The 1970s – Ash Clifton, Writer

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Fountains of Paradise”

I’m no expert on the subject, but when I think of The History of Science Fiction, I imagine it in three big chunks. First came the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and 1930s, when pulp magazines like Astounding and Amazing Stories became enormously popular. Second was the era during and after World War II, when the so-called “Big Three” superstar authors—Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Authur C. Clarke—emerged. Then came science fiction’s “New Wave,” when literary writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, and J. G. Ballard transformed the genre.

Over my reading lifetime, I have mostly explored this third era—the New Wave—mainly because, frankly, it’s the only one where you can find some genuinely great novels. But in middle school and high school, I read some of the post-WWII writers, too, especially Clarke. I read Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earthlight, and Rendezvous with Rama. I loved all of them, particularly Childhood’s End, which is probably his best book.

Clarke was, by far, my favorite of the Big Three, even though he was far from a great writer. (Heinlein was probably the best, from a stylistic sense, but I disliked his books for other reasons.) Almost invariably, Clarke’s characters fall into a two-dimensional, generic type—the stalwart (male) hero, the honorable scientist, the devoted wife, the curious child, etc. etc.—but he was such a good story teller that no one cared. Essentially, his books are like extended Astounding magazine short stories, beginning with a fascinating, nerdy premise and weaving a cerebral-yet-exciting adventure tale around it.

I read one of his later novels, The Fountains of Paradise, when I was in college and enjoyed it immensely. Set in the near-future, it focuses on a stalwart scientist-hero—a civil engineer, in this case, named Vannevar Morgan—who is determined to build the world’s first space elevator, a literal railway to the stars. He needs to build it somewhere on the earth’s equator and chooses a mountain on the fictional island of Taprobane (a thinly veiled Sri Lanka, which was Clarke’s home for the latter half of his life). Naturally, he immediately faces challenges, beginning with the intractable head-monk of a Buddhist monastery that happens to be smack in the middle of the site Morgan has chosen. The rest of the story follows Morgan’s struggle to build the elevator. Technical problems abound, and several mini-crisis intrude on the elevator’s progress.

One element that The Fountains of Paradise stand-out from the rest of his novels is a clever narrative trick he pulls off. The 21^st Century story Morgan is interwoven with a 5^th Century tale of a local monarch, King Kalidasa, who tried to build a heaven-like palace on the exact same mountain top. The parallels between the two men are obvious but interesting—each is driven, almost to the point of madness, to see his dream come to reality. But while Kalidasa is a ruthless dictator who amputates the hands off his craftsmen after they finish their task (so they can never reproduce the work for another king), Morgan is a deeply moral, modern, scientific visionary whose goal is the betterment of humanity. He also cares about his workers. In the books final act, an accident occurs that requires Morgan to risk his own life to get oxygen to the workers who are stranded high-up on the elevator’s monofilament cable. It’s a great sequence. (I won’t spoil the ending, of course.)

I really like this cover (by veteran illustrator Terry Oakes) from the 1979 Del Rey edition. I like the juxtaposition of the monks in the foreground with the ghost of King Kalidasa hovering over the mountain (albeit in a high-tech reincarnation, wearing a pressure suit) and the space-elevator cable shooting up into the sky. It’s a crazy cover, in some ways, but it captures the clever dichotomy of the book.

Synchronicity for Bookworms: Koo Stark and George Lucas

There is a great moment in David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart when Nicholas Cage’s character, Sailor, says to his girlfriend, Lula, “The way your head works is God’s own private mystery.” Sometimes, I feel the same thing could be said about me. About my brain, that is.

A case in point: When Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—yes, The-Andrew-formally-known-as-Prince—was arrested by British authorities last February, my mind went on a very strange tangent. He was arrested, it is believed, for crimes he might have committed while in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, who has become the most famous sexual predator and pimp in the history of the world. As soon as I heard the news of Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, my mind went back to the early 1980s, when he was dubbed “Randy Andy” by the U.K. tabloid press for his playboy lifestyle and many affairs with attractive women.

The name of one of these women leapt into my mind—that of Koo Stark, a beautiful actress from the 70s, with whom Mountbatten-Windsor had a long, heavily publicized romance. Stark contributed significantly to the “Randy Andy” mystique because she had (unwisely) appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Awakening of Emily, which I and millions of other teenaged boys watched (and re-watched) on late-night cable.

I must confess that as soon as I remembered her name—Koo Stark!—I was instantly transported back to that long ago time. What a great name it is, too, and even more so back then. Perfect for a hot young actress in swinging London! Yeah, baby! KOO STARK! “Koo,” as in the sound a dove makes right before it achieves orgasm; “Stark” as in stark naked! STARKERS!

I must also confess, however, that after the thrill of remembering Ms. Stark’s name wore off, I didn’t give her, or Mountbatten-Windsor, a second thought. UNTIL, just one day later, I was reading a great book about the great American film directors of the 1970s entitled The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema by Paul Fischer. The book documents the history of all three men as they created their early, iconic films including The Godfather, Jaws, and (of course), Star Wars. My jaw dropped when I read this passage describing Geoge Lucas’s quest to find the perfect actress for the role of Princess Leia…

George considered fourteen-year-old Terri Nunn, soon to be lead vocalist of the pop band Berlin, before whittling his list down to two nineteen-year-olds: Koo Stark and Fisher. They were strikingly similar: bright, funny, and gorgeous, both from show business families—Stark’s father, Wilbur, had produced film and television since the 1940s—and each with limited screen acting experience. Koo had appeared in one of her father’s smaller pictures and popped up, uncredited, as a bridesmaid in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Carrie had stolen a couple of scenes earlier that year in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo.

I was thus flabbergasted to learn that Koo Stark, rather than becoming famous for one stupid Cinemax-After-Dark movie and for her relationship with Randy Andy, might have become PRINCESS FRIGGIN LEIA instead! Ye Gods! How the Wheel of Fortune doth turn!

Mr. Fischer’s book got me thinking that Ms. Stark probably had a much more interesting history and character than I suspected, so I immediately did a web search on her. Sure enough, her Wikipedia page confirmed that she has had a pretty amazing life. Besides having been in contention for the role of Leia, she appeared in several “real” movies from the 1970s, and she was the understudy for a role in the National Theater’s production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In the decades since, she became a successful and respected stage actress, as well as an accomplished professional photographer. Also, it turns out that she is American (I always thought she was English), and she is three years older than Mountbatten-Windsor, which suggests she might be one of the few beautiful women in England at the time whom he did not (obviously) exploit.

I was even more amazed to learn that, in fact, she did ultimately land a small part in Star Wars, that of Camie Marstrap, a friend of Luke Skywalker’s. (Her scenes were, alas, cut from the final film.)

And so, in true Synchronicity-for-Bookworms fashion, I discovered a tenuous karmic link between Jeffrey Epstein and Star Wars, conducted through the being of Ms. Koo Stark (and my own imagination, of course).

Or maybe it’s not so tenuous. At the risk of seeming a bit precious, I would suggest that Koo Stark was a victim of the same exploitative, male-controlled world of acting and model that men like Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and countless others have abused for a century. After all, if she had not appeared in that “erotic” film when she was a kid, she might have found more success in films later. Of course, I have no idea if her appearance in an exploitation film had any impact on Lucas’s decision not to cast her as Princess Leia (I doubt that it did). But I do know that the stigma followed for years.

Fortunately, she overcame it. She has successfully sued several newspapers for libel, including a 2022 case against The Daily Mail, which referred to her (unfairly) as a “soft-core porn actress.”

To which I say, good for her!

Today I Learned a Word: “Precariat”

I’ve been reading an excellent non-fiction book by Paul Fischer called The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg—and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. It’s very similar to another great book I read recently (and subsequently wrote a post about), Don’t Stop: Why We Still Love Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours,” in that both books document the history of struggling artists—film directors, in the former, and rock stars, in the latter—who hit the Big Time. Inevitably, they each also tell the story of a bohemian sub-culture of the 1970s, when people lived hand-to-mouth in the canyons of Southern California, occupying cheap, hardscrabble houses and doing menial jobs while they developed their artistic skills. They also did a lot of drugs (mostly cocaine, booze, and marijuana) while having lots of sex with multiple partners. Fischer’s book, in particular, tells the great story of aspiring actress Margo Kidder, whose rented, A-frame house was frequented by young film makers, actors, musicians, and other arty-types, all attracted by Kidder’s good-natured wit, excellent cooking, and general hospitality. And by her beauty, of course. As Fischer relates, Kidder once joked that if she had bothered to write a memoir of that halcyon time, she would’ve entitled it I Fucked Everybody.

Such artistic, bohemian scenes are as old as…well, 19^th Century Paris, when the term “bohemianism” came into use. Apparently, it first referred to the Romani people of Paris, who lived a nomadic existence doing odd-jobs and performing various services (most legal, some not) for local people. In French, they were called bohémiens, because they were thought (mistakenly) to have migrated to France from the Kingdom of Bohemia. Bohemian soon came to describe anyone who, by choice, lived an unconventional life on the edges of society, doing as they pleased. Often, these were artists (painters, writers, musicians) who refused to pursue a normal career, but it also included the moneyed, free-spirited offspring of rich people, who went “slumming” with those same artists.

As I was reading the Wikipedia page on bohemianism, I discovered that such bohemian subcultures are often examples of a precariat. Precariat (I learned) is a mashup of precarious and proletariat, the latter being Karl Marx’s term for the working class. (“Proles” as they are called in George Orwell’s 1984.) People in a precariat are usually just as poor but also lack even the job security of the traditional industrial class, going from low-paying job to low-paying job, with no guarantee of when they’ll land their next position (or be able to pay the rent).

The term (I also learned) is particularly apt today, being often used to describe our modern world of Uber drivers, digital freelancers, and other non-traditional workers. As I read about all this, I thought of a book I posted about some years ago called Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! by Chris Carlston. Written at the dawn of the so-called gig economy, Carlston describes how, rather than dreading the precariousness of modern capitalism, some people have embraced it. By working temporary gigs, such people—whom Carlson calls Nowtopians—have managed to preserve the time and freedom to pursue their true passions like art, or education, or community service, or whatever. He writes:

What we see in the Nowtopian movement is not a fight for workers emancipation within the capitalist division of labor…. Instead we see people responding to the overwork and emptiness of a bifurcated life that is imposed in the precarious marketplace. They seek emancipation from being merely workers. To a growing minority of people, the endless treadmill of consumerism and overwork is something they are working to escape. Thus, for many people time is more important than money. Access to goods has been the major incentive for compliance with the dictatorship of the economy. But in pockets here and there, the allure of hollow material wealth, and with it the discipline imposed by economic life, is breaking down.

Looking back on these words now, they seem a bit naïve. The longings of a utopian dream. They hardly seem describe our current gig economy, which, instead of new bohemian class, seems little more than a last-ditch means of survival for those who can not find good, decent-paying jobs (with benefits). As wealth and power become more concentrated in the hands of a few (usually male) oligarchs, fewer people have the freedom to do anything, no less pursue art. They’re too busy working, looking for jobs, looking for housing, or generally getting by.

In fact, rather than a utopia, our precariat seems more like the dystopia of which William Gibson foretold in his early, cyberpunk novels. Worlds in which most people on earth are underemployed, rootless, and in constant danger, while a tiny middle-class manages everything for an even tinier upper-class. The heroes of such novels are usually young, smart people who resist in the only way they can—by entering an underworld of artists, hackers, thieves, and gangsters who make their living off the rich.

Does this mean that we, as modern Americans, are headed for a world in which the precariat is, essentially, everyone? I think so, yeah. After all, isn’t that the fantasy of every oligarch—to rule over a vast sea of unpaid serfs with no autonomy to control their own lives? A limitless, self-perpetuating underclass, with no agency to defend themselves from the predatory impulses of the ultra-rich, impulses are, ultimately, sadistic in nature.

I hope not. We’ll see.

What I’m Reading – “Dont Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours”

I finally moved out of my parents’ house when I was twenty-two, when I embarked on a cross-country move to Tucson, Arizona. I had enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the university there, and I arrived knowing not a single, living soul. Once I found a place to live and acquired a U-of-A ID card, I spent my evenings going to the small, student gym in the basement of the football stadium, where I and a few other lonely souls (all dudes) worked out until the lights went off.

I vividly remember my first night at that gym. There were radio speakers in the ceiling tuned to the local F.M. rock station. That night, as it happened to be running an hour-long special devoted entirely to one rock album: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The show included a few tracks off the album along with interviews with Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, and Christine McVie. (For some reason, Mick Fleetwood and John McVie were left out.)

By this time, Rumours had already achieved legendary status of the sort afforded very few pop-music albums. (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is perhaps the only other.) Today, many years after that first night in Tucson, the album’s popularity and reputation has not diminished. If anything, it has increased. It’s gone from being a recognized artistic masterpiece to a timeless cultural colossus. As each new generation of music fans and musicians have discovered Rumours, an entire legendarium has been constructed around it.

Entire books have been devoted to the months-long, tortuous period in 1977 when the album was recorded. Two of the band’s members, John and Christine McVie, were in the midst of an ugly divorce. Two other members, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, were in the midst of an ugly breakup. And the remaining member, drummer and band leader Mick Fleetwood, was on the verge of breaking up with his famous wife, Jenny Boyd. The five members alternated between screaming obscenities at each other and slipping into effortless, soulful harmonies, all while drinking heavily and vacuuming titanic amounts of cocaine up their collective nose.

At one point late in the process, the album’s producer, Ken Caillat, was horrified to discover that the master recording tapes were literally flaking-out. They had been re-run through the mixing machines so many times that the metal-oxide strip was coming loose from the plastic, threatening to lose all the work he and the band had done. A technician from the manufacturer was flown in to manually transfer the recording onto a new tape before disaster struck.

In short, the fact that Rumours was made at all seems like something of a miracle.

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…

OTD, Richard Burton was Born

A lady I follow on Twitter named @johnstonglenn posted earlier that on this day in 1925, the famous Welsh actor Richard Burton was born. Yes, this would have been the great man’s 100^th birthday.

I’ve written about Burton a lot on this blog (see links below), and so I thought I would share this bit of trivia. A fabulously gifted Shakespearean actor, Burton had the second-greatest voice in Western theater (after James Earl Jones, who had the very best). But Burton wasn’t just a great voice. He was a deeply intelligent man who brought enormous power to every part he played. And soul. Lots of it. (He was a bit like Viggo Mortensen in that last regard, actually). If you’ve never seen a Burton film and are looking for a good one to start with, I recommend 1965’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A snippet of it is shown below.

Scene from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

R.I.P. Diane Keaton

One indication of Diane Keaton’s greatness is the simple fact that two of the most iconic of the 1970s end with her face. That is, with her face literally filling their final frames, as she looks straight at the viewer. These films are, of course, The Godfather (1972) and Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977). In the former, her character, Kay, gives a stricken expression as she watches her young husband, Michael Corleone, go over to the Dark Side of the Force to become, at last, the new godfather of his crime family. In the Looking for Mr. Goodbar, her character, Theresa, lies on the floor in her darkened apartment, dying. She has just been fatally stabbed by a psycho guy she picked up at a bar. The guy runs off, and the camera stays fixed on her face as she breathes her last breath, alone.

I’m not sure which ending is more disturbing. In both cases, her character dies a kind of death (spiritual, in The Godfather; literal in Looking for Mr. Goodbar). And this death is brought on, directly or indirectly, by a man’s act of evil. This might seem ironic, given the fact that Keaton, more than other female star, best embodied the spirit of the New Woman, especially the second-wave version that swept the culture in the 60s and 70s. In fact, it’s not ironic at all. In both films, she becomes a kind of casualty-of-war, defiant but ultimately destroyed by a male-centered (if not actually misogynistic) culture.

No, I am not trying to define Keaton’s long, brilliant career through the single lens of feminism-vs-toxic-masculinity. But you can’t talk about Diane Keaton without considering how important a symbol she was for both boys and girls watching movies when I was growing up. From the moment she appeared on-screen at the titular character in Woody Allen’s masterpiece, Annie Hall, she captured the heart of a generation. Dressed in men’s clothing, she was beautiful, elegant, and breath-takingly feminine. With her goofy demeanor, mixed with her sharp-as-a-whip intellect, she was the gawky, A-student who all the smart, gawky, A-student girls in the audience could look up to (and who all the A-student guys secretly fell in love with.)

As with any movie star of any gender, it is impossible to separate Keaton’s appeal from her physiognomy. She was, of course, beautiful, but in a more muted, subtle way than someone like Jacqueline Bisset, Britt Ekland, Jill St. John, or any other of the “off-the-charts-sexy” actresses of her generation. (On my list of 15 Hollywood Archetypes, Keaton would sit firmly in the “Goddess Next Door” bucket.) To me, the most remarkable thing about Keaton was the way she always seemed to glow. She was literally luminous, in all her films, an attribute that a cynic might write-off as a testament to good genetics (i.e., good skin), or perhaps expert lighting.

Being a bit of mystical, woo-hoo type, I would call it the emanation of her sublime, inner being, filtering out into our mortal plane…

She carried this luminous quality into old age. Alas, though she was 79, she left us too soon.

Godspeed, Ms. Keaton!

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.