Nostalgia – Ash Clifton, Writer

Movies I Loved as a Kid: “Rollerball”

It still amazes me that Norman Jewison, the same guy that directed Moonstruck, also directed Rollerball. I can’t imagine two films that are more different in content, genre, style, and tone. Moonstruck is a rom-com (imho, the best ever made); Rollerball is a dystopian sci-fi movie. Moonstruck is a comedy; Rollerball is a violent, brutal drama.

And yet, when one thinks about it, the twinning of these two movies under Jewison’s visionary eye kind of makes sense. Both are about an individual seeking personal freedom—self-actualization, as the shrinks say. The main difference is that, in Moonstruck, the obstacle is the protagonist’s own self-doubt and traumatized soul, while in Rollerball, it’s an oppressive, corporatist state.

Moonstruck is the better film, by far. But, as a kid, I absolutely loved Rollerball. It came out fifty years ago, in 1975, and it’s hard to describe how incredibly cool it was among the 11-to-14-year-old boy demographic. It checked all the teenage-boy boxes: sci-fi, sports, violence, motorcycles, and sex.

And then there was the novelty of the game itself, a nightmarish blend of NFL football, roller derby, motocross, and MMA. Of these, football seemed to be the primary influence, with the protagonist coming off very much like one of the celebrity quarterbacks of the era (think Joe Namath or Snake Stabler).

So, basically you had a futuristic, ultra-violent sport where Joe Namath got to kill people! How cool is that??? The film also had the appeal of forbidden fruit. A “hard R”-rated movie, its violence was deemed shocking, even transgressive, at the time. This was especially true considering the film’s A-list imprimatur; it was released by a major Hollywood studio (United Artists) with a major star (James Caan) and a major director (Jewison).

In retrospect, the fact that Rollerball was made at all seems a bit miraculous. It’s a good movie, and there is still much to love about it. Set on a near-future Earth where huge mega-corporations have replaced governments, it tells the story of an elite athlete, Jonathan E., who plays the violent, gladiatorial sport of Rollerball. Jonathan is so good that, after ten years in the sport, he is its oldest living practitioner, as well as its best. He is beloved and famous—so famous, in fact, that he worries the reigning cabal of corporate bosses, who use the game as a kind of panem et circenses form of mass entertainment, giving the oppressed masses an outlet for their (potentially revolutionary) rage.

Mr. Bartholomew, the CEO of the corporation that owns Jonathan’s team (and, it is implied, Jonathan himself, bodily, as a kind of company chattel), is especially concerned. He orders the aging star to announce his retirement. Jonathan refuses. Bartholomew orders him again. Jonathan refuses, again. Unfortunately, Jonathan is too famous to arrest or kill, so Bartholomew contrives to make the next few Rollerball matches so absurdly violent, even by the standards of the game, that Jonathan will change his mind, get injured, or get killed.

If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Rollerball essentially invented the extreme-sports-of-the-future sub-genre of sci-fi, beginning with Death Race 2000 and continuing all the way up to The Hunger Games series. It also anticipated cyberpunk, in which evil corporations have taken over all aspects of modern life, creating an authoritarian hellscape of haves vs have-nots.

In our current, CGI-corrupted age of cinema, Rollerball is especially impressive for its great, practical stunts. Supposedly, the stuntmen got so adept at the titular game that they would play matches amongst themselves between shooting sessions. And the acting is great, too. James Caan’s understated, nuanced performance as Jonathan is one of his best. He was bashed by some film critics for seeming “checked-out” in the role, but I think they were wrong. He’s playing a somewhat inarticulate but courageous character who is trying to make sense of his plight—and find a way to win.

Now that I have said all those good things about Rollerball, it’s time for me to add that it is also an extremely dated film. Alas, it suffers from much of the garishness of the 1970s, as well as a whiff of misogyny that even the patriarchal/fascist setting cannot quite explain. But if you can get past these flaws, it’s a good movie.

Check it out. It’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Hotel California”

If you’re of a certain age (i.e., over fifty), you probably spent many a summer afternoon in the long-ago past listening to the 45 single of “Hotel California” over and over and over. (You might also have enjoyed a mildly illegal form of herbal, hand-rolled cigarette as you listened.) If you did, you’ve probably read a lot of articles about the song, and heard a lot of interviews by Don Henley or Glenn Frey or others about it, to the point that you probably think you know everything about it. You know, for instance, that Henley and Frey wrote the lyrics in a very short period of time (by some accounts, a few hours; by others, over a weekend). You know that the album cover is a photo of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and that some people think they see a mysterious figure in the bell tower. And you know that the song is really about Hell, or California-as-Hell, or American hedonism, or…something cool like that.

What you probably don’t know is that song is, primarily, the creation of guitarist Don Felder, who wrote the melody by himself before he even joined the band. As Marty Jourard recounts in his excellent non-fiction book Music Everywhere: The Rock and Roll Roots of a Southern Town:

One afternoon while enjoying his ocean view and no doubt the general situation, Felder sat on his sofa and idly strummed an acoustic twelve-string, eventually refining his musical idea into a carefully crafted guitar arrangement. Using a Teac four-track reel-to-reel recorder, Felder first recorded his Rhythm Ace drum machine playing a cha-cha beat, then added acoustic and electric guitar and bass, then an idea for two solo guitars. Don Henley listened to a cassette mix of this song and more than a dozen others Felder had submitted for consideration and declared this rhythmically complex instrumental the best, giving it a working title of “Mexican Bolero,” and along with Glenn Frey wrote lyrics that transformed Felder’s music demo into “Hotel California,” the title track of the next Eagles album and its first single.

It’s also Felder’s actual guitar playing, along with that of co-lead Joe Walsh, that gives the song its unbelievably haunting tone and its indelible, dark crescendo. I’m not just saying this because Felder, like his childhood friend Tom Petty, is a Gainesville boy like me. Felder is, in fact, one of the most underrated musician/composers in the history of rock-and-roll.

Of course, I don’t mean to denigrate Henley’s and Frey’s brilliant lyrics, gave the song its cachet among the teenage set of the 1970s (and now, even). One thing I’ve noted about “Hotel California” is that is one of those rare examples of a narrative poem (i.e., it tells a continuous story). Also, it’s written in ballad quatrains, with a rhyming scheme of ABCB. How cool is that?

And, yes, I do see a mysterious figure in the bell tower.

Rock on…

What I’m Reading: “Paperbacks from Hell”

Having had exactly one book traditionally published, I am far from an expert on the world of publishing. Even so, I learned a lot more than I ever expected, and have since become fascinated by the industry as a whole. Also, I am currently working on a supernatural horror novel. So, it makes perfect sense that I would be drawn to Grady Hendrix’s excellent non-fiction book, Paperbacks from Hell, which examines (skewers?) pulp horror literature as it existed in the 1970s and 80s, both as a uber-genre and as an industry.

Let me say right up front that this is a very funny book. I found myself laughing out loud many, many times as Hendrix describes the trends and fads that overtook the genre. Take this passage where he introduces the wildly successful pop writer Robin Cook, whose 1977 book Coma is, in Hendrix’s words, the “source of the medical-thriller Nile.” As Hendrix goes on:

It all started with Robin Cook and his novels: Fever, Outbreak, Mutation, Shock, Seizure…terse nouns splashed across paperback racks. And just when you thought you had Cook pegged, he adds an adjective: Fatal Cure, Acceptable Risk, Mortal Fear, Harmful Intent. An ophthalmologist as well as an author, Cook has checked eyes and written best sellers with equal frequency. He’s best known for Coma (1977)…. Its heroine, Susan Wheeler, is one of those beautiful, brilliant medical students who’s constantly earning double takes from male colleagues or looking in the mirror and wondering if she’s a doctor or a woman—and why can’t she be both, dammit? On her first day as a trainee at Boston Memorial, she settles on “woman” and allows herself to flirt with an attractive patient on his way into a routine surgery. They make a date for coffee, but something goes wrong on the table and he goes into…a COMA!

Hendrix cleverly divides each chapter to a single, overarching trend in the pulp horror universe, with titles like HAIL, SATAN (novels of demonic possession and devil-sex), WEIRD SCIENCE (evil doctors and mad scientist-sex), INHUMANIOIDS (deformed monsters and mutant-sex), and so on. I was especially impressed by the way Hendrix explains each publishing fad as a symptom of a larger societal shift. For example, he explains how the white-flight phenomenon of the 1970s in which white middle- and upper-class families abandoned the big cities and moved to quaint, charming little towns in upstate New York or the mid-west or norther California or wherever, results in a surge of small-town horror novels like Harvest Home (wherein evil pagan matriarchs conduct human sacrifices to make the corn grow) and Effigies (wherein Satan is breeding grotesque monsters in the basement of the local church).

Another chapter entitled CREEPY KIDS, which deals with such diverse plot concepts as children who are fathered by Satan, children are who are really small adults pretending to be children, and children who, for whatever reason, just love to kill people. I particularly love this passage:

Some parents will feel helpless. “How can I possibly stop my child from murdering strangers with a hammer because she thinks they are demons from hell?” you might wail (Mama’s Little Girl). Fortunately there are some practical, commonsense steps you can take to lower the body count. Most important, try not to have sex with Satan. Fornicating with the incarnation of all evil usually produces children who are genetically predisposed to use their supernatural powers to cram their grandmothers into television sets, headfirst. “But how do I know if the man I’m dating is the devil?” I hear you ask. Here are some warning signs learned from Seed of Evil: Does he refuse to use contractions when he speaks? Does he deliver pickup lines like, “You live on the edge of darkness”? When nude, is his body the most beautiful male form you have ever seen, but possessed of a penis that’s either monstrously enormous, double-headed, has glowing yellow eyes, or all three? After intercourse, does he laugh malevolently, urinate on your mattress, and then disappear? If you spot any of these behaviors, chances are you went on a date with Satan. Or an alien.

One the many things I learned from reading the book was how the entire publishing world (not just horror) was permanently changed in 1979 by an obscure tax-law case called The Thor Power Tool Co. v Commissioner. In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that manufacturers could not write-down poor-selling or slow-selling inventory and thus reduce their tax liability. The case was focused on unsold parts for power-tools, but the ruling equally applied to publishing houses, who had hitherto done the same kind of write-down on their slow-selling novels. As Hendrix explains: “Suddenly, the day of the mid-list novel was over. Paperbacks were given six weeks on the racks to find an audience, then it was off to the shredder.” And so, inevitably, came the frantic scramble to find those half-dozen or so “blockbuster” books each season, behind which publishers focused their resources. (A similar “blockbuster” effect ravaged Hollywood in the 1970s, in this case due to the success of summer films like Jaws and Star Wars.) Books got less pulpy and more sparkly, with foil covers and die-cast cutouts like those made famous by the V.C. Andrews novels (which continued to be published, zombie-like, long after Andrews’s death).

Whether you’re a writer or just a pulp-paperback fan, Paperbacks from Hell is a great read. Check it out…

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Harlan Ellison

The great film critic Roger Ebert once noted that the people we think of as heroes are those we looked up to when we were kids. As adults, we might admire a particularly talented athlete or actor or musician, but they won’t really be “heroes” to us; they’ll just be really cool (but life-sized) people.

I think that my middle-aged affection for Harlan Ellison might be a slight exception to this adage, however. I was a fan of his when I was growing up (he became famous in the 1970s with his revolutionary, sci-fi short-stories like “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”), but he wasn’t exactly a “hero” of mine. Then, in the 1990s, Ellison began to appear on TV as a talk-show celebrity, especially on the sci-fi channel, where he essentially co-hosted a show called Sci-Fi Buzz, where he was often very funny and always insightful. Also, to my amazement, one of his stories, “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” was included in 1993’s Best American Short Stories collection. I saw an Ellison interview around that time, in which related that the series’ editor called him to give him the good news. At the end of their brief conversation, she asked him if had written any other short stories—an unintentional slight that Ellison said felt like “a dagger to the heart.”

But this was typical of Ellison’s relationship to the literary world, and to Hollywood. He couldn’t get no respect. Part of this life-long diss was, surely, his own fault. He was famously abrasive and out-spoken, and hated to have his work messed with. When he wrote the screenplay for the what is generally considered the best episode of the original Star Trek series, “City on the Edge of Forever,” he hated Gene Roddenbury’s changes so much that he tried to have his name taken off the credits. (Fortunately, he failed.) In fact, he was so contentious about such matters that he had a special pseudonym, Cordwainer Smith, that he would use when he felt his work had been to mangled by studio executives that he no longer wanted his real name associated with it.

Paradoxically, the more interviews I watched of Ellison in the 1990s and beyond, the more I liked him. He had a razor wit, and he did not suffer fools easily. He could also be mean as hell when he felt attacked. But these were all characteristics I had seen before in some exceptional people I have met over the years, including my great teacher, the writer Harry Crews. I never met Ellison, but I suspect that we would have gotten along just fine.

Indeed, I came to admire even Elllison’s famously pugilistic nature. He was quick to sue anyone who he felt had stolen his ideas. Most famously, he sued Orion Pictures over 1984’s The Terminator, alleging that director/writer James Cameron had cribbed the concept from a script Ellison wrote for The Outer Limits. Orion settled the suit out of court. (Cameron later called Ellison a “blood-sucking ghoul,” which I still find hilarious.)

Clearly, Ellison knew how to defend himself and his ideas, and to get what he felt was owed to him. Much of this toughness, I imagine, came from Ellison’s early life, growing up as an diminutive Jewish kid in Ohio. Like a lot of smart, little guys, Ellison learned how to punch back, and punch hard.

After I wrote a blog post about Ellison and Isaac Asimov last year, I found myself thinking about Ellison more and more. So much so, in fact, that a couple of weeks ago I decided to write something about him, although what form that would take.

Then, in one of those moments of synchronicity that happen to writers when they immerse themselves in a subject, I stumbled upon a fact regarding Ellison that I had never read before, and it came from a totally unrelated source.

I was looking at some classic sci-fi book covers when I spotted one for Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. I hadn’t thought of Leiber in decades (he was a favorite of a friend of mine in middle school), so out of pure curiosity I checked out his Wikipedia page. There, I was saddened to learn that Leiber spent the last few years of his life in poverty. As with so many writers, alcohol had taken its toll, and Leiber ended up living in a cheap motel. Apparently, Ellison came to visit him one day and was appalled by the state of his affairs, with Leiber not even able to afford a writing table. Rather, he was composing his latest work on a “manual typewriter propped up over the sink.”

Fritz Leiber’s Sci-Fi Classic, “The Big Time”

Okay, maybe this wasn’t a good example of full-blown, Jungian synchronicity. I guess it wasn’t that unlikely that I should stumble upon a Ellison anecdote while reading about Leiber. They were both great science fiction writers, after all, and it make sense that they might have known each other. In fact, as I learned, Ellison included some of Leiber’s short stories in the Dangerous Vision anthologies that he (Ellison) edited for decades. Still, I didn’t know of any connection between the men. They were of different generations and circumstances, linked only by their genre and talent.

Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article does not cite the source of this (if anyone knows, please tell me), nor does it say what action, if any, Ellison took to improve Leiber’s circumstances. But I like to think that he did something to help. After all, he was a pugnacious, smart-ass little guy who looked after himself and other little guys. I miss him.

Here is a good interview that Ellison gave to the BBC in the 1970s.

R.I.P. Robert Redford

The great scholar Joseph Campbell once explained that every time we go into a cinema and see a movie star—Tom Cruise, for example—up on the screen, some part of our brains is aware that the real person, the actor Tom Cruise, is alive somewhere else in that same, exact moment. This ability to exist in two places at once, Campbell said, is an aspect of a God, a living divinity.

Our subconscious perception of actors as gods is one reason we are always surprised by the death of a movie star, especially one who has been around since we, ourselves, were kids. How could they ever die? They seem to occupy a higher plane of reality, immortal, always youthful if not actually young.

Robert Redford was surely one of the greatest movie stars of my youth, and he starred in two of my favorite films of all time, All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor, both of which I have written about on this blog. What made him interesting was that weird dichotomy of blond, athletic, all-American good-looks combined with a reserved, wary intelligence. (On my list of Hollywood Archetypes, he fits squarely in the “Dark Prince” slot.) He was a very smart man, who did a lot of amazing things both on-screen and off-. Among the most notable of these was his founding of the Sundance Film Festival, which has come to rival Cannes as the preferred venue for indie-film directors to premiere their movies.

The fact that Redford would create an alternative festival for “the little guys” in the film industry was typical. He was, in some ways, the most counter-cultural movie star of the last fifty years—even more so than Easy Rider himself, Peter Fonda—in that he made movies about men fighting some vast, evil establishment. Often, this was the military-industrial complex in either its actual (All the President’s Men) or its fantasy (Three Days of the Condor) form. In his later years, when Redford could no longer play the lead, he took on the role of the villain who represents this evil empire, as in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

As a kid, I always found something soothing about Robert Redford, even in movies filled with threats and violence. I suspect that, in my mind, he represented the best spirit of my parents’ generation (he was roughly the same age as my father). That is, the young adults of the 1960s and 70s. Post-hippie, but very hip. World-weary, but not broken. Brave, but not foolhardy. Idealistic, but not naïve.

And, above all, ready to fight the system.

Godspeed, Mr. Redford…

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Deathworld Trilogy”

Harry Harrison’s Deathworld trilogy kept me sane during one long-ago summer when I was bored and lonely. As I recall, my father gave it to me, having bought it in an airport bookshop after a long trip. (Yes, he was a good dad.)

Harrison is most famous for his Stainless Steel Rat series, but I liked these books better. As in all of Harrison’s work, the Deathworld stories center around a trickster anti-hero—in this case, Jason dinAlt, a smart, conniving rogue who is also telepathic. (He uses his E.S.P. to cheat at cards and thus travels from casino-to-casino, and planet-to-planet, having adventures but never a real job.)

Looking back on it, I would bet that this cover by illustrator David Egge, depicting dinAlt in futuristic battle gear, had a lot to do with further popularizing the military science fiction sub-genre, of which Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers is the best-known example. (Current examples are too numerous to name.) In fact, the Deathworld books are not military sci-fi. The characters dress like soldiers because they live on a very dangerous planet named Pyrrus (as in pyrrhic; get it?) where every living thing from plants to animals is lethal to humans. Indeed, the entire ecosystem of Pyrrus seems determined to kill all the human colonists, for reasons that dinAlt will try to discover using his telepathic powers as well as his finely honed survival skills.

The Deathworld books are just fun, well-plotted, fast-paced adventure stories, reminiscent of science fiction’s Golden Age—albeit with a bit more wit attached to them than the average sci-fi fair. Moreover, Harrison should be lauded for the series’ strong ecological message (well hidden, at first, but definitely in there), which was usual at the time, especially in “guy’s” books.

Check them out…

What I’m Reading: “The Future Was Now”

In the summer of 1982, I was a very unhappy boy. Being a nerd in an upper-class high school full of preppies and jocks, I didn’t fit in very well. I hated most of my classes. I had a few good, close friends (including some jocks), but that was it. As one would expect, I spent a lot of time in my room reading sci-fi novels and typing short stories on the typewriter my mother had bought me.

The only thing that kept me sane was movies. Fortunately, 1982 turned out to be the most incredible time in cinematic history to be a nerd. A string of classics came out that summer including Blade Runner, The Thing, The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Max Max II), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, Tron, Conan the Barbarian, and (the 800-pound gorilla) E.T. Even at the time, I was cognizant that this bumper crop of cool films, all coming out within a few weeks of each other, was a very unusual, almost magical development. I spent many hours on the bus with my friends going to and from the local cineplex, where we watched many of these films over and over.

For forty years, I labored under the delusion that this rapid series of classics was just a lucky coincidence. But while reading Chris Nashawaty’s fine nonfiction book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, I learned otherwise. A good historian will reveal that any event, no matter how seemingly incredible or unlikely, actually emerges logically from previous events. That is, the seeds were planted years or even decades before. And in 1982, main seed was a little film called Star Wars. As Nashawaty explains:

There’s an unwritten rule for reporters and trendwatchers who cover Hollywood that if you want to know why a movie—or a particular group of movies—was made, all you need to do is look back and see what was a hit at the box office five years earlier since that’s the typical gestation period for studio executives to spot a trend, develop and green-light an imitator, push it into production, and usher it into theaters. And the summer of 1982 would prove no exception, coming exactly five years after Star Wars. What seemed underreported, however, was how this new wave of sci-fi titles had been conceived and carried out. It is a wave that we’re still feeling the aftereffects of, for better and worse, today.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Listen to Her Heart”

Of the hundreds of kids who graduate from Gainesville High School every year, relatively few (I’m guessing) are aware that they attended the same school as the late, great Tom Petty. (My son Connor definitely was aware because I was constantly reminding him of it, to his annoyance. LOL.) Petty is still Gainesville’s most famous native son, and with good reason. He was one of the greatest rock musicians of his generation. In fact, I think of him as America’s version of David Bowie—brilliant, inventive, always changing and yet always the same.

(Fun fact: one of Gainesville’s other famous sons, Don Felder, taught Petty how to play piano, or guitar, depending on who you ask.)

My favorites of Petty’s songs are the early classics like this one, “Listen to her Heart.” If you’ve ever feared losing a lover to a rival with a lot of money and cocaine (and who hasn’t?), this song is for you.

Rock on…

Edgar Awards De-Brief

Well, the 2025 Edgar Awards Ceremony is over. I didn’t win my category (that honor went to Henry Wise for his excellent novel Holy City, but I still had a blast. I met a lot of cool people, including my new editor at Crooked Lane, Sara Henry, CLB founder Matt Martz, and others. Best of all, I made some new friends in writers Kerri Hakoda, Audree Lee, and Carol Floriani.

And, for a bonus, Cathy and I got to spend some time in the greatest city in the world, Manhattan. (I am writing this post from inside a Starbucks on 7th Ave.) I used to come here pretty often in the early 2000s, when I was working for software consulting company on Prince Street, and I always loved it. I was last here for fun in 2017 with my son Connor, doing the tourist thing. The city hasn’t changed that much as far as I can tell. It’s still a rambling, teeming, kinetic barrage of sights, sounds, and languages. Manhattan is one of the few places on earth where you can step into a crowded elevator and hear Spanish, French, German, Russian, Hausa, and several others being spoken.

It’s also got the best museum in the world, the Met, which Cathy and I visited, of course. We got to see the John Singer Sargent exhibit, with Sargent’s masterpiece Portrait of Madame X on prominent display. I first learned about this amazing picture (and the scandal it caused) from David McCollough’s excellent history The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, in which Sargent is one of the Paris-bound artists discussed. (Sargent painted Madame X in Paris with a well-known socialite as his subject; hence the scandal.)

So, all in all, a damn fine trip so far. I don’t know if I will ever get another Edgar nom, but if I do, you can bet I will be back.

Friday Night Rock-Out: “Masterplan”

Back in the early 1980s when I was in high school, Wendy O. Williams and The Plasmatics played the annual Halloween Festival Concert at the U.F. Bandshell. I didn’t go, but some of my friends did, and word quickly spread that Williams and the band had played a great set. Also, apparently, Williams bared her breasts, as she was wont to do in concert. In fact, I heard that she had come on-stage wearing nothing on her upper half except a heavy coating of whipped cream (which quickly slid off).

Ahhh, punk rock.

Sadly, Williams’s life ended tragically when she committed suicide in 1998. She battled depression throughout her life, and it finally caught her. Which really sucks, because she sounded like an amazing person. Also, I think she would have had a comeback, at some point. She and the Plasmatics made some incredible music. My favorite of their songs is this one, “Masterplan.”

Rock on…