Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  YOU CAN TAKE A PLUVICULTURE BUT YOU CAN’T MAKE IT DRINK

  Then came the men & women who not only talked (as Mark Twain once said) about the weather but they did something about it! They called themselves storm wizards, rainmakers, and even pluviculturists (which is the fancy word for rainmaker!) & their theories were many & varied but what they did & how they did it & how they changed our lives & the destiny of the world was the stuff of legend. But at first everybody just talked about them & nobody did anything about them.

  Until 1935, that is!!!

  TWO THUNDERHEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE

  That year George Mayhew (the screenwriter of Little Lost Dinosaur & Wild Bill Barnacle) teamed up with James Selvors (director of such great movies as The Claw-Man Escapes, His Head Came C.O.D., and the fantastic musical war movie Blue Skies & Tailwinds) to bring to the screen a series of films dealing with the life & times of the men who broke the weather & transformed the American West to a second Garden of Eatin’—The Cloudbusters!

  THE GUN THAT DROWNED THE WEST

  Aided by the marvelous & mysterious Thunder Wagon (in which they kept all their superscientific paraphernalia & their downpour-making equipment) they roamed the west through five feature films & three shorts that will never be forgotten by those who’ve seen ’em.

  SHADOWS OF THINGS TO COME

  For the lead in the films (except for the last one where he had only a brief appearance due to his untimely & tragic death) they chose Shadow Smith, the big (6'5½") actor who starred in such films as Warden, Let Me Out!, My Friend Frankenstein, and lots more. Before the Cloudbusters films, his best known role was as Biff Bamm in Spooks in the Ring, Singing Gloves, and Biff Bamm Meets Jawbreaker, all for Warner Bros. Shadow was born in 1908 in Flatonia, Texas, & had worked in films from 1928 on, after a stint as an egg-handler & then college in Oklahoma City.

  He fit the role perfectly (his character name was Shadow Smith too) and, according to people who knew him, was just like his screen character—soft-spoken, shy, and a great lover of the outdoors. It is interesting that the Shadow Smith character in the Cloudbusters never used a firearm to settle a score—sometimes resorting to scientific wrestling holds & fisticuffs, but most usually depending on his quick wits, brain, and powers of logic.

  WHO DAT WHO DAY “DOODAD”?

  As comic relief & sidekick “Doodad” Jones was played by Elmer “PDQ” Podmer (the “PDQ” in the name of this old-time character actor stuck with him for the alacrity with which he learned & assayed his many roles, and the speed with which he went from one acting job to another, sometimes working on as many as three different films at three different studios in one day!). The character of “Doodad” was one of the most interesting he ever had. Many characteristics were the usual—he used malapropisms like other sidekicks (“aspersions to greatness” and “some hick yokelramus,” and he once used “matutinal absolution” for “morning bath”) but was deferred to by Shadow Smith for his practical knowledge & mechanical abilities, especially when something went wrong with the “consarned idjit contraptions” in the Thunder Wagon.

  Their young assistant, Chancy Raines (played by Bobby Hornmann, who died tragically young before he could fulfill his great talents as an actor) was added in the second film as an orphan picked up by Smith and “Doodad” after a drought & sudden flash flood killed his mother & father & little sister.

  Together they roamed the West, in three short (three-reel or twenty-eight-minute) films and five full-length features made between 1935 and 1938. They went from small towns and settlements to the roaring hellcamps of Central City and Sherman Colorado to the Mojave Desert in California, and as far north as the Canadian border, bringing with them storms & life-giving rains which made the prairies bloom—always in their magnificent Thunder Wagon!

  SKYWARD HO!

  The Thunder Wagon! A beautiful & sleek yellow and blue (we were told) wagon pulled by a team of three pure white horses (Cirrus, Stratus, and Cumulus) and one pure black horse (Nimbus)!

  Designed by director/cameraman/set designer/special effects man Bill C. Menzies (who had come from Germany via England to the M.G.M. studios in Boise in 1931), the Thunder Wagon seemed both swift & a solid platform from which Shadow, “Doodad,” and Chancy made war on the elements with their powerful Lightning Rockets, Nimbus Mortars (& the black horse neighed every time that weapon was fired), and Hailstone Cannons, which they fired into the earth’s atmosphere & caused black clouds & thunderstorms (& in one case a blizzard) to form & dump their precipitation on the hopeful thirsty farmers and ranchers who’d hired them.

  DON QUIXOTES OF THE PLAINS!

  But the weather wasn’t the only thing the Cloudbusters fought in the course of their movies. For they also had to battle the deadly Windmill Trust!

  The Windmill Trust! A group of desperate Eastern investors, led by the powerful Mr. Dryden, dedicated to keeping the status quo of low rainfall & limited water resources in the Western territories! Their tentacles were everywhere—they owned the majority of railroads & all the well-drilling & windmill manufacturing firms in the United States & they kept in their employ many shootists & desperados whom they hired to thwart the efforts of all the rainmakers & pluviculturalists to bring moisture to the parched plains. These men resorted to sabotage, mis-sending of equipment, wrongful processes of law, and in many cases outright murder and violence to retain their stranglehold on the American West and its thirsty inhabitants!

  DESICCATED TO THE ONE I LOVE

  Through these eight films, with their eye-popping special effects (even the credits were an effects matte shot of a giant cloud forming & coming toward you & suddenly spelling out the series’ name!), their uncharacteristic themes, and their vision of a changing America (brought on by the very rainmakers these films were about!), there were thrills & images people would never forget.

  If you ever get to see these (& someone should really put the first three shorts together in one package & release it to TV) you’ll see:

  A race to the death between raging floodwaters, the Thunder Wagon, and the formerly unbelieving Doc Geezler & a wagonload of orphans!

  “Doodad” Jones using the Nimbus Mortars to cause a huge electrical storm & demolish the Giant Windmill (thirty stories high!) sucking the water from & drying up the South Platte River & threatening the town of Denver with drought!

  The henchmen of the Windmill Trust (led by Joe Sawyer) dressed as ghosts in a silent (no sound of hoofbeats, only the snap of quirts and jangle of spurs heard in an eerie scene) raid on the town of Central City, Colorado!

  The climactic fight on the salt-drilling platform above Utah Great Lake in the hailstorm between Shadow Smith & Dryden, and three others seemingly plunging to their deaths far below!

  The great blizzard forming over the heated floor of the (once) Great Mojave Desert, with its magical scenes of cacti in the snow & icicles on the sagebrush!

  ACTION! THRILLS! WET SOCKS!

  You can see all this and more, if you travel back via the silver screen & your TV set to a time not so long ago, when the Cloudbusters rode the Wild American West in their eight films:

  The Cloudbusters (1935—a short, introducing Shadow Smith, “Doodad,” and the Thunder Wagon!)

  44 Inches or Bust! (1935—the second short—the title refers to the rainfall they promise a parched community—introducing Chancy Raines & the Windmill Trust!)

  Storms Along the Mojave (1936—the last short)

  The Desert Breakers (1936—the first feature, introducing Dryden as head of the Windmill Trust!)

  The Dust Tamers (1936—with the magic blizzard scenes!)

  Battling the Windmill Trust (1936—with the giant windmill that threatens Denver!)

  The Watershed Wars (1937—Dryden and Shadow Smith in hand-to-hand combat above Utah Great Lake!)

  The Thunder Wagon (1938—the best film though not most representative due to the death of Shadow Smith ((who appears only in an early scene & to whom the picture is dedicated))
but the Thunder Wagon is the star along with “Doodad” & Chancy—they have to cause rain in three widely separated places & use the Hailstone Cannons to freeze an underground stream!)

  So through these films you can ride (or saddle up again if you were lucky enough to see them the first time) with Shadow Smith, “Doodad” Jones, and Chancy Raines, fighting the Windmill Trust & bringing the West the rain it so sorely needs & experience a true part of American history & thrill to the science & adventures of The Cloudbusters!

  Introduction: The Effects of Alienation

  ONE OF THE BEAUTIES (there are few) of being a writer is that you can do all the things in one genre that you never did in another.

  For instance: I lived, breathed, ate (and dropped other courses in college) theater for a period of about three years. Theater was a crummy one-credit course, and you were spending fifty and sixty hours a week there, besides all the other education-crap-type courses you were supposed to be doing (three- and four-credit courses). I wrote plays, I was technical director, gaffer, best boy, key grip, scene painter and designer, Johannes factotum. I even acted (there’s never been another such Thousand Clowns as ours; since I had the twelve-year-old Nick Burns part—the Barry Gordon one in the movie—they cast giants all around me—the leading lady was 6'1" for godsakes, and she was the shortest besides me at 5'7").

  Anyway, I did everything, read everything, wrote everything. I was going to be the next Aeschylus, the next Lope de Vega, the next Eugene O’Neill.

  Somewhere along the line I made two astounding discoveries: 1.) All those guys were dead and we didn’t need new ones. 2.) I was making money writing prose. Then I was drafted. But that’s another story.

  One time I got a part because I was the only one who could do a Peter Lorre imitation (the part was of a very confused obscene phone-caller . . .). I wrote a play about the dying Bogart (before Woody Allen) and Lorre called The Long Goodnight. It was probably horrible; like the one about the Round Table, set in the Old West with barbed wire in the place of Mordred . . . and so on and so forth. Copies of some of my playwriting stuff’s in the Special Collections Library at Texas A&M University. Those, I pray, aren’t. If they exist, they’re in box four after the third divider; it says in my list here. I sure hope not . . .

  I do have a point and I am getting to it: You will notice that several of my stories have plays in them—this one, “The Lions Are Asleep This Night,” not here, and movie scripts, or parts of movies never made. This book’s full of them.

  That’s what you can do when you’re a big-time writer—you can put in your stories all the plays you didn’t write when you were eighteen; only in the stories, they’re all produced and are Big Hits! (or not, but they are produced).

  I wrote this in a hotel in Harrowgate England (as with far too many stories, I had to write one or show up empty-handed and wing-it for an hour). Not only that (and I’ve done this twice), a panel of lit-crits were there, to instantly critique it. Sort of a Gong Show Self-Worth Theater, if you know what I mean.

  I wowed ’em. Pretty good going for a guy everybody kept filled to the Plimsoll Line with Guinness Stout for two weeks. At the end of my time over there, at Gatwick, I said, “You know, I’m not a drinking man.”

  “Could have fooled us,” they said.

  I’m inordinately proud of this one. And it is about the movies.

  The Effects of Alienation

  IT ALWAYS SEEMED TO BE SNOWING in Zürich that winter, but as Peter walked toward the café, he found himself looking up at an astonishingly blue sky.

  Cold, still colder than a well-digger’s ass, but clear nonetheless. He was so taken aback he stopped. There was a dull sun, looking as frozen as an outdoor Christmas tree ornament, over to the west. The houses and buildings all seemed new-washed; even the slush on the sides of the street was white, not the usual sooty gray. Perhaps the crowd for the opening night might be larger than even he had hoped. If Brecht were still alive, he would have said, “Weather good for a crowd, good for a crowd.”

  There was a stuttering hum in the air, a summer sound from another country and time, the sound of a fan in a faraway room. It got louder. Then above the lake the airship Herman Göring II pulled into view like an art deco sausage on its daily run from Freidrichschaffen across the border to Berne. Some mighty Germans aboard; an admiral’s and two generals’ pennants flew from the tail landing ropes just below the swastikas on the stubby fins. Peter’s eyes were getting worse (he was in his fifties) but he noticed the flags while the thing was still two kilometers away. The airship passed out of sight beyond the nearest buildings. Its usual course was far northwest of Zürich—one of the Aryans must have wanted a look.

  Higher up in the sky he saw the thin slash of white made by the Helsinki-Madrid jet, usually invisible far above the snowy clouds over Switzerland. Peter hadn’t seen it for months (not that he’d even been looking). To people here, the passenger planes were something you only occasionally saw, like summer. Well, maybe that will change tonight, he thought. They’ll never look at a jet plane or a rocket the same way again.

  Then he asked himself: Who are we fooling?

  He went on down the street to the Cabaret Kropotkin.

  The actor doubling in the role of the blind organ grinder was having trouble with his Zucco, so in the last run-through he had to sing a cappella. Another headache, thought Peter. Brecht’s widow sent the offending instrument out: The one thing you could get done in Switzerland was have things fixed. More trouble: The ropes holding some of the props had loosened; they had to be restrung.

  Peter tugged on a carabiner. “Zero,” he said to the actor, “you really should lose some weight.” Peter had the voice of a small, adenoidal Austrian garter snake.

  The other actor (in the Cabaret Kropotkin, everyone was an actor; everyone a stagehand, an usher, a waiter, a dishwasher) pulled himself to his full height. He towered over Peter and blocked his view of the stage. He let go of his end of the rope.

  “What? And lose my personality?” said Zero. “It’s glands!”

  “Glands, my ass,” said Peter. “On what we make, I don’t know how you gain weight.” He pulled on the guy rope.

  “Do what? Gain? Back in America, I used to weigh—”

  “Back in America,” said Shemp, the other actor with a leading role in the play, “back in America, we all had jobs. We also knew how to keep a rope tight.” He jerked it away, burning their hands.

  “Quit trying to be your late brother!” said Zero, sucking on his fingers. “You just don’t have Moe’s unique personality.”

  “And he didn’t have my looks. Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!”

  Peter shook his head, twisted a turnbuckle past the stripped place on the threads.

  “Vaudeville!” said Zero. “God, how I don’t miss it!”

  “Eight shows a day!” said Shemp. “Your name up in lights!”

  “The only thing your name is going to be up in is the pay register,” said Brecht’s widow from the cabaret floor where she had returned without a sound, “if you don’t get those ropes straightened out.”

  “Yes, comrade Ma’am,” said Shemp for all of them.

  A little after 5:00 P.M. they finished the last rehearsal and it was time for supper. They’d had to cook that, too. A healthy cabbage soup with potatoes and a thick black bread Zero had kneaded up that morning.

  Madame Brecht, who wore her hair in a severe bun, joined them. The conversation was light. The Poles, Swedes, English, American, German, French, and Lithuanians who made up the ensemble had been together for such a time they no longer needed to talk. One look, and everybody knew just how everybody else’s life was going. When they did speak, it was in a sort of pig-Esperanto comprised of parts of all their languages, and when the Madame was around, great heaping doses of Hegelian gibberish.

  Not that a single one of them didn’t believe that being right there right then wasn’t the only place to be.

  Bruno, the old German gaffer, was staring into
his soup bowl like it was the floor of Pontius Pilate’s house.

  Shemp whispered to Peter, “Here comes the fucking Paris story again.”

  “I was there,” said Bruno. “I was in the German Army then. What did I know? I was fifty-three years old and had been drafted.”

  Madame Brecht started to say something. Peter caught her eye and raised his finger, warning her off.

  “Paris!” said the old man, looking up from the table. “Paris, the second time we took it. There we were in our millions, drums beating, bugles blaring, rank on rank of us! There was the Führer in his chariot, Mussolini following behind in his. There they were pulling the Führer down the Champs-élysées, Montgomery and Eisenhower in the lead traces, de Gaulle and Bomber Harris behind. Poor Bomber! He’d been put in at the last moment after they shot Patton down like a dog when he refused. Then came all the Allied generals with their insignia ripped off. It was a beautiful spring day. It was fifteen years ago.”

  There were tears streaming down his face, and he looked at the Madame and smiled in a goofy way.

  “I remember it well,” continued Bruno, “for that night, while looting a store, under the floorboards, I found the writings of Mr. Brecht.”

  “Thank you for your kind reminiscence, Bruno,” said the Madame.

  “Suck up!” said Zero, under his breath.

  “Just another hard-luck story,” said Shemp.

  “I like it very much,” said Peter to Zero quietly. “It has a certain decadent bourgeois charm.”

  “Does anyone else have an anecdote about the Master?” asked the Madame, looking around expectantly.

  Peter sighed as someone else started in on yet another instructive little dialectic parable.