Crimson Peak/Strawberry Hill Connection? Or am I just imagining things?

I have a lingering question about Guillermo Del Toro's recent Gothic horror film Crimson Peak that I haven't seen anyone raise--and which I had wondered about even before the movie's release. The great Gothic writer Horace Walpole lived in a completely Gothic estate called "Strawberry Hill." What I keep wondering is: is Crimson Peak, the name of the film's central manor house, a play on Strawberry Hill? Crimson Peak is loaded with references to Gothic literature and film and cinematic ghost stories--all the usual suspects: The Innocents, The Changeling, Mario Bava's ghost stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, ad infinitum. A reference to Walpole would be perfectly suitable, especially considering his references to Algernon Blackwood in the name of a manor house in his Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Your guess is as good as mine.

The New Mexico Museum of Space honors George Pal

http://www.alamogordonews.com/story/news/local/community/2015/10/06/new-mexico-museum-space-history/73415724/

Last weekend, the New Mexico Museum of Space inducted five visionary filmmakers into its Space Hall of Fame: George Melies, Fritz Lang, George Lucas, Walt Disney, and George Pal. All of these men helped popularize the idea of spaceflight and make it a reality or helped make science fiction a popular and profitable movie genre. I was honored to accept Mr. Pal's award on behalf of his family, and to read an essay by Mr. Pal himself. The keynote speaker was Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden, whose own speech coincidentally dovetailed perfectly with Mr. Pal's.

My authorized biography of Mr. Pal is nearing completion. My research for it included interviewing over sixty of Pal's co-workers, family members, and fans in the movie industry. The Pal family has given me unparalleled support and access to Pal's papers and this will be the definitive work on his life and films.

Dr. Quest's Supersonic Jet Soars Again: Moebius Models's "Dragonfly" Model

The good folks at Moebius Models have outdone themselves again with yet another first-rate kit, which they seem to release faster than a "Jonny Quest" villain can holler "AIEEEEE!" In the beloved Hanna-Barbera series, the Dragonfly was Dr. Quest's supersonic jet in which he and the series' other heroes-- Race Bannon, Jonny, Hadji, and Bandit-- soared around the world, battling their foes and righting wrongs at every port of call. Moebius has done an outstanding job of reproducing the Dragonfly in styrene. Luckily, "Jonny Quest" has been the victim of a ridiculous reboot or "reimagining" (which very little "imagining" will factor into) and the wonderful, streamlined beauty of the Dragonfly hasn't been reinvented in some ridiculous 21st century way that kills its mid-century animated comic book-style charm. Moebius has captured that charm beautifully. 

I can only hope that they will follow this up with figure kits of Doug Wildey's Quests and their nefarious enemies: Dr. Zin, Turu the Terrible, the Lizard Men, et al. Thanks again, Moebius! 

David Pal's praise for my manuscript "George Pal: Man of Tomorrow"

David Pal, the eldest son of producer/director George Pal, has this to say about my authorized biography of his father, George Pal: Man of Tomorrow:

"Bravo, Justin. Your manuscript is wonderful. You have made a document that will be a treasure to my family, I am sure, forever. I believe there will never need to be another biography of my father based on the in-depth research that is present in your manuscript. It is a complete picture of his life and most importantly a liberation of facts into the light of the truth, which from my perspective has been much-needed.
  "All those names that I had forgotten and all the memories of my past with my father that have been rekindled– I have never previously felt that with other writing about him. You have captured aspects of him as a person that I have found very difficult to explain to others, particularly those who think they knew him. Thanks so much, Justin.
  "I will, from this point on, say to other researchers that all the facts regarding my father have already been addressed in toto in your book and there is nothing further that could be added."

For Sale: Ultra-Rare Unfilmed "A Clockwork Orange" Screenplay by Anthony Burgess Himself!

http://www.ebay.com/itm/221817543837?ssPageName=STRK%3AMESELX%3AIT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649

I'm selling an extremely rare reproduction of executive producer Si Litvinoff's personal copy of Anthony Burgess's unfilmed screenplay of "A Clockwork Orange." This is not Stanley Kubrick's screenplay that was shot, or Terry Southern's earlier script, but one by Burgess himself. It cleaves much closer to Burgess's novel and has a wildly different opening, among countless other differences. Two years ago, the Anthony Burgess Foundation told me that the only copies of this script that they know of are in their collection and in the Kubrick Archives. I sold Litvinoff's original copy of this script a while back and it is currently up for sale by a European bookseller for 15,000 Euros.

The exquisite corpses keep a-comin'

More exquisite corpse nonsense done in collaboration with Paul Komoda and others. 

R.I.P. Sharon Compton-- "The Haunted Palace's" portraitess

I am shocked and saddened to report the passing of my friend Sharon Compton, a veteran of many Roger Corman and Chuck Griffith movies. She was a lovely, sunny person and I had lunch with her (usually in the company of some other Corman vets) whenever I could. Her stories were never dull and she was always a pleasure to be around. I'm relieved that I was able to interview her about her work with Chuck for my second book, "Interviews Too Shocking to Print!"-- I made sure that Sharon got one of the first copies of it.

Sharon's first movie job was painting Vincent Price's portrait for Corman's H.P. Lovecraft adaptation "The Haunted Palace." Sharon lamented not having photographed the painting before it went up in flames in the film's finale. To this day, she has never been properly credited for the painting. She revealed to me that the painting has hidden beastly faces scattered throughout it, including a gargoyle-like one in Price's cravat and a piranha-like creature at the bottom of his waistcoat, the lowermost button its eye.

Sharon also worked on the spacesuits, among other things, for Curtis Harrington's "Queen of Blood," and in various capacities on Corman productions like "The Wild Angels," "The Trip," and "Battle Beyond the Stars."

Probably Sharon's most memorable role was in the obscure "Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype," in which she played Heckyl/Hype's (Oliver Reed) landlady, Mrs. Quivel, who Reed first seduces, then electrocutes. Sharon got to do some wacky histrionics during her big death scene, including darting her tongue wildly in and out. After a screening of the film, she told me, a young girl recognized her, walked up to Sharon, and started imitating her lizard-like tongue gyrations. Sharon took this as a compliment, as she should have.

I will miss Sharon very much.

Another Exquisite Corpse (with Paul Komoda and Norman Meyers)

Mil gracias, Noir City, para "El Vampiro Negro"

The Noir City Film Festival outdid itself tonight with a screening of the only existing English-subtitled 35mm print of "El Vampiro Negro" ("The Black Vampire"), a 1953 Argentinian reworking of Fritz Lang's "M." Hopefully, this beautifully photographed and tense obscurity will get the solid Blu-Ray release it deserves. The film's raw sordidness serves as a reminder of how much saltier foreign crime films were than their American counterparts. One of the high points of "El Vampiro Negro" is a roving tour of a dive bar where one of the protagonists sings, all set to a torch song she's gorgeously moaning out onstage. Shot in high noir style, the sequence is all smoke, chiaroscuro lighting, and misery, and in the best sense. One wretched tableau vivant follows another: a tart passed out on a table in the foreground as her equally blousy companion gazes uncertainly around behind her; a hideous barfly and his blonde companion flash each other oozing grins over their drinks; a haggard and obviously horny patron staring entranced by the chanteuse; and another drunken, smoking degenerate after another, after another, after another. Later, the singer catches a glimpse of the Peter Lorre-esque child-killer through the club's basement window and bursts into hysterics. On the dance floor up above, a floozy nonchalantly tells her dancing partner, "I like to be beaten, too, but I don't scream." As I said, much saltier.

I don't want to give too much else about this little wonder away for right now, but I strongly recommend it.

A Cinema of Miracles: Remembering George Pal

Producer/director George Pal confers with his star, Rod Taylor, on the set of Pal's most popular film The Time Machine (1960).


In 2008, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' celebrated producer/director George Pal's centennial with a screening of his feature films and shorts. AMPAS asked me to write that screening's program notes--here is the essay: "A Cinema of Miracles: Remembering George Pal." David Pal, George's eldest son, told me that he thought this was the best article about his father ever written, which I am incredibly flattered by.

Without further ado:

In 1949 the expressions “science fiction” and “blockbuster movies” were antithetical to each other. Science fiction was considered pure Flash Gordon/Saturday matinee stuff, unfit for adult consumption. Like the Moon itself, the genre was a vast, unexplored territory, with barely enough masterpieces in it to be counted on one hand. Unimaginative producers and executives wouldn’t entertain absurd notions like interplanetary travel, let alone gamble on filming or – heresy  – venerating them.

That is, until George Pal did.

With his Destination Moon (1950), Pal, then 42, ignited the science fiction film boom of the 1950s, oddly enough with a “science fact” movie – a “documentary of the near future,” as Pal described it. His exhaustively detailed, full-color portrayal of man’s first lunar voyage was a hit, proving that intelligent science fiction had a massive audience eager for more. The film’s closing title fittingly reads “The End of the Beginning.” The genre’s infancy was over. Pal had almost single-handedly fathered the most profitable and popular film genre of the last sixty years.

Pal next upped the ante by destroying Earth in his cataclysmic When Worlds Collide (1951), and then trumped himself again by producing arguably the finest depiction of an alien invasion ever filmed in The War of the Worlds (1953). (Pal enthusiast Steven Spielberg went so far as to remake the latter in 2005.) Despite their tight budgets and relatively unknown talent, these movies weren’t haphazard poverty row quickies stocked with klutzy rubber monsters. They were crafted to exacting standards and overseen by some of the finest minds in astronomy and rocketry of their day, and they came alive with breathtaking (and Academy Award-winning) visual effects. Over the years, Pal closely collaborated with some of the biggest names in 20th century science fiction and fantasy, including Robert Heinlein, painter Chesley Bonestell, Robert Bloch (Psycho), Philip Jose Farmer, and Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont. Pal gave stop-motion animation titan Ray Harryhausen his first professional job in the film industry.

As Pal blazed a trail with his genre works, he endured the skepticism and ridicule that allowed those who followed him – filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro – to popularly legitimize science fiction and fantasy movies to an unprecedented extent. His films inspired a generation of astronomers, scientists, writers, special effects magicians and artists to persevere in their love of the awe-inspiring reaches of space and time, their infinite mysteries, and the shared dream of cracking them.

In 1960, Pal produced and directed his most popular work, The Time Machine. Like several of his earlier hits, it was disdained by its own studio and filmed for pocket change, only to score big at the box office and become a beloved perennial favorite. Several flops and near-misses followed, including 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964), a charming and whimsical western fantasy whose makeup artist, William Tuttle, earned the Academy’s Honorary Award “for his outstanding makeup achievement” for the film. It was the first time in Academy history that a makeup artist was honored by the organization.

Pal passed away in 1980, and his reputation today rests primarily on his live-action science fiction and fantasy features. However, his (unjustly) neglected animated shorts remain some of his most sublime and enduring works. Filmed in Holland and Hollywood in the 1930s and ’40s, Pal’s stop-motion Puppetoons occupy a unique niche in animation history. They were shot using the painstaking replacement-animation process that incorporated dozens of different hand-tooled model limbs, torsos and faces to create frequently seamless, elegant and graceful sequences.

One of Pal’s finest Puppetoons is “John Henry and the Inky Poo,” a film that treats its folkloric black hero with far greater respect and dignity than 1940s Hollywood’s live-action fare seemed capable of. Beautifully animated, inventively staged and shot, and moving in its denouement, John Henry transcends the politics of race: it’s a paean to humanity’s indomitable spirit and its superiority to machines.

Therein is a major part of the longevity of Pal’s films: their very human artistry. Unlike many of today’s CGI spectacles and their retina-assaulting, headache-inducing onslaught of un-special effects, the visual effects in Pal’s work were art. They are aesthetically stunning, and even at their most gloriously imperfect, they bear the imprint of gifted artists’ hands. Props and models like the Time Machine, the Martian warships of The War of the Worlds, and the Luna rocket of Destination Moon still have the capacity to astonish.

But there remains much more to Pal’s legacy than special effects sleight of hand. His work is deeply optimistic and genuinely uplifting, easy to enjoy and delightfully unjaded. His oeuvre bespeaks a love of humanity and of the genre to which he devoted his life. This extraordinary cinematic visionary, his fabulous celluloid labors of love, and his joyful spirit may be best captured in the words of one of his protagonists, Dr. Lao: “I’m alive, and being alive is fantastic.”

More Exquisite Corpses With Paul Komoda and Max Wedner

Was the Lucy statue sculpted by Walter Paisley?

Am I the only person who sees a strong resemblance between the infamous Lucille Ball statue at the center of all this Media hubbub and Walter Paisley's "Murdered Man" statue from A Bucket of Blood (1959)? Did somebody just re-purpose the prop from Roger's movie and sculpt a dress and hair on it? That would be oddly appropriate considering the movie. 

Exquisite Corpses with Paul Komoda

An Exquisite Corpse is a (preferably freewheeling) drawing by two or more partners on a folded sheet of paper where each artist continues the other artist's work with little or no idea of what they've been drawing. I can't recommend doing these enough--they keep the imagination limber. Here are two that I did in collaboration with the estimable illustrator Paul Komoda. 

My motto is "I just paint 'em-- I don't explain 'em." 

From My Sketchbook

Contrary to Popular Opinion Blogathon Presents: William Friedkin's THE NIGHT THEY RAIDED MINSKY'S (1968)

* This post is presented as part of Sister Celluloid and Movies Silently's Contrary to Popular Opinion blogathon and, as such, is a defense of what I consider to be an unfairly maligned and unjustly generally ignored film, The Night They Raided Minsky's (1968). To see the full blogathon, visit sistercelluloid.com

All of my favorite William Friedkin films are generally considered his secondary works-- The Boys in the Band, Sorcerer, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A., and one that's barely even considered, The Night They Raided Minsky's. These films are every bit as inventive and artistically vital as his mega-hits like The French Connection and The Exorcist, but for various reasons never had the same galvanic impact on audiences.

Minsky's tells the 95% fictionalized story of how an Amish girl invented the striptease at Billy Minsky's burlesque theater in 1925 New York. (This is no spoiler since crooner Rudy Vallee tells you as much in a prologue). Much of the film is a backstage farce, a la The Boy Friend and Noises Off. Minsky's was part of a 1920s-1930s nostalgia wave in the late '60s, when throwback hits like "Winchester Cathedral" and The Beatles' "Honey Pie" were all the rage. But the beauty of it is that the only way that it really feels "'60s" is in some of its mod editing, like during its rat-a-tat-tat opening credits. The rest of the film is pure, deep-dish 1920s New York, shot on a block of tenements about to be demolished. In the wake of New York's fall to gentrification, this gives the film a special historical poignancy, particularly during its opening.

On a critical level, I have to confess that Minsky's gets too wacky for its own good sometimes. Stan Laurel told actor Alan Young "If you're going to be funny, don't be funny doing it." Minsky's could use some of that kind of restraint, in spots. With that said, star Jason Robards can do no wrong in my book and he kills as Lee Tracy-like top banana comic Raymond Paine, BFC ("Bastard First Class"). Robards fast-talking his way out of his botched pick-up of a married woman is a virtuoso performance, and I could watch him and Norman Wisdom perform their "Perfect Gentleman" number all day. The sheer precision and variety of Robards' and Wisdom's comic business in that scene is astounding and holds up after dozens of viewings. The late film historian and professor Gene Stavis, who once followed Minsky's from theater to theater as it moved around New York, once aptly told me "Minsky's is eternal."

I am admittedly no scholar on burlesque theater, so I can't unequivocally praise Friedkin's recreations of burly-q shows, but the film's vision of Minsky's acts just FEELS real through and through. (It was convincing enough to be rotoscoped for use in the burlesque scenes in Ralph Bakski's animated American Pop). It doesn't have Bob Fosse's trademark fixation on sordidness like in Cabaret's Kit Kat Club numbers, but it still has just the right amount of tawdriness. Friedkin isn't out to make any overt statements like Fosse--he's focused on capturing burlesque's silly, bawdy, gently sleazy charm. Unlike Fosse's performers, Friedkin's painted-and-powdered Criswell-like Emcee during the "Take Ten Terrific Girls (in Only Nine Costumes)" number is just ghoulish enough to be funny without being macabre. And Friedkin's dancers in their garish pastel outfits and makeups look just blousy enough without falling into Weimar loathsomeness.

That's where Minsky's really excels: in the likable balance of so many of its parts, including an affection for the bygone days of burlesque leavened with ironic amusement at that innocuous brand of ribaldry. Irony in large quantities can be fatal to any movie, and Friedkin makes the film JUST ironic enough. It's also not too seedy, too wistful, too innocent, or too romantic to ever lose its charm, which it largely maintains.

I could spend paragraphs upon paragraphs praising the supporting cast, but I will briefly single out Denholm Elliott as the pale, sweaty Legion of Decency rep intent on shutting Minsky's down at the first sign of a nipple and Joseph Wiseman as Billy Minsky's wry sage of a father ("Where there's smoke, there's salmon.). And in spite of Minsky's broad slapstick, there is a wistful, elegiac undercurrent of loss, personified by the faded vaudevillian Professor Spats (actual vaudevillian Burt Lahr, in his final performance). When Spats surveys the wreckage onstage after the titular raid, his expression beautifully evokes the loss of an era, a theatrical form, and a peculiar kind of innocence. The flash of breasts that sparks the raid is the beginning of the end--the genie is out of the proverbial bottle, and the form now has to one-up itself with stripping, then something harder, then something harder still, then descend into the 42nd Street Purgatory of the '70s and '80s.

To put it simply, I love this film, whatever its faults may be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROLgwF_Bqhs

R.I.P. Taylor Negron--a Dear and Ridiculously Funny Man

To say that I am saddened and stunned by the loss of my friend Taylor Negron is an understatement. I was just texting with him four days ago. The last lengthy message I got was just before Christmas-- "Dear son. Can't wait to see happy Christmas.to you. We can have a quite luncheon in the begging of year. When I am styled in my la apt." Taylor was always good to me--unlike the craven show biz steretotype, he never looked to get anything from me except good conversation and friendship, and I never, ever had a cross word with him. He was also very well-read ("I read more than the average bear," he used to say), which counts for a LOT. For some reason, our conversations always seemed to drift toward early 20th century theater--he was Ruth Etting's biggest fan.

We hung out in New York (he gave me a linen shirt there) and L.A. whenever we could make our schedules mesh. This photo was taken at a friend's house in Silver Lake after a grilled shrimp dinner.

For a guy who excelled at deadpan humor, Taylor wore his emotions on his sleeves like a little kid in a very winning way. I have so many good memories of him--going to an art exhibit with him, Heather Sterman, and Amy Heckerling. Singing "Anything Goes" with him in an LA hat shop, to the shopgirl's confused glee. Listening to him and his performing partner Logan Heftel sing their song memorializing Robin Williams in Taylor's apartment. It was the only time I ever saw Taylor tear up.

I will miss his utterly unique comic turns of phrase, delivered in his classic deadpan mode: "I would rather be stuck in a cul-de-sac with a slavering llama." When I spooned a bit too much jam into my oatmeal when we were having brunch, he warmly chided me: "Do you know how sugary that is? What are you--a diabetic Joan Blondell at the automat?"

He cared about me, and I cared about him. And that's what matters.
Love you, Taylor. I'm gonna miss you.