Some nice work courtesy of Cliff Chiang, in aid of a charity auction for Heroes Con
It occurs to me that I haven’t written much about comics of late. Not that I haven’t wanted to. There was the Ryan Choi controversy. My love of the Jodoverse refuses to die and a new Scott Pilgrim book is on the horizon.
Let me just assemble my thoughts and I’ll get back to you.
Phelim O’Neill’s touching tribute to the late Dan O’Bannon reminded me just how much I enjoyed his work. A rather affable raconteur, with a certain raffish charm that he had in common with his collaborator John Carpenter, O’Bannon helped create some of the most indelible movie moments of the past thirty years.
Yet his contribution is often passed over in favour of those he worked with such as Carpenter, Jodorowsky, George Lucas (for whom he did some design work on Star Wars during a lean period), Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven.
He will never be remembered as a screenwriting mentor like William Goldman, but he often welcomed the interest of science fiction and horror fans, freely divulging anecdotes of his involvement in the genre cinema revolution of the 70s that followed Star Wars and Alien. O’Neill mentions that a book by the man himself, The Rules of Writing, is waiting in the wings. Could it rival Adventures in the Screen Trade?
Some of O’Bannon’s charm I believe came down to his admission that he had been incredibly lucky in his career. Swept away to Paris by the mercurial Jodorowsky to work on that great film that never was, an abortive adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, he nevertheless was plunged into an inspiring artistic collective that included comic artist Moebius and the inscrutable H. R. Giger. Last year I saw a documentary on Moebius that included an interview with O’Bannon, ruefully looking back on the failure of Dune, that eventually returned him to L.A. broke and bewildered. Yet for all that, I feel working with Jodorowsky gave him the confidence to continue to pursue his inspiration.
After all the wreckage of Dune provided the body, guts and all, of haunted-house-cum-Freudian-nightmare Alien. The franchise that refuses to die started with a poorly titled script by O’Bannon called Star Beast. His work with Moebius in Metal Hurtlant also ‘inspired’ Blade Runner and The Fifth Element.
But it’s Lifeforce, the comically bad ’space vampires’, film based on Colin Wilson’s novel that I think of with the most fondness. Strangely it begins in a similar manner to Alien, with a team of astronauts discovering a vessel adrift in space carrying three humanoid beings preserved in stasis pods surrounded by giant bat-like corpses. The space-shuttle returns to Earth with only one survivor, an American astronaut suffering from amnesia. Of course the three humanoids are revealed to be lifeforce draining vampires, hence the title, that soon turn the city of London into a zombie plagued warzone. With a surfeit of ambition and the budgetary efficiency of a Roger Corman production, the film rips along with the occasional wink at the camera. Patrick Stewart being possessed by the female space vampire, indicated by the Shakespearian thespian mincing it up with a curled lip, is a particular highlight for me. It is also fun, a quality that escapes many film-makers today.
O’Bannon’s legacy is secure. An American fantasist with a European sensibility. A horror and science fiction afficionado who brought the spectacular images of Metal Hurlant with him into the cineplexes of today. Without him the gamut run from Ridley Scott’s Alien to EA Games’ Dead Space would never have been.
I had a good feeling when I bought this book, much like I did with Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees. Partly because it also is published by Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks, which has done a wonderful job of republishing out-of-print fantasy books that deserve wider acclaim. It’s humbling to discover just how many writers have slipped beneath my radar.
Such as McKillip. Eld is written in a style similar to a classic fairytale. In fact it is hard to distinguish it from a tale by the Grimm brothers, so neatly observed is the use of conventions of the genre.
A young girl named Sybel, daughter of a powerful wizard, grows up after his death accompanied only by his menagerie of magical animals, hidden from the world in a mountain. She has learned from her father the ability to call any animal, or human and compel them to do what she wishes. The opening with its description of how her father and his father before him lured young maidens to Eld to mate with was reminiscent of a Michael Moorcock book The Shores of Death that begins with an unfeeling father raising his daughter in a lone tower in the wilderness, or Jodorowsky’s Metabarons. It is clear that the birth of a daughter after three generations of male mages has broken the cycle and things are about to change. Sybel is an emancipated Rapunzel though, able to communicate her thoughts to her magical animals and sometimes travel across the land of Eldwold to steal tomes from rival wizards. Her greatest desire is to capture and tame the creature known as the Liralen, which has eluded her call since she first discovered it in one of those stolen books.
Then one day a man brings a child to the gates of Eld. The baby is the offspring of the king of Eldwold, whose wife has been having an affair with a rival prince. The man explains that he is the brother of that prince, who has been killed and that the kingdoms of Eldwold are at war. The king Drede is searching for the child, as he suspects it is illegitimate. The man begs Sybel to protect the baby and raise it in secret until the war is over and he has avenged the death of his brother.
Reluctantly Sybel accepts and the boy known as Tamlorn grows up in her household, reading the histories of the kingdom and playing with her animals. Then one day, after the boy has grown into a young man, the man named Coren returns to claim the king’s heir.
What follows is a plot filled with romance, intrigue and magic. McKillip has written a modern day fairytale that predates Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment by only two years, but deserves a chapter all to itself. It is a charming, wonderful book.
There are two kinds of ‘what might have been’ games when it comes to Hollywood. The most popular is the fascination with actors who died young, such as James Dean -what projects might they have done. There was a sudden surge of this type of speculation after the death of Heath Ledger.
The other camp, of which I am a member, is that of film fans who wonder how films that were never made might have turned out. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, with the eye-catching casting of Salvador Dali as Emperor of the Galaxy. Vincent Ward’s unproduced script for Alien 3, describing Ripley’s encounter with an order of monks inhabiting a wooden satellite. Alex Cox’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, scuppered when Hunter S. Thompson took a dislike to the quirky Englishman.
This material fascinates me and led me to buy David Hughes’ The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. The bookstore owner of The Film & Television Specialist Bookshop in Newtown was taken aback by my choice. He only had the one copy and didn’t suspect there would be any interest in a book about films not made. I launched into something of a rant with him when I noticed listed on the book’s blurb that there had been a proposed Star Trek film to be directed by Philip Kaufman. How incredible might that have been I wondered? One of the most underrated films in my opinion is his ‘The Right Stuff’, detailing the American Space Race. His idea for relaunching Star Trek on the big screen was to have Spock trapped in space with a rival Klingon, which sounds like a remake of John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific in a sci-fi mould. Unfortunately there was something of a personality clash between Kaufman and the producers, not to mention the ever-protective Gene Roddenberry, killing the project.
Years later a movie with a very similar plot called Enemy Mine was released, starring Dennis Quaid as the human trapped on an inhospitable planet with a hostile alien warrior. This is part of the fascination for me – film pitches never really die. They haunt the boulevards of Hollywood until their chance arrives to be recycled. So many of these ‘movies never made’, eventually are made – but in a different form (and usually poorly executed).
In the end the reason for movies dying before conception has been assured is typically one of financial risk. Movie producers are some of the most compulsive gamblers there are (although cinema audiences are not far behind) and every project, regardless of popular recognition or projected profits, is always a risk. Frequently movie fans complain about the sense of diminishing returns from current pictures. One obvious reason is that despite the drop in quality (compare Judd Apatow to the wit of Billy Wilder) audiences continue to pay to see whatever is showing in the cinema. There are reports that box office numbers are falling, which will hopefully provoke Hollywood into trying to rectify this decline in quality, but the sceptic in me suspects otherwise.
David Hughes’ book focuses on one narrow cinema genre – science fiction. The properties adapted into pictures would typically be based on or inspired by pulp writing of the Amazing Fantasy variety. Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen King were early novelist luminaries, but how famous would they have been without the brand recognition granted by the cinema? Today there has been a further shift. The glut of comic book adaptations can be directly attributed to two movie studios owning most of the properties – Warner Brothers and Marvel Entertainment. The risks are minimal. Comic book films are something of a guilty pleasure. Many people know the characters, but few read them. There’s even an additional source of recognition in console game tie-ins like Marvel’s Ultimate Alliance or the upcoming Capcom game pitching the heroes of the DCU against the Mortal Kombat crowd. So let us not applaud this development as proof that Hollywood producers are all secretly nerds (and how much fanboy affection did that misconception stoke up). Rather these films are cheap to make and a guaranteed source of revenue on multiple fronts.
As a science-fiction enthusiast, I enjoy reading about the development of these projects. After a while though I have noticed the more I learned, the greater my cynicism. Which is why Hughes’ chapter on Douglas Adams, describing how the British writer was interminably wined and dined by Hollywood producers in Malibu, while failing to produce anything considered ‘filmable’, was something of a pleasure. In fact it struck me that Alan Moore’s attitude of why bother trying to adapt something for the cinema which is tailored for an entirely difference medium also applies here. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is more like a series of comedy sketches contained within a loosely defined plot. Any sense of narrative is accidental. The characters do not grow, they bumble along and encounter events sharing in the reader’s sense of surprise at each development. They are not subject to plot – they got the plot drunk and left him to sleep it off on the coach while they continued to enjoy the evening.
It’s so rare to read a story describing the failure of a film version of a property to come to fruition because the original creator was too wily for Hollywood. Generally the risk-shy producers use and abuse a number of writers, then chew up their work and spit it out as pabulum. That or the writer is offered the carrot of a possible deal and then is left stranded. In William Goldman’s classic adage ‘Nobody knows anything’, the reason being when the sole determining factor in a movie’s production is the bottom dollar there is no room for vision in the creator. There is nothing to know.
This is also why marketers insist on using the description of ‘visionary’ so often, because there is an essential lack of vision in Hollywood, less a dream factory, more an assembly line for a reliably useful products, like boxes.
Which underlines the real appeal of these movies that never were. In their failure to come to term, we are left with the idealized, wished for picture we’ll never see. Pure and uncompromised.
Brought Tom & Cormac with me to see El Topo.
When the lights came up Tom had a cheshirecat grin on his face a mile wide. Cormac frankly looked disturbed.
Must have been all those dead rabbits.
As I’ve said elsewhere, this film sent me out into the streets with my head buzzing. That’s what I look for in a truly cinematic experience. I want to be transported. I want to not catch myself in the act of ’seeing the movie’, but to see/feel/touch the movie. El Topo’s internal logic (very internal – it draws heavily on the Tarot and every scene has some peculiar significance) and brutal humour made it a unique experience.
A gunfighter/mystic is travelling the desert with his young son. After they come upon the site of a massacre he sets out hunting down those responsible. Credit to Jodorowsky, these villains weren’t simple thugs – each coded differently by a increasingly bizarre set of fetishes and colourful costume.
That’s simply the opening though. Jodorowsky, playing the gunfighter, is encouraged to go on a further quest to defeat a series of Gunfighter Saints to prove he is the greatest killer. Little does he realize he’s being led along a path to a very costly form of enlightenment.
Jodorowsky himself is an extraordinary performer. At one point he even puts his skills as a mime to rather inventive and comical use. Much like Santa Sangre he casts this movie with multitudinous freaks – I’m convinced he’s a devotee of Tod Browning’s film of the same name. Certainly the dwarflove anyway.
I think Tom has a new fetish himself 
I would argue that this isn’t weirdness for the sake of it. There is meaning here, structure, but it requires commitment on the part of the viewer. A strange notion, I know, but it’s definitely there.
It was certainly an experience. If you’re looking for something different, have a gander at the dvd in May.
Santa Sangre. Incal. metabarons. The abortive designs for Dune. The White Lama. psychomagie. Son of the Gun. Bouncer.
This is all I’ve managed to scramble together of Jodorowsky’s material. Poet, artist, writer, director, expert on the tarot, mime, actor – oh less we forget official at Marilyn Manson’s wedding (ok it’s over, but don’t blame Alejandro). He’s many strings to his bow. It’s feckin’ impossible to get his stuff though. I traveled all the way to Brussels once just to pick up some of his work. It wasn’t the main reason for my going there – more extra incentive.
His films and books tend to be extraordinarily personal. In fact he tends to cast family members as actors, along with non-professional freaks. Santa Sangre famously features an elephant burial were the beast is flung down into a pit populated by lepers. They were real lepers.
El Topo’s reputation rests on the involvement of John Lennon, who viewed it at a series of midnight screenings. Inspired he approached Jodorowsky to fund whatever the hell he wanted to do, which produced Holy Mountain. Unfortunately this proved to be something of a poisoned chalice, as Lennon’s manager kept the rights to Jodo’s films tied up in arbitration until very recently.
This summer there’ll be a dvd release of El Topo, Holy Mountain and Fando y Lis.
But aha! At the end of the month it’ll be screening at the IFI on Saturday 31st. & lil ol’ me got tickets.
Everything’s coming up Emmet of late 
Crazy. His voice was strained as I answered the phone. “I had to tell somebody and you’re the only person I know who’d appreciate this.” What was it I asked? “Guess who Marilyn Manson got to perform the service at his wedding?” No clue. “Alexjandro Joderowsky.”
My goodness. That’s the first cool thing that big girl’s blouse has done since the ‘Beautiful People’, video some ten years ago. Joderowsky is king! And hey they did the deed in Ireland. Have I already posted about Alejandro here? I can’t remember. He’s commonly referred to as being ‘Lynchian’, which translates as meaning no one has a fricking clue what his films are about. Seemingly the man operates a clinic in Paris specialising in ‘psychomagie’, which roughly translates as being psychological magick. Imagine characterising all your higher order ego states and unconscious drives as angels and devils. Perhaps it’s an attempt to reclaim the mental states humans were privy to prior to the breakdown of the bicameral mind, as per Mr. Julian Jaynes. On top of this and his film-making Joderowsky has also found various vocations over the years as an artist, poet, painter and comic book writer. Plus he studied with Marcel Marceau and an avante-garde theatre troupe in the 60’s.
Cool guy
Radiation guilt?
Just a notion and perhaps others can point me in the right direction, but I was thinking the other day about how Manga/Anime has dealt with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It echoes through most of the dystopian storylines produced by Japan. There is a recurring story trope of nuclear holocaust ushering in a darker civilization, be they demons, vampires, religious zealots or the Akira dystopia.
In the sixties in the states we had veterans like Kirby illustrating and writing comics. As a member of the Marvel stable, he was among the contributors who created characters whose ’superhero’, identities were the result of radiation. The Hulk is exposed to gamma radiation and becomes a creature of unfettered strength. Captain America is dosed with radiation in order to stimulate his body to become enhanced. Spider-Man is bitten by a radioactive spider, mutants were originally the first generation to be affected by ambient radiation I believe (in keeping with the novel ‘Children of the Atom’), though now we are led to believe it was due to evolution. Even Daredevil receives his powers due to domestic toxic waste.
So were these comic superbeings created in order to assuage public guilt over the atomic bombings? Not in a conspiratorial sense – men in a dark room deciding to brainwash the children of America with Atomic Propaganda – no, I mean more in the sense of cultural synchronicity. There was a general sense of unease over the use of atomic weapons and fantasies were constructed that used atomic power in a beneficial way.
However, being constructed as fantasies this may well have been a self-reflexive admission of ‘guilt’.
Now European comics, as well as Jodorowsky, Bilal etc….don’t see this ‘atomic dystopia/enhancement’, theme so much. DC comic characters acquired before WW2 are aliens, magicians, master strategists and vigilantes. With the ‘Marvel Age’, we have the power of the Atom being employed.
Just curious myself.
Review of Serenity to follow shortly.