Forry Ackerman, Ray Harryhausen,
Ray Bradbury, and Julie Schwartz
[photo by Dave Truesdale]

…and now there are none.

They were truly legendary, the first fan boys to become more than fans, ur-geeks who went on to help shape modern culture to varying degrees throughout their long, productive lives.

I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Ray Harryhausen several times over the years, though never as long as I would have liked.  He was a charming and soft-spoken man, very gentlemanly and polite.  The kind of person you’d cast as a kindly old grandfather on a Disney Channel movie, not the kinda guy who gave us this…

…or this…

…or this…

My very first exposure to Ray Harryhausen occurred roughly around the same time I first encountered the work of Ray Bradbury.  Rain pre-empted a scheduled kindergarten trip, so to keep us quiet they screened a 16mm print of Harryhausen’s King Midas.

Yikes!  Not exactly kid fare, is it?  Not when you compare it with the Popeye and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons that ran endlessly on local kiddee cartoon shows.

Yeah, cartoons had their scary moments, but they were cartoon-scary, more funny than frightening, certainly not real in the sense our families were real, and certainly comforting insofar as we’d seen dozens of Popeye and Bugs and Daffy cartoons so we knew nothing really bad was going to happen to them.

But Harryhausen’s animated version of the classic Greek myth (updated to fairy tale medieval Europe) was unsettling.  First off, we didn’t know these characters, so we had no idea if they were going to come through intact or not.  Secondly, they occupied some weird realm more real than cartoons but not yet fully in our own world.

That probably is the best explanation for Harryhausen’s unique hold on the imagination of millions of young boys and girls, even after he left his series of self-produced fairy tales to go on to provide special effects for major studio productions.

He brought the unreal to life in a way that was difficult to emulate with costumes and props.  He could create monsters that truly looked monstrous, not like a guy in a rubber suit, and bring them to life in a manner that easily achieved suspension of disbelief.

There was, for lack of a better word, charm to his creations, and he beguiled generations of audiences and fans.

As posted above, his trek began early in the days of science fiction fandom, when a handful of excitable young boys poured over the meager offerings on the newsstands and cinemas.  Ray H. was friends with Ray Bradbury and Forrest J Ackerman, and the trio grew up together in pre-WWII Los Angeles, fueling each others’ interests and desires in the realm of imaginative stories.

Just as Metropolis and Amazing Stories grabbed hold of young Forry Ackerman’s mind, so did King Kong with Ray Harryhausen.  There’s not enough time or space here to do full justice to the story (besides, that’s what the Internet is for); suffice it to say Ray & Ray & 4SJ ended up fulfilling at least some of the lofty dreams of their youth, and in doing so inspired and challenged many, many others (yrs trly included) to follow their dreams as well.

One closing story to demonstrate the friendship among the trio:  Following his work assisting Willis O’Brien on Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen was offered the gig of providing the special effects for a new monster movie.  Ray H. read the script and quickly realized the core scene in the film — a scene where the monster, attracted by a foghorn, attacks a lighthouse in the mistaken belief it’s one of its kind — was lifted from Ray B.’s famous short story, “The Foghorn”.

Most people in Hollywood would have said nothing, a few would have notified their friend and let them handle it on their own.

Ray H. did something far, far smarter:  He suggested to the producers that they contact Ray Bradbury as a consultant on the sci-fi angle of the film.

They did, and so they walked into a perfect trap where if they denied they had lifted the story they would had demonstrated prior knowledge of Ray Bradbury and so would have lost any possible lawsuit…

So they bought the story from Ray B. and credited him in the movie…

R.I.P., Mr. Harryhausen, and thanx for all the wonderful memories and inspiration…

 ”What’s my motivation in this scene?”

Over at In The Balcony on Facebook, the question was raised:

Who are your favorite lead
and supporting characters in
feature-length animated films?

And my answers are:

this guy

and these guys

…and I thot, geeze, put ‘em together and you’re half way to a great sci-fi novel.

These guys ordering breakfast would be epic.

Someone asked me what was so difficult about being called away from one’s muse.  To them — and they weren’t being mean-spirited — writing a story or drawing a picture or composing music was the same as baking a cake or hanging wall paper:  You can always start any time you feel like it.

Well, yeah…if by “any time” you mean “whenever the muse calls”.  As Charles Bukowski famously observed, ”…it comes out of / your soul like a rocket / …being still would / drive you to madness or / suicide or murder”.

Every creator I know is nodding at this (and, yes, there are creators who manage to harness themselves to a steady work schedule; I contend for them the faucet is always on and they don’t know how #%@&ing lucky they are to be able to fill their buckets on their own timetable).

For the rest of you, I’ve made a little simulation after the jump that will give you the barest inkling of what it feels like to be a creator denied access to pen / paper / pixels when inspiration hits.

Hold your breath, follow the jump, and don’t inhale again until you scroll down to “10“.

Read the rest of this article »

As most of you know, my first job in show biz was a lot attendant at a drive-in theater.  Today while putzing around doing research on the InterWebs, I stumbled across these gorgeous but heartbreaking[1] photos of an abandoned drive-in in Rhode Island[2] taken by Reana Rose.[3]

I’m posting small versions of three of her shots here; you really need to visit her blog & see these & her other work in full.

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[1]  Well, to me, at least…

[2]  H.P. Lovecraft’s old stomping — or should I say slithering? — grounds.

[3]  A nom de shutter; you can find her on FB if you go to her old blog

“There are only three principles necessary for a lyric writer…

Content Dictates Form

Less Is More

God Is In The Details

all in the service of

Clarity

without which nothing else matters.”

– from Finishing The Hat

Gerry and Sylvia Anderson in happier
times.  On the set (literally!) of Stingray

Let us be generous, let us be kind, let us say Gerry Anderson was a complicated person and leave it at that.

Like most fans of my generation, I became aware of Gerry Anderson through his first American released TV show, Supercar.[1]

Fireball XL5 was my favorite of his puppet shows, and I remain a big fan of it to this day.  It seemed to be the best looking of any of his series, and avoided the top & nose heavy production design of later shows.[2]

But as much as I enjoyed Fireball XL5, and as many positive things I can say about Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet And The Mysterons, to me the two most fascinating Gerry Anderson productions were Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun a.k.a. Doppelganger and his first live action sci-fi series, UFO.

There’s something off kilter and disconcerting about both projects; they produce a feeling of unease and anxiety and most importantly not because of the sci-fi elements.

Rather they were reflections of a marriage in the last stages of disintegration.[3]

Journey / Doppelganger takes a Twilight Zone-ish idea — there’s a world orbiting the sun on the exact opposite side of Earth that’s just like us except for One Tiny Detail — slathered on a wholly unnecessary spy sub-plot, and crammed the whole mess into a meandering 101 minutes.

Visually it’s gangbusters, and though it’s pretty turgid plot-wise, thematically it really strikes deep and doesn’t let go.  Astronaut-for-hire Roy Thinnes finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage with a genuinely castrating bitch of a wife; when he arrives on the counter-Earth he finds himself not only stuck in the exact same relationship, but now wondering on an even more existential level if he really knows her or, for that matter, if he even really knows himself.

The one person who could shed any light on the matter, his co-pilot, dies from traumatic injuries after their crash.  Since the world they are on is the exact counter-part of the Earth they left, it’s presumed that somehow the two turned back halfway through their mission; no one thinks they may be an exact doppelganger crew from the doppelganger world.  So Thinnes’ character finds himself increasingly alienated in his “own” world, unable to successfully communicate with either his wife or his colleagues.

Journey / Doppelganger sputtered out at the box office despite it’s top notch visual design and effects.  Perhaps a more action oriented plot ala Planet Of The Apes would have helped instead of focusing so tightly on marital disintegration.

But Journey / Doppelganger was just the warm-up for UFO.  By that time the Andersons’ marriage was in free fall (it would prove to be a very acrimonious divorce) and that was reflected in virtually every episode of UFO.

The American TV series The Invaders[4] covered similar territory re Earth vs an invasion from space but the Andersons’ show almost regulated the aliens to the background.[5] And while The Invaders often ended with the protagonist barely escaping from some peril and often experiencing short-term defeat, the feeling was that somehow in the end he would persevere.

An example of Gerry Anderson’s propensity for top / nose heavy design

UFO, on the other hand, frequently rocked its characters back on their heels, defeating and frustrating them at almost every turn, denying them any sort of satisfaction in forward progress against their enemy.

Additionally, almost every episode involved some duplicity involving either a married couple or comrades-in-arms.  It became impossible to find any good guys, and increasingly harder to sympathize with any series regulars.

This sort of storytelling works great with shows like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad; it’s not an ideal theme for a slam bang space opera, which was how the show was being sold.

ditto

UFO didn’t exactly flop, but it certainly failed to get renewed and it failed to resolve the morose plot threads entangling its characters.  It’s remember fondly now for trying something different — and perhaps with a slightly different execution it might have clicked.

Anderson’s next series, Space: 1999, marked the official end of both his marriage and his business relationship with Sylvia and the end of his quality work.  Anderson struggled along many years after that, producing gimmicky shows of varying quality, eventually succumbing to Alzheimer’s this week.

It was a sad finish.  His shows — their shows, actually — brought a lot of pleasure to millions of people around the world and certainly elevated the quality of visual effects in TV, but few people knew what they were looking at was a reflection of a very painful personal life.

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[1]  While I watched the show faithfully as a kid, I never really warmed to the look of the series, finding the vehicles awkward and top heavy.  Why did I watch it?  Cut me some slack:  I was 8 years old; I’d watch anything made of pixels.

[2]  Yeah, I’m looking at you, Thunderbirds.

[3]  Credit to the late Frederick S. Clarke, editor/publisher of Cinefantastique magazine, for first noticing this.

[4]  Also starring Roy Thinnes.

[5] Indeed, one episode was a very conventional drama about the protagonist’s own marriage falling apart, with only one short scene with a flying saucer to justify its inclusion in a sci-fi series.

For more reasons than one, it’s appropriate that we’re using The Bledsoe Scene from Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid to make our point today.  BC & The SDK is one of the best movies to come out of Hollywood, beloved by audiences but somewhat despised by old time Western fans.

Y’see, BC & The SDK took a whole lotta conventions of the genre & turned ‘em on their ear.  Up to that point — and indeed, for several years afterwards[1] — the standard trope of the genre’ was that when the hero/s faced impossible odds, they stood their ground and fought, sometimes to their death, but more often than not to victory.

Butch and Sundance, when faced with overwhelming odds,
said “Shuck this fit” and fled the country to South America.

But between the point where they rob their final train in the good ol’ US of A to the point where they decide to go to Bolivia then jump off a cliff, they are pursued by the relentless Super Posse.  At one point in the chase they[2] get the cockamamie idea that leads to The Bledsoe Scene.[3]

Bledsoe is a former outlaw turned sheriff; Butch & Sundance know this but the town folk don’t.  Butch & Sundance sneak up to his house in the middle of the night & present their plan to him:  Acting as their intermediary, Bledsoe will go to the territorial governor and get a pardon for them in exchange for their agreeing to join the Army and fight in the Spanish-American War.

To their surprise, Bledsoe does not cotton to this idea.  He explodes in rage, in fact:

“It’s over, don’t you get that?  Your times is over and you’re gonna die bloody, and all you can do is choose where.”

The conservative white Protestant male POV had a good long run as the dominant / default POV for this country, but it’s over.  From May 14, 1607 (the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the Americas) to the present, the values espoused by Anglo-American culture / society / civilization were those of conservative white Protestant males.

It’s not that they always excluded others — here and there token minority representation was allowed to participate — or that they were entirely adverse to outside ideas, but the bottom line was the white boys decided what the cultural values were, and if you wanted a chance to participate, even on the fringes, you had to toe their line.

And “everybody” “knew” that.

Injuns were either bloodthirsty redskins or noble savages, depending on what game the white boys wanted to play.  Blacks were simple minded creatures just one step up from animals whom whites were duty bound to enslave in order to bring them the benefits of civilization.  Homosexuals were godless perverted sodomites to be pitied at best, scorned and brutalized always.  Furners were smelly, creepy, weird folks with foreign gods and strange customs and un-American ideas.  The ladies, God love ‘em, were gentle creatures who need to be protected and shielded from their own thoughts and desires for their own good.

And anybody who doubted rapacious dog-eat-dog / winner-take-all capitalism wasn’t God’s specific plan for the human race — and that America wasn’t His new Jerusalem, a shining beacon unto the world — was some atheist commie pinko.

We were a Christian nation, gawdammit — but none of that namby-pamby love-your-enemy / turn-the-other-cheek stuff, nosiree!  Good conservative white Protestant male values faced all problems head on, never compromising, never backing down, beating the opposition back with fists or guns.

Conservative white Protestant male values were always right, never wrong.  If we said drugs were bad, m’kay? then drugs were bad, period.  And if we said certain drugs used by non-conservative non-white non-Protestant non-male groups were far, far worse than the drugs the conservative white Protestant males liked, well, that was a self-evident truth, wasn’t it?  We need to punish those people more than we punish our own because they don’t see the inherent virtue of conservative white Protestant male values.

It’s over.

This is not to say conservative white Protestant male values did not make a tremendous contribution not only to the formation of this country but the shaping of worldwide values for over three centuries, but they weren’t the only values nor the only POV out there.

And they certainly weren’t virtuous just because they
happened to originate with conservative white Protestant males.

In the original draft of Toy Story, Woody was an outright villain, a nasty bully who dominated the other toys.  But as Pixar was working on the story, somebody had a flash of genius:  Woody could afford to be nice and sweet and affable and helpful to all the other toys –

– so long as they recognized he was the top toy.

The moment something happens to threaten his standing as top toy…well, that’s where things got interesting.[4]

We have just entered into a period that history will certainly decree is “interesting.”  Conservative white Protestant male values are no longer the default well-of-course-our-ideas-are-the-best values any longer.  There’s a lot of good to be found in conservative white Protestant male values…

…you jes’ gotta prove they’re better than any other values.

The days of the easy lowest-level-setting for conservative white Protestant male values is over; now they have to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

Compete as equals…

And this is making a lot of people — whom it must be said genuinely & truly believe that conservative white Protestant male values are the best — grow Very, Very Nervous.

A whole lotta people…

Because they have been living in the horror of what our old pal Socrates described as “the unexamined life.”[5]

They have never really questioned or tried or tested their values, they just accepted them as templates laid on them from above, pre-ordained by God and / or the founding fathers however they envisioned Him and / or them.

As a result, over the next 20 to 30 years as these people see their conservative white Protestant male values be treated as irrelevant but before they die off as a generation, there’s gonna be a whole lotta really, really stupid acting out and really, really, really stupid things said.

There are valid, important conservative ideas out there, and those will be heard.  There are vibrant, soul-stirring expressions of God’s love waiting to be shared.

But they have to be conscious decisions, conclusions arrived at through careful, deliberate thought and actual human experience.

Not embraced because they are the path of least cultural / intellectual resistance.

Especially not embraced because they comfort and reassure by appealing to a lust for power and control.

Bad enough such a lust is a conscious expression;
too often it is the result of unthinking denial.

This is not the time to be Butch and Sundance.

This is the time to be Woody.

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[1] The Wild Bunch

[2]  Well, Butch…

[3]  So dubbed by William Goldman, and why not?  He wrote the screenplay.

[4]  What I love about Pixar movies is that every time a character has a chance to make the right decision — they make the right decision!  Woody’s growth in maturity and selflessness turned him from an affable antagonist into a genuine hero and set the stage for two great sequels.  Those who espouse conservative white Protestant male values should keep that in mind.

[5]  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

The news this weekend was so overwhelming it took a while to sink in, to get me to wondering if this wasn’t what the killer had in mind when he went to the school…

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not. (Matthew 2:16–18, KJV)

Peter Paul Rubens

Giotto di Bondone

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Matteo di Giovanni

Luca Giordano