of Go Fish amounts to is just gambling with the odds. It's the basic idea of rolling the dice or betting on the lucky number by other means, no more, no less. In that sense, much like running and playing the odds in Vegas, all the really best books amount to little more than hopeful bets that somehow managed to come up all Aces and Jacks. An even better way to put it is that the successful story belongs to whoever is lucky enough to draw that tricksy wild card in their favor. If all that sounds less than promising, then the real kick in the teeth is that there is no sure-fire formula for working the odds in your favor. It's proven impossible to cheat the Imagination. You either play by its rules and wind up with a maybe publishable book, or else you take your little red wagon and go home, never to show your face at this particular dice table ever again.
There is one aspect to this whole literary gaming table that's begun to fascinate me in recent years. I'm not talking about the blockbuster successes or the cringeworthy failures anymore, here. Nor am I thinking about at all about the middle of the roaders, the types of storytellers who are good enough to be remembered, even if they're not in the company of the greats. The type of stories that have begun to draw more of my attention of late are the ones where the roll of the dice somehow just didn't pay out, yet you'll swear its almost possible to see the faint hints, traces, and outlines of how things could have worked if the writer had just a little bit more careful. What I'm talking about now, in other words, are those moments where you run across a story that is an objective poor showing, if maybe not just plain bad. These are the less than successful efforts where nonetheless a careful study of the material leaves the notion that you can just begin to see how things might have been able to work out with better success. If only the artist had paid greater attention to the artistic material they were working with. If they had just taken a bit more time to work out this particular plot point, or chosen to explore this otherwise unexamined bit of narrative thread, then things might have been different. I don't say the finished product would have been a masterpiece. Yet at least it might have had a better chance of being a genuine entertainment. These are the ground rules for the kind of unfinished story I'm thinking of.There are some books and films out there, in other words, where you can tell there was a lot good potential to be had, and yet the bet just never came off. The author didn't play the cards he was dealt as well as he should or could have. Are you starting to see what I mean when I say that writing is like gambling? You take a chance on a roll of the dice, and the worst plays are the one's where you can see in retrospect how things could have been better if you'd just played your cards different, or given the writing a bit more of the effort needed to be, at the very least, a pretty decent read. I've been fascinated by those almost success stories for sometime now. What happened is I'd get to mulling over various finished products where I could tell the story still needed a bit of work. The pastime I mentioned before got started when I began the serious effort of giving some actual thought into the question of whether or how could an essentially incomplete story be made better than what we got, or wound up with? That was the key to the whole thing for me. If you can find any halfway decent answer to that question, then you might have learned a thing or two about the Art of Storytelling that's not in any of the official dossiers. So that's the hobby I've started. I've taken works that seemed unfinished, and I began to mentally consider the all of the possible ways and means in which a mediocre tale can be a good one.
To my own surprise, I've managed to come up with a few possible solutions to a few final products that seemed lackluster. I kind of surprised myself by stumbling upon what (to me, at least) sounds like a more promising narrative through line than the official one we've gotten for every single release in the Destiny video game franchise, for instance. I'm not saying I've managed to find anything like a definitive storytelling solution. Just one that grants the secondary world of those games a better overall plot, and hence a greater use of its recurring cast of characters. That's a story for another day, however. The point I've been working up to with all of this is that it was this relatively recent hobby of mine that lead by pure accident to the discovery that I was just a picture in a book. The way that came about was that I happened to stumble by pure chance on the account of someone else who seems to have had the exact same idea more than 40 years before I was born. I was doing nothing more than looking for something to read, and then I ran across the history of how some enterprising young wit in Argentina came to similar conclusions about how a merely competent story could become a potentially great one with just a bit of proper rewriting. This is the story of "Pierre Menard", by Jorge Luis Borges.