Wild and Crazy Guys (2019).

One of the interesting things to note about the history of the arts is how often you tend to find differing and separate individuals grouping together or clustering around what can only be described as a burst of creative energy.  This is a subject that's been examined more than once on this blog.  We've looked at least two types of this same phenomena, one of them occurring in the mid to late 70s.  The other happened quite a while back, and centered around artists like Ray Bradbury and Rod Serling.  Both of those instances had a kind of continuity between them, as each group was concerned with taking the major materials of the fantastic genres and molding them into the modern forms that we know today.  What's notable about this interlinked artistic development is how it is both important on both a historical and aesthetic level, while at the same time being all too easy to miss.  It's this lack of notice that poses a danger to valuable bits of history slipping through the cracks.

This same phenomena of artistic group clustering was not limited to just the fantastic genres, however.  There have been moments during the closing years of the 20th century when varying talents would come together in collaboration in the field of the comedic arts.  Unlike the New Wave Fabulists or the California Fantasists, this comedy oriented phenomena was a bit more noticeable, and has managed to carve out a lucky space for itself in the memories of pop-culture.  To this day, there are still people who can recall every single line of dialogue from Ghostbusters, or Beverly Hills Cop.  Guys like Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis have managed to use their talent to etch their place in the hearts and memories of an entire generation of grateful fans.  Their collective ability to bring a laugh out of others is so impactful that it seems they're now in the process of winning over a lot of millenial fans as this is being written.  It's the kind of thing you hope goes on long after time has made them all take a final bow.

It's sort of why it's a service to future generations when some aspiring fan decides to set down a chronicle of the accomplishments of each one of the funny men of the 80s.  That's the goal Nick De Semlyen set out for himself when he decided to write Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the 80s Changes Hollywood Forever.  At the center of this study lies a small, yet substantial number of talents, each of whom would go on to have a major impact in the shaping of the pop-cultural landscape, part of them originating, according to the author, from the NBC stages of Saturday Night Live.  "Many huge starts would be launched from the show, including Dan Ayckroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, and Eddie Murphy.  Meanwhile, up in the chillier and considerably less glamorous environs of Toronto and Edmonton, John Candy and Rick Moranis were working alongside people like Martin Short, Eugene Levy, and Catherine O'Hara, cutting their teeth at SCTV.

"Together they made up a sprawling, smart, subversive collective...Their approach to comedy was freewheeling, hip, and fearless.  And whether their on-screen mission was to save the world from supernatural forces, get the girl, or make authority figures fizz with rage, they were about to inherit the Earth (xv)".

Semlyen follows this statement up by asking a rhetorical question that has, at least as far as this critic is concerned, a definite claim to validity.  "Try to imagine what cinema would look like without them.  Collaborating with behind-the-camera talents including John Landis, Ivan Reitman, Carl Reiner, and John Hughes - and fellow stars such as Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Goldie Hawn - this new wave would produce a litany of big, brash blockbusters and evergreen oddities: National Lampoon's Animal House, The Jerk, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack, 48 Hrs., Trading Places, The Man with Two Brains, Beverly Hills Cop, Ghostbusters, Fletch, Coming to America, and Scrooged to name but a few.  That list alone makes a compelling case that this period is as good as things have ever gotten for big-screen comedy (xvi)".

I'd have to argue that at least in terms of wit and delivery, that might be the case.  Although I don't think that's enough to erase all the genuine accomplishments of past cinematic eras.  Just recently I've had the opportunity to examine the work of old-timers like Carol Burnette and Tim Conway, and I found myself having to hold my gut just take in air.  It's a testament to level of talent involved, even before the 80s crew came in to take over things.  Because of this, I've got to go with the idea that humor is perhaps just a bit more timeless than a lot of jaded and cynical reviewers (the kind that are too focused on, or just plain obsessed with the present moment) are willing to give it credit.  This holds true just as much for older funny guys and gals like Lucille Ball or Mel Brooks, as for those who came after.  Still, the comics of the 80s have a fair share of accomplishments to their name, and it's the nature of these achievements that Semlyen is here to look at.  He lays out his goals of his study in the introduction as follows:

"This is the story not only of how these classic movies were made, against the odds and frequently under the influence, but how their stars handled the perils and pitfalls of fame.  Murray, Murphy, Martin, and company all hurtled onto the A-list, becoming global celebrities pursued by paparazzi and fending off, or accepting, frequent offers of sex and drugs.  Not bad for a bunch of guys - and despite the early promise of Gilda Radner, it was exclusively the men who hit big - who generally looked more like maintenance staff, or appliance salesmen, than members of the Rat Pack.

"There was plenty of fun, as these stars lived out an extended adolescence, getting paid obscene amounts of money to goof about in lavish screen fantasies.  But when you're flying so high, the pressure is immense, and even the seeming perks could become nightmarish.  "When I started plying stadiums, I did have girls trying to get into my room a few time," Steve Martin recalls.  "But it wasn't a fun thing like you'd imagine.  You don't want someone knocking at your door at two a.m. when you're exhausted and trying to sleep"

"Everyone acclimatized to the lunacy in different ways.  Rick Moranis wound up retiring in the early 1990s.  Eddie Murphy embraced his celebrity with both hands, strutting around in a red leather boiler suit from the stand-up set Eddie Murphy: Delirious and employing a full-time entourage.  Johns Belushi and Candy died tragically young.  Bill Murray sailed through rumpled but uncrumpled, seemingly doing whatever he damn well pleased (xvi-ii)".  The artistic highs and lows of the comic talents that came out of the SNL era is the kind of story that's well worth telling.  The real challenge for any chronicler of this particular artistic movement all comes down to two simple questions.  Is the story told well, and is it the truth?  

RKO 281 (1999).

Orson Welles is and was the kind of personality that generates stories.  He collected tall-tales about himself almost as if was his own folklorist.  He would use them often in his interactions with others, especially when it came to funding his many celluloid endeavors.  That much is a fact of history, though its an open question of just how many today still realize it.  Perhaps its the director's penchant for taking creative license with his own existence that accounts for the strange back story for the film under discussion today.

I remember hearing that RKO 281 was originally slated as a big screen production featuring Marlon Brando as the main antagonist.  For some reason, however, the deal never managed to come together.  Instead, the whole thing wound up as a TV movie.  To be fair, that in itself is no determination of a picture's quality, especially not today, when guys like Scorsese, De Niro, and Peschi can use the small screen to deliver a film like The Irishman.  All that counts in the end is that the story is intact, or that there's a narrative worth telling.

The subject matter behind RKO 281 is the stuff of Hollywood legend.  That makes it ripe for dramatization.  There is a problem with this particular story, however, and its adaptation into film, that winds up raising more questions than answers.

Soundtrack for a Novel: An Experiment.

Can novels have their own soundtracks?  It's not a question most people would bother to ask.  The most commonsense answer would be to point out that a novel is not something like a movie or a record.  All a book amounts to is just a series of words on a page.  There's no sound or music to go along with it.  Even if its possible to say you'd like you're copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Fellowship of the Rings to have its own soundtrack accompany the words as you read along, the fact remains you're not going to find it anywhere in the book itself.  You'll either have to find some music that could go well with the words, or else just use your imagination as best you can.

That's as far as everyday commonsense can go when faced with such an off-kilter question.  By and large, the majority of audiences, including even the readers in the crowd, do not tend to make an automatic connection between texts and songs.  The reason for this seems to be because there is no essential reason for the two forms of art to mix.  One can exist just as well without the other, unless of course you're a band like the Beatles and you're trying to make a concept album with something like an actual narrative attached to it.  Then the singer must learn how to be not just a songwriter, but also a kind of storyteller.  That's a task that can be harder than it sounds.  A lot of talented artists who make great musicians are also pretty lousy at trying to be straight-up writers.  When an concept album like Marvin Gaye's What's Going On? is able to mix both music with a sense of narrative its usually an achievement that goes underappreciated by both music and book enthusiasts.

The irony is that the commonsense response itself has left the door open for certain creative opportunities.  Let's recall that the answer boils down to three statements.  (1) Books and music are separate artistic mediums. (2) If anyone wanted music to go along with their reading material, they would have find ways of incorporating it from vinyl, CDs, or clips off the Net.  Those are about the only options anyone has left in terms of where you can get music to listen to.  (3) The third and final option is to just use your imagination in order to fill in all the sonic gaps provided by the text, if any.

The good news is that it is possible to meet all three challenges, if you know how to do it.  Take Tolkien's aforementioned Fellowship, most Middle-Earth geeks already have a soundtrack all neatly laid out for them and waiting in the wings, thanks to, and courtesy of Howard Shore.  All anyone has to do is grab a headset, pop in the CD, open the book, press play, and begin to read.  All of that amounts to one way of proving that it is possible for books to have the potential for a soundtrack.

I'd like to see if it's possible to go a bit further than that.  I want to try something.  I don't know if it's new, or anything like that.  In fact all of the materials involved are all pretty darn old.  However there may be a lingering sense of novelty about the whole thing for those who've never tried or thought of it before.

What I'd like to do is take a random novel, a handful of old songs, and then see what happens when an imaginative attempt is made to combine the two.  I don't mean to create anything like a new hybrid medium where literature and music interchange with one another to the point of being indistinguishable.  Instead, I'm trying something that I might have got from Walt Disney.  Allow me to explain.  In his 1940 concert film, Fantasia, Disney took the concept of the animated film, and combined it with music in a variety of ways.  One of them was a mix of images and music, with the goal of setting up a mood or atmosphere.  This was done in the film with sequences like Toccata and Fugue.  Another was to use music in a way that told a story.  This goal was best on display in Night on Bald Mountain, The Rite of Spring, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice.  As it turns out, Fantasia was not the only time that Walt would find ways to utilize music in the service of a legit narrative.  One of my oldest childhood memories is seeing a Silly Symphonies adaptation of Peter and the Wolf.  It was an animated adaptation of the entire folktale, and it was free of any real dialogue from start to finish.  Instead, the symphonic score of the legend was used to punctuate and accentuate the action and story beats happening up on the screen.  The result was a film that used music to tell its story.

I think it's a technique that's been tried here and there, once or twice more, though it's never the sort of thing that has ever managed to really catch on with the public.  We seem to have reached a point where we tend to like our medias unmixed.  Part of the reason for this might be down to the ways we've allowed imaginations to shrink and atrophy with the passage of years.  It didn't use to be like this back in the days when everyone lived in forests, and no one could live anywhere else.  Back in the old, Medieval peasant cultures of Europe, most groups never minded if a fiddler decided to provide some violin accompaniment to retelling of an old folktale or legend such as that of Robin Hood.  In fact, such techniques were said to enhance the experience.  That's one of the reasons why storytelling minstrels flourished for such a long time in an age when books weren't really a thing like they are now (if they ever were).

I'd like to see if I can bring some of these old materials back in a minor way.  It's nothing major, just a brief moment's diversion.  What I'd like to do is take a text that lends itself easily to a musical soundtrack, and see what happens when we mentally use various Golden Oldies to provide something like a musical compliment or commentary for the text.  I think the best choice for now is to choose a book like Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis.  I think this is the best course of action because King is a writer who likes to sprinkle the artifacts of pop-culture here and there throughout his works.  He can erase 99% percent of the world's population, and then have one of Marvin Gaye's songs start to play in an abandoned, imaginary record shop.  This makes King's work an ideal test case for my experiment.  I want to take the narrative beats of a novel like Hearts and see if it's possible to make a soundtrack for an already established text.  From here on in, I think it's best if I actually show what I intend to do, rather than just talking about it.  With that in mind, let's take a bit of mental leap and see if there's anything to find.

A Tribute to Old Time Radio.

I sort of have my parents to blame for this one.  It all started a while back when was just a kid.  I was an avid book fan in the making back then.  I knew I liked what I had read to me, but I didn't yet know how to read.  Turns out this wasn't too much of a problem, however.  There were two reasons for that.  The first, and most important, is that I soon got rid of the whole illiteracy problem by learning to both spell out and pick up the meaning of the words, both on the page, as well as the ones my school teachers made me spell in notebooks.  Another factor in my favor was that I never lost the enthusiasm for books, and so it was the drive of that whole interest which finally made me drill down, grab a copy of R.L. Stine, and begin to pour over the letters I found inside.  It was something of a relief to discover they made sense.  It was even better when, a few minutes later, they also turned out to be pretty entertaining.

That was the major reason why I didn't have much trouble back then.  Another part of it has to do with the fact that I'd discovered an item that was called a "Book on Tape".  They were clunky, yet compact audio cassettes with little spools or reels of odd, ink-ish stuff woven around them like cloth on an old weaver's loom.  They had to be the novelest looking things I'd ever seen up to that point.  I don't think I had much time to give the cassettes all that much consideration however.  What riveted my attention was the cover of the miniature box the tape came in.  It was one of the familiar and macabre illustrations of an old artist named Stephen Gammell.  The cassette tape was an entire collection of the second volume in Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark series, and it was all mine.

I suppose it wasn't my first exposure to books on cassette.  However, the little I'd heard of this "hip new medium" was in the form of old collections of children's folk songs that my grandparents kept lying around, and maybe one of two condensed narrations of Disney's that I can still recall, but they are all a vague series of snippets of dialogue and one tune that I remember and yet can't make out at the same time.  I know there was perhaps one more in there, an kids audio of Return of the Jedi, however that's about as far as my exposure went at the time.  It's a bunch of voices from the aether that aren't quite live enough to be Memorex.

That Scary Stories tape, however, was something else.  I recall I had one of those cheesy old tape players, the kind with the sort of bright, garish colors painted on that would appeal to no one else except a little kid.  It's main casing was red with a yellow main speaker.  I could be wrong, yet it's just possible that the player buttons were blue, or something like it.  What I know a lot better is that I might have had a pair of headphones to go along with the whole ensemble.  I put on the head-set, unwrapped the cassette with what might have been careful eagerness or just plain carelessness.  It's the small details, after all, that seem insignificant as they happen.  It's the passage of time that somehow makes even the trivial seem like one big moment of important, like a form of code whose cipher has been lost.

Anyway, I know for a fact I opened the tape box and brought out a curious, squarish, white rectangular object.  You could just make out the spool of tape inside.  I don't think I knew what they meant, however.  I placed it in the tape player, and pushed play.  Or was it just an ordinary Walkman, and the multi-color player was from earlier?  Either way, a lever was flipped, there was an audible pop as the speakers began to work.  There was the arrival of a slow, rhythmic opening musical chord that in retrospect is sort of like a milder, slower form of the Halloween theme.  Or at least that's as close as I get get to a description.  The next thing I knew, I was listening to the voice of the Heat Miser from The Year Without a Santa Clause as he took me on a guided tour of a corpse who didn't know he was dead, vengeful wraiths from beyond the grave, a girl who survived a premature burial, a new mother with glass eyes and a wooden tail, as well as my first experience with the Gothic genre as a spoken performance.  That was my introduction to what is nowadays known as the audiobook.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong (2013).

It's part of the stated goal of this blog to take a closer look at the nature of stories in general.  Sometimes this can mean paying special attention to the way they are told.  One way to do it is to look at the narrative strategies used to tell a story.  Narrative strategy itself isn't all that common a word.  You're never likely to hear it outside of a creative writing seminar, or anything like that.  Since there's not a lot of familiarity to go with the phrase, it's no real shock to learn it's the kind of thing few people would bother to give a moment's thought about.  Like a great deal of ideas and concepts that fly under the radar, this doesn't mean they've ceased to exist.  Sometimes it doesn't even mean they''re no longer in use.

A good way to look at narrative strategies is to think of them as part of the bells and whistles that go along with the art of writing.  A particular use of the word could refer to the various techniques the writer has for getting across the desired artistic effect.  A good example is the way Spielberg is able to build up suspense around the main villain of Jaws.  Every scene in that film is about the build up towards the film's Great White.  When it makes its appearance at last, the moment is impactful because the movie spent the last half hour drumming into our heads the threat that it represents.  This is a relatively straightforward example of just one kind of narrative strategy.  There are other ways of telling a story.

One of them revolves around an old English theater tradition.  I suppose the most familiar label for this style of writing is Pantomime.  However, I think I prefer the more open-ended term of the Popular Dramatic Tradition.  The phrase isn't mine, by the way.  It belongs to someone else.  It's the main topic of Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition by S.L. Bethell.  That's a subject we'll get to in a moment.  For now it's enough to point out that the Popular Tradition amounts to a whole way of telling a story that's not so much different as it is out of sight and out of mind.  It also appears to be still in use today.

That's the only explanation I can offer for the existence of something like Peter Pan Goes Wrong.  It's a kind theatrical production I'm not quite sure most folks have seen before.  It's a commonplace across the pond, however.  Plays like this are older than the Bard of Avon and have managed to hang on as a staple of British entertainment long after the old scribbler for the Globe Theater breathed his last.  Pan Goes Wrong just seems to be the latest incarnation of the same Tradition I mentioned above.  It's the kind of play that might appear to offer little in the way of a serious artistic discussion.  The irony is that such a minor seeming jest really can point the way to an old alternative way of storytelling.  That's why I'd like to take some time to unpack this bit of theatrical sport and see what it can tell us about how much we've forgotten in terms of how to both write and pay attention to the stories we tell ourselves.  It might also be a decent enough way to spread a bit of holiday cheer to those who need it.

The Man Who Would Be King.

The most common question an author gets asked is, "Where do you get your ideas"?  Part of what makes it so difficult to answer is that the ideas could just as well come from anywhere, at least to a certain extent.  J.K. Rowling has claimed that Harry Potter just stepped into her head one day while riding on a train.  Tolkien found himself faced with a blank sheet of paper and all at once wrote, "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit", without any clue as to the meaning of the word.  Both cases are examples of what might be called sudden inspiration, or a story idea that occurs more or less of its own accord.  This is perhaps as close as anyone can get to a standard operating procedure in the creative arts.  However it's not the only way that a work of fiction is created.  It's also possible for writers to draw inspiration from the world around them.  Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King" is one of those cases where sometimes real life encounters lead to the creation of a totally made-up situation.

Kipling scholar Richard Jaffa is able to provide a glimpse at the events that set everything in motion.  "The origins of the story can be found in Kipling's correspondence.  In a lengthy letter to his cousin...He goes on to relate...an experience he had...on a train on the other side of India.  He describes how he met a man who was also a Mason.  "Ships upon the sea' are nothing compared to our meetings in India."  The man told Kipling that he had a friend coming across the Empire by train from the East, (that) he could not meet him but that Kipling's route meant his train, if on time, would cross this man's route.  He asked Kipling to take a message which he would not write, to give to this man.  The message was unintelligible to Kipling.  "My brother gave me this message...." continues Kipling.  He goes on to describe how at 5:00 a.m., on a cold winter's morning the Calcutta train drew up alongside his and he sleepily put his head out the window.

"Kipling relates, "I didn't want to go threshing all down the train - there were three Englishmen on it - in my search for the unknown, so I went towards the window and behold, it was the man I was told to find; for he also (doesn't this sound mad?) was a brother of mine."  The man thanked Kipling and said he knew what the message meant.  Kipling comments that he didn't know the name of the man who gave him the message or the man who received it.  The description in this letter confirms the great enthusiasm that Kipling felt for Freemasonry and the concept of universal brotherhood.  It also demonstrates the contemporary significance of Masonry among its adherents in British India at that time (99-100)".

I'll have more to say on the topic of this symbolism later in the review.  At the moment it's enough to note that for a simple short work of fiction, it's amazing how many layers of depth there are to explore if you take a closer look.  It's one of those old curiosities that somehow stand as a kind of sentinel, or testament to the staying power of a well told story.  Perhaps just a handful of authors are able to keep the heads of their popular reputations above the tide of time in such a fashion.  Dickens was one, and Lewis Carroll seems to be another from the time when Kipling first wrote.   In what follows, I'd like to examine both the original story, and it's film adaptation in order to unpack the materials hidden in this simple tale.

This review will be a bit different as I've decided to see if I can't review both Kipling's original story, and its later movie adaptation all in one go.  I'm at least sort of confident in this approach because John Huston's film is an example of that rare beast where the adapter seems to understand his source material on an almost fundamental level.  The result is one of those cases where the text and the picture can be placed alongside without either doing harm to the other.  Huston's respectful approach to the material also has the added bonus that both versions share a thematic overlap.  This makes the critic's job a lot easier, as the underlying concepts of the text inform the movie in a way that is near beat-for-beat.

There are at least three levels that I'm able to unpack in Kipling's narrative.  The first is the lingering question of Imperialism, and how the story tackles this difficult subject.  The second revolves around Jaffa's recognition the presence of Masonic themes in the tale.  An examination of this symbolic aspect of the work leads to a further inspection of the story's third and final theme: the idea of antiquity, and the uses and abuses that this concept is subject to in an ill-informed modern age.

Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling.

There are two ways to immortality.  One of them is earn the kind of achievement that people will talk about forever.  Mahatma Gandhi provides a good example of this first type.  The other is create such a scandal that your name has no choice except to survive forever as an example to be avoided.  Rudyard Kipling is a rare and exotic breed.  He seems to managed both tricks in the space of a single lifetime.  At least, I think that's what he did.  Part of the hesitation stems from a number of interlinking factors.  Part of it is that all you have to do is mention The Jungle Book to call up whole film reels of childhood memories.  The catch is that just because most viewers are familiar with Walt Disney's last animated feature film, that's still no guarantee the majority of them will ever know that the film's author even existed.  Fewer may even realize that The Jungle Book was, in fact, an actual text.

The result is I can't say I know just what kind of reputation Kipling has in this day and age.  It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he's a fossil relegated to the darkest corner of a nursery that's escaped our memories.  I'm willing to go far enough in believing maybe handful of book types might remember who he is.  Even if that's the case, there's still a problem of having a notorious reputation.  The closest thing to a basic consensus I can find is that Kipling is regarded in much the same light as H.P. Lovecraft.  He's a great talent lodged inside a troubled and troubling personality.  Like his Providence counterpart, Kipling is seen as the great Imperial Apologist.  He's a man with a blind loyalty to Queen and Country, right or wrong.  Even his best works are alleged to be thinly disguised propaganda.  If he isn't cheering young British boys to throw their lives away for an unjust cause, then he's urging them to keep the "others" in their proper place.

At the same time, he's something of a childhood favorite.  Aside from the Mowgli stories, Kipling is responsible for filling our world with the likes of a mongoose christened "Rikki Tikki Tavi", a street urchin named Kim, and a "Man Who Would Be King".  Each one of these tales, taken together or separate, have since won recognition as genuine classics of both fantasy and adventure.  Still, there is the nonsense drivel known as "The White Man's Burden".  "And so it goes".  You can't admire Kipling.  You can't just bring yourself to throw him away either.  The worst part is the odd, almost schizoid quality that seems to live in his work.  The "Burden" doggerel is some of the most shallow and insensitive waste of good ink ever committed to paper.  Then, if you go from there and read about "The Man Who Would Be King", the strangest result happens.  It's as if the author of that tale were another man who, after reading the poem, got inspired to dash off, as in a white heat, a story with a clear anti-imperialist message at it's core.  The message in that short story is not just true, it's almost downright prophetic in the way it narrates the slow decay and downfall of British rule in India.  An ending that was written by none other than Gandhi himself.

How does one reconcile such a dichotomy?  How can two men live in the same head?  Are we dealing with a Jekyll and Hyde personality?  Does the right hand truly have no idea of what the left is doing?  What gives with this Kipling guy, anyway?  Is he some sort of elaborate fool, or just plain crazy?  Charles Allen is one who author who has at least made a valiant attempt to find an answer.  The question is what kind of writer does historical examinations turn up?  That' the question at the heart of Kipling Sahib, which details RK's exploits in the land of his birth, and how it shaped the writer he became.  It sounds like a standard enough approach, yet the writer uncovered by Allen is not the one I was expecting.