Dream Factories and Radio Pictures Read online

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  ●PART ONE●Dream Factories: The PastFin de Cyclé

  Flatfeet!

  Occam’s Ducks

  Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen

  Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me

  The Passing of the Western

  The Effects of Alienation

  All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past

  Dream Factories: The FutureFrench Scenes

  Heirs of the Perisphere

  ●INTERLUDE●A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .

  ●PART TWO●Radio PicturesHoover’s Men

  Mr. Goober’s Show

  Major Spacer in the 21st Century

  Other Books by ElectricStory

  DREAM FACTORIES

  AND

  RADIO PICTURES

  by Howard Waldrop

  ElectricStory.com, Inc.®

  Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

  Howard Waldrop

  What if the post-apocalyptic world was inherited by the android avatars of a famous duck, mouse, and dog? What if every '50s Bugarama monster-movie nightmare came true at once? What if Cloudbuster pioneers had transformed the arid American Southwest into a subtropical paradise? What do you mean, what if? They're real, they're here, a life-giving downpour in a desert of mundanity, right from the cranium of Howard Waldrop, one of the best, most original writers in America. For the first time, the greater part of Howard's media-related tales are brought together in one place. TV, radio, movies—they're all right here. Plus original essays by the author. Plus a never-before-published novelette: "Major Spacer in the 21st Century," about the triumph of McCarthyism over a space-opera serial, the subsequent death of democracy, and the country's eventual second shot at freedom. In this collection, Howard brings to life the kind of historical trivia nobody else can imagine. Oh sure, you can laud his insights into the technical and social development of our dream factories and radio pictures. But what will blow you away are his wacky ideas—the way he brings together things that you'd never imagined on the same bookshelf, much less the same page of the same story. And yet, once he lays them out, you wonder why no one else thought to see it that way—his quirkiness exposes the romance of it all better than any cinéma vérité ever could.

  DREAM FACTORIES AND RADIO PICTURES

  Copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop. All rights reserved.

  Ebook edition of Dream Factories and Radio Pictures copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-59729-083-8

  Kindle ISBN: 978-1-930815-09-4

  ElectricStory.com and the ES design are registered trademarks of ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  This novella is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.

  Cover art by and copyright © 2000 Cory and Catska Ench.

  Original Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.

  Additional editing by Robert Kruger.

  For the full ElectricStory catalog, visit www.electricstory.com.

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  Baen Ebooks electronic version by Baen Books

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  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  This ebook is protected by U.S. and International copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Know that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you, the author, and the publisher.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  “Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen”: First published in Chacal No. 1, Winter 1976.

  “Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me”: First published in Nickelodeon No. 2, 1976.

  “All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past”: First published in Shayol 4 (Vol. 1, No. 4), 1980.

  “Heirs of the Perisphere”: First published in Playboy, July 1985.

  “Hoover’s Men”: First published in Omni, October 1988.

  “French Scenes”: First published in Synergy II, ed. George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), 1988.

  “The Passing of the Western”: First published in Razored Saddles, ed. Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto, Dark Harvest, 1989.

  “Fin de Cyclé”: First published in Night of the Cooters, Ursus/Zeising, 1990.

  “The Effects of Alienation”: First published in Omni, October 1992.

  “Occam’s Ducks”: First published in Omni, February 1995.

  “Flatfeet!”: First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1996.

  “Mr. Goober’s Show”: Previously published in Omni Online, March 1998; and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1998.

  “A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .” and “Major Spacer in the 21st Century!”, prefaces and introductions appear here for the first time and are therefore copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop.

  Thanks and a tip of the iceberg to Andrew P. Hooper for help in the research for “Mr. Goober’s Show” and to Gordon Van Gelder for a better story title.

  For Mr. Utley and Mr. Potter and the lady who knows what she wants.

  Preface

  WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ is a collection of all my stories about movies (dream factories) and television (radio pictures) from my first four collections, plus an unpublished article and a new story. There’ll be an introduction to each category. The movie part’s divided into Dream Factories: The Past, stories about motion pictures from the beginning circa 1895 to one set in an alternate 1970s. Dream Factories: The Future is a couple of my 1980s stabs at where films and (well . . .) famous characters were going or could go. There’s an Interlude for the new article; then we plunge together manfully forward into Radio Pictures, three stories dealing with television since before the beginning in the 1920s to now. (Well, June 2000 anyway, one that didn’t happen.)

  There’ll be a new introduction to each story (I always do that, usually to give people who’ve read all the stories a reason to buy a collection of mine). My introductions usually deal with the actual writing, Strange But True facts uncovered while researching them; you know, writer stuff. . . . There’ll be some of that here; mostly the new intros will be about the stories as they fit into (or outside or alongside) the history of motion pictures and television.

  Why am I telling you this up front? First, I’m an upfront kind of guy. Second, this is my first ebook (and the far-seeing and astute Robert [Bob] Kruger at ElectricStory.com should be congratulated on his taste [and his quick contract and check]). I don’t own a computer, a telephone, or, up until a year ago, a refrigerator; that being said, I do have a website (kind friends set it up) at http://www.sff.net/people/waldrop (last time I looked, the bibliography hadn’t been updated since mid-’98, but any day now I hear . . .). This is also the first (mostly) retrospective collection of mine. Stories here come from all four (Howard Who?, Doubleday 1986; All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Ursus 1987; Night of the Cooters, Ursus/Zeising 1991; Going Home Again, Eidolon Press, Perth, Australia 1997/St. Martin’s 1998, with various American paperback and foreign regroupings and additions and subtractions) of my previous short-story collections.

  Most readers have the general impression of me (if they have any at all) of being a guy who writes about extinct species (only two stories), rock and roll (only three and a half sto
ries), or alternate history (well, touché—a lot, including some overlap in all the other categories, including this one).

  But as this collection shows, a lot of my stories have been about film and television; their evolution, their heights and depths, some side channels they could have or should have taken but didn’t; actors, directors, technicians, hangers-on, all that Raymond Chandler/Nathaniel West Southern California stuff; other places, too, where movies and television evolved; what effect they have had and will have on us. These kinds of things will be in the individual sections.

  There’s more stuff from film, TV, etc., popping up in other stories of mine that aren’t here. “The Sawing Boys,” for instance, which is essentially the Bremen Town Musicians partly told in Damon Runyon style, set in the early 1920s, which allows a backwoods Kentucky musical-saw quartet to come on like a bunch of Beirut klezmorim because of the spread of mass communications (radio). But that’s buried so deep in the story that when I tell most people what it’s really about, they look at me funny. “It’s the Bremen Town Musicians, with musical saws,” they say. They could be right.

  Anyhow: These are the stories that are directly (or mostly—see the individual intros) about movies and television; personalities, history, projections, alternatives, guesses, and the effects they had on everybody, especially me.

  And, as John Barrymore said, after staggering up the center aisle, still in his street clothes, after they’d held the curtain for him thirty minutes, turning to the audience: “You sit right there. I’m going to give you the goddamndest King Lear you’ve ever seen. . . .”

  ●PART ONE●

  Dream Factories

  Dream Factories: The Past

  WITH HUMANS, IT GOES LIKE THIS:

  You’re born.

  You learn to move.

  You learn to talk.

  You learn to tell stories and jokes.

  The movies got it all wrong.

  They were born. They learned to move. Then they learned to tell stories and jokes. Finally, they learned to talk.

  * * *

  The stories in this section are about film, from the beginnings to (some other) circa 1970. There’s plenty of stuff here on grammar and orientation, on personalities and genres; all the stuff we love that the movies have done for the past 105 years.

  Film was the first mass medium, one capable of taking a product to millions of people at the same time. (Music recording was first, but it took the product—mass-produced—to a few people at a time. Plays had large audiences, but someone seeing the same play in NYC and Cleveland is seeing two different plays; for that matter, someone seeing a matinee and an evening performance of the same play in the same theater with the same cast is seeing two different plays.) The movies—once past the Kinetoscope-card one-viewer-at-a-time penny-arcade version—showed the same thing every time to everyone who ever saw it, no matter where in the world. It was for forever (or as close to forever as celluloid nitrate stock could be), and because it was forever, it changed the way people looked at their transiently beautiful world. . . .

  You’ll see in my introductions to the individual stories what I call the Waldrop/Sennett universal plot [hereafter, “W/S u-plot”]: Tom Oakheart, Teddy the Keystone Dog, Oil Can Harry, Pearl. You can illustrate almost anything in film with the likes of Teddy at the Throttle (1916). Buddy movies? Tom and Teddy. Romance? Tom, Pearl. Drama? That plot itself. Psychodrama? Why does Oil Can Harry want to saw Pearl into wet kindling when she won’t put out for him? Isn’t that counterproductive? And so on. (If you think this is outdated: the film-within-the-film in The Player, the one that’s always being pitched and talked about is the W/S u-plot: Tom Oakheart [Willis] with Teddy [his Land Rover] rescues Pearl [Julia Roberts] from the sawmill [gas chamber], where Oil Can Harry [The State of California] is killing her. Yes or no?)

  These things are imprinted on you and me from childhood as surely as if we were baby ducks. The movies are as real (or more real) than the first grade or the SAT or your second car or ’Nam or whatever else we call life. They’re part of it; they’re escape from it. What I’m saying in all these stories is that they’re beside life; a place we went that’s better or worse than what we have here, now . . .

  * * *

  Remember this while you’re reading these stories about the movies’ past: How real they are.

  Reporters waited outside the theater where the world premier of The Robe (1953—the first movie using the Cinemascope screen) took place. It was over. Sam Goldwyn, always good for a mangled quote, came out.

  “What was The Robe about, Mr. Goldwyn?” they asked him.

  “It was about a guy with fourteen-foot lips,” he said, and got in his limo, and left.

  Introduction: Fin de Cyclé

  IS THIS A STORY ABOUT BICYCLES, or is it about the beginnings of film? You tell me. I always give stories a reference title (before I give them a real one) by some private name—this I always thought of as “the velocipede story.” But as I wrote it, it came to be as much or more about film as about two-wheeled vehicles.

  The early history of film is about what is called grammar. At first, films were one- or two-minute pieces of life—trains arriving at stations, waves breaking on the coast, workers leaving a factory. Audiences would watch anything because it moved. The idea itself was astounding to them.

  But then film started telling stories. (The Waterer Watered: gardener watering flowers; kid steps on hose; gardener looks in hose; kid steps off hose; gardener gets face-full; gardener beats shit out of kid. The End.) It was a minute long and it packed them in like ET.

  But to do that, the Lumière Bros. had to figure out how to tell it: Show the gardener watering. Show the kid stepping on the hose. Show the water flow stopping. Pretty simple. Cause and effect. Shot continuously, like you’re watching a stage show. Gardener over here, kid over there, hose, flowers, etc.

  It was a little later, when people tried to show simultaneous action that things got complicated. That’s why to us early narrative film seems so slow moving. This happens. Then a title: Meanwhile, over at the sawmill . . . Oil Can Harry has Pearl tied to the log. Another title: Back at the Roundhouse . . . Teddy the Keystone Dog unties Tom Oakheart, who gets on a handcar to make for the sawmill. The titles had to do the early work. There was no grammar of editing yet. It was only later that filmmakers (Griffith gets credit for a hundred other people) cut to: sawmill, Oil Can Harry, Pearl, the whirring saw blade. Cut to: the roundhouse, Teddy, Tom Oakheart, the bonds gnawed through, Tom and Teddy running to the handcar.

  Also, you’ll notice, in this (my and Mack Sennett’s) universal scenario: Harry faces screen right; Pearl, in the middle, the whirring saw blade at the edge of the screen. When Tom’s bonds are chewed through, he moves screen right (toward the screen sawmill)—and when Tom bursts in on Harry’s plan to turn Pearl into red wet 2x4s, he’d damn well better come in from screen left, behind Harry (from the direction of the screen roundhouse).

  This is screen orientation, part of the grammar of film movement and editing. (And the W/S u-plot is the kind of thing that was being done twenty years into film history—the kind of thing Sennett made fun of while he was making money from it.)

  Nobody knew any of this stuff in the 1890s. They had to figure it out from Day One.

  The other thing the early filmmakers (especially Méliès, who was a stage magician and illusionist) didn’t realize was that MAGIC does not work on the screen; the screen is magic. In other words, you can do the most complicated illusion in the world, one that, if you did it outdoors, in broad daylight with two hundred thousand spectators, would be the most astounding thing ever seen. Let’s say you make some behemoth of an elephant disappear. Bravo! Astounding! How’d he do it?

  Now on film (and Méliès did discover this; he just never understood its impact): Daylight. Two hundred thousand spectators. Méliès waves his wand. We stop the camera. Europe holds still. We remove the elephant by walking it off to one side. We start the camera, Mé
liès finishes the wave. The elephant is gone. Bravo! (in the film) Astounding! (in the film) How’d he do it? (in the film)

  I can make an elephant disappear, so can you and so can your Aunt Minnie, on film. Méliès never understood this (beautiful as some of his tricks were). Houdini didn’t, and neither did David Copperfield (the illusionist, not the Victorian journalist).

  Elaborate tricks and trick photography have equal weight on the screen.

  Houdini could show his escape from a welded-shut, chained-up milk can on the bottom of the near-frozen Hudson River. You could see him do it; his contortions are amazing, his manipulations have never been equaled. BUT—

  I can escape from a welded-shut, chained-up milk can on film, and so can you. Because it wouldn’t be those things—it would be a cinematic milk can (one side cut away so I could be filmed); it wouldn’t be welded shut. The chains would be papier-mâché; through the use of editing and with doubles hidden behind and under me (or now with the use of morphing) I could make my body move around like Plastic Man; and the damned thing wouldn’t be at the bottom of the Hudson River (I’d be dropped in there, and swim out there, like Tony Curtis); it would be in some tank somewhere when it needed to be shown. (I’d be somewhere else high and dry doing the contortions.) Then I’d come out of the milk can in the tank and swim upward and then—again like Tony Curtis—I’d surface in the Hudson.