Don’t ask.
Changing the subject so that I do not go mad, I will do my best to tie up a lot of loose ends from recent columns, as well as tip you off to a few good things that may enrich your lives.
But first, if I may, I’d like to complain about the lack of response to what I thought were inordinately subtle hints in exceeding good taste about what I wanted for my birthday last May 27th. Not one of you went to either of The Cigar Warehouse’s two locations and bought me one of those spiffy $100–$300 Radice (pronounced ra-dee-chee) pipes I casually mentioned. Perhaps those of you who continue to write postcards to the Weekly saying what a credit I am to the Human Race did not understand that I sit here smoking my pipe as I write, and that for a piddling $100–$300 outlay you could provide me with endless hours of wonder-filled relaxation, thus enabling me to better entertain you. Perhaps you didn’t understand that.
Photo: Richard Todd
Not to mention that my winsome request for any of the Oz books written post-L. Frank Baum brought an embarrassing silence. One guy called and said he’d loan me a few of his copies to read. Now he understood the nature of insane possessiveness.
Look, folks, let’s understand something. What the hell is the point of having free access to the unlimited power of the Press if one cannot use that power for one’s personal greed and aggrandizement? Clearly, most of you do not perceive the point of having power. It is a pain in the ass to amass such power; it takes time and annoys total strangers; it entails grinding the faces of the poor and dispensing favors in a thoroughly nepotic manner. Surely no one would waste his / her life in such a wretched pursuit unless there were a payoff. So if you’re going to play this game correctly, you’re going to have to shape up.
I can be bought. No, let me revise that. I can’t be bought, but I can be rented. A nice Greek plateau briar or a copy of KABUMPO IN OZ can put you right there in the fat part of the Spoils System feed trough. Don’t make me have to mention this again. It verges on Self-serving.
Sharon Gilbert wrote asking why, if I mentioned in my first ERA column that a major corporation had funneled $40,000 into Florida’s anti-ERA campaign, I didn’t name the corporation? Because I forgot the name of the corporation. It was in the Miami Herald, in a major exposé last year. If I can locate the item, I’ll drop it into a future column.
I’d like to recommend a quartet of good books. After my columns about Bill Starr and the anguish of being a freelance writer, I received a number of notes asking me if there is a good book on the economics of being a writer. There are, of course, hundreds of books ranging from the useful to the moronic on “being” a writer, but until now there hasn’t been a comprehensive text concerning itself with THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WRITER. The book is called THE BUSINESS OF BEING A WRITER (what a goddam coincidence), and it’s written by Stephen Goldin and Kathleen Sky, both of whom make their living at doing the job. It is published by Harper & Row, will cost you something like 14 bucks, and was published early in June. It covers virtually all of the ground necessary to making the running of your one-person cottage industry behind a typewriter something other than terra incognita. I’ve read the book and, while I may have a few minor carps about this’n’that, mostly because my experiences are different than those of Goldin &. Sky, they are charmingly pragmatic and exhaustive in their approach to this labyrinth of royalty statements and intransigent publishers. You will not go wrong if you hie yourself to a place where you can buy this tome. It may not make you a better writer, but it will sure as hell keep you from being a poorer writer.
Though I am only mentioned once, and then en passant, I would be a pisher in pique if I didn’t recommend a new book on 1950s science fiction movies titled KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES! It was written by a friend of mine, Bill Warren (you see what I mean about the Spoils System and the uses of the corruption of power?). It costs the staggering sum of $39.95—and they have the audacity to demand an additional $1.25 for postage and handling—from a small publisher (McFarland & Company, Inc.; Box 611; Jefferson, North Carolina 28640) but it is simply delightful. Warren has an idiosyncratic eye and a nasty sense of humor that permits him both to totemize and revile most of the monstrosities from 1950 through 1957 with equal aplomb. The difference between KEEP WATCHING THE SKIES! and the usual microcephalic flying saucer movie books, is that Warren is possessed of a special derangement: he loves all these awful movies, even the ones about giant maggots from Mars that eat Duluth. There is an innocence, a charm, in Warren’s approach that permits the reader to accept the irrational concept that there is even a scintilla of merit in such ghastlies as Carolina Cannonball (1955) starring Judy Canova. He goes on at hefty length, telling you almost more than you may wish to know, about something in excess of 160 films; there are cast&credit appendices; an appendix that lists the films in order of release; one on announced but not released films; and a final appendix on the SF serials of the Fifties; also a good Index; and the book is board-bound like a good library edition. It is humungously expensive, but if you like to chortle over the peccadilloes of your parents when they were teens, this is a superb job of writing.
I am a freak for dinosaurs. Anyone save the prematurely adult will cop to a similar fascination. Two new books have crossed my palm that deal with saurians in a spectacular fashion. The first is DINOSAURS, MAMMOTHS AND CAVEMEN: The Art of Charles R. Knight, by Sylvia Massey Czerkas & Donald F. Glut (Dutton, $14.95). Ms. Czerkas is, by my way of thinking, the world’s finest sculptor of dinosaurs. Her work can be seen at both the Page Museum and the Natural History Museum here in L.A., and it will bring a shine into the eyes of any kid you take to stand before it. Don Glut wrote both THE DINOSAUR DICTIONARY and THE DINOSAUR SCRAPBOOK (though he made more money writing the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back) and what he doesn’t know about the beasties Sylvia does. They have teamed up here to produce an awesome retrospective of the paintings of prehistoric eras done by the late Charles Robert Knight, whose imagination and sure sense of paleontological reproduction combined to bring forth exquisite art at the highest level combining scientific accuracy (at that time) with the wonder one finds in the finest natural history paintings. The quality of the reproductions is better than good, the subject matter is exhaustive, and one flips page after page with one’s mouth hanging open.
This is a special treasure, and I commend it to your attention.
The other dinosaur book is William Stout and William Service’s THE DINOSAURS, edited by Byron Preiss (Bantam, $12.95). The damned thing is already a trade paperback bestseller, so you probably don’t need me to rhapsodize over it, but in the unlikely event you missed hearing about it, this is the very latest we know about dinosaurs, presented in mind-croggling paintings by the multitalented Stout and in delicious, innovative text by Service. Like the Knight book, this is one of those cornerstone volumes that you will be the poorer for having let slip past. I cannot urge you to it strongly enough. Particularly pages titled The Shadow, In the Jungle, and Hot Weather. The Nose ain’t too dusty, neither.
I was asked to take note of the recent death of Philip K. Dick. That is not an easy thing for me to do. We were close friends once. We fell out. We had not talked civilly to each other in a number of years. I learned, shortly before the two strokes that took him, that he regretted the distance between us and wanted to get together. Time and circumstances and probably pigheadedness on my part prevented that. Now he is gone and, like many of you, I never got to say to someone who mattered, how much he mattered. So I am not the proper person to speak of this enormously talented, tormented man. I am not entitled to eulogize him as so many others have. Only this, as one who came out at the finish line too far behind to make his presence known, is open to me: nowhere in all the high flown testimonials to Phil and his singular writings, has anyone noted that there were greedy and amoral fuckers who used him badly, who kept him paranoid and poor and delusional with nightmares of life that served their own commercial ends. As one denied the right to praise him, I am per
mitted, I suppose, to suggest that each and every one of those scum who fed off his life-force be condemned to live out the rest of their days under the miasma of anguish and paranoia they visited on him.
A number of you asked why, in my pieces on Walter Annenberg and TV Guide, I didn’t mention Annenberg’s essay, “The Fourth Branch of Government,” in the May 15th issue of that publication. I simply forgot it. But it was L’eminence Grise hisself, coming out from behind his editors and hired guns to help Uncle Ronnie attack the tv newscasters who have had the temerity to suggest Reagan may not be sanctified. It was one more salvo in the war against opposition reportage that the Reagan White House has been waging since his ill-deserved popularity began slipping so severely. He said, in the piece, “Our argument is with adversary journalism and advocacy journalism, which are by their very nature biased. We believe there is no place on television news programs for such journalism, that it serves only to confuse the public and weaken the Nation. More than ratings are at stake here; it is the effectiveness of the Presidency itself.”
This disingenuous twaddle might make some sense if the automatic weight of The Presidency were not a fact of life. As Reagan and his cohorts have the power of Being There going for them, without strong advocacy and adversary examination of their actions to advise us, we would be totally at the mercy of what they proffer as The Right Way Things Should Be Done.
Annenberg and TV Guide, in a fistful of articles—as noted in my columns by date and title—repeatedly bring into question the right and credentials of those who take exception to administration policy. I’m sorry I forgot to do a ride-out on this naked statement by Uncle Ron’s most powerful mouthpiece.
But this oversight has been corrected. Thanks, Alan, for reminding me.
And next week I think I’ll strip the hide off Paul Schrader and John Carpenter, and say a few loving words about E.T., which I urge you to go stand on line to see this very minute.
As for today, if it comes back again, I’m going to throw myself into a Cuisinart.
—————LETTERS—————
An Open Letter To Harlan Ellison
Dear Harlan:
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro…”
Armchair psychiatrist? Dubious. Constitutional backseat lawyer? Hardly. Competent political analyst? Amateurish. An excellent writer at one point in time? I am beginning to wonder.
Come on, Harlan, relax, lay out for a few months. The bogey-man of the “far right” will still be there when you feel better. Ed will cool off and this caper should ensure his departure from television to film as it should have.
I too am vocal about the insipid behavior of the “Machiavelli-like” Moralists or anyone of the left, right or center who proposes my tastes. However, we all have one common and most precious bond: that being the First Amendment. As human creatures we all tend to be subjective on issues which inflame our concerns and passions. Most of us are convinced of our positions as being the moral (i.e., “right”) one. Just as you have the right to search out paranoid network conspiracies and reactionaries in print, so too do Kimberly Clark, Walter H. & Company and CBS possess that same right by means of the purse, the pen and the camera. Face it, Harlan, you, me and the rest—we are all stuck with it. Free enterprise and free speech are born of the same mother.
Ed will be okay and make tons of hard, hard earned money. El Salvador will be sadly forgotten for more fashionable pursuits. And Hugh Beaumont is gone forever. If you really need a channel for your energies, both you and Ed could get an effort going for the very victimized Lebanese and Palestinians. (Civilian dead now over 10,000?) Of course, you and Ed and I know who signs the checks.
I’m in the phone book if you would like to come to Burbank and kick my ass. You can turn out the closet lights now…
—Jon Douglas West,
Burbank
INSTALLMENT 34: 12 JULY 82
Michelangelo is reported to have said, “Where I steal an idea, I leave my knife.”
Were it possible to locate that knife, I would suggest those words be carved into the foreheads of such filmmakers as Paul Schrader, Dino De Laurentiis and John Carpenter.
And while we’re at it, though I suspect the low brows of at least two of those gentlemen would not provide ample space, we might add the words of novelist Meyer Levin: “Three evils plague the writer’s world: suppression, plagiarism and falsification.”
Motion pictures are the damned-near eternal product of an industry that Pauline Kael has lamented as “an art-form controlled by businessmen.” When that product transcends its essentially surface dominated limitations, we find our meager store of permanent memories enriched by Casablanca, Singin’ In The Rain, The Pawnbroker, Lonely Are The Brave, The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, Atlantic City, La Strada and E.T.
When the worship of the marketplace above all other considerations holds sway, we are disgusted, disappointed, gulled and ultimately repelled by remakes of Cat People, King Kong and The Thing.
Sequels are chancy at best. Anyone puerile enough to plonk down ticket money earned by sweat for such mimetic efforts has no right nattering about what a dreary hundred and five minutes was spent there in the darkness with Grease 2, Jaws III, Rocky IX or Smokey and the Bandit XVII. But every once in a great while a Godfather II or a Butch & Sundance: The Early Days proffers riches as worthy, or worthier, than the parent film, and so the denigration of the sequel cannot be wholehearted.
But the egregious chutzpah of such brutes as Schrader, De Laurentiis and (I’m pained to say it) Carpenter in thinking they have the ability to remake films already created as close to perfection as the materials permitted, is a demonstration of hubris and venality that compels Olympian scorn.
Whatever flaws may be found in the original versions of Cat People, King Kong, or The Thing upon the hundredth reviewing, it is clear they were originals, gifts of imagination that were muscular, talents that were first rate, and intentions not wholly dedicated to placating Mammon. Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur, Cooper & Schoedsack, Willis O’Brien, Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, Christian Nyby…these were men who worked within a restrictive system, with budgets that wouldn’t have paid for one patch of Iron’s computer graphics or a side street in the world of Blade Runner, but who could not be contained by the comic book plots they put on celluloid, who transcended petty considerations and fleshed out immortal fantasies for generations to come.
Such imagination, such talent, is absent in Schrader, Dino and Carpenter. With the exception of Carpenter, who once, briefly, held out promise of being a director worth watching, these men are nothing better than graverobbers. They bring nothing new to the screen, and worse, they defile that which they have no right to touch.
The original version of Cat People, which I ran again the other night for the umpteenth time since I first saw it as an eight-year-old in the Utopia Theater in Painesville, Ohio, has not grown stale with age. One can wince at moments in Watch on the Rhine or Wild In the Streets, but Lewton’s conception of metamorphosis, brilliantly scripted by DeWitt Bodeen and photographed in misty eeriness by Tourneur, maintains its mystical hold on our intellects and emotions.
Even forty years after its initial release, Cat People is adult, inventive, artful and, most important, as effective as the first day it played as a “B” accompaniment to an “A” feature now totally forgotten. It is a classic because it adheres to the stringent rules governing any kind of Art, and because it has withstood the ravages of time and fad.
By contrast, Schrader’s twisted vision of Cat People is an exercise in depravity. An unsuccessful exercise in blood and warped eugenics. He has performed an autopsy on a dear thing that was not dead. He has drained out the gentleness, the caring, the characterization, the magic and the mystery and pumped it full of the currently fashionable formaldehyde of special effects brutality, gratuitous carnage, embarassing nudity, moronic storyline and a full measure of his own crepuscular view of humanity.
Mr. Schrader is a de
eply disturbed person. What seemed to be eye-opening insight into the human condition as manifested in the persona of Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, now presents itself as valid only because of the artistry of De Niro and Scorsese. We have seen what Mr. Schrader thinks of the rest of us inhabiting this vale of tears in Hardcore, Rolling Thunder, American Gigolo and Obsession. He does not like us. He does not, I think, like himself very much. His Dutch Calvinist upbringing is constantly being raised as apologia for the humorless, unrelenting revenant that stalks films with which he has been associated. That’s too easy.
None of us escaped the thumb of God pressed into our temple in childhood by such True Believers as Mommy, Daddy, Preacher, Teacher and Door-to-Door Bible Thumpers. Nonetheless, most of us do not see women as whores or virgins, do not conceive of Father as avenging angel, do not slough hip-deep through a murky world of sin and punishment.
Yet even if Schrader’s baroque image of the darkling world were universal, by what immense stretch of temerity does he presume to say (in the May-June 82 issue of Cinefantastique magazine), “Val Lewton’s Cat People isn’t that brilliant. It’s a very good B-movie with one or two brilliant sequences. I mean, we’re not talking about a real classic.”
One or two brilliant sequences that he swiped for his vile ripoff; sequences noted by virtually every reviewer as having been perverted and sophomorically reinterpreted.
An Edge in My Voice Page 29