Star Wars? I was right there at the beginning, I tell you.
Well, when I say the beginning, I mean I got into the press show. In Manchester. All right, so it was hardly the creative coalface, but looking back on it I can feel that I was a witness to something. I saw the moment when we moved from a world with no Star Wars in it to one where it would forever be a part of the fabric.
Many at that showing were genuinely astonished at what unreeled before them. They just weren't prepared for it. Until Star Wars came along, to be an sf fan was to have lowish expectations from the cinema. You learned to be very, very happy over not very much.
If I didn't quite share the astonishment, that was for one simple reason. Back then I subscribed to American Cinematographer, and the issue dated July 1977 had carried a Star Wars cover and no less than four behind-the-scenes articles including one by effects supervisor John Dykstra, detailing the various ways in which the visuals were achieved. There was no skipping over the hard bits, no simplification for public understanding. This was a magazine for fellow-pros who didn't need to be talked down to, and hangers-on like me who didn't want to be.
American Cinematographer was to be my guidebook through the boom in science fiction cinema over the next few years. Its editor was Herb A Lightman, a former cameraman who loved nothing better than to get out of the office and take himself down to a movie set where he could talk shop with old colleagues and maybe end up operating camera number fifteen on some massive, unrepeatable stunts-and-effects sequence. Lightman's almost childlike enthusiasm for the business of making movies, allied with the magazine's technical remit, resulted in some of the best insider coverage of screen science fiction around.
Over the next half-decade or so, that same coverage gave me advance warning of a whole series of ground-breaking sf movies that would all owe their greenlighting to a "Star Wars effect". Not that Star Wars changed the audience. The audience was always there, its appetites unrecognised, uncared-for, not believed in – those around-the-block lines didn't gather by mass hypnosis. Rather, it forced a change in the industry's attitude to science fiction. Fox executives famously slept through the preview screening and would later scramble to retrieve and shred copies of their market research, out of sheer embarrassment. The success of the film was one massive head slap which made them start taking the idea of big-budget sf very seriously indeed.
To me the most memorable films of that period were the ones that owed their commercial viability to the Star Wars effect, but not their inspiration. Alien. Close Encounters. Superman. Blade Runner. As each one came along, its groundbreaking techniques flagged and enthused over by Lightman and his team, it really felt as if the future was opening up and that the possibilities of screen sf were going to be endless.
So what happened? Did that prove to be the case? I'd have to say no. Back then I thought of it as a tidal wave, carrying us forward. But now I think of it more as an earthquake, shaking things up where they stood and leaving us with a different landscape. I look at screen sf now and what I mostly see is new variations on (almost) thirty-year-old templates – which themselves were revisions of much earlier, lower-rent models.
It's hard to find a civilian space crew that doesn't owe something to the bickering bluecollar bunch from Alien, or a scary extraterrestrial that doesn't owe something to that same movie's indestructible phallus-headed cockroach. If it's a non-scary extraterrestrial… well, even ET was pretty much a calving from the Close Encounters iceberg. While we're at it, knock off that movie's feelgood ending and give Roy Neary a badge and Clarice Starling for a sidekick, and you've got The X Files.
Has there been an Earth's-future dystopia since that hasn't made us think of Blade Runner? I look at Spiderman or Iron Man now and I see the same basic approach that made Superman work. It was that film's screenplay that cracked the problem of the comicbook movie with the realisation that the key to believable superdeeds lies in the way you handle the hero's private life. The humour, the form, the tone, the exact placing of the line between fantasy and reality… it's all there in the template.
It was a fertile period, and Star Wars allowed it to happen. It was a great time to be a fan. The downside is that if you felt the first impact of something like Alien, it's hard to get too excited when a Pitch Black comes along. And in a way, we've taken some backward steps; my heart sinks at the prospect of committing two hours of my life to a movie in which I just know that the last act is going to consist almost entirely of two CGI characters slugging it out in a CGI world.
When the Art of Star Wars exhibition was running at London's Barbican centre, I took myself along. Nearly all of the props and sketches were from the later films but I might as well have been back in 1978. The only difference being that while I still find Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back watchable, Return of the Jedi seems to have set the tone for the rest of them – a bunch of elements thrown together, some you like, some you don't, but the whole thing lacking in coherence and feeling somehow unnecessary. For me, watching the later Star Wars movies is like being buttonholed by a gamer at a convention who insists on recounting in great detail all the fantastic and hilarious things that happened to his character in last night's RPG. Lucas has extended the weaknesses of the original – the cod mythologizing lifted straight from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, the made-up future politics – while losing sight of its youthful joie de vivre.
And then he had to revisit the originals, too. What would the young Lucas have made of this middle-aged stranger imposing revisions on his work? George, you're just fiddling now. Stop it. You're spoiling it.
American Cinematographer's no longer the magazine it was, either.
Grump, grump.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
The scariest comic I ever read
I'm not sure exactly how old I was when I first read What If? v2 #30; I don't believe I bought it new, so I must have been older than nine, but I also don't think it was long after it came out, so I'll ballpark myself around eleven.As you can see from the cover, it was "two feature length thrillers" asking the question "What if the Fantastic Four's second child had lived?" Comic Vine has Jim Valentino listed as the book's writer and (ironically) current FF artist Dale Eaglesham as penciler, but I'm not sure if they did both stories or, if not, which one they were responsible for. I'm not concerned with the second story for the purposes of this post, as it was a fairly pedestrian yarn about Reed and Sue Richards' daughter becoming some sort of global messiah, but the book's first "thriller" scared the living heck out of me.
The premise of the story, as implied by the question/title, was presenting one possible scenario had the second child of Mister Fantastic and the Invisible Woman lived. See, while today any FF fan worth their salt knows that Reed and Sue do have two children, Franklin and Valeria, back in 1991, Franklin was the only child of Marvel's First Family, as a second had been lost in childbirth during John Byrne's run on the book due to the mother's exposure to radiation in the Negative Zone (I believe).
Here, with the help of Doctor Octopus, Reed is able to save the baby, a girl, but Sue dies in the process.
The story is told from Franklin's point of view, and right off the bat Valentino (or whoever wrote this) provides an emotionally gut-wrenching account of a little boy losing his mother and having to accept that the person who ostensibly killed her is now a member of his family. That's not even the makings of a horror movie, that's a real-life tragedy that was certainly not typically dealt with in all-ages super hero comics during the 90's, not something I had ever really thought about at my tender age, and a subject I at least remember the creative team handling with impressive care and craft.
However from there creepier elements beyond the norm do begin cropping up as members of the Fantastic Four as well as friends like Alicia Masters are becoming weak and dying and nobody can figure out an explanation why. Franklin is the only one convinced his younger sister has something to do with it, but his father refuses to believe him and his uncles and their super friends humor him but try to explain to him it's only natural to feel threatened by a new sibling (which it is).
There's really no on-panel action or violence for the first two thirds of the story, just personal dynamic drama about your family being thrown into tumult and nobody believing you; it felt more like "Child's Play" or any other thriller designed to terrify kids specifically because it focuses in on your helplessness to save the people you love because you can't get anybody to listen to you.
Again, I can't say for sure that Dale Eaglesham was the artist on this story, but if he was, even at what would have been a formative stage in his career, he was doing some impressive work, as his visuals were a huge part of what made this story so dang eerie. I vividly recall a panel of Franklin walking by the room of an emaciated Johnny Storm who was half-conscious and mumbling as one of the scariest images my young mind had ever processed. This was the Human Torch, a cocky, young character full of life sapped of all that and there wasn't even a bad guy to throw blame to; gripping stuff when you're eleven (or twenty-seven).
Reed basically locks himself in his lab and becomes obsessed with figuring out what had happened to his family at the expense of paying any attention his son, who insisted his sister was to blame, a claim Mister Fantastic refused to hear. This worked because it was a pretty logical extension of Reed's character (how many times has he locked himself in a lab and ignored his family over the years?) and made the next bit even more shocking but weighty when he hauled off and slapped Franklin for daring to hurl these accusations.
Obviously this story played on some pretty realistic fears most kids have: your younger sibling trying to steal your family from you (literally in this case), nobody listening to you, and even a parent who is supposed to be protecting you turning against you in the cruelest of ways. This wasn't alien invaders or monsters from another dimension, it was real stuff that some kids are unfortunate enough to face jacked up with sci fi trappings.
The climax of the story is almost predictable, but no less horrifying, as the youngest Richards does indeed turn out to be a parasitic Negative Zone monster with emotion-altering abilities who turns into a giant green creature after Franklin recruits Doctor Doom of all people as his savior while his father curses at him to his last breath. The beast ends up tearing through both Reed and Doom and trying to come at Franklin, who is able to activate a switch and send her back to where she came from. The story ends with Franklin cradling his dead father's head and wishing somebody would have listened to him.
It was a horror movie in comic book form done to great effect and pulled off with maximum psychological effect. It terrified me so much I gave the comic to my mom and had her hide it from me, never wanting to see it again. I believe when I was in college we were cleaning some area of the house and I found it; I read it again, all my childhood emotions came rushing back, and I threw it out post haste.
It was the scariest comic I ever read.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
28 Comics I Love
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[NOTE: I should have had this up last week to follow the example set by the much harder working Ben in his whole series which you should go back and re-check out, but it was a weird thing to do. At first I felt like I couldn't find enough comics that I felt as strongly about as the ones I love most on this list...then I found I had way, way too many fucking comics and had to cut way down. I hope no one takes this as a best of all time list (as if anyone really gives a shit what my best of all time would look like) and more as a snapshot of why I'm so juvenile at this age. - KP]
Still...So...Tired
Hey y'all, very sorry for the infrequency/relative lameness of this week's posting, but apparently getting married takes a lot out of you (and your friends). Besides that, I was also out late last night at MarvelFest and am freaking exhausted.
I swear I'm gonna get some sleep this weekend and return to the irreverent discourse on comics, movies and Subway that you live to consume. Until then, here's a medley of covers from random stuff I bought in the 90's!
I swear I'm gonna get some sleep this weekend and return to the irreverent discourse on comics, movies and Subway that you live to consume. Until then, here's a medley of covers from random stuff I bought in the 90's!
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