Off to Skull Island... (Part the Fifth and Final)

Much has been made, even by those expressing affection for Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong, of the “miscasting” of Jack Black as Carl Denham.

This is being perceived/received as ‘found wisdom,’ a given, and has been for some time. It’s my belief that part of this ‘problem’ is the misperception of Denham as a character, whose stature has been conflated into something quite apart from the Denham of yore. It is also to my mind indicative of a false cultural and individual expectation of any remake of a cinematic original (as opposed to an adaptation of a novel or work from other media; there, I can see the argument and allure). If it’s replicas we are seeking, there’s no reason to experience anything but the original, is there?

[This is true in all media, not just film. I recall the process that led to John Totleben and I embracing Taboo as a worthwhile venture after Dave Sim extended the invitation to subsidize any project we wished to pursue in comics. It was apparent to both John and I how shallow and empty horror comics had become, in large part due to the slavish regurgitation of the EC Comics template of the early 1950s. Even when creators we felt were innovative had their shot at really reinvigorating the genre (horror comics), the damned EC mold was embraced with such slavish fidelity that it inevitably strait-jacketed the most ballyhooed resurrection: thus, when writer Bruce Jones, who had scripted some of the most imaginative and transgressive horror comics stories published in the 1970s Warren black-and-white zines Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, had his shot at editing and writing his own horror comic for Pacific Comics in the early ‘80s, he helmed Twisted Tales -- which, with only a couple of precious exceptions, demonstrated anew the EC formula was dead, dead, dead. What was transgressive and provocative in 1951-54 was toothless three decades later, however ballsy the gore or language; conceptually, it was the same ol’ O. Henry twist-ending claptrap. To be true to the real spirit and wellspring of the EC tradition, it seemed obvious to John Totleben and I, one had to be as bold, imaginative, reckless, innovative and daring as the EC creators, editors, and publishers had been in their time. It was fidelity to the spirit, not acolyte devotion to the narrative templates, that was needed to reinvigorate and reinvent horror comics -- thus, Taboo, moles and all. In comics, music, movies, sculpture, art, etc., it’s all the same -- imitation is a dim echo by definition. Emulating a beloved artist, creation, movement or philosophy can only honor, sometimes transcend, its wellspring by remembering that wellspring has power because it broke molds in its day and redefined all that came before and after. Thus, the truest reinventions emulate the spirit, not the specifics; embrace transformative change, rather than merely replicating the original.]

As with every other character in the new Kong -- including, dare I remind everyone, Kong -- the new Denham is not a carbon copy of the old. Part of the nimble effectiveness of Jackson and his collaborators’s revamp of Kong is their attention to rethinking each of the key players: this is, after all, a 2005 production, not a pale simulcrum of the 1933 original. As I noted in my first installment, Jackson’s King Kong is not what Gus Van Sant’s Psycho ended up being, apparently on purpose: a recreation, not a reinvention, of its respective wellspring. What’s the point? Here, at least, I can understand the decision of those who simply are avoiding the new Kong: if you can only conceive of Kong as being the 1933 original, by all means, cling to it like a precious bit of driftwood in a storm.

Fortunately, Jackson and his compatriots could concieve of Kong as something else -- true in spirit to the original and its time, but as full-bloodedly of-its-time (2005) as was the Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack/Willis O’Brien classic. That is the only way to be true to the original, in my mind. Slavish imitation is too often mistaken for ‘being true.’ When something is as unique as the 1933 Kong was, slavish imitation is neither the way or means of remaining true to the spirit of the film or its creators. In the broad sense of the 2005 Kong and its genres (romantic action/adventure/fantasy/horror films), the seven+ decades spread like a Skull Island chasm between Cooper/Schoedsack/O’Brien and Jackson and his creative partners is wide and deep: in every way, those genres have been stripped down, revved up, and juiced beyond recognition. To think that anything truly resembling the 1933 Kong could be made anew in the contemporary corporate studio dominian, in the wake of everything from Lucas, Spielberg, Cameron and Verhoeven to Raiders of the Lost Ark, Die Hard and Titanic, and the current movie-as-video-game mentality, is unthinkable. Still, Jackson was canny enough to identify both the seams and the junctures between the ‘33 original and the contemporary mode of action/thriller and dance the dance between with skill and agility and nary a hint of cynicism.

Curiously, the inflation of all action/thriller requirements circa 2005 has adopted an accepted level of casual brutality and primal emotion that’s oddly attuned to the pre-Code ferocity & lusty drive of the ‘33 Kong. As countless film historians have detailed, once the regulatory Code grew teeth (a mere year or two after Kong debuted in March 1933), it would have been impossible to make such a film again until the emergence of the MPAA Ratings in 1968. In the meantime, Kong was indeed given a haircut, losing its blunt matter-of-fact unblinking depiction of violence -- reflecting an adventurer’s acceptance of the casualties of sailors, natives, and citizens alike -- along with its more overt sexuality, including Kong’s “whif of quim in the morning” scratch/peel-and-sniff tableau with Ann. By the time the original Kong salvaged RKO’s fortunes anew with its 1952 rerelease and its debut on television three years later, the restrictive environment of theatrical filmmaking and television broadcast had ‘cleaned up’ the old boy and his antics extensively: still, there was no neutering Kong himself.

[An aside on the original film’s power: I still recall, in my first theatrical viewing of the original Kong at a University of Vermont “Lane Series” college revival in 1969 or ‘70, feeling and seeing rippling waves of energy washing over the rapt audience from the screen as Kong battled the T. rex. It was a phenomenon I observed again and again in theatrical showings of the ‘33 Kong; as primal a spectacle as any I’d ever imagined possible, casting a strobic spell as vivid as that of the ‘pure cinema’ underground film The Flicker (1966) by Tony Conrad, composed only of patterned alternating black and white frames of film, which I saw a year later on the same campus. In the case of Kong, of course, those ‘waves’ moving over & through the audience were invigorated by the dramatic context of the film, but also radiating from the personal power O’Brien and his crew had infused into the film, frame by frame. I confess to feeling a similar rush in Jackson’s Kong at the moment, after the giddy battle between Kong and the trio of T. rex in the vines, when the film at last arrived at the iconic confrontation between Kong and the last rex standing: arriving, at last, where the first Kong’s confrontation began. Like a Sergio Leone western, that showdown had now been reinvigorated and effectively recontextualized, not merely restaged. The moment galvanizing the cumulative weight of the film’s narrative thrust -- almost two hours! -- and its dream & nightmare imagery & movement to that point, emulating and honoring as it does not only O’Brien before, but O’Brien’s inspiration Gustave Dore and Boecklin and Charles Knight, and all who came after O’Brien and between then and now: Ray Harryhausen, Al Williamson, Zdenak Burian, Rudolph Zallinger, Frank Frazetta, William Stout, Phil Tippett, Mark Schultz, Budd Root -- need I go on? In the staging of the one-on-one showdown, and the charge not only between giant beasts but between Ann and Kong, and the film and the audience, I also felt a rush evocative of my first exposure to Frazetta, specifically his wonderful One Million Years B.C. cover painting for Monster Mania, his best Kong paperback cover painting (for the 1977 Lorenzo Semple, Jr. screenplay), and that -- ah, I’ll stop now.]

The rethinking of Kong as a character in the Jackson remake is marvelous, and in its way utterly true to the original -- the spirit, not the specifics, of the original. As noted in my previous posts on the film, much has changed in our cultural perceptions of primates: in short, the sketchy caricature and behavior patterns of the 1933 Kong simply wouldn’t wash today, given all we’ve learned since field biologist George Schaller began his observations of true mountain gorilla behavior in 1959 (first published in 1963). Given all that followed from then to now, including Snowball and his kitten and Diane Fossey and her life’s work, our cultural perceptions of what constitutes ‘genuine’ primate behavior has been irrevocably altered. On an unconscious level, the average 2005 viewer would reject as simplistic a Kong as was palatable and believable in 1933. Hell, if all one ‘knew’ had been superficially absorbed via the scantest osmosis -- cursory glimpses of National Geographic photos or TV specials, or Rick Baker’s dramatic evolution of the cinematic primate over the past three decades -- a slavish recreation of the 1933 Kong still would seem archaic, anachronistic, false, laughable.

The same is true of Ann, Jack and -- yep -- Carl Denham. Why wouldn’t it be?

As a viewer, the first time Black registered for me was as a teenage actor, a supporting player in an effectively understated episode of The X-Files and in the underrated rollerblade coming-of-age flick Airborne, which I saw with my kids at a matinee in Bellows Falls, VT. Black was playing essentially the same role in both: the belligerent, slightly overweight outsider teen (is there any other kind?) who is a bit of a fringe-dweller, a bottom-feeder, and an adrift opportunist, as most of us were at that age. That Black lent a charge and charm to these characters became emblematic of his charisma and energy as an actor, and though his range expanded and feral intelligence came to the fore, the validity of those initial perceptions still rang true. That these characteristics were increasingly offset/enhanced by his anarchic spirit and further experience was what elevated Black to his current level of celebrity and relative stardom, in part because he reflected something recognizably contemporary, alive, and utterly American.

For me, from Black’s first second onscreen in King Kong -- a moment I specifically referred to in my first installment of this analysis -- his Carl Denham was a character I instantly understood and recognized.

Was it ‘the’ Carl Denham that Robert Armstrong played? No. Is Jack Black in any way a Robert Armstrong of the 21st Century? No. There are affinities, but the gulf of age, demeanor, and range is self-evident (and I must add, Black has the greater range, though both Armstrong and Black are character actors defined largely by their respective ‘type’). Still, this new Denham works for this viewer, for a number of reasons.

First, let’s not conflate the original Denham. He was as much of a scoundrel as the new: a braggart, a carny, an opportunist, a user of people, and yes, an adventurer and filmmaker. One of the reasons the sequel, Son of Kong, failed then and still malingers in the shadow of its ‘father’ is because it’s harder to ignore Denham’s nature from the first scene to the last: he’s still a bottom-feeder, working an angle on another waif ‘frail’ and another big dumb ape. But the resonance of Kong’s forever-quoted last line -- “’Twas Beauty killed the Beast” -- always was Denham’s deftest sidestepping of responsibility for all the horrors he’d wrought, despite the romantization of that line over the decades (particularly by Forrest J. Ackerman and Famous Monsters of Filmland, which inflated its resonance for two generations). Having seen the film for the first time after reading about it in Famous Monsters, I remember being a bit disturbed and pissed off at that immortal line spoken by Denham: it was another con, pure and simple, and I didn’t buy it at age 10, and I don’t buy it now.

As Americans, we once loved our con-artists, particularly those of a previous generation (after all, we can tell ourselves, we’re not one of their suckers, are we?). As I mentioned from the get-go, though, the con-artist/showman archetype is no longer a living part of our cultural memories: I mentioned P.T. Barnum, but how many kids have ever heard of him? William Castle and Evel Knievel were the most beloved flesh-and-blood incarnations of the archetype in my lifetime, and they were the last of their breed -- again, unknown quantities to contemporary audiences by-and-large, dim memories at best but most likely simply nonexistent to those born after 1970. Sans the patina and mythic umbrella of the real McCoys, Denham’s boisterous chicanery is only further exposed, the incompatibility of his true culpability vs. his aggressive avoidance of any personal consequences -- done with enough swagger and bravado to still be amusing -- laid bare.

What flew as a recognizable, even endearing, ‘type’ in 1933 no longer harbors such innate charisma -- and that, I fear, is what undid Denham for 2005, regardless of what actor inhabited the role. It’s become harder to indulge or forgive, much less ‘love,’ our cultural con-artists, wearing as they do these days the faces of passionless corporate CEOs and pious politicians. In the seven decades since the first Carl Denham so shamelessly spirited Ann away to Skull Island, the archetype has irrevocably shifted into darker terrain -- and that’s the cultural orientation and ‘new reality’ Jackson and his collaborators were facing.

Much as the original Denham was Cooper & Schoedsack’s (particularly Cooper’s) self-aggrandizing peon to their self-images as shameless hucksters and adventurers -- a love letter to themselves writ large, a feat screenwriter and Cooper spouse Ruth Rose managed in spades -- the character also exposed some truths about the archetype. Denham is working on that last line from the time we first meet him (just as Cooper & Schoedsack set it up with the pre-narrative intertitle “Old Arabian Proverb” quote, another canny bit of smoke-and-mirrors flim-flam). From the get-go, Denham is a sexual predator, knowing he has to “sex up” his new film as the boxoffice has dwindled on his jungle pix. He kidnaps Ann because he needs a pretty bod and face, a hook: he isn’t interested in her one whit (that becomes Jack’s narrative imperative, in both Kongs), and in the end, with his final line, he makes her the patsy. There’s never a reason to trust Denham for a second in the ‘33 original -- he’s out to cover his own ass every step of the way; it’s only his male comraderie with those he’s suckered into his hare-brained death-defying scheme that fleetingly lends him some measure of dignity, though he’s playing that for all it’s worth, too (knowing if anyone can bail his sorry ass out of having lost the film, the sailors, the girl & the gorilla, Jack’s his only bet). From stem to stern, Denham plays his compatriots, employees, lackies, stooges, and his blonde patsy by spinning myths, fairy tales, and romances -- and enough of ‘em fall for Denham to function (as a showman and as a catalyst for the film’s action).

The irony here is that Jackson is as fully aware of the mythic grip of fairy tales, romance, and hooey as the original Denham was. But he and his creative partners are also savvy enough to know it doesn’t “sell” as it once did: there’s no actor alive I can think of who could “sell” that iconic line in 2005 with a straight face. We don’t fall for the Denham’s of the world any longer (no, we fall for the Ken Lays, Dick Cheneys, Condi Rices, and George Bushes of the world -- or some of us do, anyway).

Jackson knew exactly what he was up to with the character of Carl Denham, like it or lump it.

My son Dan told me his best friend Sam was 'with' the film -- till "Twas beauty killed the beast." “I dug it until that last line,” Sam said, “that really soured the cream in my coffee.”

I think that’s the point, you see.

No, it’s not Jack Black’s fault or Peter Jackson’s that Denham comes across as the manipulative, self-justifying, opportunistic weasel, huckster and people-user he always was. It’s the times, they have a-changed, and I might add while we Americans are still capable of lying to and about ourselves, the world doesn’t fall for that line of horseshit and hooey any longer. Jackson is a New Zealander, not a Californian, and he’s never been under the spell of America’s vast capacity for self-deception. (I mean, really -- did you think we were the hobbits and heroes of The Lord of the Rings in the eyes of the rest of the world? Look upon Sauron’s realm, allies, armies and entourage, and shudder.)

No mistake, Jackson meaningfully cast Jack Black as Denham, and the very character elements so many who bristle at this King Kong are citing as litany and verse are the components that expose Denham -- and, by proxy, his fellow Americans -- as the scurvy cur he is (we are).

The new King Kong fully inhabits its dream, and that’s its terrible power and beauty.

But it fully embraces the fall from glory, too -- not only the great ape’s fall, but our own -- that, after all, is part of the dream, too.

Sadly, it’s part of our cultural reality as well, a mirror, if you will, of who we no longer are, of how far we’ve wandered astray since 1933; of what we’ve done, how we’ve changed, and what we’ve become and how we look to the rest of the world.

It’s a mirror we reject and resent, whether or not we choose to fall for or from the dream.

We made all our choices. If we didn’t chart the boat, we willingly went along for the ride.

It’s our Kong, damn it.

But it’s Denham’s fall that is ours, as much as -- more than -- Kong’s.

It’s a long. long fall.

And it never, ever was the blonde’s fault.



- New Year’s Eve, 2005, The Mountains of Madness, VT

______

Happy New Year, one and all.

May it be a better year for us all.

Happy New Year! This Blog Has Been Liberated! Anyone can now comment!

First off, one and all -- Happy New Year! Now let's see if this old sot can make it to midnight this year. My balls dropped long ago.

OK, on to the big news:

Having finally had some time in the wee hours this morning to fully explore the setup of this blog and all, I have stumbled upon the means of liberation.

Huzzah! Dunston Checks Out!

The Blog is Dead! Long Live the New Blog!

As of this morning, commenting on this blog is a simple operation!

No more oppression of the unbloggified or the timid!

Lift your heads out of the tarn of repressed free speech and utter what you will! The monopolistic capitalization of the comment board by a chosen few is over!

A new dynasty of freeform blather is loosed! Spread wide your typographic colon and let splay the spew of your gray matter! Yawn vast and unpucker your gaping red-eye, spill your psychic small intestine and spatter my virtual-bowl with your issue!

OK, that's no longer an obstacle. Sorry I'm such a Luddite. Apparently, I could have done this months ago.

At some point, you never know, I might even be able to post images on this thing, or reset the clock to something other than a timezone in the mid-Pacific.

OK -- More later --

Intermission! "Let's All Go to the Lobby, Let's All Go to the Lobby..."

Before I wrap up my lengthy King Kong rant this afternoon, a quick morning jog about the keyboard:

* Walter Ungerer and I are now in Day Three of our two-week University of Vermont online film class, "Ways Of Seeing: Film as Art." I intended to promote the class here, in case some of you were at all interested in taking the class, but I received no prior notice or info from UVM. Still, all is going well, and I hope -- if we're tapped to do this again (this is our second year offering the class) -- I can rectify the situation enough to post ample alert here in hopes some of you do climb aboard.

One of the reasons I'm working with James Sturm and Michelle Ollie at The Center for Cartoon Studies is simple: they followed through. Everything James and I discussed, everything that was bounced about, culminated in the CCS opening its doors, and James made participation possible and easy. One of the reasons my papers and collections are with Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas instead of anywhere else is because Randy Duncan and Lea Ann Alexander followed through when others had not (I had previous approached, and been approached by, other universities and libraries). Now, I'm no king of follow-through, mind you, but it makes a world of difference when working with an institution or college when the minimal contact and support is indeed provided.

In the end, UVM came through, but it was a curious vacuum to be in: knowing (thanks to my conversations with Walter) that we were giving the class again, but hearing nothing from UVM. One day the contract showed up, and next day we're giving the class! Whew -- I was, if anything, over-prepared, so it's all good now. But sorry I didn't give advance notice here.

* Speaking of the Center for Cartoon Studies, I am indeed teaching there this coming semester -- teaching drawing, in fact. This has inevitably led me back to my own drawing board as I prepare. So if more Bissette art surfaces in 2006, you all have James Sturm and the CCS -- students and faculty -- to thank. Just a heads up on that.

* I saw Wolf Creek last night on the big screen, despite my son Dan and daughter Maia's dire warnings. It's a curious deadend of a film, quite beautifully crafted and put together, but as bleak an experience as Open Water was, in its way, with the key caveat that it isn't misfortune, a heartless universe and ill luck alone that dooms its waylaid protagonists: it's base human malice. Like its initially beguiling antagonist ("you'll never know where I might -- POP UP!"), this is a nasty piece of work, not recommended for tender dispositions or the squeamish, but it's not a particularly grueling or worthwhile film, either.

As such, Wolf Creek is:

(a) the latest nihilistic variation on the venerable and justifiably classic Richard Connell short story The Most Dangerous Game. Relevent to the ongoing discussion of King Kong on this blog, it bears repeating that the 1932 Ernest B. Schoedsack/Irving Pichel version starring Fay Wray, Joel McCrea, and Leslie Banks (as the screen's greatest Count Zaroff) -- along with ol' Denham himself, Robert Armstrong, as a sloshed victim -- is still the one to see;

(b) the latest offering from Lion's Gate, which remains the one studio dedicated to releasing a steady flow of always (at least) interesting horror films into theaters, and hence near and dear to my horror-lovin' heart;

(c) pleasurable in its way as a throwback to seminal 1970s Outback horrors like Outback, aka Wake in Fright (still the best of its breed, though rarely screened and hard to see, and practically a primer for this film), The Cars That Ate Paris (again, a clear precursor to Wolf Creek) and Celia aka Celia: Child of Terror. Wolf Creek is closest in look, temper and tone to the Australian genre and borderline-horror films of the 1980s which I quite loved and love: think Razorback, Shame, Long Weekend, Fortress (a real gem starring Rachel Ward with an EC Comics-worthy final shot), etc. Visually, as in all these films, the unique landscape of the Outback defines the film in a way that sets it apart while lending gravity and a terrible reality to its horrors. This is a reference point few viewers will have, though, so I don't expect much resonance for others on this count;

(d) the latest in the contemporary string of torture movies, which has become -- synchronistic with our national shame of Abu Ghraib et al -- a mortifying mirror of our life & times.

There have always been torture movies, mind you, going back to the silent era, but it's no coincidence this new strain is so insidious and malicious. I've written at length about the 'lost memory' variation of this contemporary subgenre in a review of The Jacket I'll be publishing in Green Mountain Cinema II in February, which is arguably where the current virulent strain began. It was also anticipated by a sleeper I quite enjoyed, Wrong Turn, though this new vein was launched into boxoffice vitality with the one-two-three punch of Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses, Eli Roth's Cabin Fever, and the odd breakthrough success in 2004 of Saw (which shaded a semi-remake of The Abominable Dr. Phibes by way of Se7en into the most schematic of all the current torture films, effectively placing audience empathy in both the tortured and torturer's shoes via its final absurd twist).

I must add, however, that the most intense of all these films -- and by far the most successful -- remains Mel Gibson's The Passion (of the Christ), a statement and context that may infuriate some, but there it is. The Passion not only distilled the essence of torture-as-spectacle into the most abusive two+ hours of film I've ever endured, it did so as a pro-Christian vehicle that had busloads of devout parents dragging their impressionable little ones into the theaters, too: no wonder we're mired in Abu Ghraib as a nation. It is no coincidence: this is how these things work, don't you see? The pop culture reflects our unconsciousness, our cultural and national zeitgeist, in ways we are usually blind to until we've a bit of hindsight. In other ways, Mel also pushed the envelope that has fueled the savagery of this latest strain of Sadean films: with The Passion passing with an 'R' rating, the cat is well out of the bag.

High Tension (in many ways still the best of the current lot), The Devil's Rejects (a better-made film than Rob Zombie's first, but an empty exercise in the end that risibly romanticizes its killer brood), Saw II, and Eli Roth's eagerly-awaited-in-some-camps Hostel (nice phonetic pun, that) have upped the ante, and this vicious streak of Sadean cinema is only getting more agonizing, more of an audience endurance test, and strangely more urgent than ever. It's the nature of the beast, a dual-edged sword that deserves far more scrutiny than I'm able to give this morning in this venue -- and, of course, the backlash is inevitable.

Just remember, at all times, the context of our shared reality that is fueling this new subgenre -- and that it was our willful entry into "pre-emptive war" and all that has followed that provided the stock for the bloody soup.

Oh, and that Mel was the one who really upped the ante in the first place. It's going to be mighty tough for the Christian right to claim any high ground when the shit hits the fan, as it must.

Off to Skull Island: Part the Fourth (and penultimate)...

It's amazing what audiences will and won't suspend when they (we) are actively suspending disbelief -- and what is elevated, deified even, or quickly damned in the process.

Critical faculties are applied or ignored opportunistically, and the individual experience is rarely (if ever) the communal experience. Simply put, what works for one viewer doesn't work for another viewer; what one audience member gleefully embraces is emphatically rejected by another.

All this is going on, consciously and unconsciously, between heartbeats, eyeblinks, as the film unreels.

It's astounding that we can even communicate about "our" experience afterwards. First of all, there is little agreed-upon vocabulary when it comes to conversing about any vicarious experience, be it music, art, cinema, comics, whatever. But most of us accumulate a workable enough arsenal of catch-phrases and terms over the years to not only stumble through the process of articulating "our" experience (usually distilled into a utilitarian opinion, and nothing more), but of asserting "our" experience/opinion as being innately "correct." (It's even loopier when one is struggling to communicate about an experience others have refused to participate in, whatever their reasons; I'll leave that for the comment threads and the exchange with 'HB3', which speaks volumes.)

Everything is realigned again after the experience of viewing a film. We'll talk (or write) with a tone of 'common sense' candor that makes "our" view sound the most "of course" sensible, pragmatic, and thus "correct." Our value judgements are stated as fact more often than not, and the presumption is that the individual experience and communal experience are somehow aligned or permeable: that is, what Peter Jackson's King Kong was or was not for me must of course have been the same for you, or somethign is amiss -- with me, or with you (the unstated assumption being, of course, that "I'm" always right and "you're" always wrong, unless we are in full or acceptedly partial agreement).

That said, I am not saying my views stated herein are "correct" in any way. They're just my views, which I've gone to some lengths to detail in hopes of communicating what I experienced while getting thouroughly intoxicated on Peter Jackson's Kong. For my money, this Kong was sheer pleasure, as engaging, entertaining and marvelous an experience as I've had in a movie theater in quite some time. It was worthy of the beloved original, which itself was and is a creature of inspiration, compromises, and opportunistically-applied suspension of disbelief as any other film.

Ah, but the 1933 King Kong has also been deified, elevated like its titular iconic monster into a form of Godhead, a thing to be revered, savored, worshipped perhaps. Thus, it has become somehow critic-proof, impervious to whatever pitiful slings and arrows were, are, or might be fired against it. It is, in the mind of many, mythic, a totem, "perfect" -- and thus, idealized in a way few films are or ever will be.

The original King Kong is a truly great film, but it harbors its share of anachronistic cultural presumptions and assumptions, errors and missteps, adsurdities and impossibilities. For some, stop-motion animation is inherently a flawed technology, and they've never been able to accept Kong or his fellow primordial inhabitants of Skull Island as anything but shoddily animated, herky-jerky puppets, and when that is the case, King Kong remains forever a puzzlement. (I have my own theories on this, being a die-hard lifelong lover of stop-motion animation: the 'persistance of vision' illusion inherent to cinema that makes stop-motion animation work for much of the populace may not biologically function for another portion of the populace: that is, the frame-to-frame movement doesn't 'read' as it does to most viewers, and is thus rendered clumsy and 'refused' by the eye/mind -- but enough on that.) But those of us who love Kong not only 'ignore' those flaws -- we embrace them.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard Kong devotees rhapsodize over how Kong's rippling fur is "more lifelike," when it is in fact the handling of the animators that caused the original Kong's pelt to shift and move erratically, with neither rhyme nor reason according to any sense of anatomical versimilitude. But it's part-and-parcel of "the one and only true King Kong," hence sacred and sacrosanct.

The original King Kong is a great film, yes, but it's a load of horseshit, too, steaming and bubbling, served with shameless vigor and garnished with piping-hot fresh neck-deep blarney.

As I read various online critics, writers and bloggers tearing into the new King Kong on this point or that point -- the cartoonish excess of the Apatosaurus stampede, the further escalating action of Kong vs. the trio of T. rex, the show-stopping blight of the spider-pit, the decision not to show Kong's passage (identical to the original), Anne's flimsy non-winterwear, the lack of wind on the top of the Empire State Building, etc. -- it becomes laughable that the contemporary yardstick is so different from that applied to the 1933 original. Is any of this nonsense valid? Check your credibility at the concession stand if you're one of those who embrace the 1933 and use such circular illogic to damn the 2005 remake.

I mean, let's get real. Once I've accepted (a) a 25-to-50 foot gorilla where no gorillas or gorilla-like primates of any kind reside on Planet Earth, (b) the very premise of Skull Island, complete with all manner of incompatible prehistoric specimens living and breathing, and (c) the impossibility of any importation of an outsized primate into the heart of Manhattan (if, in the first place, you can swallow the export of a homeless blonde ingenue and lone female on a shipload of male salts), let's face it -- in the words of Cole Porter, anything goes. If you argue otherwise, you're full of as much shit as Kong before he drops his morning load.

Now, being a fantasist and storyteller myself by profession, able over my career to swallow and projectile-vomit among other risible conceits that of a man reborn as a spud-man and living in the swamps in and about Houma, Louisiana circa 1983-86, I absolutely accept the 'internal logic' necessary to make any quantity of horseshit float, for the duration of either a reading or a viewing, perhaps more. But it is, nonetheless, a conceit, a fabrication, an agreed-upon tapestry of lies and trickery we are all indulging for the pleasure of a story being told. Within that tapestry, one sets up certain groundrules, and works with them -- and by necessity (including, in the case of a film, what a 90-minute-to-200-minute running time will or will not permit) we all implicity agree to suspend the rest.

"Suspension of disbelief," some call it, so I shall, too.

Now, by any measure, the original King Kong required a healthy few swallows of horseshit if the film was/is to be enjoyed. In fact, many 1933 critics (including The New York Post reviewer) at first ridiculed King Kong, even as the Depression-burdened audiences were lining up around the block for their 15-cents worth of escapist/confrontist entertainment. Seems like most of the 1933 audiences, and those of every decade thereafter (including those blessed by the daily rebroadcast of Kong on The Million Dollar Movie in the 1950s), were able to swallow what some 1933 critics couldn't and wouldn't.

Let's see, Skull Island -- even if you can swallow the geological absurdity of a 'skull' shaped landmass, that's some name, particularly for a Dutch East Indies isle off the coast of Sumatra which was shunted back and forth between colonial countries for centuries (and extensively explored and charted by the 19th Century). Scientific study of the area can be charted in part by the extensive telegraphed reports pre-and-post Krakatoa's volcanic eruption, if you're seeking some bearings on the matter.

Gorillas in this hemisphere are less than unlikely. In 1933, gorillas, per se, were arguably as recent additions to the pop cultural menagerie as dinosaurs: the first gorillas were lowland gorillas, discovered and announced as such around 1846. Still, it took Paul du Chaillu plunging into Africa to begin shooting them a decade later to really elevate the beasts into the pantheon of fearsome zoological curios. It was du Chaillu who referred to his quarry as "hellish dream creature[s]... half-man and half-beast," inhabitants of "the infernal regions." The first mountain gorillas -- inhabitants of Eastern and Central Africa -- were shot in 1902 by a German named Oscar von Beringe (hence the latin name for the species, Gorilla gorilla beringei), with many more falling under the gun before 1925 -- but all in Africa. Most of what we now know about gorillas, particularly their behavior and true nature, we owe to George Schaller, whose studies began in 1959, so I won't diss the '33 Kong in light of those discoveries -- after all, if it is the mythic primate over-sexuality Kong's creators were seeking to conflate or exploit, the male Orangutan would have been the way to go, and we now know chimpanzees are by far the most aggressive and potentially homicidal of the great apes -- but still, as gorillas made their way into the circuses of the world, their peaceful, slow-moving nature was becoming recognized. Note, for instance and purposes of context, my previous post on Gargantua.

So, the conceit of an easily-angered big gorilla living on a remote isle in the Dutch East Indies, far from Africa, was pretty silly shit circa 1933. Good thing Merian C. Cooper's original plan to have his big ape battling Komodo Dragons didn't wash.

Instead, Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack supplanted the Komodo Dragons with neodinosaurs -- that is, living dinosaurs, still living and thriving in sequestered seclusion on Skull Island -- inspired by efforts of Willis O'Brien, whose the stop-motion animation footage created for the planned RKO project Creation, which Cooper scrapped, prompted O'Brien to pitch Kong being done with the same technique, including dinosaurs. Neodinosaurs, much as I and every other child who loves or loved dinosaurs wishes otherwise, remain a pretty remote bit of speculative fantasy, whatever lake monsters and sea monsters may or may not actually exist. The discovery of living coelocanths once lent tenuous credibility to the fantasy of prehistoric life being extant on the planet, but a tenacious fish is still many rungs of the ladder from dinosaurs -- so, much as this writer loves the notion and always had, its sheer foolishness to buy into the premise of any patch of ground, however remote, still nurturing a menagerie of neodinosaurian giants.

Then there's the issue of Kong's existence at his given size, the same stretch of credibility all 'giant monster' fantasies require. The entire premise of a 30-to-50 foot ape, or ant, or whatever, is by and large invalidated by the square-cube law (publicized in the context of the genre thanks to an excellent 1953 Saturday Review of Literature review of the giant ant classic Them!, which is where I first read about and understood this scientific principle as a wee lad scouring the dusty magazine stacks of the Waterbury Public Library, reading up on old movies). In short, the square cube law of geometry maintains that the surface area of any given form increases proportionally to the square of its linear dimensions; however, its volume increases as the cube of its dimensions. In the case of a giant monster, its size and relative strength may be proportional to the square of its height or length, but its mass (in terms of sheer weight) is cubed: thus, the larger a given monster, the less likely it will be capable of sustaining its own weight. Its legs won't function, it won't be able to breathe, etc., if it's capable of eating enough to sustain any life at all.

I know, that's no fun at all. Never had been, but thus the rarity of giant apes, radiation-inflated insects and arachnids, and lack of real-life kaiju eiga in our banal day-to-day world.

Furthermore, if you can roll with all that without your skull imploding like Skull Island at the end of Son of Kong (so, was Kong a female? A primate lesbian with the hots for the blonde dish?), there's the conundrum of an ape that we later see climbing all over Manhattan's skyline being 'kept at bay' on Skull Island by comparatively puny walls and a double-door he pushes open when provoked.

Then there's the issue of getting Kong from an Indonesian isle and into Manhattan without, oh, I don't know, passing through Ellis Island or alerting customs, much less setting off an international incident with Indonesian authorities or whatever. Even in 1933, there were laws governing the trafficking of animals and alien species, and by any stretch of the imagination, Kong (however docile and/or drugged) is a pretty tough-to-hide 'bring 'em back alive' acquisition. Besides, such a voyage would take (per the film's own narrative) at least six weeks. How to keep Kong drugged, chained, and fed (not to mentioned, uh, the waste disposal issues)? How, exactly, is that accomplished?

So, with a deft quick-cut (emulated, properly, by Jackson and his creative partners), we leap from Kong konked on the Skull Island beach to debuting in downtown Manhattan. OK. (If you maintain, as some do, that Jackson dropped some sort of narrative ball emulating that canny cut from Skull Island to Manhattan, consider, constant reader, the always maladroit "en route to civilization" scenes of Kong sequels and imitations, including the Toho 'sequels,' the Dino remake, et al -- it's rare when a flick like Eugene Lourie's gem Gorgo has a reason for the sequence, and pulls it off with any measure of believability. Sometimes, narrative shorthand like that jumpcut serves a plethora of purposes, including sidestepping the kind of running-time-devouring necessities of dealing with logistical issues even going there invites.)

Thereafter, we are supposed to buy that Kong indeed finds Ann -- finds and recognizes and recaptures Ann -- by climbing on buildings and peering into windows. Itty, bitty, what's-the-chances-he'll-luck-on-that-apartment's-particular-window windows. With New York City's population already in the millions, the odds are certainly stacked against this, however sharp his eye, nostrils, or just dumb luck.

The Empire State Building was pretty spiffy and new in '33 -- construction having been completed only a couple of years before -- so incorporating it into the narrative was a stroke of genius by any cynic's or naysayer's standard. Still, would its structure have borne up under the weight of a 16-ton or so gorilla? Would its summit's structure have carried that weight? Wouldn't the winds have simply blown Kong -- and if not the ape, the girl -- from that 1,200+ foot height?

And when he fell -- barring issues of wind velocity, air resistance, and the impact the bounces on the way down might have -- it seems fair to guesstimate his less-than-ten-second fall to street level bringing that mass of primate flesh into the pavement at better than approximately 270+ feet-per-second, which means (given the laws of kinetic energy: kinetic energy=1/2 mass x velocity squared) the fall should impact at over 39 million foot-pounds of force, which will either (a) plunge Kong's karcass into a very deep crater of sub-street destruction, including perhaps a crevass through the subway and all such veining of civilization below, or (b) pulped primate soup with a splatter of hair and central stock of splintered marrow and bone, in the unlikely event the street sustains any measure of support when the mega-monkey pancakes.

Not much to eulogize, in either case.

So, let's take it all in: we've got a savage great ape of indeterminate gender and variably size (sometimes shot-to-shot), by all evidence the lone or last member of its species, living on the wrong continent in the wrong hemisphere of the planet, scrapping with neodinosaurs (which themselves wrecklessly mixed species geography, not to mention incompatible spans of geological time, without any regard for any semblence of 'realism), falling in love with a female of a dwarfish, hairless, completely incompatible species. And then, like, being towed into New York City and displayed on stage for a paying audience to see, after clearing said importation and display with relevent authorities. After which, having somehow maintained his footing atop the summit despite high winds while making sure his frail little plaything Ann Darrow didn't blow off either, Kong was shot down by planes and subsequently plunged from the top of the Empire State Building, though he neither plunges through the tarmac into whatever is under the street below, nor turns to primate puree on the pavement. Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

What a vast and brimming, steaming crock of shit.

Heresy!

Bullshit.

Still, Kong is magic, and we accept magic when we wish to fall beneath its spell. Kong -- in all his incarnations -- is a fairy tale, the best two versions (1933 and 2005) dreams. They function solely on that level. That is their power, their charge, their importance, the be-all and end-all. Tear at the fabric of either, and they dissolve. That's not a flaw, that's the nature of dreams.

But let's stay with the cultural elevation of the 1933 version, 70+ years hence:

Furthermore, when a film (or any creative work) becomes thus culturally sanctified, its elements become similarly deified. Thus, the characters, however shallow, anachronistic, or reprehensible when analyzed with the same critical faculties we bring to bear on a contemporary work (such as, for instance, the Jackson Kong), are already "blessed" as being identifiably themselves. We have long since qualified/rectified/amplified them into proper alignment with the sanctified work.

Case in point: Carl Denham, as played by Robert Armstrong.

[To be concluded, as the conjunction of Armstrong and Black's Carl Denham's brings all this to a head, tomorrow...]

The Condi Connection: Picking up on Kong tomorrow at last, but first, this from Kondi's Kissin' Kuzzin! Can't Get Enough of Condi? Meet Constance!

I've about finished my King Kong piece for posting here -- concluding the multi-part 'think piece' I launched last week -- and hope to have it up by Friday AM at the latest. But there's been a number of things that demanded immediate attention in the meantime, what with dear friends and family in need, making sure Blue Underground got in touch with Eddie Campbell and had access to the necessary issues of Taboo for the upcoming DVD release of the rare 1977 giallo The Pyjama Girl Case (never before released in the US!), the launch of filmmaker Walter Ungerer and my online film class for the University of Vermont -- which I meant to alert you all to here in advance, but the necessary info never reached me -- not to mention all the shit relevent to the year coming to a close, and Marj and I just getting back from a trip and all... so, apologies, thanks for being patient.

So sure, it's been a hectic day, but I have to share this scattershot info turned up while researching my buddy Mark Martin's fave Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- and the synchronistic conjunction of a recent item HomeyM sent my way.

First off, it seems Condi has a cousin, Mark -- and she's a mighty interesting cousin at that.

To quote 200 Motels: "Which -- do -- you -- chooooooose?"

According to Ronald Hilton (in "Confederate Flag: Stand Firm, Howard Dean", November 6, 2003), "Constance L. Rice, lawyer, is director of the Advancement Project in Los Angeles... [addressing] the battle for equal education in a city that is racially and ethnically divided." Hilton wrote about Constance:

"Always a studious tomboy, Rice gained admission to Harvard, only to be physically beaten during her freshman year by a fellow student whom she had refused to date. Left with a broken nose and a determination never to be that powerless again, Rice began studying tae kwon do and became a national champion. With a degree in government from Harvard and a degree in law from New York University, she also is a champion fighter for women's rights, minority rights and community rights.... Rice began her legal career as a federal clerk, drafting an opinion that created the "reasonable woman" standard. She moved to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and became co-director of the Los Angeles office. During her tenure, the fund's Los Angeles office won more than $1.6 billion worth of injunctive relief and damages through class action lawsuits on behalf of multi-racial coalitions of clients. In 1998, the Los Angeles Times designated her one of 24 leaders considered the "most experienced, civic-minded and thoughtful people on the subject of Los Angeles."... The Advancement Project, which Rice co-founded, is responsible for a dramatic court victory that required the state to spend the funds it had to build new schools in the districts that needed them. Also, her firm was deeply involved in efforts to expose the recent Ramparts corruption scandal, and it now has a contract to advise the city's police union. "We need to help them have the tools they need to be humane," Rice says. Unlike her second cousin, Condoleezza Rice, Constance Rice avoids party affiliations and political labels. But she says the two women share an appreciation of "facts, analysis and a solution."

Ah, very diplomatically put, Mr. Hilton. And here all this time I thought Condi was lying through her teeth. But enough of that, back to Constance, who makes the heart grow fonder.

Seems Constance has quite impressive career credentials, having received more than 50 major awards "for her work in expanding opportunity and advancing multi-racial democracy" (quoted from the article, below) after having graduated from Harvard College in 1978 and winning the Root Tilden Public Interest Scholarship to New York University School of Law, where she earned her law degree in 1984. Constance thereafter served as law clerk to the Honorable Damon J. Keith, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; worked at Morrison & Foerster as a litigation associate; joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (in '91), and so on per Hilton's article, above.

As a litigator, Rice filed a landmark case on behalf of low-income bus riders that resulted in a mandate that more than 2 billion dollars be spent to improve the bus system; launched a coalition lawsuit that won $750 million for new school construction in L.A. (reportedly rerouting funds previously slated for far more affluent suburban school districts); etc. Beyond that, Rice served as counsel to the Watts gang truce; spearheaded a statewide campaign to save equal opportunity programs; was appointed to the governing board of Los Angeles's Department of Water and Power (where she served as president); etc. etc. etc. It's a head-spinning whirlwind career, to say the least.

All that and more about Condoleezza Rice's cousin can be found online in various venues (google her!). Among her many online documents is Constance's "Confederate Flap: Stand Firm, Howard Dean: Candidate's allusion to poor Southern whites opens an important issue," which is

here.

Worth a read, if only to balance the spin.

Anyhoot, by coincidence, here's what HomeyM sent me this past week:

Last Friday on NOW, David Brancaccio talked with Constance Rice, Condi's talented, compassionate and humane second cousin, about what Guantanamo says about our society.... As a civil rights lawyer, Connie Rice has had extensive experience with the justice system and she knows that a lot that is being exposed in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib is reflected in the US prisons. David talked with her about those prisons....

Members of Congress from both parties are now calling for an independent investigation into possible abuses at Guantanamo. But even with the painful lessons learned from Abu Ghraib, the White House says "no." Civil rights crusader and regular NOW contributor Constance Rice says that there are parallels between the treatment of prisoners in American prisons, those in Abu Ghraib, and the prison camp at Guantanamo that are instructive.

"Am I saying that our prisons are as bad as Abu Ghraib? No," she says. "But do we have conditions that are illegal, unconstitutional and cruel and unusual? Yes."

The talk between David Brancaccio and Constance Rice is

here.

And here's the link for

The Advancement Project,

should you be so moved.

OK, enough Condi and Constance and such -- back to Kong!

Bissette Blathers On: Interview online!

Among the items I hoped to post while away is this, which went online yesterday (12/26/05) -- so, one day late, but still, it's there.

The good & gracious Land of Frost inhabitant Alex Ness interviewed yours truly at length, and it all awaits you at

Pop Thought Pops Bissette!

Here's hoping all is going well for you, Alex. Send some good vibes his way, people, he can use it!

Enjoy, and more later...

Hello, Blogosphere! Back from the road, 12/27...

Hope you all had a most Merry Christmas, and are enjoying a fine stretch of holi-daze and days.

I've been away for a few days and unable to access computers (a rather blissful state, actually) for a time, so I've got considerable 'catch-up' to do today, including posting my in-progress 'think piece' on King Kong. When I was able to get (briefly) online, it was impossible to link to my blog (due to the archaic old computers in reach), so it went, so it goes.

More later, with multiple daily posts in the coming day or two to get everything caught up and back in gear. See you here, soon!

Off to Skull Island... (Part the Third)

It’s ironic, given the decades of rumors and obits of/for men who claimed to have “played Kong” in the 1933 original, that 21st Century movie-making magic has come back to -- an actor “playing Kong.” As my friend Michel H. Price, co-author (with the late, great George Turner) of the definitive book(s) on the making of the 1933, had occasion to remind me when I sent him a photocopy of an obit of yet another pretender to the throne, “no one played Kong, ever, in any shot.” The original Kong was a fusion of stop-motion animation (by Willis O’Brien and his crew) and ‘life-sized’ live-action Kong animatronic mechanics: that huge grinning face, the iconic simian hand Fay Wray spent so much time in.

Andy Serkis is the 2005 Kong, converted by calculated CGI magic into the most vivid and heart-breaking primate character in cinema history. Building upon the venerable tradition of the Hollywood ape actor, from Charles Gemora to Bob Burns to Rick Baker (who, BTW, is piloting one of the planes that bring down Kong at the end of Jackson’s remake: Dino’s Kong shoots down Jackson’s Kong, not quite up there with Divine raping him/herself in John Waters’s Female Trouble, but still a nifty conceit), Serkis honors those-who-came-before with a performance of remarkable intensity, majesty, and uncanny fidelity to primate behavior. By design and necessity, Serkis’s Kong is a conflation of all things simian, wedded to a depth of heart and expression superceding any and all previous celluloid or CGI outsized monsters: he is indeed King.

The most convincingly ‘real’ cinematic gorillas to date remain Rick Baker’s creations for Gorillas in the Mist (1988), with Baker’s slightly stylized simians for Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) and Ron Underwood’s engaging remake of another O’Brien stop-motion simian Mighty Joe Young (1998). In fact, both versions of Mighty Joe Young (the 1949 original is strongly recommended, and just out on DVD) are as heartfelt a balm as I can recommend to parents seeking to soothe the savaged hearts of their little ones moved to tears by the old or new Kong -- though in both cases, King Kong is by far the superior film. Baker, of course, also “played Kong” in the inflated, ill-fated 1977 remake, and he remains the sole asset of that opus worth revisiting. Despite the limitations imposed upon him by the misguided entirity of Dino DeLaurentiis’s enterprise (which, it must be remembered, included Dino’s bid to purchase all extant prints and negatives of the 1933 original and have them destroyed, a ploy that thankfully proved impossible), Baker gave the film his all, and Baker’s Kong is an honorable ode to the iconic Kong we all know and love, even if the film he is trapped within is not. That Baker would dramatically refine and perfect his art -- in terms of both performance and makeup-effects versimilitude -- to create the far more convincing and personable primates of Greystoke, Gorillas in the Mist, and the Mighty Joe Young remake is no surprise. After all, the young Rick Baker who “played Kong” wasn’t that far in years from his breaking-into-the-biz ape suit John Landis wore for Landis’s spoof Schlock!, or those Baker constructed and donned for Kentucky Fried Movie (another early Landis gem, the one that landed him the directing gig for Animal House) and The Thing with Two Heads (a double-decker gorilla, natch), or even Baker’s mutant baby for It’s Alive and the risible Octoman. Baker’s own affection and devotion to Kong punctuates his stellar career, and his involvement with Jackson’s project, however peripheral, only enhances the integrity of the current venture.

Serkis builds upon Baker’s primates in particular, lending the new Kong the utterly convincing, beguiling presence of a true outsized silverback. Serkis first struts his stuff in the brief sequence in which Anne (Watts) extracts herself short-term from the fate of all previous ‘brides of Kong’ by removing her ceremonial spiked ‘bride’s collar’ and plunging one of its thorns into Kong’s paw (a neat bit of environment-as-storytelling here, as Kong’s first stop with Anne is the site of the evident death-by-battering of all who preceded Anne); thus, Anne survives Kong-as-wife-beater, elevating their relationship a notch above domestic abuse writ hideously large.

The film’s pivotal sequence follows this, as Anne truly saves herself from potential death-as-frail-plaything when she startles Kong with further unprecedented “bride of Kong” behavior by doing the unexpected: applying her vaudeville skills, Anne entertains Kong (she has, after all, made ‘gorillas’ laugh in the off-Broadway theater performance glimpsed in the film’s opening). What could have fallen flatter than Jessice Lange’s ‘70s feminist-caricature prattle elevates the enterprise to a new level as Serkis’s Kong reacts with appropriate simian reactions. He is startled, angered and fearful, and his immediate instinct is to aggressively grimace, bare his fangs, roar, and basically carry on like Bill O’Reilly, while his eyes reveal more than he intends: a child-like merger of fear (what is this?), outrage, and wonder. Anne coaxes simian hoots of amusement from Kong, who then escalates Anne’s ‘act’ into dangerous turf by first knocking a stick out from under her (as satisfyingly primal a bit of slapstick as can be imagined) and then poking, prodding, and bullying her, trying to get this blonde ‘doll’ to extent the performance that has so unexpectedly delighted him. Kong-as-domestic-abuser rushes to the fore anew when Anne insists “no” means ”no”, and his subsequent destructive whirlwind of rage is both apt for a silverback and for the frustrated human male. By this juncture -- and without missing a beat thereafter -- Anne has won both Kong’s heart and our own, and in doing so giving us fresh insight and access to Kong as a character.

Now, this moment is as much the fruits of the script and Jackson’s canny conception and direction as it is Serkis and Watts’s performances: it is brilliantly conceived and executed, the point at which this King Kong shifts into a new realm of inspiration and excellence. While remaining faithful to the 1933 wellspring, all involved understood the task at hand, and rose to the occasion. The further evolution of their relationship is communicated by Serkis and his CGI collaborative creators of the character, and Watts as Anne, with similar economy of intent, effect and consequence. The second pivotal turn in the relationship between Anne and Kong comes amid the heart-stopping, floor-stomping, pulse-racing Kong-vs.-Tyrannosaurus rex (in triplicate!) tour-de-force, which further demonstrates Jackson’s skill as a storyteller and a filmmaker. Where most 21st Century action directors would be satisfied with a fraction of the kinetics generated by this dynamo sequence, Jackson the storyteller knows if it does not serve the tale, it is all useless noise. After the sequence’s initial giddy escalation of the classic 1933 sequence, culminating in a breathtaking participants-on-the-ropes extension of the battle into a dangling entanglement of vines, the moment Jackson brings us back to the iconic confrontation between Kong and the last T. rex standing -- at last, we are back where the 1933 Kong stood -- it is Anne’s realization that Kong is her protector, and her acting upon that realization, and Kong’s reaction to her action, that sends our hearts soaring to match our already racing pulse. All this occurs without bringing the confrontation between Kong and the snaggle-toothed T. rex to a halt: it in fact intensifies the showdown, and we are more fully invested in the action that follows than we perhaps believed possible.

Jackson, Serkis, Watts and their creative partners only build further upon this for the duration of the film. The immediate wake of the battle -- Kong refusing eye contact with Anne, turning his back her (further believable simian behavior, unexpected but ringing absolutely true); her slow ‘presenting’ herself to him as he labors to keep his eyes from her, culminating in his casual ‘acceptance’ via plucking Anne from the ground and tossing her onto his shoulder -- sets up the exquisitely-played moments between Kong and Anne outside his lair. Since seeing the film last week and now, I’ve read a few reviews and online critiques; some argue the sexual dimension of the Kong of yore has been taken away, but I can’t see that. The courtship is as ferocious as before, its culmination (Kong offering Anne his open palm, their ‘first’ -- alas, only -- night ‘sleeping together’ with Anne cradled in Kong’s hand) as affecting and sexualized as ever. True, gone is the inferred primal rape fantasy of the 1930s (coming as it did on the heels of genuine scientific research into cross-breeding humans and apes: see “Kissing Cousins” by Clive D. Wynne, The New York Times, Monday, December 12, 2005; thanks to Rick Veitch for sending this tear-sheet to me!): this is indeed a courtship, and all the more moving for being one. Jackson and his creative partners have wisely brought Kong, Anne and ourselves beyond the parameters of the original’s potent but shallow uncanny biological urges -- Kong sniffing the clothing of the unconscious Anne (which evokes the rude comment of Brian Cox’s character in Rob Roy: “Ah, nothing like a sniff of quim in the morning!”). This is indeed an interspecies romance of fresh depth and dimension, and the new Kong is the better for it.

The payoff in the final Manhattan-set act is profound, from Kong’s initial look of revulsion when confronted with Denham’s stage faux-Anne to Kong and Anne’s reunion to the revelation of Anne's empathic bond during her showgirl act on another stage (effectively drowned out by the lyrics of "Bye, Bye Blackbird"); from their playful interlude on Central Park ice (a lovely, unexpected delight) to the inevitable, iconic tragic finale atop the Empire State Building.

That the King who asserted his dignity and dominance by refusing to make eye contact with Anne on Skull Island now cannot take his eyes off Anne lends heartbreaking urgency to the whole of Jackson’s recreation and slight reinvention of the remarkable finale.

This is brilliant filmmaking on every level -- and it is the chemistry between Serkis and Watts, the fusion between Serkis and the CGI team, that brings Kong to such affecting life.

[An aside: One of the primary moments in my own education as a comics artist and storyteller came from my mentor Joe Kubert, who once effectively dissected a pragmatic but critical misstep in the final panel of a story I was drawing for Heavy Metal while still a student of Joe's school. "Eye contact is very important," Joe patiently explained from over my shoulder, while pencilling onto tracing paper an alternative approach to the last panel of "Curious Thing". "Eye contact between characters, eye contact with the reader -- this is one of the greatest tools you have as a storyteller." I never forgot Joe's lesson, and it always played a vital role in each and every panel or piece of art I ever drew thereafter. Jackson knows the primal power of that tool, too, and few fantasy films have used it as dramatically, appropriately, or effectively as Jackson did in his work, including the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy -- and King Kong.]

This brown-eyed, scar-visaged, broken-jawed, tooth-jutting Kong is also patterned after the 20th Century’s most renowned and beloved gorilla, Gargantua. Gargantua was once as famous as Elvis, but just as P.T. Barnum is no longer a known quantity to 21st Century audiences, Gargantua has faded (with his partriarch circus-proprietor) into vague cultural memory; it is entirely appropo that Jackson and his creative team resurrect Gargantua via/into Kong.

The associative link is strangely apt: the real-life Gargantua’s career trajectory roughly paralleled reel-life Kong’s. The maimed little gorilla orphan West Key Bar Captain Arthur Phillips delivered to caring foster ‘mother’ Gertrude Davies Lintz aka Mrs. William Lintz (I’m not being a chauvanist, just adhering to the standard of that era) about this time of year in 1931 had reportedly been scarred by a vengeful sailor, who ‘avenged’ himself on his captain after being discharged for misbehavior by the cowardly act of spraying a nitric-acid-filled fire extinguisher into the infant gorilla’s face. Working with an adventurous dermatologist (who repaired the extensive facial damage as best as 1930s medical procedures allowed), Mrs. Lintz personally nursed the wounded gorilla back to health, though Gargantua was never able to close his eyes. “I had to put drops in [his eyes] three times a day,” Mrs. Lintz said, “It is a tribute to the gorilla’s intelligence that after the first panic, he cooperated in his own cure.” A devoted animal lover, Mrs. Lintz indeed nursed Gargantua -- then named Buddy, short for Buddha -- back to health with such tenderness that the primate not only recovered from the trauma, but remained (despite the fixed scowl of his striking features) one of the most affectionate primates to tour the circus circuit. Richard Kroener and Anthony J. Desimone also worked with Mrs. Lintz and Buddy aka Gargantua in his formative years, nursing him back to health again in 1936 from a second mean-spirited scarring (a North Miami Zoo employee fed Buddy chocolate syrup laced with a potent cleaning disinfectant, internally burning the gorilla’s stomach lining and intestines).

After sheltering and caring for Buddy for six years, the near-adult size, strength, and potential for her 400-pound adopted ‘son’ to inadvertantly injuring someone prompted Mrs. Lintz to find a new home for her beloved primate. Already renowned among circus and animal trainers, Buddy/Gargantua was a desirable acquisition for any circus, and his sale to John and Henry Ringling North in December of 1937 placed the primate in the menagerie of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Baily Circus. Wintering in Sarasota, Florida and touring the US thereafter as Gargantua the Great: "The Largest Gorilla Ever Exhibited -- The World’s Most Terrifying Living Creature!", the benevolent Buddha was world-famous for over a decade. When Gargantua died in November of 1949 -- coincidentally passing while Mighty Joe Young ‘toured’ movie theaters across America -- his death was front-page news. (If you want to learn more, check out the two books I referenced for this writeup -- Animals Are My Hobby by Mrs. Lintz, 1937, Robert M. McBride & Company; and Gargantua: Circus Star of the Century by Gene Plowden, 1972, Bonanza Books -- or google Gargantua and check out the photos.)

Thus, Kong and Gargantua were already simian brethren throughout the late 1930s (Gargantua’s world tour began in 1938; King Kong was re-released throughout the 1930s and ‘40s, still bailing out RKO’s dwindling studio fortunes with a boxoffice-busting 1952 rerelease that earned a writeup in Time magazine). The decision of Jackson and his creative collaborators to revamp Kong with a Gargantua-stylized ‘facelift’ -- evoking the scars of a life lived amid the deadly saurians and primordial inhabitants so abundant on Skull Island -- is as true to the great ape’s era as every other component of this 2005 masterwork.

Except, some argue, for Jack Black’s incarnation of Carl Denham.

[To be continued...]
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Interlude: My First Printed Art?

As a break from my Kong essay, here's something I can't wait on:

Well, technically, no. It wasn't my first printed art, but damn near.

But still -- My pal Mark Martin reacted so passionately to my son Dan wearing an old Bissette's Market t-shirt that Marj and I did a new printrun of 'em, just for Mark.

Check out Mark's hilarious post on this over at

Jabberous!

It's the Monday, December 19th posting, though the rest of Mark's blog is always of interest, too!

Off to Skull Island... (Part the Second)

Ray Harryhausen always said it took a very special kind of actor to perform in his type of film -- interacting/shadowboxing with stop-motion creations that simply weren't there on set -- citing Kerwin Mathews (Sinbad in Harryhausen's classic The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 1958) as an exceptional actor in that regard. Arguably, what was an extraordinary task in the era of stop-motion animation pioneer/mentor Willis O'Brien and his acolyte/breakaway sucessor Harryhausen's films is now expected of almost all screen actors, given the new CGI-dominated landscape. Instead of Harryhausen instructing William Hopper to play off, say, the eyeline-defining 25-foot-black-head-on-a-stick-standin for the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, directors Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller have the entire cast of Sin City performing against green-screen sketches-of-sets in Texas to play off their absent co-stars, who will later perform on the same green-screen in abstentia imagined environments and already-in-the-can (or to-be-filmed-later) performances.

Thus, what was the unusual province of low-budget marginal actors and non-stars in the 1930s-70s is now the norm, punctuated with aging action stars like Arnold Schwarzeneggar providing the physical templates for their CGI simulcrums -- virtual performances, of a kind -- which 'perform' in their place as necessary. The stop-motion-animated skeletal Arnold that figured so prominently in the final act of James Cameron's sleeper hit The Terminator (1984) was a transitional keystone: now, Arnold is enhanced and/or supplanted by a CGI-simulcrum in almost all his films, at some point or another. A CGI-simulcrum Arnold dominates a surprising share of screentime in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), evidence of how far we already are in the blurring of special effects & screen acting. It is not hard to project an upcoming Schwarzeneggar opus in which the CGI template already on hand from the actor/governor's younger self dominates the film, enhanced with CGI-touched-up closeups of the still-living performer for the sake of versimilitude; a concept Peter Laird and I mused & chuckled over back in the early 1990s, then far-fetched, now business-as-usual in Hollywood.

In this regard, then, let me acknowledge and touch upon the extraordinary performance Naomi Watts gives in King Kong, for the life of the film and of Kong is so strongly felt in part because Watts so beautifully inhabits Anne Darrow and the film as a whole. In hindsight, Watts demonstrated her chops for this once-unusual kind of performance in one of the most surprising sequences in David Lynch’s full-of-surprises Mulholland Drive (2001): when the frail ingenue Betty (Watts) gets her shot at an audition in a producer’s office, we aren’t prepared for the conviction and power of her performance. Playing off hunky Chad Everett (the handsome but undistinguished actor I still can only associate with the 1960s TV show Medical Center), Watts sweeps us off our feet in the emotional force of the moment, invigorating the hoariest and most risible of soap-opera schtick with breathtaking intensity. It’s a delicious (and distinctively Lynchian) scene, and incredibly relevent to King Kong. Just as Watts vicariously lent momentary conviction and dimension to even (chuckle) Chad Everett, her Anne lends support to her CGI co-star. Anne and her character arc, defined in large part by her mercurial dynamic with Kong, is such an affecting experience that we do not only believe in her bond, her love, for Kong, we come to share it.

All of which would have been for naught were Kong -- specifically, the Kong created for Peter Jackson’s version of King Kong -- unworthy of such a performance, such devotion, such love.

Thankfully, he is. Ohhhh, is he ever.

But there is more -- much more -- to this. Dig:

We're in an age where the term "animated feature" is no longer distinctive: most Hollywood films we see are in fact "animated features," punctuated with live-action components. While this would seem self-evident in certain genres, bear in mind that almost all live-action films from the major studios are so CGI-enhanced (placing landscapes in windows, supplanting live skies with CGI skies, etc.) that the chances of your seeing a non-CGI-enhanced "major" feature in now almost nil. With the emergence in 2004 of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and especially Robert Rodriguez's initial batch of made-in-Texas CGI-constructed live-action fantasies (culminating in the already-cited Sin City), the mutants have indeed taken over. We've come a long way from the anachronisms of silent-era live-action/animation curios like Max & Dave Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell and Walt Disney's Alice and their 1990s descendents Cool World and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, which are as relevent to the new age of cinema as are Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen's populist monster-movie fusions of live-action actors and stop-motion creatures.

The true nature of the crossroads we're at in 21st Century cinema has already spawned noisy-but-empty exercises in tedium like Van Helsing: seamless technological versimilitude guarantees only the relative illusion of high production values will be slathered over the most voidoid of turds, if the studios deem said turd worthy of such window-dressing.

Still, there's no computer-generating talent, nor is there any magic bullet for the emotional vacuum most CGI creations embody. What's been forgotten by all but a few in the post-O'Brien/Harryhausen era is that shopping-out effects sequences in the crazy-quilt production mode Hollywood has indoctrinated as the norm is inherently antithetical to the convincing creation of life on the screen.

For instance, though Ang Lee reportedly dedicated intensive attention and time to 'directing' the CGI 'performance' of The Hulk for his ambitious 2003 adaptation of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Marvel comic character, the failure to infuse the Hulk with any recognizable personality traits was almost a given. You cannot 'shop out' or 'outsource' a performance: the many hands behind the CGI Hulk -- the character, that sense of being alone -- doomed the project from the beginning in a way most audiences and critics were unable to articulate, but all felt. It wasn't just the fact that Eric Bana -- playing the Hulk's human alter-ego Bruce Banner -- seemed in no way connected to that green CGI brute in purple shorts; it was the fact that no single presence or personality was evident or could be felt in the Hulk. He remained an impersonal, soulless CGI confection.

On a conscious level, we all reacted to that. On an unconscious level, we knew there was literally nothing there.

The multi-effects-house school of film production is by definition destructive to a film like Ang Lee's The Hulk. The end result is, by definition, unavoidable. Primary lessons have been lost: there is a reason, for instance, that Walt Disney and Dave Fleischer assigned particular animators to particular characters in their animated shorts and features. Betty Boop animated by anyone but her creator Grim Natwick simply wasn't Betty: she'd pass for a shot or sequence when the necessities of tight production deadlines and scheduling required other animators animate Betty for a shot or two, but unless Grim's hand was behind the key sequences, it just wasn't Betty (until her look, movements, and manner was suitably codified later in the series). Disney and his directors made sure Bill Tytla animated Stromboli in Pinocchio because they understood Tytla was as much a performer as an animator: Bill inhabited his creations, from the winged-and-horned demon in The Night on Bald Mountain sequence of Fantasia to Stromboli and beyond, in ways that indeed communicated directly to audiences. Assigning animators was inherently a form of casting, and "casting" Tytla as Stromboli was a masterstroke, a perfect fusion of animator and character.

Those men were also alchemists: they projected essential aspects of themselves into their animated creations. The same was absolutely true of O'Brien and Harryhausen's work, via their interaction with those stop-motion-animated puppets. It was their distinctive personalities and performances we responded to (and still respond to). Thus, Willis O'Brien was Kong in a measurable way: Kong embodied and projected vital elements of O'Brien.

Stop-motion animation was not a mere technical exercise in the hands of a true artist.

Ray Harryhausen has often recalled in interviews and his books that when he worked under his mentor O'Brien on the animation of Mighty Joe Young (1949), there was one particular Joe puppet Harryhausen felt a great affinity for, and that affinity comes through in the particular sequences Harryhausen animated in the film using that puppet: those sequences, in fact, define Joe's personality in ways that carry the film. Harryhausen's most memorable solo stop-motion creations, from the Rhedosaurus of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to the Medusa of Clash of the Titans, were recognizably extensions of Harryhausen the actor: they acted, reacted, moved and inhabited their cinematic worlds in ways our unconscious minds recognized as distinctively, uniquely Harryhausen's way of acting, reacting, moving and inhabiting the world. It wasn't just a matter of similar movements or stances -- though those manifest threads are self-evident upon scrutiny, from Harryhausen's 1940s fairy tale shorts to his final feature Clash of the Titans -- but of the literal projection of the artist through his art, the alchemy I referred to above. Artists like O'Brien and Harryhausen expressed themselves so eloquently through their stop-motion creations that we recognized them and reacted to them as projections, loved them as such.

I know from an early age, long before I stumbled upon the first articles on O'Brien or Harryhausen in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the child I was recognized upon seeing 20 Million Miles to Earth for the first time that it was somehow, mysteriously linked to "that monster" in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Little did I know at the time that Harryhausen had pursued the path he did due to his own overwhelming, definitively formative exposure to O'Brien's magic in the original King Kong: art as communicative disease.

As children, we unconsciously respond to these things. We grasp them on an organic, beyond-words level. This is something the best puppeteers have always understood and worked with. There's a reason Jim Henson, Frank Oz and their fellow Muppeteers always played the same roles on Sesame Street: the puppeteers were their puppets. The kids would know when Big Bird was right, and would respond on a gut-level if Big Bird was "wrong." It isn't just a matter of vocal performances (though that has an organic reality, too: since Mel Blanc's death, we've all missed on a very real level the Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam et al of our youths), it's physical, interactive, and children know when Bert & Ernie aren't really Bert & Ernie. It's a sort of alchemy, it's magic; as children, we respond to this. As adults, we may consciously forget, but when confronted by as soulless and fragmented a non-personality as the CGI Hulk of Ang Lee's film, our unconsciousness makes the same assessment. The kid in us all knew there was nothing really there.

All of which brings me (at last!) to Peter Jackson and his Kong. Jackson never, ever forgot his childhood perceptions of film, and of the original Kong; never forgetting, Jackson has attended to his films with the necessary childlike intensity of play and zeal for creating convincing realities on a primal, organic level. Hence, the alchemy and magic of his King Kong is genuine.

From his first film, the delightfully daft gorefest Bad Taste (1988), Jackson demonstrated a fundamental grasp of cinema and its potential that was intoxicating. Even with no money to work with, the ever-inventive Jackson and his cronies pulled off ambitious effects (including almost seamless forced in-camera, live perspective shots using detailed miniatures) that lent their cheapjack opus a sense of expansive scale and scope that belied its impoverished means. En route to the reportedly $200+ million budget of Kong, Jackson has never lost sight of the core issues of cinema, its fundamental nature.

Unlike Ang Lee (or, more to the point, the insufferably detached George Lucas, whose films since the 1977 Star Wars and his magnificent production of The Empire Strikes Back have been steadfastly soulless confections), Jackson understood that it is not the director that infuses life into special effects and CGI characters. As The Hulk painfully demonstrated, the work of many hands adds up to a dramatic cipher, however involving the narrative and dramatic context, if we do not feel, sense, and believe in the organic totality of a character. Fragmented among multiple effects house and technicians (and, yes, artists), however attentively Ang Lee directed the performance of his Hulk, the CGI Hulk would be less than a hulk: a thing of disconnected illusory movement and images, shards of a notion of a character, splinters and bytes of what might-have-been. Lee's Hulk will sadly forever remain a fragmented cipher: less, in fact, than the sum of his parts.

As in theatrical puppetry, the creation of cinematic characters via effects requires a single, organically-identifiable personality be projected into a 'virtual' character, and it must obey the rules of such alchemy: it is unavoidably either the animator or the puppeteer who instills life in the character.

If Kong were to live, he had to have a single, solitary, and strongly felt soul injecting life into that otherwise soulless simulcrum. However much Naomi Watts poured into her heartfelt performance, she would have been stranded high and dry (much like Jennifer Connolly, who gave an excellent performance in The Hulk) were the CGI-spawn-of-Skull-Island Kong unworthy of her (or our) devotion.

Thus, Jackson knew his Kong depended entirely on Kong being a perceivable extension of a single personality: a soul had to be enfused into the CGI beast. With the reality of 21st Century theatrical feature film production belying the remote chance of a single animator being the soul of his Kong, Jackson embraced the model he had already forged in his remarkable Lord of the Rings trilogy: he cast his Kong.

Thus, the heart and soul and voice of Gollum, the incredibly versatile and personable Andy Serkis, was Jackson's perfect Kong.

Andy Serkis played -- he was -- Gollum, the greatest CGI character in the history of cinema.

Andy Serkis is now Kong, and we are in the thrall of a new spectacle: the perfect synthesis of technology and art, of CGI and performance, of computers and magic.

[Continued tomorrow...]

Off to Skull Island... (Part the First)

Forgive my crowing a bit, but before I get into Kong (thought I'd never get to it, HB3?), a heads up for the top ranking a DVD I had a little hand in (guest interview subject in one of its delicious extras) just earned. Check it out --

Diabolik Laughs Last!

"moo-oo-ha ha hah HAH HAH!"

[PS: If the Diabolik link doesn't work for some reason, cut-and-paste the following:
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1833pick.html
I've corrected the link three times, but for some reason it doesn't seem to be functional. Sorry!]

It's an honor to have been part of this sterling resurrection of one of my favorite Mario Bava films, one of my all-time fave comics-to-cinema adaptations, and bigs thanks to Kim Aubry of Zeotrope-Aubrey Productions and to my long-time Bava-lovin' amigo Tim Lucas for suggesting to Kim I be involved at all. Great to see Kim and Tim's faith, devotion, and hard work pay off thus, too.
______

I've held off writing this until I could get the time in place and thoughts in order. Here we go:

Spoiler Alert/Warning: I'm not holding back! If you don't want to know details about Kong, stop reading ang go see it now!

The coincidental excavation of my "where did I put those?" collection of Budd Root's 1990s run of Cavewoman comics series (amid the setting up of my new workspace/studio) the very day my son Dan and I took in the early morning matinee of Peter Jackson's marvelous King Kong was a pleasant omen. No one in the remaining self-publishers circle I've stayed in touch with has been more eager about the coming of the new Kong then Budd has been; so, Budd (along with Willis O'Brien devotee Myron Mercury's occasional emails) kept my enthusiasm bouyed even as I diligently avoided reading anything on the upcoming remake. The sole exception to this tactic was my purchase of the DVD restoration of the original Merian C. Cooper/Ernest B. Schoedsack/Willis O'Brien classic King Kong, which unavoidably placed Jackson and his creative team on my screen, lovingly "recreating" (some would argue "creating for the first time") the long-lost, long-cut and almost mythic 1933 spider pit sequence. More on that later...

The most heartening evidence, though, came the morning of the new Kong's debut, when my son Dan called me early in the AM to ask if I was ready to go see Kong with him. He'd caught a midnight show the night before (he'd plugged into the local theater staff showing), and was eager to immediately share the experience with his ol' Pop! Dan is a pretty discerning viewer, and this was a great sign. Later that same day, my amigo Chas Balun rang up out of the blue to alert me to the glory that is the Jackson Kong, and again, this carries a lot of weight for me: Chas, you'll recall, was the man who alerted most of us in North America to the joys of Jackson's very first feature, Bad Taste, having in fact provided me with my first viewing of that gem waaaaaaaay back in the day. Chas wrote up Bad Taste for the newsstand in the pages of Fangoria and moreso in the pages of his own zine Deep Red, thus launching the Peter Jackson US cult before anyone else recognized the mad wet glint in Jackson's bloodshot eye as the lunacy of genius. Thus, when Chas called to say all the hype wasn't a lie and Jackson had come through with flying colors, on the immediate heels of Dan's "Hey, Dad, we're going and that's all there is to it!" call -- well, I at last permitted myself to harbor some expectations.

So, Dan, Chas, and Budd, here's to you.

A thing of primal beauty and surprising majesty it is, Jackson's Kong (a shorthand reference I use but hope not to abuse for the sake of convenience, as this Kong was forged by a remarkable collaborative effort lead by Jackson, prominent among that number Jackson's sterling New Zealand-based effects crew Weta Workshop and Weta Digital and his credited screenplay partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens). First off, Jackson and his confederates in cinematic crime were true to the time, tenor, intent and content of the original sans devotion to anything but the narrative meat and core spirit of the 1933 Kong. Passionate fidelity not unquestioning fealty, inspiration above mere imitation reigns: Jackson was devoted to making a Kong for the 21st Century rather than simply retrofitting and rebooting the 1933 model with 21st Century technology. Thus, we're spared the tarn of, for instance, Gus Van Sant's Psycho (which replicated its source beat-for-beat with the unfortunate grace note 'enhancements' of greviously miscasting its two leads, overt masturbation added to Bates's scopophilia, color and a gaping wound to its shower murder, and the utter trivialization of its crimes amid the context of the post-Manson/Lucas/Dahmer et al reality of the 1990s). In every detail, this rethinking of Kong is rigorous and faithful and, in most cases, correct.

One can quibble with "I would have preferred this" alternative notions, but there's no denying the clarity and crystalline follow-through of every decision Jackson and his creative partners made. There are few missteps and no missed opportunities, and even with the 'spider-pit' sequence, the urge to recreate (or, in the case of the 'spider-pit,' create for the first time for audiences) is addressed and embraced only when it fits and/or amplifies the narrative drive of Kong itself. Therefore, where a lesser filmmaker with all the CGI toys at his or her disposal might have simply amped up classic 1933 sequences customized with unfilmed passages from the Delos W. Lovelace 1932 novelization (such as Kong's confrontation at the tar pit with a group of Triceratops, a spectacular bit including Kong tossing boulder-sized shards of solidified tar at the ceratopsians), Jackson and his team instead reinvigorate the narrative by passionately reinvesting themselves in the characters -- and by doing so, reinvesting ourselves in this resonant pop-culture myth, from stem to stern.

They did so with renewed attention to Kong's era -- absolutely wed as it is to the myth and its tenacity -- thus immediately eschewing the dangers of making Kong more 'contemporary' by setting it in the present. The early 20th Century era of high adventure that Kong emerged from is instrinsic to its mythic power; that Kong was the creation of restless, aggressive adventurers, fighters, cowboys and dreamers is fully acknowledged and honored, as are the desperate times Kong both personified and promised, however romantically, escape from.

Thus, we meet Anne (a radiant Naomi Watts) playing a faux-Chaplin-Tramp in a failing vaudeville production, clinging to a beloved father-figure as the entire troupe is on its last legs. This rethinking of Anne stills brings us to the meeting place of the 1933 original -- Anne's desperate theft of an apple -- but her deftly scripted, played and directed backstory isn't superfluous, attuned as it is to both the realities and fantasies (how many Busby Berkeley scenarios began this way?) of the early Depression years. This setup also slyly introduces the chops, skills and tools necessary to Anne's initial survival of, and eventual winning of, Kong himself -- very sharp writing, this.

We meet Carl Denham (played by a perhaps-too-youtful but eager and utterly shameless Jack Black) at his most furtive, his eyes narrowing and darting like a cornered scavenger. He is, in fact, 'cornered' by the failed screening of footage from his latest opus, met at the moment of his imminent demise as an up-and-coming filmmaker, as the bored producers assess their cut-and-run alternatives to further indulging Denham's latest hare-brained exotica. This passage is cannily true to its era in ways most audiences are blissfully unaware of (the crass query of the most bored of the producers as to whether Denham will include "titties" is dead-on, as lurid & sensationalist early sound era exotics like the gorilla-mating-with-women confection Ingagi and breasts-in-Bali Goona Goona had eclipsed the respectable pioneering adventure documentaries of Martin & Osa Johnson and Cooper & Schoedsack). Denham's flop-sweat followed by his off-the-top-of-his-head pitch for something more and his foot-in-mouth confrontation and blow-up at the "titties" query synchronistictly plops Denham into Anne's shoes: shit out of luck, out of work, and desperate for any alternative still in accord with his/her path. Again, very tasty scripting.

However, some devotees of the original may already find themselves at odds with the film. I put it to you that the original Anne (Fay Wray, beautifully evoked here -- along with Cooper -- in Denham's cab-ride dialogue with his flunky perfectly played throughout by Colin Hanks) was as much a shorthand product of her era as the original Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong, natch). To 1933 audiences caught in the grip of the Depression, they needed only to lay eyes on willowy Anne as she reached for that apple to identify fully with her plight; 2005 viewers would make no such leap, not this side of the Atlantic, anyways (we're still too fat and complacent as a people to so immediately empathize and identify with poverty, hunger, and need). To 1933 audiences still close enough to the reality of P.T. Barnum as part of their own lives, Denham (an overt projection of both real-life adventurers/creators Cooper and Schoedsack, but particularly the outspoken huckster Cooper) was an immediately recognizable and alluring archetype; again, not so for 2005, when few remember who Barnum was and fewer still have ever brushed, much less experienced, the kind of old-school carny bluster Denham embodied in '33. There was still an electricity and validity (a cultural investment, if you will) in the 'White Queen' narrative in 1933, too; it had informed silent jungle films and serials, best-selling adventure stories and countless pulps, and was essential to MGM's monumental 1931 hit adaptation of Trader Horn. That colonial-era archetype was old-hat and already disposed-of when it was last trotted out in failed anachronistic jungle films of the 1980s, from the mainstream bomb Sheena, Queen of the Jungle to various cheapjack Jess Franco and Italian cannibal and zombie retreads. So, any allure or stock 2005 audiences might have lent to the mere sketch of 'a blonde white queen' by nature taming the big, black ape was nothing to be counted upon. Nor do the partriarchal precepts, prejudices and presumptions of '33 carry the day -- anachronisms all, risible at best, offensive at worst -- hence the wisdom of this meticulous character reinvention.

Jackson, Walsh and Boyens properly (and literally) slow the juggernaut rhythms of their Kong time and time again to place us in privileged empathic moments of meditation with both Anne and Denham, and this lends surprising cumulative weight to the proceedings. They -- and, once he assumes center stage almost 75 minutes into the film's running time, Kong -- are the only characters afforded these communal moments, and this is the film's keystone. Thus, we share/experience Anne's decisive moment in which she steps onto the platform of the steamer (and Denham's anxiety that she may not); Anne's experience of being borne away by Kong in all its pulse-racing immediacy, and her eventual realization that she must act in order to save her life; Anne's gradual awakening to Kong as more than just a beast, and the tentative stages of their nascent bond forming, its (believably) blossoming into something extraordinary; the arc of Anne's reaction to her rescue, and the conflicting emotions (relief, confusion, reassessment -- not just of the rescue, but tellingly of Denham and of her rescuer Jack -- outrage and ire); the almost telepathic moment of empathy with Kong, many streets and a stage away, in NYC; etc. We also share/experience Denham's emotional life with similar reveries, arriving at Denham making eye contact with his right-hand man (Hanks) amid the hoopla of Kong's impending show opening in Manhattan. This is a great and telling moment in the film: Denham is a user, and for a fragile moment the burden and shame of that -- of all the lives he has derailed, destroyed and altered in reckless pursuit of goals he cannot articulate, only seize -- is felt, by Denham and by the audience. A lesser filmmaker wouldn't have known, much less cared, the moment was there to be conveyed.

In the original King Kong, Anne was a waif and a cipher, invigorated primarily by the cinematic appeal of Fay Wray in the part and then by Kong's devotion to her, which we (the audience) come to share; Denham was an arrogant, reckless showman and braggart, a man's man in that he was fearless in the face of any danger (hence worthy of our emotional investment rather than rejected a villain). Neither would wash in 2005, any more than they would have in 1977, but Jackson and company thankfully avoided the revamps Dino DeLaurentiis, Lorenzo Semple Jr., and John Guillermin brought to bear: Anne (Jessica Lange) as feminist showgirl, Denham (Charles Grodin) as greedy capitalist/oilman. In fact, if there is any contemporary spin to these characters, it's Jackson and company's slight nod to none other than our current president in Denham's character (in fact, one fleeting dialogue exchange involving Denham, the ship's first mate, and the cabin boy played by Jamie Bell resonates in this context, citing the foolishness of equating "I'm not gonna cut & run" bravado with bravery, particularly when the alternative leads to the death of almost everyone in the search party).

But that's subtext, not text: Denham and Anne are fully-fleshed characters in all their appeal and foibles, and throughout Kong this investment pays off in spades.

As is, and as does, I am thankful to say, the characterization of Kong.

And it is this that elevates not just the film, but makes abundantly clear why Peter Jackson is among the greatest filmmakers of this or any era.

[Part the Second on Monday. See you here...]

What Will It Take? Yet Another Presidential Crime Much, Much Worse Than Lying About a Blowjob...

It could not have been more timely -- with the reauthorization of the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act landing on the Senate floor after the House sanctioned the Act's perpetual enactment -- for the American people to have learned that two years ago, Bush and his Administration covertly authorized the NSA (the National Security Agency, natch) to secretly carry out surveillance of hundreds, likely thousands of people throughout the United States.

If anything was necessary to emphasize how this President and Administration have now eclipsed even the grossest abuses of the equally-paranoid President Richard Nixon and his Administration, and how they will trample on any check/balance system in place to extend the reach of government into our homes under any pretence, this is it.

Now, Bush, like Ronald Reagan and Poppa Bush before him, campaigned mightily (both campaigns) on the populist stand that the government is too big, too intrusive, and that "down-sizing" government to make it less intrusive to the lives of American citizens is a priority of this President, this Administration.

As the tragic (and needlessly ugly) Terry Schiavo case history demonstrated, there is no nook or cranny of our lives too intimate for the present Administration to ignore, and in fact insert their bull-in-a-china-shop girth into, especially if it serves their agenda (broad or opportunistic agenda-of-the-moment). This latest revelation puts paid to any notion that Bush's campaign promises were based in anything but appealing to voter prejudices.

True to the monikers applied to his environmental policies, Bush's ongoing claims to believe in 'downsizing government' is in fact the reverse of his true intentions. Bush personally ordered this inversion of standing law and Constitutional protections. He can blame no one else for this latest abuse of power to come to light.

As reported in The NY Times this week, Bush's secret presidential edict skirted standing post-Nixon era NSA rules and regs (which require only the permission of a judge for the NSA to investigate any one of us -- not a major hurdle, by NSA's own admissions) to not only allow but mandate massive spying on any designated citizens (designated by whom?). This edict includes (but is not limited to) surveillance of phone calls and peoples' homes without any evidence of criminal activity, and by Bush's order can be mobilized sans court order.

Understand, too, that the very 'rules and regulations' the Administration quickly asserted as being in place were the rules and regs the edict circumvented by design.

Thus, their 'defense' is by definition false -- another lie.

This gross violation of the Bill of Rights was also deliberately orchestrated and issued sans congressional debate, avoiding any and all judicial scrutiny and oversight.

This was another overreaching abuse of Presidential power, a secret and secretive criminal violation of our constitutional rights. It is an indefensible act, yet another blatant example of this President and Administration's sociopathic behavior, part of an ongoing and traceable pattern of behavior that simply cannot be excused, ignored, or justified.

President Bush’s personal authorization of this violation of federal wiretapping law, the Privacy Act and a violation of the Fourth Amendment cannot be palmed off as "bad intelligence," the ill behavior of subordinates, or something Bush was unaware of.

Are we left at last with no choice but to demand Congress defend the Constitution through the impeachment of President Bush?

THIS IS CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR, pure and simple.

Snow, Sleet, and Freezing Rain...

...means both Marj and I are home today, as all schools in the area were cancelled. Hence, my day of lectures at Bennington's Mt. Anthony High School were postponed to January.

Off to shovel, more later --

Tortured Language...

This from a new book catalogue from a regional publisher. I'll save the author embarrassment by deleting his name, but the book title must stand, as its part of the "stupefying" spectacle that follows. I have no idea if this is copy written specifically for the catalogue or excerpted from the book jacket's back cover copy; one can hope this is reserved only for catalogue ballyhoo.

The following is best appreciated if read aloud:

"If one has grown tired of the ambition, naked, shorn, and bleating, on display in many recent first books of poetry, then one will welcome the concussive impact of ------ -------'s The Stupefying Flashbulbs. These are short, impulsive, occasion-stained lyrics, by turns insouciant and pregnable. Their pretensions are few, their presumptions, endearing. Thematic concerns include severity, inconclusiveness, and artistry. An evil cube makes repeat appearances. We will all laugh last."

I did not make this up.

What is that evil cube doing over there -- ??
__

Speaking of evil cubes, it should come as no surprise that the twisted hyenas in power responsible for sick monikers like "Clear Skies Initiative" (which increases pollutants and toxins in our atmosphere) and "Healthy Forests Initiative" (encouraging timber companies to go hog-wild) cooked up the 'USA PATRIOT' act. I thank Christopher Faris for reminding me that term is actually an acronym for (ahem) "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."

If it were true, it would be levelled against those in power who are so effectively spreading terrorism across the globe, like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et al. But, of course, it isn't, and it doesn't. It's aimed at our collective civil liberties, and its reauthorization or revision comes down to this week's -- possibly today's -- vote on the Senate floor.

This Act is sorely in need of scrutiny, debate, and revision now that we are no longer in the immediate wake of 9/11, and have had a few years to weigh its reality.

Filibuster or nuclear option? We'll see, won't we.

But we needn't stand by silently as this goes down. Speak up -- write your Senator; sign the petition

here.

Our Vermont state Senator Patrick Leahy is leading the call for change, campaigning for an extension to March to ensure time to properly dissect and 'correct' the Act. I'd rather it simply not be extended, given the abuses of power abundantly in evidence from this corrupt President and Administration, but that's unlikely given the Republican dominance in Washington, and Leahy's call for compromise and further debate and analysis is likely a best-hope option.

I am listening to President Bush's morning speech.

It is the same old shit. Word for word, much of it.

Same.
Old.
Shit.
For.
Three.
Years.

Can this be true...?

First off, CCS (Center for Cartoon Studies, natch) final project presentations were amazing and enlightening -- and long. As I'd expected, we'll be picking up with presentations the beginning of next semester in January. Still, it was a great afternoon, and I'm happy to say I learned a great deal on everything from Swedish comics and Jack T. Chick tracts to the Marvel 2099 series, which I'd pretty much ignored when it came out in the 1990s (I haven't seen the light, but I now know I'll be including at least two of the titles in the series in my revised text for We Are Going to Eat You!!).

Still, there just warn't enough hours in the afternoon to cram in any more than we did.

Maybe now a few students understand not only how much work goes into lectures -- but also into keeping the time frame tight and in place!
__

Speaking of which, I'm prepping my Friday lecture(s) on graphic novels for the students of Mt. Anthony High School in Bennington, VT, an event Michelle Ollie at CCS suggested I take on. So, I proudly go representing CCS and all of comicdom!

With the rise in interest in graphic novels and comics at all age levels, and the fact that schools are now eager to place comics and graphic novels into students's hand (instead of yanking 'em away as they did in my childhood), I see it as my task to (a) open the students's eyes to what waits for them while (b) not boring them shitless and turning them off graphic novels before they're fully turned on. I'll be delivering the same talk three times that day, so it's also vital to make sure session #3 is as lively as session #1. Wish me luck!
__

G. Michael Dobbs, former editor of Animato magazine and editor/publisher of the short-lived but beloved Animation Planet magazine, newspaper editor and dear friend launched his own blog a week or so ago. Mike covers a wide variety of topics and interests there, beyond his ongoing animation studies and reflections.

Today, Mike is excerpting his interview with one of my all-time favorite filmmakers Joe Dante on his sadly underrated (and inexplicably buried by Warner) Looney Tunes movie; earlier this month, Mike covered everything from Spirit Warriors (a proposed animation series being created by a Western New England College junior) to Massachusetts radio show host and Pastor Tom Crouse's first Mr. Heterosexual Contest (shades of Tom Cruise in Magnolia)! It's part of my daily routine checking out what Mike's got to say, so tune in early and often.

Check it out ASAP at

Out of the Inkwell.

See you there!
__

"Let's get in line, kids," takes on new meaning in our increasingly paranoid and Orwellian school systems, post-Columbine and post-9/11. The term 'tag' is no longer just about graffiti, either, for our up and coming generation of teens.

This compliments of HomeyM (for the forward) and journalist Catherine Komp at Alternative Press Review:

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT PRESSING TO TAG CHILDREN LIKE CATTLE

...As debate over government surveillance rages in adult society, the US Department of Justice is quietly enticing school districts to implement controversial technologies that monitor and track students. Critics fear these efforts will normalize electronic surveillance at an early age, conditioning young people to accept privacy violations while creating a market for companies that develop and sell surveillance systems.

A few of the nation's schools are already running pilot programs to monitor students' movements using radio frequency identification. The highly controversial programs, implemented in the name of student protection, see pupils wearing tags around their necks and submitting themselves to electronic scanning as they enter and leave school property. Now, a new federal grant could lure more districts into using these or similar technologies.

Even though school violence is at its lowest rate in a decade, according to the federal government's own statistics, the Justice Department's "School Safety Technologies" grants will be distributed to schools that develop proposals in four broadly defined areas: integrated physical security systems, bus-fleet monitoring systems, low-level force devices and school safety training.

In its call for the grant proposals, the National Institute of Justice, an arm of the Justice Department, says the money will be distributed to schools proposing "effective technology solutions to protect the students, teachers, school personnel, and the educational infrastructure from criminal activities, particularly crimes of
violence.". . .

Such technologies have already been implemented in some school districts. North of Houston, Texas, 16,000 elementary students in the Spring Independent School District wear RFID tags, embedded with chips that indicate their locations on a computerized map. The school also has 750 surveillance cameras mounted throughout its facilities, with plans to install 300 more.

In New York, RFID systems are also being used in schools. The Brockport Central School District in northern New York is testing school bus fleet monitoring with GPS technology and scanning students IDs as they enter and exit the bus. Students at the Enterprise Charter School in Buffalo wave their RFID tags in front of two kiosks at the school entrance which automatically transmit attendance to teachers and administrators. . .

Lee Tien, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public-interest organization, believes the increasing use of RFID technology in schools could affect how the public views surveillance. "It creates an atmosphere where you normalize the use of surveillance technology... [and] the idea that you should accept that you are being tracked," said Tien.

It's all here at

tag them two-legged heifers!

__

Posted here without comment, other than to say: Can this be true?

Bush on the Constitution: 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper'

Capital Hill Blue/DOUG THOMPSON | December 9 2005

Last month, Republican Congressional leaders filed into the Oval Office to meet with President George W. Bush and talk about renewing the controversial USA Patriot Act.

Several provisions of the act, passed in the shell shocked period immediately following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, caused enough anger that liberal groups like the American Civil Liberties Union had joined forces with prominent conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly and Bob Barr to oppose renewal.

GOP leaders told Bush that his hardcore push to renew the more onerous provisions of the act could further alienate conservatives still mad at the President from his botched attempt to nominate White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

'I don't give a goddamn,' Bush retorted. 'I'm the President and the Commander-in-Chief. Do it my way.' 'Mr. President,' one aide in the meeting said. 'There is a valid case that the provisions in this law undermine the Constitution.'

'Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,' Bush screamed back. 'It's just a goddamned piece of paper!'

I've talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution 'a goddamned piece of paper.'"

It's

here.

Via other online sources, confirm or deny, anyone? I'm curious... place links if you're responding, I'd love to know if this has any validity.

Wouldn't you?

The Heat Man Cometh

...OK, it's the day! Our fave heating specialist Rick Fortier is coming in this morning and installing the baseboard (hot water heat) into the new studio/office/library room. This is the final bit of work necessary to the room's completion, and I couldn't be readier or happier to see it all finished.

The second part of my two-part blog entry about freelancing was the first chunk of computer work and writing done in the new studio. As I worked, the space began to feel like, well, mine. At a couple points I stopped typing and looked around, conscious of the fact I'd accepted the space completely. It feels a bit like the old trailer studio I had behind my garage in the house Marlene, the kids and I lived in on Lower Dover Road in Marlboro -- the length of the room, the prominence (and smell) of wood, the feel of the space itself.

That studio was kind to me, and I got a lot of writing and drawing done (and started: Tyrant began in that trailer) there. My first Deep Red reviews, articles, and interviews were scribed there, along with the whole of the We Are Going to Eat You! manuscript, the first and second drafts of Aliens: Tribes (the third and final revision was largely completed on our kitchen table, due to -- oh, never mind), all my Video Watchdog and Ecco submissions, reviews and articles, and my few scripts for Swamp Thing. In the second room of the trailer, where my drawing table dominated, I drew the world's second 24 Hour Comic, the first pages of Tyrant (portions of what I then thought would be the first chapter, but ended up being the third), portions of 1963 (though the bulk was done in a studio Rick Veitch found for us that was roughly midway between our houses, The Hypernaut was done in my home, as were my pinups and covers), and much more. It was a great work space, and it was kind to me.

This is better. It will be kinder.

Off to CCS for our final session of the semester. See you here tomorrow...

Mondaze

...in a bit of a blur. Lectured about filmmaking (with sample clips from lots of movies, all made for little $ and with the same sort of means the students have in reach) to the Center for Digital Art in Brattleboro, VT this morn, as I do almost every semester. Michelle Moyse and his wife Linda have tapped me for years, and I love doing it, so big fun all around.

Tomorrow is the final session for this first semester with my Center for Cartoon Studies "Survey of the Drawn Story" class; another big day. With almost a dozen students giving their presentations (final projects) and four others moderating Q&A sessions for their written presentations, it should be a lively mix.

Speaking of CCS and my class, Howard Cruse has posted photos and a recap of his session with me, my class and the CCS two weeks ago. It's all at

Howard's 'My Doings' page!

While you're there, explore Howard's site a while; lots of great art, info and more.

More tomorrow!

(That all short enough for you, Mark? Signing off after a loooong weekend post -- Steve B)

Fun With Freelance: How Not to Break In to the Horror Magazine Market: Part Two -- Being a Chronology of Some Woe, Concerning That Which Was Not Deemed Fit to "Entertain" or "Enlighten," and That Which Was, But Was Not Paid For, Thus Published to the Loss of Only the Author, Sweetened as it were with Some Flights of Pique and Passages of Moribund Musings, and Ending As Promised Without Proper Resolution, Save for the Usual Niggardly Dissolution.

[PS: Read Part One, yesterday's post first, if you're just joining us. Thanks.]
___

So, after the long silence following the submission of my revised review of The Ghosts of Edendale (a wait I must admit I have inflicted on others, too, inadvertantly, especially as an editor), I finally received a reply when I prompted one at last with more than one increasingly aggressive, but unfailingly polite, email.

The email from Ye Editor of Note that I received almost two months after submission of the revised text was rather condenscending.

In short, it urged me to rewrite the review again -- not for word count, which was fine, but because, well, I had liked the film too much, you see. Ye Editor pressed me for negative comments in the revision. "Isn't there some flaw, something that doesn't work in the film?" the editor pressed.

Ye Editor also expressed some concern that this was a film that wasn't yet in general distribution, or on video or DVD. Why write about it?

I was also given a pointed sentence or two on the magazine's preferred writing style, which was amusing because it was, for all intents and purposes, a distillation of my amigo Chas Balun's writing style. Curse words were encouraged, critical barbs preferred. It was the matter-of-fact, no-shit, dick-in-the-dirt review style Chas had introduced and institutionalized for horror fandom with his seminal little self-published pamphlets The Connoisseur's Guide to the Contemporary Horror Film (1983) and The Gore Score back in '84, which Chas further indoctrinated as his own via Deep Red magazine a year or two later.

Now, I had written for Chas and Deep Red many times; as I've said before and will till the day I die, it was Chas who first opened the door for me as a published writer, and Deep Red was the initial vehicle. I knew the style, and I knew the source.

I bit my tongue, though, as I didn't want to respond angrily, noting that I had been writing in "the magazine's preferred style" while its publisher and Ye Editor I was hoping to curry favor with were most likely still in grade school or junior high.

I instead wrote a polite letter asserting that (a) I knew their magazine well, and its preferred writing style, which was one I'd indeed indulged myself in the pages of Deep Red; (b) while I was certainly willing to do another rewrite -- still on spec -- I was writing about a film I was enthusiastic about, and didn't care to waste any portion of my 345 word count citing flaws that didn't seem worthy of mention and would be in fact contrary to the spirit, intent and content of my review and my reason for writing it; (c) it was worth writing about because it was a new work from a filmmaker of some significance, and I was deliberately submitting th review early so as to provide their magazine with a 'scoop,' and (d) in the spirit of cooperation and making it clear my intentions were pure, I offered a further review of a film I'd seen no one else write about anywhere. In fact, I sent two drafts of the review, one long, one short, as I had with Ghosts of Edendale.

Furthermore, I carefully selected a film that offered the kind of gore quotient most gorehounds prefer, and that incorporated negative comments among the positive comments, which seemed somehow essential to this editor. I also chose a film and review that appropriately incorporated the tenor, tone and slang typical of my Deep Red work.

I was now offering the editor two drafts of two spec reviews, of two films no other genre magazine had covered to date. This would seem to be an exclusive of sorts, though I didn't assert that aggressively as yet -- I did, however, remind Ye Editor that I was able to contact both filmmakers, and would be happy to expand my reviews into full articles or interviews, if the magazine were at all interested.

Here's the reviews I offered in the spirit of freelancer peace, good will, and further cooperation, and in hopes of landing one or the other in the pages of their magazine. The second, shorter draft was also 'punched up' to fit Ye Editor's request for edgier writing:
____

THE CHAMPAGNE CLUB (2002; Dir/Scr: Joao Machado): Michael Naismith once sang about “running from the Grand Ennui,” but this handsomely mounted threnody plunges into the Grand Canyon of ennui. Direction, photography, art direction, music, and performances are fine and perfectly tuned with this upscale production’s nihilistic descent into a self-made hell. It’s a harrowing, graphic LEAVING LAS VEGAS for the elite urban gallery set.

Joao Machado’s debut feature bottles up a quartet of L.A.’s young art-scene nouveau rich in a remote tropical estate and lets them fester. Initially drawn together by their shared discomfort over the “pendulum swing between art and commerce” in which they owe their wealth & privilege to exploitation rather than creation, in due course (or, should I say, multiple courses, each more vile than the last) they destroy all the art in sight and willingly slide from boredom, narcissism, alienation and despair to self-degradation, self-mutilation, madness, coprophilia, cannibalism, and beyond.

When all is said and done (and eaten), this is arch and calculatedly gross fare, but there's no denying Machado chronicles ground-zero emotional auto-cannibalism with exquisite clarity. He also boasts impeccable credentials, both personal (the film is dedicated to his father, painter Juarez Machado, and mother, “consecrated grand culinary chef” Eliane Carvalho) and cinematic. Machado brazenly plunders thematics, dramaturgy, and specifics from a stellar pantheon of art-(charnel)house horrors: Luis Bunuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, Marco Ferreri’s LA GRANDE BOUFFE, Pasolini’s SALO, and Peter Greenaway’s THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER, amid resonant imagery echoing Kubrick’s THE SHINING (Tim’s hallway visions of butchering his companions), Argento’s SUSPIRIA (the final closeup of Connie in a pool of blood spreading on a decoratively tiled floor), the anarchic Brazilian master work MACUNAIMA (the swimming pool ‘soup’), and key works by painters like Rene Magritte and others.

Machado orchestrates this tapestry without compromising the integrity of his own vision; indeed, though he borrows much and acknowledges all his debts along the way, the potent framing device -- opening and closing with perfect symmetry -- succinctly anchors his conceits and keeps the film from becoming merely derivative navel-gazing. That much of it is risible (nude Bruce eating and humping his man-sized portion of mashed potatoes) allows one to keep watching, even while the gorge rises. Machado intends to provoke, disgust, and outrage, but amid the current art house wave of explicit grue and sex (dominated by French imports like BAISE MOI, SEE THE SEA, FAT GIRL, and TROUBLE EVERY DAY peppered with more domestic fare like TITUS and AMERICAN PSYCHO), THE CHAMPAGNE CLUB seems tamer than it intends to be; casual viewers may consider this mannered wallow in ‘poor little rich kids’ degradation and despair much ado about nothing, while gorehounds and exploitation buffs won’t wade through the aristocratic angst to get to the grue. It’s nevertheless disturbing, an engaging first film; Machado is a filmmaker well worth following, a talent to watch.
___

THE CHAMPAGNE CLUB (2002; Dir/Scr: Joao Machado):

Joao Machado’s debut feature locks a quartet of L.A.’s young art-scene nouveau rich into a remote tropical estate and watches ‘em fester. Their snobby discomfort over the “pendulum swing between art and commerce” -- they owe their wealth & privilege to exploitation rather than creation -- prompts the slide from boredom, narcissism, alienation and despair dips into self-degradation, self-mutilation, madness, coprophilia, cannibalism, and beyond -- [the title of the magazine I was submitting to] turf, no doubt.

When all is said, done, and eaten, this is gross shit, but Machado chronicles ground-zero emotional auto-cannibalism with exquisite clarity. Direction, photography, art direction, music, and performances are perfectly attuned to this upscale production’s nihilistic descent into self-made hell. Machado boasts impeccable credentials (the film is dedicated to his father, painter Juarez Machado, and mother, “consecrated grand culinary chef” Eliane Carvalho), and he plunders from a stellar pantheon of art-(charnel)house horrors: Luis Bunuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL, Marco Ferreri’s LA GRANDE BOUFFE, Pasolini’s SALO, and Peter Greenaway’s arty horrors. Still, there are echoes of Kubrick’s THE SHINING (the hero’s hallway visions of butchering his companions), Argento’s SUSPIRIA (the blood of one female victim spreads across a decoratively tiled floor), the anarchic ‘lost’ Brazilian masterpiece MACUNAIMA (a swimming pool charnelhouse ‘soup’), and references to painters like Rene Magritte.

Machado orchestrates this tapestry without compromising his vision; he borrows much and acknowledges all his debts, but the potent framing device -- opening and closing with perfect symmetry -- anchors the film and keeps it from becoming pretentious navel-gazing. Much of it is hilarious (one nude yuppie scarfs and humps a man-sized portion of mashed potatoes); Machado intends to provoke, disgust, and outrage, but amid the current art house wave of explicit grue and sex (dominated by French imports like BAISE MOI and IRREVERSIBLE), THE CHAMPAGNE CLUB seems tamer than it intends to be. Many will consider this mannered wallow in ‘poor little rich kids’ degradation much ado about nothing, gorehounds and exploitation buffs will be hard-pressed to stomach the snotty angst to reach the grue. Still, an engaging first film; keep an eye out for future Machado mayhem.
______

OK, that's the pair. A rewrite of my Ghosts of Edendale review was also attached, though the changes were minor and inconsequential.

This garnered a response.

Ye Editor liked this new review of this new film, which no one at the zine had ever heard of, and if I'd be willing to indulge their making a few editorial revisions, they would like to run it.

Those changes were so minor, they weren't going to give me the chance to make them myself. And, in fact, they were thinking about assigning a writer to interview the director of The Champagne Club.

Got that? Assigning another writer to do an interview I'd proposed to do. And still, no response on the initial review of The Ghosts of Edendale, which I'd now rewritten three times.

Now, an odd bit of banter followed. Note the dates of the following email exchanges.

___

From: "--------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Steve Bissette w/Slight rewrite on GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review, here --
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 20:38:43 -0500

Steve, just a quick note to let you know that the director of Champagne Club asked for the text from the review and he was really happy with it, he plans to use quotes in the marketing of the movie. Cool!

--------

Managing Editor, ---------------
__________

Dear ----,

Good news, that. I’ve already been an asset to [your magazine] and the director; what more can one ask in this lifetime?

Stay in touch,

Best,

Steve B
________

What more can one ask?

How about getting a clear response to my initial submission, or not having something I turned the zine onto result in some other writer getting the assignment, particularly since I offered to interview the filmmaker already?

Of course, being paid for the review the editor just accepted would be nice, too.

But I'm getting ahead of myself a bit -- the email exchanges continue, with a sudden right turn into Ye Editor encouraging me to get back into comics and indulging anew in fresh diversionary flattery:
_____

From: "--------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Steve Bissette w/Slight rewrite on GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review, here --
Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 17:54:44 -0500

That and you're a WICKEDLY talented artist. I loved your Swamp Thing
years and collected Taboo religiously. You're also an accomplished writer, it's an honour to have you on board. Keep at the comics though, Mignola was lucky, if Guillermo wasn't such a Hellboy fan, that film would never have been made (it took GDT 6 years to get it going), so it takes just one determined person to really like your stuff! And everyone likes your stuff...

-------, Managing Editor

_________

Dear ------,

Too late - I retired from comics in 1999. So it goes...

I’ve kept myself productive, though. Amid writing for VIDEO WATCHDOG now and again and the occasional review (such as those you now have in hand), I illustrate at least one novel/anthology a year to keep my hand in the ink. Also, working on a book-length study of Vermont and New England films, and just wrapping up the first issue of my own regional film zine, GREEN MOUNTAIN CINEMA. Also starting work-in-earnest this week on a planned feature-length video production adapting my good friend and folklorist Joe Citro’s VERMONT GHOST GUIDE for release the end of this coming Fall. We’re shooting in June, if all goes well. Wish us luck.

But comics? It’s history, for me. 24 years was a good career, but the industry just got too fucking sour by the end. After the direct sales market collapsed and my divorce nailed me, I decided I’d had a good run, and have moved on with nary a look back.

But thanks for the very kind words.

All the best,

Steve B
___________

From: "---------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Back to you, from Steve B...
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 12:17:29 -0500

Understood. I am in the middle of a divorce myself, wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.

Oh, forgot to mention Gore Shriek, that was a blast too.

---------, Managing Editor
___________

At this point, I was beyond pissed. This was getting amusing.

I mean, how long could this go on? What would this process stretch out to? How unprofessional could this get, over a single submission?

I decided to find out.

Tired of these pleasantries I ventured the leap: since my review of The Champagne Club was accepted, what, please, were their payment rates? Copyright remains mine, yes? Is there a contract or letter of agreement Ye Editor could offer, detailing the terms of our arrangement?
___________

From: "----------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Hello from Steve B, re: GHOSTS OF EDENDALE, and review matters...
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004 13:01:51 -0500

As for our rates, they're low already because we are an independently published magazine, ...so don't expect to retire on submissions [to our zine]! ;) Please ask ----- [email address contact followed] for a final word count for your submission, then submit an invoice to her.

Thanks!

-------, Managing Editor

_______________________

Dear -----,

OK, good start. More details, please.

Let me wait for your decision on GHOSTS -- that is, after all, the film I really wanted to cover, if you’ll have me and it -- and then we’ll work out something.

Thanks, all the best,

Steve B
__________

I also pressed Ye Editor to provide me the final word count of their revised edit, which I was not privvy to; when I contacted the contact Ye Editor had steered me to, I was told to submit my word count and invoice.

I did so, using my own final word count, and -- nothing happened.

Come the month of April -- remember, this process started in October of the year before -- I wrote the following to Ye Editor, ccing it to Ye Publisher, too:
______

From: Marge & Steve Bissette
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 10:04 AM
To: ---------
Cc: ----------
Subject: Hello from Steve Bissette -- GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review??

Dear ----------,

Hope this finds you and yours well, and that you had a fine Easter.

A recent visit to the newsstand allowed me to purchase a copy of the new ----------- with my [CHAMPAGNE CLUB] review. Handsome cover, indeed!

Any decision at all on the rewrite I submitted of the GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review? Payment for the review you've now published? Please advise.

Best,

Steve Bissette

___________________________

From: "-------------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Hello from Steve Bissette -- GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review??
Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 16:00:37 -0400

Steve! Don't buy ---------! We would have sent you a copy, you contributed!

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, I've been away a lot and changed our cover story last minute last issue so it's been crazy. Unfortunately I didn't run the GHOSTS review, (it's not the writing by the way!) [The publisher] just keeps cutting all the indie stuff from ---------, there is always the --------- section but I have a feeling it's too late by now...

Seen anything interesting lately? I really want to see Shaun of the
Dead! That looks hilarious. Where are you based out of by the way?

------------, Managing Editor
_____________

Dear --------,

Ah, just back from vacation.

I'd welcome copies of --------- with my review; still, did buy a couple. My mailing address:

Stephen R. Bissette
PO Box 47
Marlboro, VT 05344
USA

(Meaning, natch, I'm based in Vermont!)

In lieu of payment, how about a --------- subscription? Let me know -- even if it's only comp copies for four issues, that would be fine with me.

Just heard via the video grapevine (I work in video retail in part, remember) that GHOSTS OF EDENDALE is coming out from WARNER (!!!) in the fall. Great news, that, since it means a good little indy will enjoy wider distribution via a major label... though I doubt it'll add up to more money for the filmmakers, knowing how these studios operate.

I've stepped away from my day-job and am re-engaging with creative life, enjoying enough of a financial cushion (thanks to an unexpected legal job AND the windfall royalties on the JOHN CONSTANTINE film -- remember, I co-created that character in SWAMP THING).

...Should be a busy spring, summer and fall, so don't fret if I don't send more reviews your way. But do, please, wish me luck.

And do, please, run the GHOSTS review at SOME point. You've got a SCOOP, damn it!!!

All the best, stay in touch,

Steve B
______________

From: "------------"
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Hello from Steve Bissette -- GHOSTS OF EDENDALE review??
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 10:02:13 -0400

Steve!

Wow this is all great news! And of course I know you co-created
Constantine, what do you think I am, an amateur??? ;) I've been a comic junkie my whole life and have been reading both Swamp Thing and Hellblazer for ages. You're hugely talented dude, your 80's run with Moore and Totleben on Swamp Thing was by far the best. Guess you don't happen to have any old pencils kicking around for sale after two decades do you? *wishful thinking* Love that fucking art!

Have you read Andy Diggle's new take on Swamp Thing it yet? Did you see the Constantine film yet? Keanu Reeves? *shudder* and why the hell does it take place in L.A.?? WTF?? Hollywood.

I also read Taboo by the way. Small world huh?

Yes we can do a swap, I'll put you on the comp list for a year. Sound good? (I'm not surprised you're in Vermont either)

Dude, keep me updated on... [projects]!

And I will run that review, especially if they've been picked up by
Warner. You are right, they'll likely get hosed by the studio but at
least people will see their movie!

Congrats on flexing your creative muscles again... You rock Steve!

------------, Managing Editor

_____________

My mid-May reply:
_____________

Hello, ---------,

Apologies for the slow reply, I’m JUST home from two weeks of travel. The second week was spent on a video industry seminar/conference/retreat; among the tidbits gleaned there was the news that GHOSTS OF EDENDALE is indeed on WARNER BROS. slate for Halloween release. Include THAT in the review, please! It’s now a fact, or at least a factoid.

...What’s your deadline for the OCTOBER issue of ---------? I’ll make sure you get all the info/contacts you need in time for that deadline...

No on seeing CONSTANTINE -- though it has to be better than VAN HELSING -- and I don’t imagine I’ll be invited to the NYC premiere, either, but you never know. Will keep you posted. Agreed on the casting... but, what the hell. It’s out of our hands!

And THANK YOU for accepting the barter agreement. I’d love a -------- sub, and happy to keep the occasional review or text piece coming your way to keep the subscription current and active.

More later, all the best,

Steve B
__________

Well, to cut to the chase, I never got my comp copies of the issue of the zine my review of The Champagne Club appeared in -- a movie that, to date, has never gained release theatrically or on video.

The film that did get wide DVD release, The Ghosts of Edendale, was ignored; to the best of my knowledge, my review never ran, though I'd submitted it to Ye Editor a full year before the film's Warner DVD release.

I'm not sure whether or not my review ever ran because I never got the promised subscription in payment for the review of mine they published.

Needless to say, I ceased submitting to this particular editor, and ceased buying their magazine with any regularity.

I wish I could say this was unusual, but it's pretty typical of the magazine publishing world. I've offered this particular case history because it is far, far more entertaining than most. Nobody got hurt, and however insulting it proved to be, its documentation is highly hilarious. In the end, my telling of it in some detail at least promotes two good films by two young filmmakers worthy of attention.

See, some good might come of it all.

The moral? I didn't say there was a moral, remember?

Well, OK, here ya go:

Flattery gets you nowhere, but magazine editors will get you nowhere a hell of a lot faster.

[All the events depicted herein are true, and the email excerpts are actual excerpts from material in the SpiderBaby Archives. All names and specific references to those involved have been deleted to protect the guilty, though damned if I know why.]

Fun With Freelance: How Not to Break In to the Horror Magazine Market: Part One -- Being a Chronology of Some Length, Concerning That Which Did Not "Work Out," to the Loss of Only the Author, Punctuated with Some Fits of Humour and Passages of Slight Sorrow, and Ending Without Resolution, Save for Dissolution.

As a freelancer with one year shy of three decades under my belt, I've many a tale to tell, and in time some of them will be told here. I thought I'd share with you my recent (2004) misadventure with one of the few slick horror mags on the newsstand, if only to demonstrate that (1) having "credentials" adds up to squat, save for flattery, and (2) even the best intentions and most diplomatic of exchanges may indeed add up to squat. Neither of which is the 'moral' of the story, because as far as I can ascertain the only moral is the usual: the gigs go to the bullpen writers and/or friends of the editor, however outgoing, forthcoming, and accomodating one tries to be.

'Cold call' submissions used to be a rather clumsy exercise, involving either literal 'cold calls' via telephone accompanied, preceded, or followed by a 'cold' (unsolicited) submission via snail-mail. Email and the internet has made this a far less clumsy process, in that one can submit introductory letter and submission all at once in a close enough proximity to real time that both author and editor can see through the transaction quickly and with greater efficiency than before. This avoids wasting time for either party, and if the end result is rejection, it's over quickly for all concerned. This is a good thing in all ways, as nothing is worse (for either party) than the mounting of false expectations -- but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here.

Having edited and published as well as freelanced over my years in the biz, I've been on all sides of the process. As an editor, this occasionally yields some delightful material amid the 'slushpile' -- the industry term for the heaps of unsolicited material that inevitably arrives and accumulates, however diligently one attends to the daily mail. 'Slushpile' also succinctly describes the nature of much unsolicited material that arrives, so I knew from experience (again, on both sides) that my best 'cold call' effort should always include a coherent, comprehensive introductory letter. Having a few credits to my name, it can't and usually doesn't hurt.

That said, it's extremely rare that I 'coldcall' any longer. Thankfully, work offers arrive often enough to carry me over most months, even with me saying 'no' to almost 100% of the comics-related inquiries. The rare exception comes, usually, when I find myself quite enjoying a given publication with some regularity, and thinking (in my weak moments), "Hey, maybe it would be fun and/or profitable to write something for these folks, see if they'd have me aboard."

Which leads me to this narrative, which I will relay to you as a chronology of exchanges -- as it happened.

In the spirit of protecting the guilty, however innocent, I'll not indulge names -- only dates -- unless it's to do with my efforts from my end of the exchange. I'll also keep my quoting emails from the magazine editor to a minimum, just including enough to cover the chronology of events.
__

It began with a phone call, which seemed to have been received warmly.

Having thus broken the ice, the phone conversation was followed immediately by an email, and an attached, complete 'cold' submission:
____

From: Marge & Steve Bissette [mailto:msbissette@yahoo.com]
Sent: October 21, 2003 4:35 PM
To: -----
Subject: Steve Bissette following up phone call w/review for GHOSTS

Dear ------,

Hope this finds you both well. Steve Bissette here, the fellow who drew Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, co-created and co-published Taboo, and did everything on Tyrant and SpiderBaby Comix while writing for Deep Red, Video Watchdog, Ecco, Fangoria, Gorezone and many other zines. Forgive the blunt American
aggression, but I'm eager to contribute to your fine zine.

As a longtime reader of --------, I'm being a bit bold here and contacting you both out-of-the-blue with a review submission. I recently had the opportunity to see Stefan Avalos' The Ghosts of Edendale, and am hoping to find a suitable home for my review.

I'm attaching it as a text document and cut-and-pasting it into this letter, below. I'm no shill for the filmmakers, but I do love the film. I have taken the precaution of ensuring they could provide photos and such if you accept this submission: contact ________ at _________ or at: [email contact]

If you don't pick this up, no sweat. Just let me know what you're take is; I'm offering it to -------- first, and hope to keep my foot in the door for more writing, if you're open to such a thing.

My contact info:

[contact info followed]

Thanks!

All the best, always,

Steve B
______

Here's the complete original review I sent along, with no idea of the magazine's parameters (word count, etc.) -- just placing something complete into their hands, as strong a first volley as an author can give:
________

THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE (2003)

The California Gold Rush never ended. Evocative yarns of dead ‘old Los Angeles’ spreading its clammy presence into ‘new Los Angeles’ are as old as the Hollywood hills, spawning non-supernatural noirs (CHINATOWN), geriatric gothics (SUNSET BOULEVARD, WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?, etc.), bewitching nightmares (the THRILLER episode “A Wig for Miss DeVore,” MULHOLLAND DRIVE), and at least one bonafide literary classic, Nathaniel West’s “The Day of the Locust.” There’s ghosts and ‘bad fuggums’ (to quote Captain Beefheart) in them thar hills, and they’re forever hungry to reclaim lost glories, withered beauty, and squandered youth. ‘They’ feed on irrational dreams of untapped riches, elevating celebrity, and virtual immortality that draws generation after generation to Tinseltown likes incendiary moths to the flame. And like moths, the intimate apocalypses that most often result provide the brief, fleeting spectacle of lives, loves, and dreams gone up in spirals of smoke.

Building on the accomplishments of his debut feature THE MONEY GAME (aka THE GAME, 1994) and his collaborative work with Lance Weiler on the pioneer digital feature THE LAST BROADCAST (1998), writer-director-editor Stefan Avalos crafts his own spin on this archetype with the eerie, unsettling THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE. Basing his latest feature on uncanny personal experience -- GHOSTS is set in Avalos’ adopted L.A. neighborhood, filmed in his own home -- and working hand-in-hand with producer Marianne Connor (IMPRESSIONS OF JORDAN, TIME ‘TIL LIGHT) and a most capable cast and production team, Avalos once again embraces digital technology to mount an chilling gem which taps an almost-palpable, suffocating sense of dread.

We first meet Kevin (Stephen Wastell, of THE MONEY GAME and THE MINER’S MASSACRE) and Rachel (Paula Ficara) as they move into their ‘dream house’ in old Hollywood’s historic Edendale, the bedrock of the movie capital’s silent-era beginnings. Their plan is to tap the promised wellsprings, writing and selling screenplays to carve out a new life for themselves, far from a fleetingly-sketched troubled past in the East. Kevin cottons immediately to the place, intrigued by its history and happy to find all their neighbors (including Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, the masterminds behind the documentaries THE HAMSTER FACTOR AND OTHER TALES OF TWELVE MONKEYS and LOST IN LA MANCHA) share his interests in working on and in the movies. Rachel, however, is almost immediately confronted with a ‘second sight’ of Edendale’s underbelly, and it is her swelling fear which shapes our own experience.

True to its chosen genre, Avalos walks a narrative tightrope between madness and the atavistic fear of the dead reawakening -- is all that we see on the screen a genuine eruption of evil forces at work, or evidence of Rachel’s slow spiral into insanity? -- and he leads us by the hand to the end of that wire with assurance and skill. Though Avalos eschews graphic violence, there are a number of quiet but very real jolts (none more jarring than the first, which I won’t betray here), but GHOSTS is shaped above all by an exquisitely realized sense of being cast adrift in a consumptive, all-devouring environment that others seem to thrive upon, and the fearful realization that one might not escape intact -- if at all. The steady slide from the inviting patio-parties and steamy hot tubs of sunny L.A. into the tangible malignancy of the avaricious rooms, homes, and streets is lovingly detailed by cinematographer/videographer Lukas Ettlin, whose work is cannily ‘corrupted’ by Scott Hale’s palette of visual effects, in which flesh can quiver into rot with the subtle shift of an eyebrow or deepening of a shadow. Vincent Gillioz’s score is the black icing on the cake, smooth, slippery, and insidious.

There are, to be sure, echoes of older genre works here, including almost-forgotten cinematic sleepers like LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH and EYES OF FIRE. While the catalyst of GHOSTS is venerable indeed -- tales entangling possessive spirits, ‘magick’ and madness date back to the Hebrew ‘dybbuk,’ the contemporary template arguably established with Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” -- the fresh orientation Avalos brings to GHOSTS is deceptively pragmatic, easing into a parable that charts the black heart of the contemporary fringe-Hollywood scene.

As the couple settle into their new home, cozily sharing their creative work space with chair backs practically touching, the widening rift between them is defined in part by the deadening writer’s block one suffers while the other savors a rush of productivity. Jealousy flares, fueling Rachel’s growing distress and certainty that something is terribly amiss.

The steady tapping of the keyboard becomes as violative as the overt manifestations of demonic children, sentient woodwork, and fleeting specters, and the absurdity of the coveted muse (“channeling” a by-the-numbers script for a western as old as, well, Tom Mix) embodies GHOSTS OF EDENDALE’s malignant forces at work. In stark contrast to the repetitive rant-manuscript of Jack Nicholson’s aspiring author in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING, Kevin’s script is -- damn it! -- praised and embraced by the unseen powers-that-be, optioned, and quickly opens doors that remain frustratingly out-of-reach to others... including Rachel.

Surely, the productive partner must be possessed: what else could explain the unnatural ability to create in a conceptually-bankrupt, culturally-impoverished city where “properly-channeled” (read: recycled) creativity is the coin of the realm?

Whatever possesses Avalos and Connor and their partners in crime, let’s hope we see more manifestations of their creative chemistry -- and soon.

- Stephen R. Bissette
(c) 2003
_____

That, by the way, is 905 words complete -- I figured it was too long for the zine, but I have no problem re-writing, revising or editing material down to length. I used to (just ask editors like Chas Balun, Tim Lucas, Steve Murphy or Mike Dobbs), but my two-plus years of writing a weekly video review column for local newspapers taught me the art of revision, compression and compromise, and to accept editorial cuts whenever necessary.

To that end, I also sent along (prior to receiving a reply) a shorter review, which clocks in at 481 words:
_____

THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE (2003)

The California Gold Rush never ended. Tales of dead ‘old Los Angeles’ spreading its clammy presence into ‘new Los Angeles’ are as old as the Hollywood hills. There’s ghosts in them thar hills, feeding on irrational dreams of wealth, celebrity, and virtual immortality that draws generation after generation to fame or ignoble obscurity. Writer-director-editor Stefan Avalos (THE MONEY GAME, 1994; THE LAST BROADCAST, 1998, co-directed by Lance Weiler) resurrects the archetype with the eerie, unsettling THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE. Set in his adopted L.A. neighborhood and filmed in his own home, Avalos and producer Marianne Connor (IMPRESSIONS OF JORDAN, TIME ‘TIL LIGHT) craft a chilling gem.

Kevin (Stephen Wastell of THE MONEY GAME, THE MINER’S MASSACRE) and Rachel (Paula Ficara) find their ‘dream house’ in historic Edendale, bedrock of the movie capital, planning to write screenplays to build a new life far from a sketchy past back East. Kevin is intrigued by their new home’s history and happy to find their neighbors (including Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, makers of THE HAMSTER FACTOR AND OTHER TALES OF TWELVE MONKEYS and LOST IN LA MANCHA) also work in movies. Rachel, however, suffers ‘second sight’ of Edendale’s underbelly, and her suffocating dread shapes the film.

True to its genre, GHOSTS walks a tightrope between madness and fear of the dead reawakening -- is all that we see truly evil forces at work, or Rachel’s spiral into insanity? -- with assurance and skill. Punctuated by quiet but very real jolts (none more jarring than the first), GHOSTS evokes the horror of being cast adrift in a consumptive, all-devouring environment that others thrive upon. The steady slide from patio-parties and hot tubs into malignant, avaricious environments is detailed by cinematographer Lukas Ettlin, ‘corrupted’ by Scott Hale’s visual effects (flesh quivers into rot with the shift of an eyebrow), and Vincent Gillioz’s insidious score is black icing on the cake.

There are echoes of older genre works here (LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, EYES OF FIRE, THE SHINING); possessive spirits date back to the Hebrew ‘dybbuk,’ the contemporary template established with Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” But Avalos’ orientation is deceptively pragmatic, offering a parable of the fringe-Hollywood scene. These ghosts pitch Rachel’s deadening writer’s block against Kevin’s rush of productivity. The tapping of the keyboard becomes as violative as the specters, and the absurdity of the coveted muse (“channeling” a by-the-numbers script for a western as old as, well, Tom Mix) embodies GHOSTS’s malignant terrors. Surely, the productive partner must be possessed: what else could explain the unnatural ability to create in a city where “properly-channeled” (read: recycled) creativity is the coin of the realm?

Whatever possesses Avalos and Connor and their partners in crime, let’s hope we see more manifestations of their creative chemistry -- and soon.

- Stephen R. Bissette
(c) 2003
______

So, anyway, that was the initial exchange.

Here's the initial response from the editor (edited only to remove identification):
__

From: -----------------
To: "'Marge & Steve Bissette'"
Subject: RE: Steve Bissette following up phone call w/review for GHOSTS
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:35:59 -0400

Hi Steve!

No worries about the cold call. We don't usually accept them but in your case, we'll make an exception. ;) Thank you for the review. I've read it and it's quite good but far too long for our ------
section; the word count for reviews there is 350 words, unless it is a major, much-anticipated release. I understand if you don't want to cut your review down to a third of its size but unfortunately you'll have to if we run it in the mag. If you want to keep it intact and offer someone else the review that's totally fine, and submit something else (that's 350) to me in the future that would be great! I'd love to add you to our roster of freelancers. LOVE your artwork by the way... you are hugely talented. You don't happen to have any Swamp Thing art prints for sale do you? It would look great at the ------- mansion.
_______

Not a bad start, I thought.

Stupid me.

I sent out a care package of my comics, all signed/personalized, and replied immediately, attaching a 345 word rewrite of my review:
_______

Howdy, ------,

THANK YOU for the prompt reply, and thanks for excusing the 'cold call.' Didn't see how else to proceed, and glad I didn't offend.

Happy to revise the review to fit your needs, and save the long version for other uses. You open for that?

Also -- happy to interview [the filmmakers], IF you're interested. [I also suggested a related article and interview with a relevent filmmaker.] Just a thought.

I'd love to write for you folks -- and now that I've got both your name and address and ----'s, I'll grease the wheels a bit with some gift packs of comics and prints via snail mail. Hey, tis the season.

All the best, look forward to your reply,

Steve B
_____

And here's the initial condensation and rewrite:
_____

THE GHOSTS OF EDENDALE (2003) haunt Hollywood’s most venerable bedrock neighborhood. The malingering spirits of silent-movie ‘days gone by’ seep like waterstains from the walls and fences as Kevin (Stephen Wastell of THE MINER'S MASSACRE) and Rachel (Paula Ficara of EL CHUPACABRA) move into their 'dream house' to build a new life (far from a sketchy past “back East”) writing screenplays. The fissures in their cozy creative domesticity manifest with the titular ghosts: Kevin loves their new home, its history, and the odd neighbors who make movies, and immediately begins cranking out a saleable script. Rachel, alas, can’t write a workable page and alone sees Edendale's underbelly as ‘it’ possesses hubby.

Set and filmed in his adopted L.A. neighborhood, this is writer/director Stefan Avalos’s follow-up to the pioneer digital chiller THE LAST BROADCAST (1998, co-directed by Lance Weiler). Extending the potential of the medium, Avalos and producer Marianne Connor craft a chilling gem that deservedly won the Silver Lake Award at the Silver Lake Film Festival in September, 2003; on the heels of its festival and theatrical play, MTI releases GHOSTS on video/DVD in August. Echoing LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (Rachel’s suffocating dread shapes the film) and Lovecraft's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," GHOSTS delineates the quiet horror of a consumptive, all-devouring environment. The insidious slide from patio-parties and hot tubs into madness is populated by fleetingly-glimpsed specters (none more startling than the first, erupting from a closet) and the quiver of flesh into rot with the lift of an eyebrow. Thus, GHOSTS is a film of subtleties, sans bloodshed: not everyone’s cup of tea, I know, but taken on its own understated terms it’s a treat. As in THE LAST BROADCAST, Avalos' orientation to the genre is deceptively pragmatic. In the end, GHOSTS is a telling parable of the fringe-Hollywood scene. Surely, Kevin is possessed: what else could explain his churning out a vapid script so perfectly suited to contemporary Hollywood’s impoverished creative marketplace? GHOSTS is a fresh of fresh fetid air to all but the most ravenous gorehounds, and highly recommended.
______

What followed was a long stretch -- weeks -- of silence.

[To Be Continued...]

Snowed In!

The first heavy snow of the season to hit the Northeast is sifting down steadily, Marj got the call at 5:45 AM that there's no school today (she's a school psychologist), and we're in for the day and happy about it.

Now, back on November 16th, when I posted here about my email woes, Argentinian cartoonist extraordinaire David Paleo sent me the following email:

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, 'oh woe me! My mail doesn't work!' Psst... who do you think you're fooling, big boy?

WE ARE ONTO YOU

And your flimsy, harebrained 'story' about how you can't respond to any e-mails doesn't hold any water.

WE KNOW THE TRUTH
 
Mr. Bissette at last finished his studio!

So he's all snuggily wrapped in, windows shut, door condemned, a cozy old blanket rolled over the feet, saying -Fuck the world!- while he lets an idle finger caress his volume of x-rays of Graham Ingels liver -I don't need any of these fuckers!- a flock of birds hurries up on the air on a frenzy to escape the rumbling thunder emanating from inside the Bissette's lovely home - you want to learn about dinosaurs, you piece of shit bibleanalphabets?!-  THUNK! CRUNK! (banging irrecognizable his I-Mac with a Brontosaurus lower jaw) - you want to learn about dinosaurs?!!!- deep silence over Vermont- GO ASK GEORGE MOTHERFUCKIN'W BUSH YOU PINHEADS!!! I got a studio, I don't need any of you shits, ever!- asked about how he will continue his classes at the Cartoon Center, Mr Bissette mumbled something about - Let's see how much those goddamn kids love comics once they have to camp for a year on the Mountain of Madness to take his classes; got the P.A. system installed soon... - and something about how - 'Dave Sim warned me back in '89 how imperative is that we cartoonist add survivalism to our all other skills, so, in my class, you first had to survive; THEN we'll see if you graduate...' -

Asked about his husband retirement from the world, a calm Marge Bissette responded - 'as long as he's happy... and besides, he'll have to get dinner sometime, he knows very well that those dinosaur eggs aren't edible' - with a wink - 'he spent a week trying to get that oven clean enough for my liking that other time, don't worry, he'll be out soon!' -

For the sake of those poor, aspiring young art cartoonists being chased by wolves on the Bissette's backyard, we hope she's right."

Well, today, David, you're right.

See ya all later -- much later!

[Since I'm quoting David, best I remind you that some of his art is online

here,

here

and here.]

Do-It-Yourself Bissette, at it again...

Well, I began the day at 7 AM at Home Depot. Mike in the flooring department at the Brattleboro store took instant care of me, though my adaptability (within the parameters of "this gets solved today") certainly made it easier.

I'd pretty much resolved myself to the likely inevitability of my tiling or painting the floor and laying commercial carpet sections (the prefab ones with rubber edges) and maybe glue down one or two larger carpet cuts for the two major work areas. Aside from my decisive "this gets done today" urgency, adding to that decision was the impending arrival of the first major snow of the season tomorrow (they're predicting 6 to 8", maybe more in our higher elevation). The only door allowing access to the new room is down around the back of the house, and I've been scrambling on every stage of completion in hopes of beating the snow. Had the carpet installation last night been successful, we'd have just made it -- alas, the race is over. The back door will be pretty much inaccessible once we get major snowfall, and the one narrow tightass stairway downstairs won't allow for the kind of carpetlength needed. Old Man Winter wins on that count.

Besides, I've had it. I wasn't going to drag ass for another two or more weeks, waiting for installation (which should have been completed last night in any case).

So, while it's snowing tomorrow (and I welcome being 'snowed in' for the time being), I want to be pulling together my work space -- at last.

Mike quickly established that (1) the carpet installers were right last night: the mill had shipped the wrong size special order (17 square yards were inexplicably shipped instead of the 21 square yards ordered & paid for); (2) the carpet installers were too backed up to install an 'FI' (Fast Installation) substitute this morning, or any time soon; quickly arriving at (3) Home Depot would deal with the mill and any loss, promptly refunded my prepayment on the spot.

Having shown up with a carefully detailed drawn scale floor plan, with all the standing shelving units, etc. specified with measurements of all the possible alternatives, Mike and I pieced together the best short-order plan possible for one such as myself who had no space or time to see to a home installation on my own of a proper wall-to-wall carpet.

In the end, concrete floor paint, five pre-fab commercial floormat lengths, and two cut-to-fit carpet sections (with the needed adhesive and carpet cutter and painting gear) is what I went home with at 9 AM. This all cost about $50 less than I'd prepaid, so a Home Depot credit awaits our future home needs.

Though this was a rather simple $200+ carpet-and-installation gig, bear in mind Marj and I have spent over $30,000 with Home Depot over the past three+ years on our home (that said, we also spent much more than that on local contractors and about that with local businesses, too). I stated this clearly in the first few minutes of polite, pleasant and ultimately productive conversation with Mike. So, customer satisfaction was utmost in his and everyone else's mind during my time there this morn. I made it easy, having worked out a back-up 'do it myself' plan, but nonetheless it was a good feeling to pull into my driveway at 9:30 AM with everything I need to finish the job myself by tomorrow afternoon (two coats of paint with 24 hours drying per coat is the slow down, but meant I could skip self-adhesive tiling -- unlikely to work well, given the slight irregularities of the poured concrete floor surface -- and just seal the floor completely via the proper paint job).

The first coat of paint is down and drying as I type this. Second coat goes on tonight before I go to bed (after my return from a trip north with my amigo Mark 'Sparky' Whitcomb to visit our ol' Johnson State College compadre Dave Booz). So, I'll be slapping down the second coat of paint after midnight, and most likely laying the carpet by tomorrow afternoon.

One way or another, I'm finally writing and drawing in my new digs this weekend.

Wednesday night closeout: A bummer --

I was hoping before this hour to be posting the news of my studio/workspace completion.

Well, after a looooong day of waiting for the carpet installation -- nada. The process that began November 12th and that was paid for & scheduled for today ended with -- well, let's see. We selected the carpet, gave the rough measurement (it's just a single 8' x 20' 6" room), signed for and paid the deposit 11/12. The measuring pro turned up the Saturday before Thanksgiving, and everything was finalized and paid in full on the 23rd. The installation had to wait until the carpet arrived at the Massachusetts installation firm, which was last Thursday; today (December 7th) was the soonest they could schedule our job.

So, I cleared the room anew, swept and double-swept the floor, wrapped all the bookcase bases with plastic to protect everything, make the installation space as neat and easy as possible. Shoveled the front step and a path around to the back of the house, where the back entrance is. It was snowing lightly all day, so I gave it another shoveling before dark. (We've also delayed the final necessary task -- the installation of the hot-water heat baseboard -- until the carpet is in place.)

It kicked off today with a phone call from Home Depot promising installation between 9 AM and 1 PM; revised an hour later to between 3 PM and 7 PM; revised about 5 PM to "on the far side of 7 PM"; come 9 PM, as Marge and I were about to turn out the lights and turn in for the night, the phone rang. The installation crew from Springfield, MA were sitting in their van on the road just above our driveway, asking if they were at the right house. "C'mon in!"

They were here maybe two minutes. "This carpet is too small," they announced, "you gonna have to wait for a new one, someone messed up. I'll call you tomorrow" -- and they departed. Like, fast.

I've laid in bed for about and hour and a half without sleeping, finally got up and rechecked all measurements (including any cuts for the bookshelving), drew out the floor plan with all the particulars in place, and I'm going to find someone somewhere tomorrow who can do this -- hopefully before the weekend.

It's gonna take a little longer...

First post: Wednesday: CCS reflections as we near the first semester's close...

As the fabric of obfuscations, deceptive side-stepping, and outright lies unravels for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Europe -- volatile torture issues aside, there is no standing international treaty, agreement, or law that will permit indefinite incarceration of detainees and suspects, home or abroad, just because the current Administration "says so" -- the news continues to steamroll. It's a pretty heady mix coming in the door via the local newspaper, the radio, and via the internet. I'll leave it to you to sort out, but don't ignore all that's going on.
__

The penultimate Center for Cartoon Studies "Survey of the Drawn Story" class for this, the first semester of the school's existence, proved to be a lively session. Two students presented their oral final projects -- one on regional comics of the Northwest States, the other on Archie comics, providing an overview of the characters' and line's history and some analysis of the line's longevity -- and four presented their published presentations, which we'll be talking about next week. This leaves eleven students presenting their final projects next week, our last session, which I'm really looking forward to. Nice to be on the receiving end of the lectures for a change!

My presentation was a hands-on overview of the mid-1970s explosion in comics history: rather than using slides or projected images, all the work we discussed from this key period were passed around, almost all first editions. So, after laying the groundwork with discussion of the founding of the direct-sales comic market and pass-arounds of touchstones like Burne Hogarth's 1972 Tarzan of the Apes hardcover original graphic novel adaptation and samplers of the National Lampoon (the critical juncture between the underground comix and the mainstream newsstand), I tried to give the students a clear overview of the landmarks of the mid-1970s: a sampler of European (primarily French) comics in transition, primary among those the first six issues of Metal Hurlant; how that was transmuted (via National Lampoon) into Heavy Metal, followed by a sampler of the first Heavy Metal trade paperback collections released to bookstores; seminal (and usually forgotten) graphic novels like Richard Corben's Bloodstar, Byron Preiss's trade paperback anthologies of Roger Zelazny and Harlan Ellison stories adapted to comics, etc.; the turning point: the almost simultaneous release of Will Eisner's landmark A Contract With God and Other Stories, the first to assert itself as a 'Graphic Novel,' linked in time with Eclipse Comics release of Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy's Sabre, and Marvel's publication of the one-shot Stan Lee/Jack Kirby original Silver Surfer graphic novel; the 1977-78 surfacing of two innovative direct-sales-market creator-self-published epics, Dave Sim's Cerebus and Wendy & Richard Pini's Elfquest; and much, much more, up to the mid-1980s release of Will Eisner's self-analysis of the comics medium and Dave Sim's historic breakthrough self-publishing and self-marketing of the first Cerebus 500-pg. novels, breaking the glass cielings for price barriers, page counts, and formats for this new permutation of comics.

Now, I personalized this by emphasizing most of this was going on at the time I was sitting precisely where they are sitting: I was a student in the first-ever class at The Joe Kubert School as most of these key works appeared (1976-78), noting how many of us then felt the shift in the axis and hungered to be part of everything that followed. This was touched upon without derailing the overview of the works themselves, and their impact -- but I really wanted this hands-on, pass-the-books-around, drink-'em-all-in session to give them a taste of what it was for us, as first-year Kubert School students, to feel windows and doors open in ways few had imagined, and taste the potential we tasted.

This led, as I'd hoped, to the students opening up discussion of the their own thoughts on their potential: what paths they might take to bring their own creations to fruition. We've begun analysis of various modes and models (which included last week's invigorating session with guest artist Howard Cruse), and the students are definitely weighing their options. It was tentative but critical discussion, including discussion of the Xeric Foundation grants and more. All in all, an excellent penultimate session, and I'm looking forward more than ever before to the next semester, which we also discussed at the outset of this gathering.
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More later today --

When Reality Catches Up: Franju's Eyes Without a Face Comes True!

First, a little anecdote:

I pulled into the local post office parking lot yesterday while listening to NPR's afternoon news coverage of Condoleezza Rice's tour of Europe and her ongoing denial of abuse and torture of detainees (and carefully worded denial of US imprisonment of detainees in covert European sites).

As the clip of Rice's distinctive through-her-teeth assertions played for the third time since noon, I shut off my car and climbed out to pick up my mail. Parked alongside me was a fellow in a pickup truck I'd noticed sitting in the cab as I pulled in. Turns out he was listening to the same report: as he climbed out of his truck at the same time I stepped out of my car, we made eye contact.

"How can Rice just lie like that?" he angrily exclaimed.

"We'll hear more of the same tomorrow," I replied.

I forgot about this fleeting moment and went on about my work. I went to sleep last night as a 1930s movie my wife Marj was watching featured a dance sequence with the tune "Brazil" playing in the background.

I woke up this morning to a fresh clip of Rice, now tempering her denials to counter confirmation from the German government that a man claiming to have been kidnapped, tortured, and released by the CIA in Germany was indeed erroneously misidentified and subsequently kidnapped, detained for five months (no firm confirmation of torture as yet that I've heard), and released without apology and left to his own devices after it was ascertained he was not the man the CIA thought he was; in fact, the episode was apparently covered up by covert agreement of the US and Germany, and is now causing great embarrassment to all.

Still laying in bed, I think of the exchange with the man in the post office parking lot, and the tune "Brazil" begins to swell and play in my head...

Shit. Terry Gilliam was right.

We're already here.
___

21st Century science and medicine has once again caught up with the horror movies of my youth.

I followed with some excitement the news reports late last week of a successful (thus far) face transplant in France. A transplant team headed by Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard had years ago successfully completed the first hand transplant; on December 2nd of this past week, Dubernard and his surgical team announced that they had transplanted the lower half of a female face (the below-the-eyes portion including the complete nose, lips, chin) onto a 38-year-old woman from Valenciennes, whose pet Labrador had torn off most of her face back in May (the dog was subsequently "destroyed," according to various sources).

Dubernard was engaged at the behest of Dr. Bernard Devauchelle, the head of facial and jaw surgery at Amiens University Hospital, and the transplant was successfully completed with the active assistance of Belgian surgeon Dr. Benoit Lengele; the 'donor face' was removed from an unidentified brain-dead woman in the northern France city of Lille. Details were released at a news conference last Friday at Edouard-Herriot Hospital in Lyon, and the Saturday December 3 New York Times featured some incredible CGI images of the restoration and recreations of the woman's face before and after surgery, along with a chillingly clinical photo of the operation that evoked, with startling precision, the unforgettable transplant sequence in Georges Franju's 1958 classic Les Yeux Sans Visage/Eyes Without a Face.

In fact, the headline of the NY Times story could serve as advertising ballyhoo for a rerelease of Franju's film: "Dire Wounds, a New Face, a Glimpse in a Mirror" (by Craig S. Smith; The NY Times, Saturday, December 3, 2005, pp. A1, A6). I don't mean to come across as overly morbid here, but there are other curious echoes: Dr. Dubernard's statement, "We had a patient with a very severe disfigurement that would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repair with classic surgery"; assertions (by the patient's estranged teenage daughter) that the patient is not "psychologically stable enough for the operation" and may be suicidal; the risk implicit in the procedure (according to Smith, "...a 33 percent risk of death, a 33 percent risk that the body will reject the graft and only a 33 percent chance that the transplant will prove successful..."; ibid., pg. A6). The disfigurement by canine is an unnerving echo of Franju, too: his film ends with the ruthless patriarchal surgeon having his face torn off by vivisection-specimen dogs released by his now-mad daughter (the unwilling recipient of his repeated unsuccessful transplants).

Franju's parable of a renegade surgeon covertly experimenting on his own daughter to restore her face after a car accident he caused, harvesting fresh faces from unwilling kidnapped 'donors' snatched from the street by his devoted predatory female assistant, is of course light years from the current case history. This was no secret-basement-lab operation: it was an openly performed, medically sanctioned and decidedly adventurous surgical (and sorely-needed) rescue of a victim of a horrible accident. No mad scientists, kidnappings, or guerilla surgical procedures here.t

Sill, one cannot help being fascinated by the hall-of-mirrors reverberations between cinema and reality in this case, both emerging from the same country. The image of that brain-dead donor laying in her bed now sans visage is an unsettling one, regardless, a Franju composition in and of itself.

When Franju's film debuted over 45 years ago, it was critically reviled and reportedly prompted faintings at its initial screenings; now, its central premise and most unnerving passage (the surgery itself) is part and parcel of our world, a reality.

Amazing.

Here's a little background for you on Franju's masterpiece, which is among my favorite films of all time. The following is excerpted from the upcoming Black Coat Press book SR Bissette's BLUR Vol. 3 -- the third of four volumes collecting my complete weekly newspaper Video Views columns from 1999-2001 -- which will be out in 2006. This review originally appeared February 1, 2001, in conjunction with Kino's vhs release of Franju's classic; per usual, please remember this was written for a family newspaper of readers I had to assume knew nothing about film history, much less genre films:
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The recent revival of influential European horror films of the ‘60s and ‘70s on video and DVD is worthy of an article in and of itself, but Kino Video’s current release of Georges Franju’s masterpiece LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (EYES WITHOUT A FACE, 1959) is particularly noteworthy. From its opening title sequence -- shot from within a car hurtling through the night to the strains of Maurice Jarre’s slippery main theme, its flickering headlights strobbing the splayed bare limbs of the trees overhead as if they were spider webs -- Franju’s thriller is eerily mesmerizing, fusing an uncanny dreamlike atmosphere with the excesses of the notorious Parisian Grand Guignol.

Like fellow French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (who greatly admired this film), Franju infuses even the cruelest passages with genuine poetry. The skeletal narrative is pure Guignol (from a novel by Jean Redon, adapted in collaboration with Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the authors of Les Diaboliques and the source novel for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo). Aided by his utterly devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), celebrated plastic surgeon Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) is covertly kidnapping young girls to graft their facial features onto the ravaged face of his long-suffering daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Though forty years on and filmed in black and white (by master cinematographer Eugen Shuftan), Franju’s horrors still pack a punch -- particularly in Kino’s uncut print, which restores footage never before seen in America -- in part because of the sterile quiet they occur within. The film’s most infamous passage details Genessier’s transplant procedure with ruthless clarity, shrouded in a silence pierced only by the cold ring of surgical instruments, the soft rustle of clothing, and the occasional offscreen barking of Genessier’s caged dogs.

Unnerving as the overt mayhem remains, it’s the austere allure of the film that lingers, embodied by Edith Scob’s unforgettable performance beneath the porcelain mask that hides her disfigurement. Christiane is a truly tragic figure, and Franju and Scob engrave her plight into our hearts. In a film brimming with indelible images, Scob’s pantomime and iconic beauty haunts its most memorable moments: accepting Louise’s strange, almost canine affection as her hair is brushed; gliding down the stairs and into the operation chamber to contemplate her father’s handiwork; gingerly cradling the phone receiver to call her fiance (who believes she is dead) and whisper his name; pausing to accept a “kiss” from her father’s tortured dogs as she frees them from their pens, her hair stirred by the freed white doves that flit around her head.

Franju remains a sadly neglected filmmaker in his own country and an unknown here. This, his second feature, received a cursory theatrical release in the U.S., badly dubbed and hideously retitled The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus to play grindhouses on a double-bill with the US/Japanese two-headed-man shocker The Manster. Though critics Pauline Kael and Raymond Durgnat sang its praises, the film was ignored and almost immediately “lost.” Later exiled (and cut further) to rare showings on late night television, a proper revival of Eyes Without a Face is long overdue. Thankfully, Kino’s restored subtitled version is exquisite, a vast improvement over ‘gray-market’ bootlegs and an earlier Interama Inc. video release. Though has yet to issue the film on DVD, it certainly deserves the added luster such a showcase would bring (coupled, perhaps, with Franju’s seminal 1949 short film Le Sang des Bete/Blood of the Beasts).

[Blog Note: Kino indeed released the film on DVD a couple of years ago, and included that very short among its extras -- highest recommendation you purchase a copy ASAP! - SRB]

Countless suspense and horror films have pirated Eyes Without a Face, from Jess Franco’s The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) and later Faceless to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) to John Woo’s Face/Off (1998). None have matched the power of Franju’s ravishing, glacial nightmare. This is a classic, not to be missed! (Made almost a decade before the MPAA ratings system, Eyes Without a Face is unrated, but it most likely would be rated ‘PG-13’ or a soft ‘R’ for its theme, gore, violence, and mild suggested sexuality.)
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More on this tomorrow, unless Condy does something even more outrageous in Europe as that particular news story unfolds...

[12:30 PM note: The news story in its current form is at

We Fucked Up, Bigtime, and Have To Admit It.

Here's an excerpt:

"U.S. Admits Botched Detention, Merkel Says"
By ANNE GEARAN, AP Diplomatic Writer
Tue Dec 6, 8:35 AM ET

BERLIN - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Tuesday that the United States has admitted making a mistake in the case of a German national who claimed he was wrongfully imprisoned by the CIA.

Merkel spoke during a press conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who refused to discuss specifics with reporters. The two women leaders' first meeting was dominated by questions about U.S. terrorism policies, including the five-month detention of Lebanese-born Khaled al-Masri and reports of secret CIA prisons and potentially illegal use of European airports and airspace to transport terror suspects.

"The American administration is not denying" it erred in the case of al-Masri, Merkel said through a translator.

Merkel welcomed that admission and added that she is grateful for Rice's assurances that the United States conducts anti-terror operations legally and without the use of torture..." etc.

To quote my amigo Joe: "They lie!"

Like rugs.]
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Have a great day. I'm off to the Center for Cartoon Studies; my penultimate class of this first semester is this afternoon, and sure to be an eventful day!

Career Path to the Stars...

One word:

Security.

In the brave new world our Fearful Leaders have wrought for us, there is only true and reliable path to dependable income, benefits, unlimited employment (and your choice of jobs), and the brightest future imaginable for all our children.

One word:

Security.

Why waste all that youthful vigor, strength, and virility on education, the arts, or the military? All are clearly dead ends. In the brave new world our Fearful Leaders have planned for us, setting one's sights (and sites) on a career in security -- protection of property and those citizens and politicians in need of and able to afford such services -- is the way to go.

If you're fit, able, and dedicated to furthering both your interests and our country's interests, it behooves you to pursue this path. If you're a parent (like I am), one's concern for one's child's well-being is mighty questionable unless you're setting their little minds and stout little bodies onto this path -- for our security, and their own.

Though, of course, you won't be able to afford them yourself, you understand. "Heat or Eat?" is the cry heard throughout the land in this winter coming for the banner year of 2005; "Eat Who?" is the winter of 2010 doctrine we have to look forward to.

So, you want your children to have a secure and safe future? A career path that promises infinite growth and income? The only service industry sure to provide all that they need, until they're too shaky to hold a handgun or unsteady on their pins to walk a flight of stairs?

One word:

Security.

Skip & Lorraine's Open House; America's Dirty (Bloody) House

As announced yesterday, fellow area cartoonist Skip Morrow is having an open house this weekend in Wilmington for his new home gallery space (!). Skip and his wife (and fellow musician) Lorraine will be meeting and greeting folks in the expansive gallery from 10 AM to 5 PM today. There's food and drink and free books and hilarious and beautiful art and good company, so don't drag your feet if you're in driving distance.

If you're in the southern Vermont area today, by all means make the trip. It's an ideal Sunday afternoon jaunt and destination point. Tell them I sent you, please.

Info, art, and all kinds of cool stuff awaits you at

Skip Morrow's site

Contact info, should you require directions to the 'real world' gallery for today's open house, are available

here.

__________

As the plethora of corruption scandals, multi-tier investigations, and cover-ups splitting at their very seamy seams swells in Washington, inevitably (at last) encompassing even pious righteous "moral" leaders like Ralph Reed (who was reportedly Bible-pocket-deep in the cynical & nakedly exploitational and racist Native American casino scam Jack Abramoff orchestrated), it's important to keep a clear eye on the most blatant and un-American of this current Administration's abuses: the New American Torture State.

In hindsight, it's impossible to continue to cling to the belief that this was not a policy of the present Administration or our President. If the gaping logic disconnect between Bush and Cheney's shameful performances of the past two weeks concerning this current policy isn't enough to expose their lies, consider anew the actions of Michael Chertoff in 2002 -- prior to the revelations of torture and detainee abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and even domestic facilities in New Jersey.

As acting head of the Justice Department's criminal division (then under John Ashcroft's fiefdom), Chertoff was overseeing all ongoing terrorism-related prosecutions, including the prominent case against John Walker Lindh, the California youth captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 whom Ashcroft had villified as an "American Taliban."

In mid-June of 2002, Lindh was scheduled to take the stand in what Nation reporter and columnist Dave Lindorff called "an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed." Lindh's defense attornies maintained that Lindh had signed the confession only after US soldiers had tortured him "for days," and Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had indicated he was prepared to allow Lindh and his attornies to place on the stand during trial military officers and Guantanamo detainees: participants in, or witnesses to, the alleged abuse of Lindh to coerce his confession and signature of the document.

The Defense Department (who we now know had begun its covert Administration-sanctioned policies of torture of detainees at Bagram Air Base and elsewhere in late 2001) did not want Lindh allowed to take the stand. Thus, Chertoff (according to Lindorff, at the specific request of the Defense Department) instructed his prosecution team to offer a deal to Lindh and his attornies. In his essay "Chertoff and Torture" in the February 14, 2005 issue of The Nation, writer Lindorff specifies the nature of this "deal" that was invisible to almost all Americans:

...All the serious charges against Lindh -- terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc. -- would be dropped and he could plead guilty to just the technical charges of "providing assistance" to an "enemy of the U.S." and of "carrying a weapon." Lindh, whose attorneys dreaded his facing trial in one of the most conservative court districts in the country of the first anniversary of 9/11, had to accept a stiff twenty-year sentence, but that was half what he faced if convicted on those two minor charges alone.

But Chertoff went further, according to one of Lindh's defense attorneys, George Harris. Chertoff (now an appeals court judge in New Jersey) demanded -- reportedly at Defense Department insistence, according to what defense attorneys were told -- that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. Further, Chertoff attached a "special administrative measure," essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.

...In retrospect...it seems clear that the man coasting toward confirmation as Secretary of Homeland Security effectively prevented early exposure of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Gonzales policy of torture, which we now know began in Afghanistan and later "migrated" to Guantanamo and eventually to Iraq. So anxious was Chertoff to avoid exposure in court of Lindh's torture -- which included keeping the seriously wounded and untreated Lindh, who was malnourished and dehydrated, blindfolded and duct-taped to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, and repeatedly threatening him with death -- that defense lawyers say he made the deal a limited-time offer. "It was good only if we accepted it before the suppression hearing," says Harris. "They said if the hearing occurred, all deals were off." He adds, "Chertoff himself was clearly the person at Justice to whom the line prosecutors were reporting. He was directing the whole plea agreement process, and there was at least one phone call involving him."

Lindorff goes on to quote the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights Michael Ratner, who summarizes:

"It is outrageous that Chertoff didn't allow testimony about Lindh's torture by American forces to come out... What did he [Chertoff] know about Lindh's treatment in Afghanistan, and why did he go to such lengths to silence him about it? ...Had testimony from witnesses under oath about Lindh's torture come out in court in 2002, we might have learned about the government's torture program earlier, and we might not have had Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals..."

(All quoted from Dave Lindorff, "Chertoff and Torture," The Nation, February 14, 2005, pp. 6, 8.)

But of course, that's the dynamic of cover-up operations: the successful ones indulge and conflate suspect or criminal behavior into wider, broader systematic adoption. The cover-up of Lindh's torture in effect sanctioned and nurtured the expansion of the Defense Department and Administration's covert torture policies -- now, it appears, into pockets of Europe, thus placing what few allies we still have in the European Union at risk for harboring covert American torture operations.

Thus, we now know the coverup was underway before the Abu Ghraib scandal, the photos, and all that has followed. The coverup was in fact underway before the torture began at Abu Ghraib.

Is this American? Are these the "armies of compassion" President Bush has ballyhooed with such smug piety, the "march of freedom and democracy" he hopes will be his legacy? Is this the triumph of "moral values" the last Presential election supposedly demonstrated?

This past week, ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero spoke out in no uncertain terms about this dire state of affairs/affairs of state:

President Bush is lying to the American people.
 
Those are words that I have never uttered before in public.  To make such a serious allegation against my country's leader is not something I do lightly.

Consider the President's words in Panama: "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice.  We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding.  We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans.  Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law.  We do not torture."

As the President well knows, the sad fact for all Americans is that many of the interrogations we have conducted are not within the law.  As many current and former government and military officials recently told PBS' Frontline, we have tortured - and even killed - prisoners in our custody.

Government documents obtained through our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit describe hundreds of incidents of torture and abuse in excruciating detail.  It is clear that these are not the actions of a few rogue soldiers.  The mere existence of thousands of government documents on torture underscores the systemic nature of the problem. There are also videos and photos showing torture and abuse that government lawyers are fighting like mad to suppress.

If the President really wished to solve the torture scandal that has marred America's standing at home and abroad, he would own up to what has happened. He would ask the Attorney General to appoint a special counsel to investigate and prosecute the torture and abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.  He would not threaten to veto the legislation proposed by Senate Republicans led by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, which would ensure that no one is above the law, and no one - regardless of their office or rank - can order anyone else to break the rules and abuse detainees.

Holding high-level government officials accountable for torture and abuse is the only way to ensure that we will not repeat these mistakes.  And upholding the rules of war will help ensure that no member of the U.S. military is subjected to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment when they are captured by the enemy.

But our President's lies merely add insult to the very real injury that has already occurred.

If you're among those denying this is either of concern or consequence, take a sobering look at the succinct blow-by-blow

US torture chronology at Kos.

ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson has posted first-hand accounts from torture victims after her visit to Amnesty International's Global Struggle Against Torture Conference in London; it's all here at the

Amnesty International Ann Beeson report.

The ACLU and Human Rights First have now filed a federal lawsuit charging Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with direct responsibility for the ongoing torture and abuse of detainees; the details are online at

ACLU federal lawsuit.

We are a rogue superpower, and Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Gonzales, Chertoff and others have actively created and/or subsidized this New Torture State.

This no longer covert knowledge: it is exposed for all the world to see -- not just by leaked photos and accounts, but by the words from the mouths of our own leaders.

Their torn fabric of lies is now obvious and inescapable.

Save, of course, for those Americans who refuse to hear or see.

If this is in any skewed stretch of the concept "moral," "Christian" or "American," we are indeed lost.

It can happen here.

It is happening here.

Are you going to wait until your neighbor is dragged away before you stand against this?

Four to Five More Days...

...and I'll be in the new studio/office/library space. The carpeting is installed on Wednesday, Rick Fortier installs the hot-water heat baseboard after that, and it's all in.

But first:

My fellow area cartooning bud Skip Morrow is having an open house this weekend in Wilmington for his new home gallery space (!). Skip and his wife (and fellow musician) Lorraine will be meeting and greeting folks in the expansive gallery from 10 AM to 5 PM today and tomorrow, with food and drink and free books. Buy their CD while you're at it, it's good listening and among Marj's and my favorite CDs.

If you're in the southern Vermont area this weekend, go for it! Tell them I sent you, please. You can find info, art, and all kinds of groovy stuff here at

Skip Morrow's site

-- or at

Skip's other site!

Actually, they both bring you to the same site, so choose your click button without a care.

Contact info, should you require require directions to the 'real world' gallery for the weekend open house, are available

here.

Skip and Lorraine have been making music in the Wilmington area for decades. Skip's cartooning career has kept him active and always evolving since the publication of his first book, The Official I Hate Cats Book (1980), which was a tremendous success and launched a series of books. These propelled Skip into a wide array of markets, including greeting cards, calenders, etc. Among my personal faves of Skip's books are The End and Don't Laugh, You're Next (both 1983), his marvelous color illustrations for the Judith Freeman Clark and Stephen Long book series Awesome Facts to Blow Your Mind, Gross Facts to Blow Your Mind, Scary Facts to Blow Your Mind and Weird Facts to Blow Your Mind (all 1993), and the more recent return to solo single-panel color cartooning with The Joy of Smoking and I Still Hate Cats (both 2000).

Skip gave me a tour of the new gallery while it was still under construction this fall, and it's a breathtaking. Skip's full-size color prints and artwork have been given the kind of showcase precious few museums provide, with ample space and a radiant warm ambience (enhanced with the wooden flooring and Skip's own touches throughout the woodwork); he's an incredible and multi-talented and skilled fellow, Skip!

Hmmm, a Bissette home art gallery -- now, there's something to shoot for down the road, eh?
___

Well, that's a pipedream for the future -- right now, I'll just be thankful to have a clear work space/studio again!

As I've stated before, this is the first time I've had a dedicated work area since 1997, so this is a pretty big change for Marjory and I. The fact that the room is downstairs, well out of earshot, allows for wee hours, night and morning, of work, which is a luxury I've not had in ages (since moving out of my downtown Wilmington, VT studio in 1997). The new access to my entire library is new, too, though that will take some time to sort out -- still, books are already being shelved, just to get them into the room and out of previous and ongoing chaos.

When Marj and I moved into our new home in 2002, the basement and top floor (the attic in the original structure) became the deposit spot for literally years of stuff -- artwork, books, comics, magazines, videos, DVDs, files (some in cabinets, some loose), collections, fossils, etc. I won't go into how mind-and-back-bending the move itself was: suffice to say the basement "office" was stacked with boxes from end to end, stacked five-to-six feet high, and the "viewing room" (still a slagheap) was left with a barely navigatable path from the bottom of the stairs to the back laundry room. The studio/attic became so choked with my comics collection and graphic novels/comics history and some paleo texts that the floor above our bedroom has begun to sag.

Thanks to the efforts of good folks like Randy Duncan and Lea Ann Alexander, among others, the arrangement for the Bissette Collection to be archived and available for public access at Henderson State University has gone a long way toward clearing out this situation; two years of shipping boxes, and I'm still sending them stuff! Clearing the deck of all my past business and creative materials -- the complete records and histories of Swamp Thing, Taboo, 1963, Tyrant, Tundra and more, my entire comics career records going back to 1976 -- is an ongoing project, but a great deal has already been sent to, archived, and even displayed at Henderson. There's still files, shelves, and heaps of stuff to finish archiving (I send complete annotations for everything, to help Lea Ann and her assistants know what they have and provide info for future generations) and then box up and ship to Lea Ann, but it's come a long way, and opened up some space.

Since my work began with James Sturm, Michelle Ollie and The Center for Cartoon Studies, accessing my comics, graphic novel and book collection has become more vital. I am scanning 200+ images per week for my "Survey of the Drawn Story" class, and that requires the ability to simply find what I need, much less drag it down, scan it, and return it to -- someplace. The previous three years of writing gigs (including one massive research project for a law firm) has left the attic/studio space in complete chaos, though the writing itself has all taken place in a tiny four-by-four-foot area around my computer.

And as for my own work: though I have a single oversized flatfile, the life and work of yours truly remains in plastic-wrapped bundles, stacks, and mounds in and about the basement and flatfile area. My son Dan and I made half-hearted efforts to sort the three-decades-plus of art and photocopies, but that occasional task was sporadic and none too productive. The new office/studio/library space has already opened up access to the decades of art, and I can see light at the end of the tunnel with this task in 2006. With the help of two computer-savvy amigos, I'll be finally diving into the long-overdue process of digitizing this body of work, so maybe something will come of all this. I feel a great obligation to at least organize, digitize, and store this body of work in a manner that will make it easier for my now-young-adult children Maia and Dan (who has shown the most interest of either in ol' Pop's legacy) to deal with all this, maybe get it into print in some form, in the future.

When my friends Mike Dobbs and Mark Martin peeked into the new area on Thanksgiving, Mike made the accurate comment, "There's no room for expansion!" Well, that's been worked into the scheme of things, too. Entire sections of the collection and library have been accumulated for specific projects. The shelving unit closest to the new writing and computer desk is entirely racked with books and illustration files gathered over 15+ years for the cannibal movie book project, We Are Going to Eat You. Now that I've found a home for that project (see previous announcement on this blog on signing with Harvey Fenton and FAB Press), as the revision/rewrite process is completed and art/illustrations scanned, an entire shelving unit and two file cabinets of research materials will be shipped off to new homes, and out of here. As that happens, my expansive paleontology library will take its place, in hopes of returning to work on my pet project Tyrant. I've other projects reaching fruition at last (including transcribing and expanding my history of horror comics, hopefully for book publication down the road) which will clear the shelves as they're completed.

The weeding out of the comics and graphic novel collection is another 2006 task -- narrowing it down to what's necessary for teaching at CCS and still of use/interest to me, passing the rest on to Maia and Dan as they wish, the rest divvied up between the libraries at Henderson University and The Center for Cartoon Studies. So, "expansion" is possible as compression is accomplished, and so it goes.

I've kept a preferred spot open in the new studio area for my drawing board. First on the board are some long (years) overdue "sketches," all of which turned into paintings, for some incredibly patient, put-upon fans (hence my refusal of commissions since 1999 -- see, they have been patient). Then -- who knows? It's been seven years that I've handled art projects on the kitchen counter and/or dining room table when Marj and the kids were away, or on lapboards in a chair. This'll be a change for the better.

Would be great to just keep the world at arm's length and see to this process as soon as the carpet folks are done on Wednesday, but no such thing is possible. We're in the first end-of-semester run at the CCS, and I'm prepping for my new class next semester; I'm also prepping for my second session of online teaching with filmmaker and friend Walter Ungerer for our January 2006 online film class with University of Vermont's online class program (more on that later this week, with info on how you can sign up if you're interested in taking our class). I've got two major writing projects to wrap up, and the holidays are almost upon us, including some travel. So, I'll tackle it as time permits, and hope for the best.
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We landed a light snowfall all day yesterday followed by some incredible winds; the power didn't go out, though, and as I bundled up this morn to shovel off the front steps, there wasn't much snow to move as the winds saw to that task pretty much.

Still, errands to run -- "see ya in the funnies," as my old college roommate Joe Mangelynx used to say.

That They May Vote: Part 2

Some films, being neither fish nor fowl, slip between the cracks of history. By their very nature uneasy fits into any prescribed genre, Abel Gance's passionate pair of anti-war films, both titled J'Accuse (1919 and 1937, respectively), remain difficult-to-screen obscurities. It took the efforts of film historian, archivist, and restorer Kevin Brownlow to reawaken dedicated cinema lovers to the existence of Abel Gance in the 1960s, when Brownlow took it upon himself to seek out, engage with, and labor for years to restore and re-present Gance's work to the public. The June 1968 BBC broadcast of Brownlow's excellent documentary Abel Gance: The Charm of Dynamite is as handy a landmark as any for the reemergence of Gance's prominence as one of the pioneers and master filmmakers of the silent and early sound eras.

The premiere Gance title to emerge and regain prominence in that process was of course Gance's masterpiece Napoleon (1926/27), boosted further by Francis Ford Coppola's US showcasing of the film in 1981 (with a new score by his father Carmine Coppola). That restoration was the result of decades of work by Brownlow, yielding incomplete restorations that were screened in 1973 and later in 1979; the 1981 Coppola-Zeotrope Studios funded revival marked a significant stage in the restoration process, but as Brownlow noted in his final sentences of his essay in the Napoleon program book, "...the reconstruction continues. Already, another fragment has appeared. Will the work ever be finished? I shall be sorry when it is..."

Brownlow labored similarly over reconstructions of Gance's sound remake of J'Accuse, though that film never earned the prestige, prominence, or visibility of Napoleon. Like all of Gance's films, and many other foreign imports, J'Accuse had suffered many cuts and many versions. Though I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say the original silent J'Accuse slipped into obscurity before the close of the silent era, though no less prominent an artist than D.W. Griffith (whose own WW1 drama Hearts of the World was completed shortly before the US debut of Gance's more passionate, visionary anti-war epic) proclaimed it a masterpiece, "history written with lightning".

Gance's sound remake suffered a similar fate: given the Third Reich's invasion and occupation of France soon after the debut of J'Accuse, the film was banned in Gance's native country. In Britain, it's horrific nature landed it the dreaded 'H' (for horror) certificate, while its US distributors originally released the film (in cut and subtitled form) as an art film; alas, despite its pedigree (as a French film made resisting Hitler's march on the Eve of that country's occupation), it, too, suffered for being too horrific. Retitled That They May Live (from the Biblical scripture quotation), the film opened to solid reviews but its horror element -- the climactic march of the living dead soldiers, many played by hideously disfigured WW1 vets rather than actors in makeup -- coupled with America's ongoing aversion to entering the war led to J'Accuse being shunted from prestige theaters to New York City's premiere horror movie grindhouse, The Rialto. Alas, despite its impact, a subtitled French film alienated that audience, too, and J'Accuse/That They May Live was deemed uncommercial. Dumped into roadshow obscurity, lacking the exploitation elements (sex and controversy) that launched the foreign film market in the US of the 1940s and '50s, Gance's passionate masterwork was relegated to rare late-night TV broadcasts in few markets until Brownlow's resurrection of Gance's reputation in the 1960s and '70s.

One would think the restored J'Accuse might have found favor in the anti-Vietnam, counterculture-fueled marketplace of the midnight movie circuit of the early 1970s, but I cannot find any evidence of a savvy booker or theater manager even attempted such a thing. Playing it on a double-bill with Romero's Vietnam-War-come-home Night of the Living Dead might have been a natural, and lest one believe midnight movie audiences would have per se rejected a subtitled film, don't forget the first of all 1970s midnight movies El Topo was subtitled. But that's a pipedream -- it never happened, nor was attempted.

Once again slipping between the cracks, J'Accuse quietly vanished, attracting neither arthouse audiences nor horror buffs. Both versions remain sadly neglected masterpieces to this day -- even for a diehard videophile like me, the silent version tooks years to track down in the gray market, finally surfacing in a French-language only version from indy convention label Moonlight Cinema. As for the sound remake, for years Sinister Cinema has offered the cut US 1939 release That They May Live, which is worth seeing, but only if you are unable to track down a copy of the long out-of-print 1991 vhs release J'Accuse from Connoisseur Video. It's the most complete version I've ever seen, and as such the one to buy; still, that edition suffers from footage long missing from the shattering climactic reel. In their excellent book Abel Gance (1978, Twayne Publishers), authors Steven Philip Kramer and James Michael Welsh cite Gance biographer Roger Icart's account of missing footage in which the dead and their powerful wave "stop planes from flying and armies from marching... The frightened nations of the world ban war and proclaim the Universal Republic. The dead can then return to their cemetaries" (Kramer & Welsh, pg. 77). None of this survives in the 1991 restoration, and the finale indeed feels rushed and truncated after the march of the dead soldiers, ending with the torching of the film's crazed hero Jean Diaz (an extraordinary performance by Victor Francen) and the walking dead lifting his body from the pyre as Jean at last joins his fallen comrades from the First World War.

Seen today, both versions of Gance's J'Accuse stand as magnificent works of cinema, and among the key works of the horror genre from any country. In this era of DVD revivals and restorations, is it possible that some innovative label will package a complete, two-disc edition of both versions of J'Accuse? There are no such plans in public view, though one can dream... that perhaps whatever attention the broadcast of Joe Dante's Homecoming on this weekend's Showtime Masters of Horror broadcast may garner will awaken fresh interest in its wellspring, J'Accuse.

Stranger things have happened, but don't hold your breath.

In the meantime, scour the internet to get your hands on a copy, any copy, of either version of J'Accuse. The sound remake is particularly stunning, a heartfelt, fierce howl of rage against war in all its bastard incarnations, against those mortal leaders, profiteers and politicians who recklessly send generation after generation to their deaths. It is as timely as ever, and as terribly relevent.

Though Gance's flailing against war in the face of Hitler's forces in 1937 was futile, there's no resisting the power of his climactic passage. I defy you to tell me that goosebumps don't surface, that the hair at the nape of your neck doesn't rise, as Diaz cries out to his long-dead comrades of WW1, "Your sacrifices were in vain. I shall not yield to war. I return to you! Refuse. Help me!"; the tracking shot of the expansive soldier's cemetary, the names on the graves glowing; the speed of the film shifting into overdrive as the very elements accelerate.

"Soldiers of the Great War, I call you," Diaz cries, "Soldaten des Weltkriegs..." A crucifixion statue opens an eye, its unyielding stone becomes supple and begins to writhe, as storms descend and birds scatter, a flower whithers in seconds; the acres of crosses dissolve.

"My twelve million friends killed in the war, I call you," Diaz shouts -- and the dead indeed rise, and begin their march...

(Note: In 1991-92, I wrote a two-part article on both versions of Abel Gance's J'Accuse that was published in Charles Kilgore's beloved Ecco magazine. I have not referred to that ms. for this blog posting, but I am revising and expanding that article for publication in one of my book projects in 2006.)

And The Dead Shall Vote: Part One (of two)

I'm not plugged into Showtime, given our available satellite package (and no cable hereabouts in the backwoods), but I'm eager to see the new Masters of Horror series -- particularly the episode being broadcast this weekend, which I'll alert you to here. Thanks to my good friend Tim Lucas, I can post this "heads up!" in time for some of you to savor the upcoming Joe Dante episode Homecoming, which promises to be something extraordinary -- but read on even if you know about this, as I'm getting into something relevent no one else seems to be citing.

OK, here's some excerpts from The Village Voice article by Dennis Lim (November 29th, 2005) on the Turin, Italy exhibition of Dante's latest creation.

(I must note with some bemusement that Lim lifts his article's title (an obvious one, but still) from the very first article ever printed with Joe Dante's byline on it: "Dante's Inferno", which was the title Forrest J. Ackerman affixed to the landmark Famous Monsters of Filmland article expanded from a 'letter to the editor' a teenage Dante wrote to the magazine in 1960 or '61 (listing the 50 worst horror films of all time, per 1960 standards). This was Dante's first claim to fame, predating his extensive writing for the Famous Monsters newsstand competitor Castle of Frankenstein; predating his move from his native state of New Jersey to move to California, writing for Film Bulletin (1969-73, currently reprinted regularly in The Video Watchdog) while working his way into cutting trailers for Roger Corman at New World Pictures; prior to his directorial debut co-directing (with Allan Arkush) the delightful Hollywood Boulevard and solo-directing the delicious post-Vietnam bio-weaponary horror gem Piranha and his breakthrough masterwork The Howling (both scripted by a young John Sayles); and looong before establishing himself as mainstream Hollywood's strangest edge-of-the-studio satirist with flicks like Gremlins and Gremlins 2, Inner Space, The Explorers, The Second Civil War, etc. But enough on all that...)

Now, lest I lose you, note that Lim's Village Voice article is subtitled "A horror movie brings out the zombie vote to protest Bush's war", and let's get into it a bit:

Dead man voting: Homecoming, Turin, Italy: "This is a horror story because most of the characters are Republicans," director Joe Dante announced before the November 13 world premiere of his latest movie, Homecoming, at the Turin Film Festival. Republicans, as it happens, will be the ones who find Homecoming's agitprop premise scariest: In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on "horseshit and elbow grease."

The dizzying high point of Showtime's new Masters of Horror series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era. With its only slightly caricatured right-wingers, the film nails the casual fraudulence and contortionist rhetoric that are the signatures of the Bush-Cheney administration. Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch (Jon Tenney), reports to a Karl Rove-like guru named Kurt Rand (Robert Picardo) and engages in kinky power fucks with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver (Thea Gill), a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy with a "No Sex for Oil" tank top and "BSH BABE" license plates. Murch's glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, "If I had one wish . . . I would wish for your son to come back," so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.

How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury (it was greeted with a five-minute ovation in Turin, the most vocal appreciation seeming to come from the American filmmakers and writers in attendance).

At once galvanic and cathartic, Dante's film uncorks the rage that despondent progressives promptly suppressed after last year's election and that has only recently been allowed to color mainstream coverage of presidential untruths and debacles. For all its broad, bludgeoning satire, Homecoming is deadly accurate in skewering the callousness and hypocrisy of the Bush White House and the spin industry in its orbit.

Now, this all sounds amazing as hell to me, and it's a treat to see Dante and his work in the limelight. As a lifetime (literally, as I read that Famous Monsters "Dante's Inferno" article at age seven) fan of Dante and his work, the conceit of the man who so perfectly parodied CEO Ted Turner in Gremlins 2 taking on sociopath Coulter is irresistable; seeing Dante regular Picardo (a fixture of the director's films since essaying the role of lycanthropic "Eddie" in The Howling: "Let me give you a piece of my mind...") as a surrogate Rove is even more appealing; and that Dante has embraced and elevated the cultural currency of his favorite genre and built so firmly upon the bedrock laid by Abel Gance (read on) and George Romero at this point in our national decline is even more exciting.

In his full article, Lim shows a little savvy in citing how "zombie flicks, with their built-in return-of-the-repressed theme, have always served as allegories of their sociopolitical moments (as demonstrated mere months ago by George A. Romero's prescient pre-Katrina class-war nightmare, Land of the Dead)", which is glib but accurate as far as Romero's influence goes. Prior to Romero and his collaborative partners making Night of the Living Dead in 1968, only Abel Gance embraced the walking dead theme with any "sociopolitical" intent. Thankfully, Lim goes a bit further, citing the source for Homecoming, "Dale Bailey's "Death and Suffrage", a 2002 short story that puts a morbidly literal spin on the idea of the dead being used to pad the Chicago voting roll... The film also owes something to the low-budget 'Nam-era Dead of Night, in which a "Monkey's Paw" wish brings an undead veteran back to his family home." Bob Clark and Alan Ormsby's understated gem Dead of Night aka (and on DVD from Blue Underground as) Deathdream is indeed relevent, as is the reference to the classic short story by W.W. Jacobs. In fact, like Night of the Living Dead, the underrated and rarely-screened (until this DVD release) Deathdream was one of the precious few Vietnam War films made during that conflict, at a time the studios avoided the subject completely (save for John Wayne's pro-war The Green Beret, 1968) leaving it for allegorical westerns (Soldier Blue), biker flicks (The Losers), and cross-genre fare like Billy Jack.

Still, there are closer unsung parallels between Homecoming and lesser-known horrors. In the scope of the mid-1980s The New Twilight Zone revival series Dante himself contributed episodes to, William Friedkin directed a highly effective adaptation of Robert McCammon's 1984 Masques short story "Nightcrawlers" (broadcast Oct. 18, 1985), in which a Vietnam vet is plagued by lethal telekinetic materializations of the war and fallen comrades he left behind.

But before all these, Abel Gance, the man who made the classic silent epic Napoleon, invented this war-fueled walking-dead genre with not one but two versions of his original feature film J'Accuse. Gance did so with a point: to attack the horrific human toll of World War I (in the case of his first J'Accuse, completed in 1919 and featuring soldiers who subsequently died in the trenches), and later, via his 1939 remake, to try and stop what became World War 2.

It would seem that Dante is channeling Gance a bit of late, given the content of his film and his uncharacteristically angry statements to Lim:

But Homecoming, very much a movie on a mission, casts aside metaphor -- it derives its power from its disconcerting literalness. The zombies do not represent -- but are -- the unseen costs of this futile war. Implicit in the film's unapologetic bluntness is a sickened urgency, an insistence that this is no time for subtlety. ...Though Bush is never named, Homecoming tailors its provocative scenario to accommodate a devastatingly specific checklist of accusations, from the underreporting of war casualties to last November's dubious Ohio count. As if in defiance of the Pentagon's policy to ban photographs of dead soldiers' coffins, Dante's film shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but their irate occupants bursting out of them. "There's a lot of powerful imagery in this movie that has nothing to do with me," Dante says. "When you see those coffins, which is a sight that's generally been withheld from us, there's a gravity to it. Even though there's comedy in the movie, there's something basically so serious and depressing about the subject that it never gets overwhelmed by satire."

As I say, Dante's statements to Lim are unusually pointed, and worth quoting in full:

"If you're going to code the message, which is the way horror movies have always done it, that's fine, but it's not going to reach an audience like a movie that's overt, and this is not exactly subtle," says Dante. "Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody's afraid -- it's uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren't people upset? Every minute, somebody's dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn't seem to me quite worth it."

...In any case, as Homecoming suggests, there are ways in which the current administration is essentially beyond satire. The nuttiest attitudes the film ascribes to its ruthless Republicans are scarcely more extreme than anything Dick Cheney or Karl Rove has been credited with. "Have you seen Network lately? Everything has happened," Dante says. "And Arthur Hiller's The Hospital, which was also [written by] Paddy Chayefsky. They wanted to make the picture as outrageous as possible, so they tried to think of the most impossible situations, like going into an emergency room and having somebody say, 'You can't get any care until you fill out these forms.' And it's all come true!"

Real events were indeed catching up with Homecoming before it was completed. "It was only when we started shooting that Cindy Sheehan emerged," Dante says. "It was weird, because everybody said [of the war mother character], 'Oh, you based that on Cindy Sheehan!' It was just a coincidence, but I guess it was inevitable that somebody like that would show up."

Dante says the lead roles were initially offered to better-known actors, who all turned them down, but Masters of Horror "happened to be a situation where nobody had any veto power over the material." ...To his surprise, Showtime executives didn't flinch when they received the script. "I can't conceive of any other venue where we would have been able to tell this story: You can't do theatrical political movies; people don't go to them. You can't do them on television, because you've got sponsors," he says. "Michael Moore's last picture made a lot of money, but he was vilified for it so much he's practically in hiding."

Dante hopes Homecoming functions as a wake-up call -- not so much for politicians but for filmmakers. "If this spurs other people into making more and better versions, it will have done its job. I want to see more discussion," he says. "Nobody is doing anything about what's going on now -- compared to the '70s, when they were making movies about the issues of the day. This elephant in the room, this Iraq war story, is not being dramatized."

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we're in," he continues. "It's been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war -- now that they see the guy is a little weak, they're kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn't bite back. It's cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody's done about this issue that's killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It's fucking sick." While gratified by the warm reception to Homecoming in Turin, Dante says he's eager for the right-wing punditocracy back home to see it: "I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it -- and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are."

Go, Joe!

Tim Lucas has already written up Homecoming on the Video Watchblog, and that post is

here.

Tim at least mentions Gance and his seminal anti-war walking dead classics; most have not, nor are they likely to. J'Accuse remains largely ignored by both mainstream and genre film fans, historians, and researchers; even George L. Mosse's insightful Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memories of the World Wars (1990, Oxford University Press) misses Gance's revelatory horrors, though they are of profound relevence in Mosse's chosen subject.

For both versions of J'Accuse, Gance mobilized his own genuine outrage, horror, and anger at the wartime arena and rhetoric of his respective eras. For the 1919 version, Gance conceived and executed a stunning tableau in which a delusional, dying soldier's vision of the dead of the trenches rising from their graves and the battlefields to march on the living and stop the war concluded an otherwise non-fantastic WW1 drama. For his sound era remake, alarmed at the mounting threat of the Third Reich and spineless rhetoric of the body politic, Gance revised his 1919 opus to create a tale in which a survivor of WW1 cries out to the war dead to march upon the living and stop the coming war.

Gance's unsung masterpiece can be tough to track down, but it's well worth the search. Given the likely interest Joe Dante's latest may doubt stir up, I urge you to scour the internet and get your hands on a video copy of J'Accuse as soon as possible. You'll be amply rewarded, and your eyes will be opened to something astounding.

More on those video releases, and more on J'Accuse, tomorrow!

-- Continued tomorrow --
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A few bon mots my Jamiacan (VT) amigo HomeyM offers that I want to share here:
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Tidbits from this month's Harper's Index:

*Percentage discount that Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has said he will offer poor Americans on oil and gas purchases: 40

*Minimum number of Americans who have signed up so far at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington: 140

*Percentage of U.S. women who own vibrators: 46

*Number of journalists killed in Vietnam during 20 years of war there: 63

*Number killed in Iraq since March 2003: 71

*Estimated number of pro-terrorism websites worldwide in 1998 and today, respectively: 12; 4,700

*Amount Americans spent last year on "fantasy football": 2,079,000,000

*Number of consecutive years that the U.S. median income has failed to increase: 5

*Number of consecutive years that the percentage of Americans living in poverty has increased: 4
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"The more you try to resist a lesson, defending yourself against your stuck point, the more you will be driven into the corner you're so desperately trying to avoid."

Wolfe Lowenthal, There Are No Secrets
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