Speaking of Midwestcons, the next one is 'only' about six months away as we write
this. It's not too early to begin making plans for it! Attendees at this past
year's Midwestcon were surprised and delighted that Dave and Ruth Kyle were present,
for the first time in too many years. Dave's article for us in this issue is a
nostalgic look at science fiction movies...
 I love the movies. Especially science
fiction and fantasy movies, of course. Once upon a time, those kinds were terribly
difficult to find. In the 1930s, when I was a boy living in a small town with only
one movie theater, I desperately yearned for them.Sixty years have brought slick
sophistication, superior technology, and oversaturation, but good sf films are still
hard to find -- for me, that is. The special effects technicians have taken over
spectacularly. Granted the novelty has gone, but the stories so often seem banal or
routine, lacking the sense of wonder.Don't get me wrong. I still dote on sf and
fantasy movies. It's just that I miss the old tingle, the quiver of excitement, the
keyed-up anticipation I once had when the screen credits started to roll. Well, not
quite, I admit, for each and every recent decade has offered me joy -- Forbidden
Planet, 2001, Star Wars, and more.How can I explain to anyone, even to myself,
why the original Flash Gordon serial of the silver screen, childish if not
downright stupid, still delights me? Sure, there's a smug feeling of superiority
engendered by the outlandish hackneyed storyline, and crude costuming and special
effects. How awful is the rocketship of Mongo, which swings around the miniature
set suspended by a thread, trailing a shower of sparks and flame while the smoke
swirls unconvincingly upward in the hardly moving air. Wow! The power is in the
imagination. The illusion was made not on the screen but in my mind. I
participated in those old movies. I collaborated.Old movies with their fanciful plotting and
cheap or flamboyant production values never bothered me. Nor do they now. It's
the trend to pretentiousness and the fixation on ugly reality that kills the romance
and repels me.The first science fiction picture which I
vividly remember is Mysterious Island. That was in the winter of 1929-1930.
I didn't know it was science fiction. It was offered as an imaginative story from
the mind of the famous writer of fantastic novels, Jules Verne. When Count Dakkar
(whom we know as Captain Nemo) flung open his collection closet to reveal the
partially reconstructed body of the frogman, I was enthralled. For years, for
decades, I remembered that Lionel Barrymore was the star, that June Collier was the
heroine (she wasn't -- Pauline Starke was), that it was in color(!) and that it had
sound and talked(!).Early in the 1930s, when I finally found out
about scientifiction and my interest in the field became almost an obsession, I was
starved for science fiction films. So were my fellow fans of that time.
Tarzan, which came on the talking scene in 1932, helped fill that emptiness.
That same year of 1932, a genuine sf film appeared, a British production called
F.P.1 Doesn't Answer. The 'F.P.1' was an abbreviation of 'Floating Platform
Number One', a landing field in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Conrad Veidt was
the star, well-known for his villainous roles in the fantasy film The Thief of
Baghdad and the silent classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. F.P.1
was excellent -- I was told. But I didn't see it -- it didn't come to my town.
Even worse luck, I had missed the wonderful science fiction musical(!) which
followed shortly after Mysterious Island. That remarkable 1930 picture,
Just Imagine, didn't come to my town, either.1932 was an incredible year.
Frankenstein reached most theaters as the year began, plus terrific
technicolor horror shows. Doctor X (with it's ghastly synthetic flesh:
"...synthetic flesh...heh, heh, heh...") starred that perennial villain
Lionel Atwill with the one-armed detective Preston Foster and the beauteous Fay
Wray. That same year, Lionel and Fay were united in another horror thriller,
The Mystery of the Wax Museum. The following year, Fay really made her
everlasting movie mark as the harassed screaming heroine in King Kong.
I took the 1932 Johnny Weissmuller-Maureen
O'Sullivan version of Tarzan to my heart, for it helped me quench my thirst
for sf movies. The few small-town fans who were my personal friends also did, and
the sf attachment for Tarzan grew with the coming years for all the sf fans I got to
know. What a thrill it was many decades later to actually meet Johnny Weissmuller
at a worldcon, when he came as the guest speaker at the Burroughs Bibliophiles
noontime banquet, and then to have a one-to-one talk with him sitting in the
lounging area of the VIP floor of the con hotel.A very similar occasion happened at another
con with Buster Crabbe -- another Tarzan who was more famous for being Flash Gordon
and Buck Rogers. Buster, who was then around seventy (he died in 1983), was proud
of his physique and rolled up his Hawaiian shirt to show his trim stomach and slap
its muscular hardness. At other such BB banquets I met other Tarzans: Bruce Bennett
(Herman Brix) and Jock Mahoney.Maureen O'Sullivan, the lovely young ingenue
actress, didn't make her first film appearance by playing Jane, Tarzan's mate. Her
first picture was in that Just Imagine of 1930, in which she played 'L-N'.
After thirty or forty years of yearning, I finally saw that classic, with old friend
John Flory, at an all-night movie program at a worldcon -- at 5:30 a.m. How could I
have missed it on first release? Did it come to my Monticello, New York theater and
pass unnoticed? Maybe it was because in 1930 I had limited funds and time -- then I
was only eleven years old, going to school, restricted in my evening activities, and
operating under the close parental supervision of that period. I have since, in my
much older age, seen Just Imagine many times and can even sing (only to
myself, of course) its sentimental and silly songs.In 1935, I suffered great agitation and
terrible frustration when I saw an advertisement in the New York Daily News
for The Lost City, a science fiction film about which I knew nothing. There
was an irresistible review of the picture, describing it as juvenile, yet giving it
an unbelievable three stars. It turned into an enormous adventure, because I
traveled a long way just to see it. However, it turned out to be only a feature
version of a serial.# # # #
In 1948, I moved to New York City and
enrolled in some publishing and editing courses at Columbia University, to help me
in my new enterprise -- publishing sf hardcovers under the name of Gnome Press.
There I met Marty Fass, a lawyer who was shifting his career from law into the
literary field. We subsequently organized a company named Argonaut Books, which
never did set sail. Around 1950, Marty knew a would-be movie producer and told him
of my expertise in the science fiction field. The man and I had a coffee conference,
during which he explained that he wanted to make some kind of monster movie, perhaps
about space aliens who threaten earth. At the time, there were many films being
churned out about aliens, monsters, and atomic mutations. I told him I'd instead
like to make a sensible sf film. His focus, however, was on the box office -- he
wanted terror, horror, mystery, fear, and the budget had to be "...low." Use had to
be made of certain valuable material he had. This 'valuable material' he revealed
as newsreel footage he owned -- thousands of feet of film around a Canadian mine
disaster.Thoughts of 'cavern disasters' or
'subterranean journeys' or 'lost civilizations' or 'encounters with semi-human
creatures' came to my mind -- plus the dominant thought that I wanted no part in his
project. I told him if he paid me a retainer I would preview his material and write
some plot lines, but I never heard from him again. In retrospect, I feel I made a
bad mistake -- I should have stretched my imagination, pumped up my enthusiasm,
previewed his film footage, and gone along with the project on speculation. I could
have had a lot of experience and probably much fun. After all, bad pictures are
entertainment, too. I might even be admired today for the trashy effort. Years
later, I did eventually collaborate with screen writer Richard Aubrey on a movie
script, about a post-atomic war subterranean community, but it was never
marketed.In the summer of 1951, I planned a first for
a world science fiction convention -- the premiere showing of a major science
fiction movie, at Nolacon, the ninth worldcon. I had known of a film being readied
for release, George Pal's When Worlds Collide, a version of the Philip
Wylie-Edwin Balmer novel, and contacted the Paramount office in Manhattan and
convinced them to have a preview at the con.In New Orleans, working with the regional
publicist, I arranged for a 35mm movie projector for the convention hall in the
St. Charles Hotel, even though con attendance was less than 200. Though such a
showing at no expense should have been the 'coup' that Sam Moskowitz later
acknowledged, it wasn't the success I expected. In fact, criticisms were mixed with
the congratulations.How had I failed? Well, my triumph had been
trumped on the Saturday night of the convention by Mel Korshak, my friendly, fannish
publisher-competitor (Shasta Publishers). True to his remarkable entrepreneurial
abilities, he had promoted a preview showing of another sf film, The Day the
Earth Stood Still, at the Saenger Theater in downtown New Orleans. That event
was really big-time Hollywood -- an exclusive showing, press coverage, preview cards,
a 'special award' by the con management to 20th Century Fox, and a photo session the
following day with Michael Rennie's silvery Klaatu suit (worn by somebody whose name
I can't recall). In comparison, my event had been good, but inferior -- the showing
was hardly perfect, with interruptions of the projection on the portable screen for
changing the 35mm reels.Old-timers, reminiscing about that Nolacon
as the very last of the 'intimate' (read: 'small-time') worldcons, recall that
midnight theater preview -- while some don't even remember my Big Event. Yet,
When Worlds Collide was a George Pal movie of a classic book depicting a
realistic rocketship, not an alien UFO. It was in Technicolor with Chesley
Bonestell art, not in black-and-white. And it later won an Oscar for technical
effects. What could I tell my Paramount PR man when the 'convention' unanimously
praised the rival picture while criticizing his own? Fortunately, I don't remember
being embarrassed. I probably was. He probably wasn't. At least earlier I had an
excellent studio-paid-for dinner at Antoine's to discuss the project. But then,
that's show biz...# # # #
Perhaps the greatest science fiction film
ever made (with a sincere tip of my hat to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur Clarke) is
H.G. Wells' Things to Come. I first saw the film, which was released in
1936, sometime in the summer of 1937 in a small movie house in the little town of
Woodridge in Sullivan County, New York. I bought one ticket, but I watched it later
on the following two or three nights for brief periods of time without paying again.
My special privilege came from being a country newspaper editor who knew the manager.
That film has made an enormous impression on my life. At my first chance, I bought
the recording of its exceptional musical score (by the English composer Arthur Bliss)
and listened to it frequently.
That summer and fall, I would go down to New
York City for a weekend, with the score playing in my head. My destination was the
legendary Ivory Tower apartment in Brooklyn to visit the Futurians. Dick Wilson, my
best friend, lived there. My other best friend, Dirk Wylie, was practically a
resident, along with regulars, Doc Lowndes, Don Wollheim, Fred Pohl, and others. As
I tramped along Bedford Avenue from the IRT subway, I would "bump-bump-buh-bummmp"
the dramatic 'March' segment and vigorously pump my arms rhythmically with the
music. It was emotionally stirring for me -- I was marching into my own personal,
inspiring milieu.That strange sense of another world, of
science fiction becoming reality, overwhelmed me again later, in December of 1942
when I was a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. I was stationed at an air base in
Northern Ireland in the middle of a world-wide war. It was midnight and I was
working behind the drawn blackout curtains of my tiny Nissen hut office. My radio
was tuned to the highbrow channel. "This is the BBC," the English announcer said,
and then Bliss' march from Things to Come flowed out of the speaker.
Suddenly, I was Cabal and Passworthy, back in time listening to the wireless on the
evening that hostilities began. I was living Wells' nightmare! I will never forget
the creepy thrill of that eerie moment -- and now, tonight, as I write this, chills
run up my spine.Later the following year, now stationed at
an aerodrome in East Anglia in England, I went to London on pass. I bought a copy
of What's On, and scanned the extensive cinema listings. Out in the Golder's
Green neighborhood I found Things to Come listed -- how could I resist? So I
took the Underground out there and saw it. Seeing that film in blacked-out, wartime
London was another overwhelming experience, but a most amazing coincidence for me
was yet to come. The following evening, I was having dinner with a Canadian officer
in the Savoy Grill. Across the room I saw a man in a RAF uniform. I immediately
recognized him as Edward Chapman, the actor who played Passworthy opposite Raymond
Massey's Cabal in the Wells movie. I excused myself, and hurried between the tables
toward him. "I beg your pardon," I said to Chapman, "but..." and I told him that I
had only the previous night seen, once again, that great movie in which he starred.
He was gracious. He was impressed. He told me that for him, too, the movie was
special."Thank you for telling me this," he said.
"This has been a difficult day for me. You have made it so much better for me.
Thank you very much for such kind words." How lucky I was that weekend! Chapman
was in another excellent H.G. Wells film produced by Alexander Korda just about the
same time, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. I wish I had told Chapman about
how much I loved that film, too. (I was thrilled later to find a thin volume of the
published scenario.)# # # #
In 1966, Ruth and I were in England with our
son Arthur C. and our daughter Kerry. He was not yet five years old and she not yet
two. We visited the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey at MGM's Boreham Wood
studios as a guest of Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur took A.C. by the hand and led him
around the lot, introducing him as "the other Arthur C.". This was fun for A.C.,
but not recognizable at the time as something so very, very special. We saw the
oasis scenery, the site of the monolith, which hadn't yet been dismantled. Stanley
Kubrick was shooting a scene in the air lock with the globular maintenance craft.
Arthur introduced me to Kubrick; I know I met him but I also know he never met me.
His mind was completely into the movie. I also met Roger Karas, doing the publicity,
who was extremely friendly and showed us so many things, such as the wealth of art
renditions and visualizations which foretold of the masterpiece being created.Most impressive was the huge construction of
scaffolding which contained a sort of ferris wheel. This unsightly structure of
wood and steel hid an incredible movie set within the suspended, hollow doughnut.
A.C. still remembers clearly being boosted on my shoulder for us to poke our heads
up into the interior of the circular control room of the spaceship. I wrote an
article for Ted Carnell's New Worlds magazine about the project, and saw the
final result at the preview screening in New York in 1968. After that screening,
Ruth and I, going out through the lobby, met Lester del Rey. I was enthusiastically
bubbling over for the picture, but Lester, forever the analytic critic, told me he
thought it was awfully disappointing. That evening I spoke on the telephone to
Arthur Clarke, who had just seen the preview in Hollywood. I congratulated him, but
wondered, "Tell me, Arthur, what does it all mean?" "Read the book I've written;"
he told me, "the ending is explicit. You'll find the answers." I did, but I still
wonder.Later in 1968, we were in Los Angeles and
went on the set of Star Trek. This was thoroughly enjoyable (they were
making "The Day of the Dove"), but the differences between television and movie sets
were quite remarkable. 2001 had exquisitely realistic, carefully engineered
props; the Star Trek set was mostly illusion: the furniture was worn but
serviceable, but the walls were mostly cardboard, very scary to me because I was
afraid to bump anything should I knock it down or fall through a flat.In the 1970s, when I was living in England,
I knew a fellow Rotarian in the Walton-on-Thames Rotary Club, J.D. Thomson. One
evening, sitting opposite him at the dinner table, we talked about the old English
movie studios. A small one had been in the center of Walton village, another at
Shepperton, not far across the Thames from my house. "I was an extra, in the
thirties," he told me. "I was in Things to Come," he said, and I jiggled my
demitasse and expressed my fascination. He described how he was one of the peace
soldiers who jumped out of the back of the huge flying ship to take over the land of
the local warlord. I remembered well those black-suited paratroopers of "Wings Over
the World", stepping off into space one by one, and told him how much I envied his
experience. He recalled how H.G. Wells himself would come into the sound stage and,
with the movie crew gathered around him, he would chat. I envied my friend even
more.One day at the Weybridge-and-Byfleet Rotary,
my luncheon club, a fellow member told me about his small engineering and tool
company, which was working on an unusual order for a film company at Shepperton. He
was making futuristic hand guns for a science fiction movie, and he knew I would be
interested. I was, but not all that much because production of cheap sf movies
seemed never-ending around London, especially for television. I never bothered to
check out the action, but I certainly should have. The movie was Star
Wars.Our house in England had been named "Two
Rivers," following the English custom of address identification. The river Thames
was twenty feet from our front deck and the river Bourne (a small stream) ran
through the back garden on its way to join the Wey and then into the Thames. A foot
bridge led to our garage and the private road. It was indisputably the exact
location which H.G. Wells chose in War of the Worlds, where the Martian
fighting machines crossed the rivers. His description of the action I chose as an
excerpt for inclusion in my book, The Illustrated Book of Science Fiction Ideas
and Dreams (Hamlyn, 1976, London). Philip José Farmer, on a visit to Two
Rivers, wanted me to put a bronze plaque in our garden to commemorate the event, but
I never did.England is a small country and London is its
heart, so occasionally I would see or rub shoulders with a recognizable person from
the stage or screen. Celebrities of sorts lived all around us. The Beatles for a
while had a fancy home in posh St. George's Hill, a quarter mile away. Once at an
Eastercon, the big British event (big, meaning several hundred persons), Christopher
Lee attended. He was riding a crest of cinematic popularity at the time and his
presence created a stir. Ina Shorrock of the Liverpool SF Group was standing near
him and confided in me on how much she admired him. I asked if she wanted to meet
him; she did, so I led her to him, a very tall impressive figure, and said, "Mr.
Lee, may I introduce Ina Shorrock to you -- she much admires your work."He acknowledged her with a friendly smile
and she was thrilled. "I didn't know you knew him," she said to me later."I don't," I said. "He doesn't know me.
But you wanted to meet him, so I introduced you." Conventions are, after all, very
friendly occasions.
I never met Bela Lugosi, but I do have
something to boast about. I saw him perform on stage as Count Dracula, on Broadway
in 1927 when I was eight years old. The event was accidental because my mother had
planned to take me to a different show on Broadway. She frequently took me to New
York from Monticello for several days of shopping, sightseeing, and the theater; I
was a very lucky kid. This one time, at the last moment just before the matinee
curtain was to go up, she hurried out of one lobby (Sold Out!) to another theater
next door for a desperate last-minute purchase, unaware that that play, for that
times, was a horror show.I did not, repeat not, draw her attention to
what hung on the wall over the ticket window -- a skull, with empty eyesockets
glowing with red light and bat wings spread out from its temples. I was entranced.
A quick transaction and we were into the darkened theater, the show having started.
I noticed at least one woman in a white uniform stationed at the rear, but I said
nothing. (The management had 'nurses' in attendance at the performances for shock
victims as part of the publicity.) The mood of the play grew more and more somber,
and my poor mother suddenly realized the extent of her thoughtless error. We had a
whispered argument about taking me out of the theater and, for some wonderful reason,
I won. I can still remember some of the theatrical effects: the baying hounds, the
red skull which slowly materializes over the back of the couch bathed in the glow of
the fireplace -- the only light in the otherwise pitch-black room. Then, suddenly,
the stage lights turned on and people rushed through the door as a bat bobbed across
the ceiling. The Count's magnificent cape, purple-lined, swirled as he, encircled
by the hand-held crosses, was touched by the dawn and vanished before my eyes
(through a trapdoor, of course).I reassured my mother that the performance
had been enjoyable (it was) and assuaged her feelings of guilt. Another time,
though, she was not so lenient. She pulled me out of a 'musical show' -- Body
and Soul, I recall -- when the blackout sketch took place in a bedroom with a
scantily-clad lady in the bed, a man under it, and her husband storming in to make a
scene. (Clifton Webb was the star, to whom I have since been compared.) And I also
remember how my mother chewed out the ticket seller for selling her two tickets
when he knew, positively, that the show wasn't fit for a child. I'm glad my mother
was more forgiving of vampires than of bedroom farce.# # # #
Shepperton Studios was nearly obliterated by
a housing project while we were still in England. It was partially saved by being
turned into a 'four-wall' operation, meaning that it became a bare-bones facility,
essentially just a place for a movie company to rent for a short term. All the
props and accumulated bits-and-pieces, large and small, were put up at auction.
Ruth and I wandered through the back lot, examined the merchandise the week of the
sale, and went there on the day of the auction. We bid on many items, including a
model airship from Verne's Master of the World (which starred Vincent Price)
requested by Forry Ackerman. Limited by our funds, we obtained only a big batch of
artwork with a couple of sf pieces. (A series of watercolors from Burroughs' The
Land That Time Forgot were in the pile we examined, but when we picked up the
illustrations, someone had stolen the very ones we most wanted. We could only shrug
off the loss.)Living in England made it possible for me to
become personally acquainted with the famous Ray Harryhausen and his family. On
the stairway landing of his home in the Kensington section of London he has a
fabulous glass-sided cabinet, where many of the models actually used in his movies
are displayed. When he was making The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, I went to his
rented workshop on Gold Hawk Road to discuss a project concerning the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Film Society which my friend John Flory and I had organized. I
was interrupting his work, but he graciously stopped to talk. He had the model of
his centaur on a pedestal, lights and camera set in positions around it. "Go ahead,
continue your work while we talk," I told him, trying to be helpful. His reaction
was swift and unexpected. He threw a cloth over his model and steered me away from
the circle of light. He then explained, almost apologetically, his instinctive
reaction -- no one was allowed to see him work. I understood. What he did, the way
he did it, was a mastery of a craft which he himself had developed. Unwittingly, I
had caught him offguard and embarrassed us both.I never dreamed that Ruth and I would become
personally acquainted with Sinbad's stunning heroine, Caroline Munro, at a
later Omnicon in Florida. Nor did I dream that she would briefly show up later at
the 1987 worldcon in Brighton and mention her hope to see me. We missed each other,
but her query rippled throughout that weekend -- I was terribly flattered with a
kind of notoriety, and avoided mentioning that our casual relationship was really
very tenuous. (Omnicon also made me some other special acquaintances: the very
likeable Kirk Alyn [the original serial Superman] and some Doctors Who: Jon Pertwee,
Patrick Troughton, and Colin Baker, who asked me for my autograph
because he was a Lensman fan and read my books! I also wrote a 'radio script' for
one Omnicon which had Majel Barrett as one of the stars.)Another Brighton worldcon had been held in
1979 (Ruth's contribution: the slogan "Britain is Fine in `79"). Ruth didn't get
there; I did. After the con, I visited the Weybridge area, in Surrey, paying a
visit to friends and the old neighborhood. Bernard Cribbins, a movie actor, was
still living a few houses down. He was in the 1965 H. Rider Haggard movie
She with Ursula Andress, and a 1966 Daleks movie with Peter Cushing.
When Bernie Cribbins wasn't acting, he used to fish the Thames off our front
garden.By chance, I discovered that Dino de
Laurentiis' Flash Gordon was being filmed in the old British Aircraft
Corporation hangar close by, where the supersonic Concorde had been constructed. I
couldn't resist. I talked my way onto the lot, conferred with publicity men, was
shown the sets, and said I would follow up the production with publicity when it was
released the following year. Dr. Zarkov's smashed laboratory was very interesting
(a re-write of the original comic strip scene), but Ming's palace set was truly
magnificent. I had great expectations, but when the film finally appeared, I was so
disappointed that I never wrote a word of publicity from all my notes and handouts.
And I never dreamed that one of the actors in the movie, Robin Langford (who had
also been in a British sf TV series, The Tripods), would eventually become a
son-in-law.# # # #
I do miss John Flory of Spacefilms, Inc.,
who died not too many years ago. He was older than me and very much a fan, but
known by very few in First Fandom. He was a retired Eastman Kodak executive who had
a large house in a wooded area outside Rochester, New York, built over an enormous
cellar which was a miniature film studio. He was working on a feature film from a
story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr., but it never materialized. In between the `73, `74, and
`75 worldcons, we organized the Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Society and planned
annual awards to those who had made outstanding contributions to the sf field in the
movies -- an idea similar to the First Fandom Hall of Fame Awards. The trophy
itself was a faceted plastic crystal with tiny lights arranged within it, which we
named the Starfire Award. The first recipient was to have been Fritz Lang, the
creator of the masterpiece Metropolis, who died in 1976. Everything about
Metropolis never ceases to intrigue me. I constantly look for different
versions with different soundtracks, and find them.In that bicentennial summer of 1976, I had
come back from England with a shipment of my first fancy book, A Pictorial
History of Science Fiction, and the elderly Lang died before John and I could
arrange to honor him. The next recipient of the Starfire Award some years later was
to have been George Pal, but while we were still fumbling around with limited
financing, he died too. Then, shortly afterward, John Flory also died -- and so did
the Starfire Award. The only Starfire trophy in existence was loaned to someone who
promised to manufacture more, even better ones. That person's name is forgotten,
and the award has disappeared. John Flory deserved better. To me, his passing
marked the end of an era -- he loved the movies as much as I still do.
All illustrations by Joe Mayhew |
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