Happy King Day!...some items coming in...and a revival of a weekly Forgotten Films multiple-blogfest...

Happy King Day, folks...my favorite of the national holidays here in the US, because it's the only one devoted to someone who strove to make sweeping change through suasion rather than through armed power. And, while not alone in doing so, succeeded...and, tragically, and not alone in this either, paid too great a price for that.


Among the items I've picked up over the weekend is the new F&SF, including new work by Kate Wilhelm, and, particularly amusingly in concept, a sequel, apparently, to Richard Lupoff's recurring-day story "12:01 AM"..."12:02 PM."

Which is an odd bit of synchronicity, inasmuch as I've been mooting encouraging a return of the Neglected or Overlooked Movies (and other A/V) roundelay, which Steve Allan (apparently now pursuing an MBA and not blogging much) sparked and Patti Abbott picked up on, briefly...but it didn't really catch on as did the "Friday's Forgotten Books" roundelay Patti hosts, or the "Monthly Forgoten Music" Scott Parker hosts, at their blogs. I'm restarting the recommendation posts as "Tuesday's Overlooked Movies and/or A/V" here tomorrow, to go forward weekly, and will post links to any other blogs where the bloggers wish to participate (or will post here any contributions by the blogless who wish to join in and send their items along). And why it's synchronicity? One of the films I mentioned in one of my posts back when was 12:01, the Showtime-commissioned film, also an early Fox Broadcasting offer, the fine adaptation of Richard Lupoff's story first published in the Robert Silverberg & Roger Elwood 1975 anthology Epoch.

And I've taken advantage of the Lulu sale ending today to buy Lupoff's collection of fantastic-fiction parodies, published as if by "Ova Hamlet" (illustrated by Trina Robbins).

So, tune in tomorrow, to see at least a few items cited that might've slipped by you...

And here's that post again:

10 "forgotten" films (from August 2009)

Three Cases of Murder (1955): There are a lot of horror films, and only a few of them don't have a number of exponents...they'd have to be pretty damned obscure not to have some sort of coterie, and actual quality doesn't have much to do with that. But this one is rather little-known among even those reasonably well-versed in horror film, an apparent crime-drama anthology of three stories, only the second of which, "You Killed Elizabeth" based on a "Brett Halliday" story, is traditional crime drama...it's also the weakest. "You're in the Picture," the lead segment, is what lifts this well into the realm of the memorable...a genuinely creepy and allusive horror drama, involving haunted paintings (of all things). "Lord Montdrago," based on a Somerset Maugham story and featuring a fine jocund performance by Orson Welles, wraps up things well with what falls over on the horror side of a borderline case...in this case, a Conservative MP is haunted by the ghost of a Labourite he mocked and hassled in life. While such other modest or clangorous classics as The Haunting or Carnival of Souls, Spider Baby or The Masque of the Red Death, Dead of Night or Black Sabbath are pretty consistently in print in various media (we could use the dvds, at least, of Ingmar Bergman's The Devil's Eye, or ofThe Night of the Eagle aka Burn, Witch, Burn!)[international all-region dvds of those two have since been issued]...I'm definitely waiting to snap up a more durable form of this one than my VHS cassette. Runner up among the more obsure anthology films: Torture Garden, another poorly-titled British film (with nothing to do with Mirbeau's novel), this one the first and only good Amicus film of Robert Bloch's fine scripts for that inconsistent studio.

Castaway (1986): Lucy Irvine wrote a memoir of her year on an otherwise deserted island, some distance from the Australian mainland, with a fellow Briton, a lunkish middle-aged man who advertised for a younger female companion to take on this challenge with him. In the film, these roles were taken by Amanda Donohoe and Oliver Reed, fairly brilliant casting that meshes well with director Nicholas Roeg's eye for gorgeous composition...all of which, given the utter beauty of the surroundings and Donohoe within them, almost completely trumps Roeg's inability to tell a story (see also, Walkabout and Don't Look Now, for further examples). For whatever reason, this film has been all but eclipsed in the public mind by those other Roegs and by the other film with the same title starring a volleyball and Tom Hanks.

12:01 (1993): A television film made from Richard Lupoff's novelet "12:01 AM"...and as deft an adaptation of a recurring-day sf story as I've seen. Runner-up in this instance: Of Time and Timbuktu, a melange of Kurt Vonnegut's works in tv-movie form, unavailable for decades in part for being made for PBS by the folks who would later do the fine Ursula Le Guin adaptation The Lathe of Heaven and the absolutely miserable adaptation of John Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" with a lost and bewildered Raul Julia.

It's in the Bag (1945): What happens when a movie is made of the Fred Allen Show version of The Twelve Chairs? Something as shambolic as a W. C. Fields movie, and about as much fun...with strong support not only from Allen's radio cast, in part, but also from Robert Benchley and Jack Benny (who, in a sense, was a part of Allen's radio cast and vice verse). Even the overdone bits, such as the adventures in a mega-theater showing Zombies of the Stratosphere, are worth seeing at least once. (Runners-up: basically any episode of the PBS sitcom anthology series Trying Times.)

City News (1983): Another PBS offering, one of the items commissioned for American Playhouse, but one which didn't get much circulation in theaters...as a romance between an "alternate" weekly paper cartoonist and the slightly mysterious woman he meets, it was refreshingly low-key and witty, and I wish I could see it again (as the only person who has described it even on IMDb, I compare it favorably to Slamdance). Most people seem to remember it, when they do, for the makeout scene to the Normal's "Warm Leatherette." Runner-up: Edward Herrmann's one-man videotaped play for AP, "The End of a Sentence."

City Lovers (1982): A short film based on Nadine Gordimer's story, and presented on public stations in the 1980s as part of the Nadine Gordimer Stories package, this was the most affecting of the group among those I saw, offering a charming yet telling liason between a young "colored" ("mixed-race") South African woman and an older "white" German visitor to SA, back in the last years of apartheid, and how his foolhardiness and the insanity of the national institutional racism messes them over.

New York Eye and Ear Control (1964): Another item I first saw, as a very young child, on PBS (as a very young network)...an impressionistic tour of NYC, conducted in part by silhouette puppets, to a soundtrack made up entirely of an extended free jazz improvisation by a band assembled around saxophonist Albert Ayler. I've had the ESP-Disk reissue of the soundtrack for more than a decade, but haven't sought out the dvd, if one has been offered, for this curio. Perhaps the best example on my list here of a film that might be more Interesting than Fun for many viewers and auditors...

Born in Flames (1983) ...unless this one is. Lizzie Borden, no less, put together this no-budget bit of agit-prop before she went on to more conventional work such as Working Girls (somewhat famous as a film in large part about the banality of prostitution). BIF is a not-quite-dystopia about the kind of non-utopia that "socialists" of the Bernie Sanders stripe might bring about had they somehow managed to take full control of the US government, and just how disenfranchised leftists, feminists, anarchists and similar folk find themselves still. Not terribly convincing as dramatic art, featuring a fairly amateur cast and a bit too much time showing us underground radio broadcasters before their microphones, it's still an exuberant and rather amusing demonstration (in at least two senses) and not the typical sf film, even at the boho margins. (Such as might be exemplified by Liquid Sky.)

The Magic Box (1952): Like most people who remember this story of the pioneering British tinkerer and developer of the moving picture process, the sequence that sticks most in memory is Robert Donat's exhausted, Eureka-moment William Friese-Greene pulling in off the street a stoic, somewhat skeptical cop, played by Laurence Olivier, to demonstrate the breakthrough he's just made...my runner up, which I like even better but which I suspect is of interest to a narrower audience, is the brilliant horor film Hotel, in which Mike Figgis shows us a film troupe making the mistake of trying to do a version of The Duchess of Malfi in a haunted Italian hotel...

Conversations with Other Women (2005): A fine, fun, funny, and reasonably mature indie involving exes who meet again, years after their breakup, at the wedding of a mutual friend. An example of the kind of film that the voracious maw of our cable-film channels can raise from utter obscurity, even if they don't make them hits...I have to wonder if the elegant use of split-screen here didn't scare cinematic distributors. I'll nominate A Few Days in September, a fine humanistic spy drama, as my runner-up here.

And, really, this just sticks with some of the (essentially) Anglophone films that come to mind.
For the last time the Forgotten Films challenge came up, see this older post...

FFB: Joe Gores: SPEAK OF THE DEVIL (Five Star, 1999); John Simon: MOVIES INTO FILM (Dial Press, 1971); JOHN SIMON ON FILM: 1982-2001 (Applause, 2005)

Joseph Gores, 1931-2011.



From the Contento index:
Speak of the Devil: 14 Tales of Crimes and Their Punishments Joe Gores (Five Star 0-7862-2035-X, Nov ’99, $20.95, 200pp, hc)
· Speak of the Devil · ss
· The Second Coming · ss Adam Aug ’66
· Raptor · ss EQMM Oct ’83
· Plot It Yourself [“Detectivitis, Anyone?”] · ss EQMM Jan ’88
· Smart Guys Don’t Snore · nv A Matter of Crime v2, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli & Richard Layman, HBJ, 1987
· Watch for It · ss Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, ed. Hans Stefan Santesson, 1973
· Quit Screaming · ss Adam’s Reader Nov ’69
· Killer Man [“Pro”] · ss Manhunt Jun ’58
· Faulty Register · ss Two Views of Wonder, ed. Thomas N. Scortia & Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Ballantine, 1973
· You’re Putting Me On—Aren’t You? · ss Adam Bedside Reader, 1971, 1970
· The Andrech Samples · ss Swank Sep ’70
· Night Out · ss Manhunt Oct ’61
· Sleep the Big Sleep · ss EQMM Apr ’91
· Goodbye, Pops · ss EQMM Dec ’69

Joe Gores died the other day, and I have seen nothing but fond remembrance of him as a person, as a pro's pro, as a guiding light of a man. Of course, few run around insisting what a bastard the recently deceased might be, unless they are inarguably so, but this outpouring bespeaks of the kind of person one is utterly glad to have known. I tend, at least sometimes, not to want to disturb such folks with fan letters and such, assuming (probably incorrectly) that they might not need any more affirmation from random folks off the street. But a number of the stories collected in this volume are among the most influential fiction I've read, at very least "The Second Coming," which I read at about age ten in one of the adult Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, probably one of Harold Masur's (I could go look it up, and probably will). I hadn't thought too hard about capital punishment at that point, but was not fond of the concept; this story, about would-be hipsters thinking they're about to have a kind of strange lark in weaseling their way into being among the witnesses of a state execution, and how that experience affects them, certainly affected me. I have been a confirmed opponent since.

Other stories here have stuck with me over the decades, as well..."Watch for It" and "Goodbye, Pops" were also in AHP: volumes, and made Gores's curiously upfront name (he certainly knew how to hook up into one's gut) one to look for; I can't remember for the life of me where I first read "Quit Screaming" all those years ago. Sitting down with the Contento/Ashley and/or Stephensen-Payne indices would probably tell me that, too.

But for now, I'm just ready to buy a copy of this collection, and remind myself of some of the talent and compassion, the anger and grace of the writer we just lost. And, again, condolences to all those folks fortunate enough to know the man, as well.

My greatest obligation is to what, correctly or incorrectly, I perceive as the truth. It is also a genuine satisfaction to express the truth as you feel it should be expressed.
--John Simon, "The Art of Criticism (No.4)," The Paris Review, Spring 1997.




I've recently been re-reading Movies into Film, the first John Simon book I read, and the relatively recent (and still in print) John Simon on Movies, and it remains an enjoyable and compulsive pastime...to read a critic who is not wedded to a specific ideological framework, who is so clear in esthetic judgments and open about his biases but nonetheless strives to take the work in question on its own terms...if those terms are in the pursuit of what he sees as actually achieving art, or at very least intelligently-assembled amusements. His criteria can be questioned, of course, as every Barbra Streisand idolater will insist, but not his commitment; his wit and elegance and open-mindedness are models for me that I only infrequently begin to emulate.

It’s wonderful to be hated by idiots. A German writer whom I love and whom I’ve translated, Erich Kästner, gives advice in one of his poems to a would-be suicide. He tries to give this man various reasons for not blowing his brains out. The man remains unconvinced, so Kästner says, in essence, all right, the world is full of idiots and they’re in control of everything. You fool, stay alive to annoy them! And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation. If I can’t convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them, and I think I do a reasonably good job of that. --ibid.

As with all good critics, even when you find yourself disagreeing with his conclusions, you can see where he's coming from. He mildly enjoyed Tootsie, a film which rather bores and annoys me; he utterly dislikes The Rapture and Before Sunrise, films I see virtues in, particularly the former. But his reactions are well-explicated and only very rarely wrongheaded--there is one instance in the newer collection where he clearly misunderstood what was being suggested by the film under review, but I don't have the book at hand and don't remember which it was (I'll slip that in later), but this instance is surprising in its near-uniqueness, in my experience. More often, part of what he so very good at is in isolating what is wrong with a deeply flawed film, whether it be Midnight Run or In the Company of Men, without losing sight of their strengths; in thoroughly castigating the dishonest film, such as Smooth Talk (where the greatest dishonesty is in how it traduces the career-making short story by Joyce Carol Oates that it supposedly seeks to adapt, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?") and celebrates the great, nearly perfect attempt to crystallize truth, such as Badlands. And he is not afraid to turn his analysis to the work of other critics, often demonstrating more virtues in Pauline Kael, for example, or even Andrew Sarris, than I might otherwise credit them with.

I think it's time I finally dug out his Acid Test, and picked up my own copy of Private Screenings, which I believe I've read but am uncertain. Dwight Macdonald's introduction to the first is probably worth the cost of admission in itself, or so I hope.

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog for a roundup.

TV notes: KCET breaks away from PBS, Tribune debuts Antenna TV and other bits and pieces

Emmy Rossum in Shameless

As of January 1st, Los Angeles PBS anchor, the largest single contributing station of original drama to PBS programming, KCET disaffiliated from PBS and the PBS-programming-heavy World networks, remaking itself into the largest and wealthiest of the independent public-broadcasting stations in the US. There is a large handful of other independent public stations around the coutry, most in large markets as well--WNYE in New York City, WYBE in Philadelphia, KUEN in Salt Lake City (KUED, its sibling, is a PBS affiliate), WNVC and WNVT in Northern Virginia (in the DC suburbs and just a notch south), and, a year or so back, KMTP in San Francsico (with mostly international programming) was joined by KCSM in San Mateo (in the San Francisco Bay area)--this last in the wake of the punitive measures the out-of-control Bush Administration FCC was levying, specifically on the vulernable community-college station KCSM...a relatively unwealthy and bureaucracy-bound station...rather than taking on any of the larger, more independent or wealthier PBS stations for any local complaints about "strong language" in the documentary series The Blues. Other PBS entities rallied to KCSM's defense, but between state budget cuts and the legal expenses for the conveniently ideological prosecution, KCSM could no longer easily afford to make payments to PBS for its programming services. KCSM, which as the quarternary or fourth-largest of the Bay Area PBS stations, by the way which PBS ranks its overlapping stations in one urban market, mostly had delayed access to primetime programming and those children's shows the other stations didn't wish to carry...and had been making efforts over the previous decade to offer locally and syndicate new programming from Australian and other sources, as well as generating some new programming locally and for the national market...it was a relatively small step from there to independent status. For their secondary digital feed, they affiliated with MHz WorldView, the small network of international programming based at the aforementioned WNVC and WNVT (the latter a former quarternary PBS affiliate) in the DC area, which features items such as the original Swedish Wallander films, among a range of often impressive mostly European, East Asian and South Asian programming.

KCET's most visible production on PBS recently has been the adult-education program, in its English version known as A Place of Our Own and in its essentially identical but recast Spanish version as Los Niños en Su Casa, both offered five days a week through PBS to member stations and a Peabody Award-winner. To fund this relatively heavy schedule of production, KCET went through a number of fundraisers over the last year or so, which raised its gross income to the highest rate it had been in quite some time...which, in addition to it being the primary station in a four-PBS-station market that is also the second-largest urban market in the country, meant that by PBS's formula for charging stations for their membership dues, that KCET would be hit with a huge new fee even while it was losing state support and some viewer monetary support (in the depths of the recent recession)...despite arguing that the moneys dedicated to the two PBS series should not be counted as part of their larger operating budget. PBS insisted. KCET, already feeling a bit overtaxed by a PBS which was more worried about such programming powerhouses as WNET New York (and the newly-absorbed-by-them WLIW Long Island, NY) and WGBH Boston, and the less prolific, struggling, but very local to PBS HQ WETA Washington, decided to call their bluff...and now California has three large-market independent public stations. KCET picked up MHz WorldView on its former World frequency, and began programming heavily from the public-broadcasting syndicators, which provide a lot of the most visible programming on US public television anyway (such as the travelog Globe Trekker and the newly-revived Ebert Presents At the Movies), mixed with some new-to-broadcast items such as Jim Henson Productions off-cable series for its children's block in the mornings. And the other three LA PBS stations just found themselves trying to work out who will be running what PBS programming when, as the Orange County station KOCE, only recently under threat of being taken over by a religious broadcaster, moves up to being the LA flagship for PBS, along with KVCR and the LA Schools-affilated KLCS.

California, not too long ago, saw a similar tussle between a big national network, NBC, and one of its legacy tent-pole stations, KRON San Francisco, sparked by the SF Chronicle being unwilling to sell the station to GE/NBC in 2002 when offered a better bid by Young Broadcasting; in the subsequent hassle, KRON disaffiliated, became the largest commercial independent station in the country by some distance (since WTBS no longer has a broadcast signal), a move which in the short run hurt both NBC and KRON severely...NBC found clearance on a relatively weak neighbor-market station, KNTV San Jose, which had to expensively upgrade and relocate equipment and make deals with cable providers to get to most San Francisco viewers...and KNTV actually paid NBC for the privilege of running NBC programming at first (the reverse of how commercial networks usually operate), till NBC bought KNTV outright. Nowadays, as a "news"-heavy MyNetworkTV affiliate, KRON might end up an NBC affiliate again, as Young Broadcasting is in deep trouble...it's already clearing some NBC programs when KNTV pre-empts them for local sports coverage.

Following KCSM's example, and that of WNVC/WNVT/MHz Networks (perhaps not that of WYBE, which in attempting to finance itself through offering courses to the general public in television production, and then leasing time on the primary WYBE channel for the subsequent five-minute productions, has fallen on hard enough times that it's disaffilated one of its digital channels from MHz WorldView to lease that signal to a Central New Jersey evangelical Christian station), KCET might well flourish, and start dusting off some of its own impressive back catalog of former PBS drama programming, or exploit its proximity to Hollywood to again start producing dramatic programming for syndication, rather than for distribution through PBS. PBS Hollywood Theater, most famous for their production of Bruce Jay Friedman's "Steambath" in the 1970s, and briefly revived in the 1990s; the late 1970s anthology Visions; the brilliant sitcom anthology Trying Times produced in the late 1980s; and KCET's involvement in such projects as American Playhouse and the 2000s dramatic hour American Family are an impressive set of shows. And perhaps KCET and PBS will rejoin...but we'll see how that goes.

Far less impressive a developement is the introduction, however financially prudent, of interrupting commercial breaks in the Independent Film Channel's film programming. It doesn't help their repeats of such HBO fare as The Larry Sanders Show, either, but it really detracts from the film-flow...much in the way that AMC's similar inserts made films all but unwatchable on that cable channel. Like AMC, IFC is investing in new and retrieved television series, many of the latter, such as The Ben Stiller Show and Freaks and Geeks, at least were made for commercial television, and their much-touted new The Onion News Network weekly parody series (debuting on Fridays at 10p ET, so as not to go Too head-to-head with The Daily Show or Real Time with Bill Maher) might well be a bright spot...though the same folks are also producing the ESPN-parody SportsDome on Comedy Central simultaneously, feeding weekly on Tuesdays. With luck, they won't be stretched too thin. But the commercial breaks in IFC's films really are unfortunate.

Tribune Media, the jilted partner of Time Warner in the defunct WB Network, now itself the junior partner in the CBS-dominated CW Network, has put up a much less ambitious project, a competitor to the RetroTV network they're calling Antenna TV, both being primarily digital-signal "secondary" networks for commercial stations that have some other affiliation on their primary feeds (and thus differentiated from such small commercial networks as America-One, or even the relatively well-distributed IonTV, which they in some ways resemble). Retro and Antenna particularly are focusing on nostalgia-freighted repeats, but Retro has the much better schedule, as far as I'm concerned...most of Antenna's offerings, with the possible exception of Maude repeats and very little else (I can always sit through another rerun of All in the Family and at least a sizable fraction of, though not all, the episodes of The Monkees, I suppose) that I ever need to see again.


Showtime has introduced an American version of the British comedy/tragedy Shameless, and the pilot of the US version, starring Emmy Rossum and featuring William H. Macy, is not Too shabby...particularly when compared with the new Showtime/BBC sitcom Episodes, which is about as thick-witted and dull as nearly every other Matt LeBlanc project (he's affable, the script of the pilot, at least, is one cliche and unengagingly rote sitcom situation after another), or the increasingly uninteresting Californication (which wasn't all that good when I was briefly blogging about it for the TV Guide website; it, like HBO's similar Entourage, just keeps getting duller and more trivial). Well, at least they aren't quite down to the utter pander of Starz's Spartacus soft-porn and CGI gore series, or Cinemax's soft-porn soap operas, "comic" or otherwise, but close enough. (And even as the soaps slip away on commercial network broadcast, Korean soaps and Eastenders on public broadcasting, Lifetime's various projects, and these lubricious things, starting to move onto Showtime as well, seem to be keeping the form alive. FWIW.)

And, apparently the Sundance Channel, instead of running ads during the movies, might be running banner ads along the bottom of some of its movies throughout the run...I haven't seen this yet, but at least one other Sundance viewer has reported as much. I'll keep my eye out. Goodness. Times really that tough?

preview: PBS's PIONEERS OF TELEVISION: SF and Friday's "Forgotten" Books: THE ART OF HARVEY KURTZMAN by Kitchen & Buhle (Abrams 2009)

So, lets deal with some attempts to celebrate some icons. The PBS series Pioneers of Television, which will be bumping the science-documentary series Nova over to Wednesdays for a couple of months starting on 18 January, returns for its second short season with an episode devoted theoretically to the pioneers of televised science fiction, at least in the US...a task which it slights pretty dismally, since it utterly fails to mention such 1950s series as Tales of Tomorrow or Science Fiction Theater, or even the relatively famous kiddie shows Captain Video (that stalwart of the DuMont network, which employed actual sf writers to do scripts, oddly enough) and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. Instead, it focuses almost exclusively on Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek, Irwin Allen and Lost in Space (never quite managing to make clear that the similarly bad Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea preceded Lost onto the airwaves by a year, albeit mentioning this series and even interviewing a cast member from The Time Tunnel, apparently the most expensive of Allen's terrible quartet of '60s skiffy embarrassments), and then doubles back to Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone. Only actors are interviewed, though a bit of the footage of a famous (and much YouTubed) Serling interview, conducted by sf writer and lit professor James Gunn, is used as well, with Roddenberry and Allen represented in re-enactments at least as much as by still photos (I suspect for the cost of those cutesy re-enactments, any rights-fee questions could've been settled for any taped or filmed interviews with Roddenberry or Allen). The ST material is almost all likely to be familiar, as it is to me as a casual fan of the series and a devout fan of some of the sf writers who wrote for it (Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, et al.--and Fredric Brown's classic story "Arena" was laughably poorly adapted for the hissing lizard-man episode), though Leonard Nimoy and to some extent Nichelle Nichols come off well in their interview segments (no attempt made, apparently, to sit down with George Takei, Walter Koenig, or any of the surviving off-camera talent). The usual misrepresentations of ST's pioneering of such matters as The "Interracial" Kiss--France Nuyen and Robert Culp had taken care of that in I Spy a season or so before, if indeed they were the first, either (and they actually kissed, rather than more or less rubbed faces), or of pioneering the use of metaphors for dealing with similar taboo subjects...when even the documentary itself has mentioned Roddenberry's previous series, the 1963-64 NBC cop show The Lieutenant, had broached at least some of these matters...and it typically manages to forget the rather more famous 1963-64 series East Side, West Side both in this context and as an example of a series with a recurring African-American woman character, Cicely Tyson's social-worker, who was not a domestic or otherwise blatantly stereotypical. To say nothing of utterly punting recognition of the sometimes effective, sometimes clumsy attempts to address such matters on The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits (which series is Never mentioned here). At least Bill Mumy, Angela Cartwright, and Marta Kristensen are rather down to Earth about the utter goofiness of their series, Lost in Space, and again as a casual observer of media fandom I've heard less from them over the years (though they were clearly moved by a years-later visit to the Kennedy Space Center, where some of the scientists and technicians told them that their series had inspired the Floridans in their childhood to consider astronautics-oriented careers). Aside from Serling, only Veronica Cartwright (two sisters, no waiting...she was a child actor in the TZ adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "I Sing the Body Electric"), William Shatner, Peter Graves (albeit he mostly refers to his Corman film work) and Mumy (of course, his star-making child-actor turn in the adaptation of Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life--") are interviewed for the Serling series, and only brief mention is made of his later work, though at least they do cite some of his earlier, notable teleplays, such as "Requiem for a Heavyweight," and they run a bit of "Patterns." They cite how Bradbury was annoyed by an elision of a scene in the episode's final form, leading to a falling out between Bradbury and Serling, but, aside from a casual reference to Richard Matheson, they manage not to cite any of the other "Little Bradburys" who wrote for the series, such as William F. Nolan (whom Matthew Bradley notes in a comment below never saw his contributed script produced) or the series' best writer, Charles Beaumont (whom Bradley notes was ghosted in some of his last credited work, as his health failed, by Jerry Sohl). There are good bits, here and there, again mostly from the less self-important actors (the script, as narrated by Kelsey Grammer, even attempts to make a virtue of Shatner's take-ruining and scene-stealing), but this is a very poor showing for a series that has been a somewhat superficial but reasonably accurate historical survey in its previous episodes (I'll be reviewing the subsequent new episodes soon, devoted to crime and western drama). And it certainly notes the pressures from the network suits, for Serling to dumb things down, for Allen to go campy (which he gleefully did), and for Roddenberry to emulate Allen (or the unmentioned Outer Limits) and get more monsters on board (the multicolored womenoids, almost all hot for Kirk, apparently not quite enough exotica). And it wraps up with a pronouncement, plummily intoned by Grammer, that TZ was the best-written series in television history, a claim neither Serling nor any reasonable judge would make, even if we took only the Beaumont episodes into consideration; even Bill Mumy, in calling it the best tv series so far, isn't nearly as sweepingly wrong.



Meanwhile, I'm breaking my "rule" again here and am featuring a book that's still in print, albeit it might not be for long, and it certainly turns up a wealth of material from magazines and books that are harder to find. Comics historians Denis Kitchen (a comics artist and publisher, and executor of Kurtzman's estate) and Paul Buhle (a Brown University historian with particular interest in comics and Judaica) have produced a slightly stilted but reasonably informative and beautifully illustrated biography/Festschrift of Harvey Kurtzman, whose career was at least as spectacular in publishing as Serling's in electronic media, his influence at least as great, his ultimate disappointment with the shape of his career probably at least as heartbreaking to him. From his earliest comics aspirations and early one-page humorous strips, "Hey Look!", for Atlas/Timely Comics (which would become Marvel), through his revolutionizing war comics at EC while that house was coming to the fore with its similarly challenging horror titles, and then out-challenging everyone in that business when Mad, which he wrote and designed nearly every aspect of from founding in 1952 to 1956, became a huge success and the only title to long survive the attacks on EC from without (driven by such rabble-rousing as Frederic Wertham's distorting "study" The Seduction of the Innocent--which, it should be noted, was more focused on crime-fiction comics than even the horror titles) and within the comics industry (notably from the triumvirate, including Columbia pulp-line owner Louis Silberkleit, who published Archie Comics, and resented enormously and litigiously Kurtzman's parodies of their cash-cow throughout the decades)...and became, in the course of that success, ever more ambitious and rule-breaking (even the reformatted black-and-white Ballantine collections from the early years of Mad didn't adequately give a sense of all the elegances and innovations of the standard-sized, richly-colored comic book it was, the authors note, and how thrilled Kurtzman was when the title was remade, briefly, into a slick-paper, 8.5 x 11" magazine--the dimensions remain the same through today, but the paper was downgraded not long after). But Kurtzman's desire to continue to run Mad according to his vision was far less practically possible once it was no longer part of a profitable stable, but the sole EC publication, and publisher William Gaines was unwilling to turn it essentially completely over to Kurtzman...who then left, and much of Mad's glory left with him.

Kurtzman already had a fan in Hugh Hefner, who offered an opportunity to do a fully-slick, full-color, more "adult" humor magazine, and a few more artists, such as Arnold Roth, signed on along with a core of his staff from Mad for the two issues produced of Trump. Then a credit-line crunch, partly in the aftermath of the American News Company magazine-distributor dismemberment, slapped around the Playboy Enterprises cashflow and Hefner was, essentially, forced to fold Trump despite excellent sales; a core group of Kurtzman and his ex-Mad and -Trump cronies banded together to produce Humbug!, an inexpensive (from the distributors' point of view, probably Too inexpensive) small-format comic, which lasted for about a year and a half, from '57-'58; Kurtzman and his collaborators scrambled pretty hard for the next year or so, but received interesting assignments from such slick magazines as Playboy, Esquire, and Pageant, and Kurtzman published with Ballantine an all-original paperback comics collection, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1958). In 1960, Kurtzman's fourth and last satire magazine emerged; James Warren, doing well with Famous Monsters of Filmland and its stablemates, was willing to partner on the release of Help! magazine, again in large-sized format but, if anything, on as much a shoestring budget as Humbug! had been. But Help! was about as important a snag in pop-culture history as Kurztman's Mad had been, reuniting most of the old crew from the previous three magazines, at least for occasional contributions, and adding such folks as Robert Sheckley, Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson, Serling and Algis Budrys mostly as script/text contributors, along with occasional work in this wise by the likes of Orson Bean, who also, like such up-and-coming comics and actors as Woody Allen and John Cleese (the latter in New York with an Oxbridge Fringe-inspired troupe), would star in the photos used in "fumetti" strips--similar to comic strips, with speech balloons coming from the actors in the photos. Also, for the first year of the magazine, rather more famous comedians and actors, ranging from Ernie Kovacs to Mort Sahl to Tom Poston, posed for humorous cover photos; most of these folks were apparently convinced to do so by assistant editor Gloria Steinem, just beginning her magazine-production career. She left after the first year, but was soon replaced by a promising young Midwestern cartoonist, Terry Gilliam, who was in place when Cleese was employed for his photo shoot; this would result in their mutual participation in Monty Python's Flying Circus when Gilliam moved to England to avoid the Draft in the latter '60s. Other Kurtzman-inspired young cartoonists, including Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, contributed to the magazine in various ways; Crumb even a had a bit-role in a fumetti, as well as debuting Fritz the Cat in Help!. But the constant budget restrictions Warren offered, as well as his caving in quickly to the again-outraged Archie Comics folks after Kurtzman's recurring character Goodman Beaver had an adventure which thoroughly mocked Archie and company again, led to discontent...and the magazine folded in 1965. Beaver, a somewhat Candide-like figure (with an ambiguously provocative name) was pitched to Playboy, which countered with a desire to have Beaver become a female character, and the strips to have a fair amount of cheesecake in them, and thus was born Little Annie Fanny, who would be a prime source of income for Kurtzman and his usual partner on the strip Will Elder for nearly three decades. Other activities came and went, but Annie went on forever (and oddly rather resembles actress Loni Anderson, not on the scene in the early '60s, but who might've patterned her look after the character a bit).

But Kurtzman also had opportunities to teach, and see his work influence further generations of comics and comix artists, who understandably lionized him; his early projects in graphic novels were mostly stymied, aside from the collection of Goodman Beaver from Macfadden and the Ballantine original book, and best-ofs his magazines with Ballantine (Mad comics, Humbug!) and Fawcett Gold Medal (Help!). Kitchen and Buhle note that the kind of graphic novel he wanted to do, and did manage, in relatively short form, to see one impressive example published, reprinted here in color from The Saturday Evening Post, wouldn't be too common until after Will Eisner's A Contract with God appeared in 1978, and not popular nor critically acclaimed till the likes of Art Spiegelman's Maus in the next decade--true unless you take into account such works as Walt Kelly and Jules Feiffer were publishing in the 1950s and later. But it's a very handsome book and does some innovative presentations of unpublished and work-in-progress from Kurtzman and his collaborators. You would do well to supplement it as a history with such items as the Fantagraphics complete reprint of Humbug! (and its accompanying interviews) and their collection of interviews with Kurtzman, reprinted from their critical magazine The Comics Journal, but this is a valuable book. Even if Harry Shearer's witty, bitter intro is too short to be so prominently advertised.

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's "forgotten" books...

utterly charming: Josie Long: All of the Planet's Wonders (Shown In Detail)

As BBC Radio 4 puts it on their website:
"Comedy series in which Josie Long attempts to better herself through learning from reference books, with help from Irish comedienne Maeve Higgins."

Unfortunately, you have only one day left to hear the first of the four episodes, which were stripped last week. But they are eminently worth making time for (and the following three episodes will each be taken down one day after the previous).

As the first one's longer blurb goes:
Award winning comedian, Josie Long (BBC New Comedy Awards, if.comedy Best Newcomer 2006) presents her first radio series, in which she aims to explore all of the planet's wonders (in detail) over four 14 minute episodes.

This comedy series is all about Long's desire to better herself through learning and her enjoyment of discovering things in reference books.

Josie is joined by Irish comedian, Maeve Higgins, and by a variety of comedic guests -Robin Ince, Chris Neill, Daniel Harkin, Henning Wehn and Isy Suttie, plus the occasional actual expert.

Each episode is anchored by Josie and Maeve in the studio, with Josie presenting her essay on the week's given subject and Maeve helping with questions, illustrations and interruptions. The guests help to play extra characters or to provide specialist advice.

This week, Josie uses the book "Astronomy for Dummies" to try and unravel the greater mysteries of the cosmos.

I liked it a lot. The Sound of Young America's Jesse Thorn makes a guest appearance.