A few year’s back, Sam Henderson’s always entertaining blogsite The Magic Whistle ran a notorious well known 3-page comics story by Sam Glanzman called “Please Don’t Cry, Johnny”.

Lemme save you some time;
you don’t have to read the entire story.
The first two pages are padding,
all the info you need is down below…

This is why it’s an okay story, not a bad story:
It’s short, it gets to its punchline quickly,
it has a visually shocking enough ending
to make it stick in one’s memory.

This is why it’s an okay story, not a good story:
Because there’s a million and one questions to be answered with that last panel.
Who are these people?  Why does the father look like this?  Is this Johnny’s fate?
How do they live?  Don’t they ever have to go to town?
Will Johnny and his family always be outcasts?

This should have been the very first page of the story.  It should have answered all of those questions, or at least intimated at answers.

Then it would have had the chance of being great, and if not great, at least much, much better than what it is.

Bottom line:
Never settle for the obvious in your writing.

Damn, this is crappy news…

I’ve just been informed through Phil Proctor that Peter Bergman, one of the members of the Firesign Theatre (and arguably the group’s founder since it started as a spin off his show Radio Free Oz) has just died of leukemia.

I first heard of the Firesign Theatre when their album Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers was nominated for a Hugo award in 1971.[1]

Curious, I sought the album out and immediately became hooked.  Don’t Crush… is my favorite of their work, but I also loved I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus, their Nick Danger, Third Eye stories, and of course the wonderful off the wall riffing that they’d do called TV Glide.

TV Glide is perhaps the purest distillation of their craft.  Taking that week’s TV Guide as source material, Bergman, Proctor, Phil Austin, and David Ossman would then improvise an entire alternate reality based on the short log-in descriptions of various TV shows.  As Harlan Ellison once observed re the craft of writing science fiction & fantasy, “There is no nobler chore in the universe than holding up the mirror of reality and turning it slightly, so we have a new and different perception of the commonplace, the everyday, the ‘normal’, the obvious.”

The Firesign Theatre was capable of doing this every week off the cuff and have you laughing all the way through.

In addition to their work together, the various members of the Theatre worked in a variety of side projects, sometimes together in various permutations, sometimes separately.  Zachariah, The First Electric Western was as wild & wolly & weird as the title suggests with the Firesign Theatre providing the script & playing supporting roles, while Americathon was a scarily prescient view of then-future / now-contemporary American culture.  Proctor & Bergman also did a hilarious series of video mash-ups, culminating in J-Men Forever (a.k.a. The Secret World War), a hilarious re-dub parody of classic Republic serials.[2]

Bergman’s own individual credits were wide ranging and impressive.  I only had a chance to meet him once, on an abortive video game project; I would have cheerfully sacrificed a testicle to have had a chance to work with the Firesign Theatre.[3] He was charming and gracious, and seemed pleased that I remembered his early work so fondly.

We’ll still be remembering it fondly for many years to come.

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[1]  Not one but two LPs got nominated for Best Dramatic Hugo by the World Science Fantasy Organization that year:  Don’t Crush… and Blows Against The Empire, a proto-rock opera concept album by Jefferson Starship.

[2]  View the opening here.

[3]  Not mine, somebody else’s.

Unlike his rival Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi starred in and / or provided supporting appearances in relative few good movies.* On Sunday, January 22, 2012 TCM is showing three of his better efforts:

Murders In The Rue Morgue

The Black Cat

Island Of Lost Souls

(That’s Bela in the middle on the left; he really
doesn’t have an awful lot to do in this movie.)

They’re all tons o’fun — The Black Cat especially — and film buffs / aspiring screenwriters might want to look at this article that speculates on what Murders was originally meant to look like & how it ended up.  None of them are widely shown but Island Of Lost Souls is especially hard to come by nowadays, so I suggest marking your calendar / setting your TiVo.

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*  For the record:

Dracula

Murders In The Rue Morgue

Chandu The Magician (plays the villain)

White Zombie

The Black Cat (co-stars w / Karloff)

The Return Of Chandu (plays the hero!)

The Raven (co-stars w / Karloff)

The Invisible Ray (co-stars w / Karloff)

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

International House (supporting George Burns, Gracie Allen & W.C. Fields)

Island Of Lost Souls (supporting Charles Laughton)

Son Of Frankenstein (supporting Karloff & Basil Rathbone)

The Wolfman (supporting Lon Chaney Jr.)

Ninotchka (supporting Greta Garbo [!])

The Body Snatcher (supporting Karloff)

The other 100 or so movies he made are all varying degrees of suckalicious.

An early example of the genre found the the pages of National Lampoon‘s June 1972 science fiction issue:

A surprisingly charming little fumetti (tho close inspection will show it was edited to keep it G-rated).  Golden Age Comic Book Stories provides this and much of the issue’s other contents, but but advised:

It is National Lampoon; if your knickers are twistable, they will end up in a twist.

You can find my reviews at HollywoodJesus.com

Part 1

Part 2

Part3

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Plus: My choice for 10 Funniest Comic Strips Of 2011

There are movies…

And there are good movies…

And there are flippin’ great movies…

…and then there are eyegasms.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger never made a bad movie in their lives and when they made really good ones they made ‘em so good your eyes will pop out of their sockets and dance with delight.  I would heartily recommend any of the following films but on Thursday January 12, 2012 TCM is gonna run all three of ‘em back-to-back-to-back.

Stay up all night and watch ‘em; no reason to go to school or work the next day.

First up is A Matter Of Life And Death (a.k.a. Stairway To Heaven).  Can’t praise this film enough; one of the most delightful fantasies ever filmed.  David Niven is an RAF pilot who should’ve been killed but survives due to a clerical error in heaven; by the time they get around to rectifying their mistake he’s fallen in love & so he sues to get a full life since he otherwise wouldn’t have met Kim Hunter!

Next is The Red Shoes, which inspired thousands of young girls (and more than a few boys) to careers in ballet.  Blending a fairy tale with a modern story, this is a glorious yet heartbreaking tale.

And capping the evening, Black Narcissus, in which Deborah Kerr & a buncha nuns go to the Himalayas to establish a convent and sLoWlY gO mAd . . .

(And if you think that’s all this movie is about, guess again;
it’s one of the most deliriously captivating dramas you’ll ever see!)

Seriously, see these movies.  I can’t stress that intensely enough.

Another long post, this one
possibly of interest to sci-fi fans

Read the rest of this article »

A brief preview to a longer upcoming post…

Hi!  I’m the nice, safe “scary” monster.  I may give
you a few thrills and some suspense, but you know
that by the end of the movie I will be defeated, the
natural order will be restored, and you will sleep
soundly in the comforting thought that all is as it
should be with nothing to challenge the security of
all you know and love and hold dear.
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We, on the other hand, are going to fnck
with your head.

I think of myself as a Christian (i.e., disciple of the person know today as Jesus Christ & a believer in His divinity).

I draw a distinction between His teachings and what we call theology.

And I really draw a distinction between theology and folk-theology.

Folk-theology is to actual theology what folk-medicine is to real medicine:
Where there is anything actually valid about it, the chances are it wound up there by chance.

Actual theology, like actual medicine, is a systematic study & application of theory.

Folk-theology, like folk-medicine, is stuff everybody “knows” to be “true”.

I bring this up because as a Christian I take the actual meaning of Christmas very seriously.

But I also enjoy having fun with the folk-theology portions.

So when you see posts like this, don’t freak out.*

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*  Well, actually I can’t stop you from freaking out; ya gonna do what ya gonna do…

Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is one of my all time favorite plays, a rollicking / poetic / bittersweet / comedy / romance / adventure.  I’ve seen several different adaptations & stagings, but my favorite is Jose Ferrer’s Oscar winning performance.[1]

There’s nuthin’ not to like here, but for a lot of writers (& poets & dramatists), our favorite speech is in Act Two, Scene VIII.

I’ll set the stage:  Cyrano has just rejected the offer of patronage from a well connected nobleman.  Cyrano’s friend (and commanding officer) suggests maybe life would be easier for him if he were willing to play the literary game.

Read the rest of this article »