Tim Lucas / Video WatchBlog: June 2022

Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Announcing CHILDREN OF THE NEW FLESH

A lot of the work occupying me over the last several years has been coming to fruition lately, so it seems I'm announcing a new book of mine every other month. In addition to THE SECRET LIFE OF LOVE SONGS and THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES, I've also contributed to WARPED & FADED (edited by Kier-La Janisse, and apparently already out of print!), Ramsey Campbell's RAMSEY'S RAMBLES (an Afterword), and now this latest arrival: Chris Kelso and David Leo Rice's CHILDREN OF THE NEW FLESH, a hefty compendium of essays, criticism, fiction and discussion about the early work of David Cronenberg (notably the short films that established themes explored less densely but more deeply in his feature work) and its continuing, fertile influence. There's ten pages of me in the interviews section of this impressively varied and thoughtful book, which also features the input of Bruce Wagner, Patrick McGrath, Mick Garris, Kathe Koja and others. Particularly notable among the other contributions is a piece on Cronenberg's debut short TRANSFER (1966) by Stephen R. Bissette, omitted from his mammoth book on THE BROOD for Electric Dreamhouse's Midnight Movie Monographs series. In short, you need this and here is where you can find it!

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

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Monday, June 27, 2022

Thought on THE MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR

Last night, I discovered MONSTER FROM THE OCEAN FLOOR (1954) among the curious free holdings of Amazon Prime. After a mildly rough title sequence, it settled into the best quality I’d seen, having only ever seen it on various cable "public domain" outlets, and I soon committed to seeing it through.

I think Roger Corman’s first sf-horror production still plays very well—not as a SF or horror picture, necessarily, but certainly as a calling card for a new name in independent film production. The story, basically written as a means to get free promotional access to a one-man mini-sub (ie., production value), is really about the power of myths and legends to obsess and fixate us; it even ventures to suggest that everything we think we know about science can become its own self-limiting belief structure. By the end of the picture, the practical, science-loving hero (Stuart Wade) must not only acknowledge the possibility that his new girlfriend’s (Ann Kimbell) belief in the sea monster of local legend is well-founded, but he must literally reenact the myth of Ulysses and Poliphemus to save her from it.

For a picture that’s barely more an hour long, that’s a pretty neat trick of narrative layering: to present a nascent romantic relationship in terms of an essential conflict of world views and beliefs, and having the hero rather than the heroine be the one to capitulate to the other's stronger self and will; its climax shows him taking a giant step outside his core belief in science to literally occupy the realm of myth and legend (ie., his girlfriend's beliefs), and returning to a shared sense of reality in which their previously uncertain relationship suddenly clicks. Also, the extensive underwater photography by Floyd Crosby is about on par with most episodes of SEA HUNT, thus well above the norm for a picture of this kind from this era.

Because MONSTER isn't the scary movie it promises to be, the movie has always been viewed with condescension and even outright derision, but it's a more ambitious picture than it appears to be. Produced for roughly $35,000 (maybe even less), it was sold to Lippert for distribution for $110,000—$60,000 of which went to Corman and put the most durable of Hollywood careers on track. Robert Lippert was reportedly annoyed when he learned that the picture was made for considerably less than its professed cost of $100,000 but the picture ultimately earned $850,000 at the box office. Even today, almost 70 years after its humble release, its cost-to-profit ratio continues to put that of a good many more famous pictures to shame.

Saturday, June 25, 2022

FINMINK Interviews Me About TMWKE

Here's a link to an epic interview with me, conducted by Stephen Vagg for the Australian magazine FILMINK.

He asks me about all the different phases of THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES: the original screenplay, its rewrites, the times it almost got made, and my new novel.

I also mention what I'd like to be working on next!

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Farewell, Jean Louis Trintignant

As I may have mentioned here before, Jean Louis Trintignant was my favorite living actor... that is, until yesterday, when he left us at the age of 91.

I said my farewell to him tonight by watching, belatedly, for the first time, Claude Lelouch’s Les plus belles années d'une vie (“The Most Beautiful Years of a Life,” 2019), the last of the sequels to A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966) and the final film to star Jean-Louis Trintignant. I read nothing about it at the time of its release and was under the impression that the reunion of Anouk Aimée and Trintignant had perhaps not worked out, so I was in no rush to see it. But last night seemed the sacrosanct moment, and indeed it was.

It's a very low-key film but a tremendous improvement over the intermediary A MAN AND A WOMAN: 20 YEARS LATER (1986). It basically tells the story of former script girl Anne Gauthier being approached by the son of former racing champion Jean Louis Duroc, asking her to visit her former lover at his assisted living residence; it seems his memory is fading as he loses interest in life, and all he can remember clearly seems to be the time he once spent with her.

Both actors have retained their ease and brilliance in these roles, and to jolt from the present tense to sepia footage from the 1966 film now stings in its sense memories of youth and beauty; the tears come as they do when you twease out nose hairs. The film coasts slowly along on fading memories, dreams, sly conversations, musings, and examples of some of the most profound poetry (Paul Verlaine, Boris Vian), and then—just when it seems to have run its course—it throws down the most stunning sequence I’ve seen in years. The penultimate stretch of the film straps the viewer into the driver’s seat for a high velocity POV shot of an urgent, instinctive journey—a mythic journey—indeed, a mythic one for anyone who knows and loves the original film. I don’t know the story behind this footage but we’ve never seen it before and yet it works as a heretofore missing but essential piece of the original film, something we have only experienced through narrative hearsay and through the window of a romanticized montage. As we accelerate dangerously through the streets of Paris, the windscreen is serially splashed with pure cinema: the rocketing journey through endlessly available avenues and occasional obstacles; the awed realization that we are seeing a real-time extended memory of a Paris of the past; and the overlays of images from the film’s past and present tenses become a momentous reflection on life, on passion, on how quickly we pass through this life and how little time it takes to profoundly change our life, and also a reflection on the way we turn to certain movies at certain times to reawaken a certain feeling, to weep in the dark. I felt I was watching the French New Wave analogy of the Stargate sequence.

Full disclosure: As far as I can tell, the film isn't available anywhere commercially in English, so I can’t point the way for you. There is a French Blu-ray, of course, but I believe it's only in French. I’ve had my copy for awhile, and its subtitles were almost 20 seconds out of synch and I couldn’t bear to watch it that way; another reason I put it off till now. It was a miracle but I looked again for English subtitles online after reading of Trintignant's death and Jean-Louis somehow guided me to the perfect fit. It’s a bittersweet film, as are the other two, but I’m so glad to have seen it, and so pleased for Lelouch and his actors that it’s a triumph.

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Look What I Got in Today's Mail!

May be a cartoon of 1 person and text that says "THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES GERSOLL At TIM LUCAS Author of Throat Sprockets"

I received my box of author's copies arrived today from PS Publishing. It's a beauty! Charlie Largent's dazzling cover art is almost three-dimensionally gorgeous!

By the way, I learned yesterday that the signed and numbered edition (limited to 100 copies) has now SOLD OUT. That particular rarity won't be coming back, however we are looking into what we can do to make copies, and even signed and personalized copies, available here in the States.

In the meantime, here's the link to PS Publishing's sales page. If you've already ordered, your copy should be arriving shortly if it hasn't already. If you ordered the signed and numbered edition, give it two or three weeks. I signed the signature pages last night and we shipped them back to PS on the fast track, so the finished copies should be shipping within a couple of weeks.

Now we need to publicize it. If you're a reviewer of quality fiction, especially fiction related to horror, science fiction and fantasy cinema, contact Electric Dreamhouse and request a review copy. I'm also open to podcast and print interviews; just drop me a line at tim@videowatchdog.com.

If you've already received the book, read it and enjoyed it (or once you do), please talk it up in social media and place reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, and any other literary outlets you can think of. This novel was originally undertaken to lend an extra push to get the Joe Dante movie made, and this remains the goal - but before this can happen, the book must send out ripples of excitement... so ripple away!

Here's a look at the back cover, where two notable gentlemen (who KNOW their Roger Corman, and have lots of stories of their own) offer their feedback on an early reading of the manuscript:

More news as soon as I have it.

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Saturday, June 11, 2022

Notes on MR. NOVAK, Season 2 (1964-65)

James Franciscus as Jefferson High School English teacher John Novak.

Last night, we completed our viewing of the second and final season of NBC’s MR. NOVAK, which aired in 1964-65. It isn’t commercially available, supposedly due to musical rights issues proposed by two episodes in particular, so we had to rely on a seller’s DVD-R set. (It was mostly taken from TNT broadcasts so a better-looking set of copies must exist somewhere.)

This was a troubled season; a new producer (Leonard Freeman) with ideas of his own took over, and halfway through the season Dean Jagger retired his role as Jefferson High School principal Albert Vane and left the show. Jagger was the eccentric bedrock of the show in many ways; it was reported that a chronic ulcer was responsible, and it later came out that his leave-taking may have been prompted by his dissatisfaction with some of the upcoming scripts of the season under Freeman's supervision. Whatever the cause, it was a great loss. Replacing him as principal was Burgess Meredith as Martin Woodridge, a venerable English teacher at Jefferson chosen by Mr. Vane to fill his vacated office after he ascends to the head of the Board of Education. Meredith isn’t quite Dean Jagger, but he’s nevertheless top form Burgess Meredith. Eccentric and earnest in his own ways, he gives outstanding performances in several episodes and, like Jagger, forms a special educative alliance with series lead James Franciscus. It also needs mentioning that Franciscus is consistently excellent throughout the series, embodying a mid-level of life learning, equidistant between the chairs occupied by Jefferson's principal and students.

Franciscus with Burgess Meredith.

For all this, and apart from several standout episodes, the second season eventually does meander away from Season One's more serious issues of education to become more of a “troubled-student-of-the-week” melodrama. It appears the show may also have had a hard time finding enough young actors of real dramatic quality to carry such episodes. For example, in the same season, Tommy Sands and Johnny Crawford were cast in one outstanding episode together and then again in two episodes separately, playing different (!) students—a hard trick to pull off, especially since their first was “Let’s Dig A Little Grammar,” perhaps the outstanding episode of the season, a gripping show-off between two young aspiring jazz musicians. This episode is one of the second season's music rights problems; the other is the second Tommy Sands episode, “And Then I Wrote...”, in which he plays a gifted science student whose once-in-a-lifetime scholarship plans are thwarted by his father’s selfish and outdated songwriting ambitions.

So there's lots to savor here, including “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt”, featuring a powerful performance (“Introducing Susan Tyrell”) as a returning student found innocent in a court of law of killing her sleeping parents with a shotgun, who has yet to clear the lingering suspicions of her peers and faculty. Also “The Tender Twigs,” in which Jefferson High’s debate class, enacting current United Nations debates with their most effective debater challenged with representing the Soviet Union, captures the attention of a smug right wing extremist agitator (well-played by Robert Culp) who publicly accuses the school of pandering communist sympathies. There are a couple of weaker episodes (Walter Koenig in "The Firebrand" as a narcissistic student protest leader, and the finale, a graduation story featuring Don Grady, who tries much too hard as a class clown who's not making the grade), but the season's high points are several and as stimulating as ever, maybe even a bit darker. They certainly warrant a proper release.

Season 1, which I heartily endorse as near wall-to-wall great television, is available from Amazon and Warner Archive Collection.

Friday, June 10, 2022

Here's the First Review of THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES!

Two weekends ago, my new novel THE MAN WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES had its launch at ChillerCon UK in Scarsborough (along with Ramsey Campbell's RAMSEY'S RAMBLES, his collected VIDEO WATCHDOG columns). I was told that copies of the unsigned edition started being mailed out last week, and on Facebook I've started receiving photos from friends who have already received it.

Today, I received this week's PS PUBLISHING NEWSLETTER and was very pleased and surprised to find the first review I've seen of the book. Here it is, with my thanks to reviewer Matthew Jones:

In case you're interested and haven't ordered yet, here is a link to Electric Dreamhouse's sales page for the book.

At present, I'm still awaiting the shipment of loose pages to be signed and tipped-into the 100 limited hardcovers, which are still in supply... but I wouldn't put it off very long.

Wednesday, June 08, 2022

Thoughts On An Old Fotobusta

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To see this Italian fotobusta for THE COUCH is like seeing it through new eyes. To audiences in America, it was a dark, psychological drama; however, when viewed in an Italian framework such as this, it is obviously a giallo—and a film whose own B&W atmospheric aggression is somewhat in advance of Bava’s reputedly seminal THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, which was released in the same year. (As I've noted before, the real template for the Bava film appears to be the tongue-in-cheek Miss Marple mystery MURDER SHE SAID, first released in September 1961.) Indeed, when considered as a giallo, THE COUCH stands out as prototypical of the 1960s-1970s gialli on several counts: it was one of the first films to posit a serial killer as the main protagonist, portrayed as an individual of great personal charm and noted for his fetishistic use of a specific weapon (an ice pick). The Italian title translates as "I'll Kill at 7:00," a reference to one of the killer's promises to the police, and also his great alibi in that he's known to be keeping an appointment with his psychiatrist at that particular hour and so cannot be out elsewhere committing a murder. As a title of murderous intent and fetishistic planning, it prefigures other giallo titles such as YOU WILL DIE AT MIDNIGHT (1986) and THE KILLER RESERVED NINE SEATS (1974)—not to mention how it sets up the echoing of the number seven in such titles as SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS and THE RED QUEEN KILLS SEVEN TIMES (both 1972) and SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973). One of the most thrilling sequences in THE COUCH also takes place on a vacant floor in a hospital where the darkened space throbs with strobing light from an outside neon sign, a motif that Mario Bava would adopt to equally disturbing effect in both THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964).

In short, this item shows us that the history of the Italian giallo did not evolve solely from Italian films, but also from foreign films in Italian.

If you've never seen THE COUCH, you're missing an important, too-often-overlooked chapter in the evolution of the horror thriller. The original script by Robert Bloch (which he later filled-out into a nifty novelization) is quintessential Bloch—dark, sick, and served up with an avuncular twinkle.