Massacre Time: Lucio Fulci in Vietnam

Arrow Video are set to release a new boxset of Italian Westerns in July, entitled Vengeance Trails: Four Classic Westerns, and among the quartet is Lucio Fulci's 1966 film Le Colt Cantarono la Morte e fu... Tempo di Massacro, or Massacre Time as it's most widely known as these days. I'm reminded that Fulci's film is mentioned quite unexpectedly in Mark Bowden's 2017 book Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, a gripping account of the battle waged by Vietnamese and American soldiers for the city of Huế (pronounced "Hway"). At one point in Bowden's street-by-street, building-by-building reconstruction he writes:

Leaving some of his lead platoon to hold the north end of the bridge, Meadows sent Lieutenant Mike McNeil with the remainder into buildings across the street. It was a commercial district. There was a movie theater advertising the Italian Western Tempo di Massacre (Massacre Time) - a title that struck Meadows as both macabre and apt... 

It's pleasing to see Fulci's film momentarily stumbling into the narrative but I wonder was Bowden using a bit of journalistic license to add some color to the story ? Certainly, it's plausible that Fulci's film was playing a theatre in Huế in the early months of 1968. The chronology is at least correct: according to Stephen Thrower's authoritive book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, the film had its first public screening in Italy in August 1966 and if the dates on the imdb entry are to be believed, the film was in distribution in various Asian countries the following year, such was the popularity of Westerns in Asian markets. And yet, the notion that an American soldier under heavy fire would take note of a title on a film poster (a title in Italian no less!) strains belief. Huế in the 60's was a cultural and intellectual center in Vietnam but I haven't found any evidence to suggest Italian Westerns actually played in Huế or other metropolitan Vietnamese cites - so much scholarship from that era is preoccupied with the American War and the cultural shift that took place after the country was reunified. But no matter, Mark Bowden's book is a masterpiece of military history and if you enjoyed the fiery cauldron of his 1999 book Black Hawk Down, and indeed Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket, Huế 1968 will be a vivid and compelling read.

Richard Burton on the joy of a book collection...

Found during a random page selection from the Richard Burton Diaries...

Saturday 4th October 1969

"Yesterday I spent most of the day unwrapping the books. By some lucky guess the bookshelves, measured by guesswork on my part, accommodate the books almost perfectly, leaving half a shelf spare for any additions that Dent-Dutton may dream up. Now comes the task, looked forward to, of putting them in order, either alphabetically or by subject matter. Alphabetically by authors is probably the most practical, though E would prefer them in colours. I protest that they will look like a pretty wall-paper, a decoration reminiscent of those shops in London where one goes in and orders two yards of books without knowing or caring what's inside them. We have mild side-bets as to who has the most volumes under his name. It's probably Dickens but there are a quite a few dark horses like Walter Scott, Gibbon and Grote (History of Greece). Shakespeare is in four volumes so he's out. The tomes are all beautifully bound in velvet green calf, red and blue calf, black and maroon morocco, grey calf. A sensuous delight just to hold and touch. There is a section for children, an encyclopedia, dictionaries of all kinds, history geography art science romances essays and all. The room when finished is going to be a dream and I shall probably spend most of my time there. There is a beautifully rough stone fireplace, log-burning, and the outside door leads directly into the garden. A couple of easy chairs, a small bar, a sofa, a desk and a chair and a couple of rugs thrown about the floor and a painting or two on the walls and you have the best cell ever for a literary man. It's so particularly delightful to have the time and the leisure (and the money) to do it without having to rush off in 10 days to do some ghastly film chore..."

Bruce Wightman's Dracula

I rediscovered this drawing earlier this morning, found inside my copy of The Dracula Centenary Book (1987). This book was part of a clutch of books that have outlived their usefulness and were being relegated to the top shelf of a wardrobe to make space on my main bookcase. I only spotted the illustration by chance, as I flicked through the book one last time before it being put out of reach. I'm reminded that my annual reading of Stoker's novel (which I've done these past 4 years) and my intention to read it back to back with the Icelandic Powers of Darkness variant never happened this year, like so many things planned at the top of the year. So, it rolls over to 2021, and as soon as I finish the Titanic book, I will pick up Joseph O'Connor's novel Shadowplay which reimagines the relationship between Stoker and Henry Irving. Things to look forward to…

On A Sea of Glass

Currently reading this detailed and comprehensive 2012 account of the life and death of the Titanic… In contrast to so many other Titanic reports, where the first few days of the voyage are merely a preamble before the disaster, Tad Fitch and his co-authors have furnished the book with so much fascinating detail about ship’s business and its passengers, that one wishes the Atlantic crossing had been longer. This is a Titanic presented with all its imperfections – behind the grand opulence of the first class spaces, there was unfinished décor and incomplete fixtures and fittings throughout the ship, and a malfunctioning heating system that had passengers shivering in their beds. There’s a wealth of compelling detail about some of the 2,240 souls on board the ship, from industrial magnates returning from holidays in Europe and Africa, newly weds on their honeymoon, and Irish and European emigrants seeking opportunity and adventure in the New World. There were disgruntled passengers, like the mother and daughter who complained incessantly to the stewards about their genuinely cramped 2nd class accommodation, and there was the poor woman who slipped on a wet staircase on her first day and broke her arm. There were seasick passengers that never made it to the dining hall, and travelers whose nerves could not be calmed by the flat sea and the oft repeated assurances that the ship was “unsinkable”.

At the point in the book where I am, the eve of the disaster, the fate of these people has yet to be determined. One crew member mentioned in the book, and I find myself frequently thinking about him, is one John Coffey, a 23 year old Irish engineer who accompanied the ship from Southampton to Cobh, and there jumped ship for reasons unclear – perhaps he had some premonition of disaster (as did many on board the ship, after Titanic almost collided with another ship as she left Southampton) or perhaps he simply wanted to get home to Cobh and stay there. But what of that extraordinary moment when he first heard about the disaster ? One could scarcely imagine having that much luck…

What’s Welsh for sinister ?

Friday the 13th came up in conversation last night and John Cale’s wearing of a white hockey mask in the latter half of the 70’s came to mind. I made a note to consult my copy of Cale’s 1999 autobiography What’s Welsh for Zen to find out the origin of the hockey mask, but disappointingly it gets only a cursory mention when Cale describes his idea for wearing costumes on stage to deepen the meaning of his songs. Tim Lucas suggested to me that Cale adopted the hockey mask after it made the front page of one of the American news weeklies, and I’ll go with that. I’m pleased to pick up the book again, not having looked at my copy in years, and I’m reminded of what a striking book it is, with the text laid over and meshing with photos, drawings and distressed image and typographic effects, as eccentric and erratic as Cale’s long discography. Looking for a mention of the damned hockey mask, I find myself drawn back into the book, as my eye scans over fascinating remarks about Eno, Lou Reed and quite candid revelations about his stormy, even harrowing marriage to Cynthia Wells of the GTOs...

Xmas AD: The 2000AD Annual

Christmas presents secured - check. Decorations retrieved from the darkest recesses of the attic - check. 2000AD annuals - CHECK !!! A December tradition I try to keep every year is taking some time to flick thru my remaining 2000ADs annuals - the galaxy’s greatest annual, which was always a huge part of Christmases-past. Reading David Bishop's 2009 book Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000AD, I was dismayed to find out that the annual was a thorn in the side of the 2000AD staff, a hastily assembled rag tag collection of old strip reprints, short stories, wordsearch puzzles and quizzes, reader drawings and in the early annuals, Tomorrow's World style features on space travel, VCRs and home computers. All grist to the mill for this young earthling.

The Kill Bill Diary

It could have been so different, as David Carradine reminds us in the second entry of his 2004 memoir The Kill Bill Diary. It's March 2002 and for the past year Warren Beatty has been courted by Quentin Tarantino to the play the part of Bill. The 65 year old Beatty however has grown increasingly weary of the amount of time and effort the part requires, and when Tarantino suggests Beatty play Bill "like David Carradine", a fed up Beatty shoots back with "Why don't you offer it to David ?" Two weeks later Carradine along with his fellow Deadly Viper Squad of actors are in the thick of a grueling month-long, pre-shoot training regime learning martial arts and wire work under the tutelage of Yuen Wu Ping. And Carradine is enjoying every moment of it. 

Written in a breezy, unpretentious style, The Kill Bill Diary is an interesting, sometimes fascinating account of David Carradine’s unlikely late career bump up to the A-list movie-making league after two decades worth of straight to video crap. Carradine’s reputation rests mostly on his 70's work, having made films for Martin Scorsese, Roger Corman, Robert Altman, Hal Ashby, Walter Hill and lest we forget Ingmar Bergman, plus he created a television icon as Caine, the wandering Shaolin monk in Kung Fu. But as the 80’s wore on Carradine’s increasingly erratic lifestyle reduced him to the status of jobbing actor taking fast pay checks for exploitation quickies. Carradine’s book doesn't rake over the ashes of the years spent languishing in the margins; he’s more content to spin a yarn about making Bound for Glory or The Long Riders, but what emerges most strongly from the diaries is Carradine's joy at finally landing the big fish (and director) he has been waiting for his entire career. 

Those looking for a detailed look at the making of Kill Bill will be disappointed. Carradine has little interest in recording the nuts and bolts of film-making and perhaps to bolster that aspect of the book, he lazily borrows two set reports written by Harry Knowles. The focus instead is on Carradine's interactions with his fellow actors (he's especially generous in his praise for Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen) and his collaboration with Quentin Tarantino, here displaying a Wellesian level of energy and enthusiasm on set, inventing dialogue and scenes moments before they are shot. One peripheral but noteworthy character in the book is Rob Moses, whom Carradine describes as his "personal trainer and guitar buddy". Their twenty-year friendship was one of the more important relationships in Carradine's life and the actor had come to rely on him, so much so that he endeavored to get Moses attached to the production and served as Carradine's driver to and from locations. I had to wonder if Tarantino took some inspiration from this when writing Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.

Carradine steers clear of gossip and controversy for the most part, but there are a few grumbles of complaint along the way. Carradine is candid about his perilous finances (a string of ex wives and a taste for the good life will do that) and moans that his fee for the film was strictly scale (as was the rest of the cast) and the lengthy shoot resulted in him turning down several film offers and lucrative work on the convention circuit signing autographs (I presume the diary was Carradine's idea to squeeze a little extra revenue out of the film). Carradine records his irritation with Miramax for reprimanding the actor for various faux pas made during the film's promotional campaign - most seriously, when Carradine prematurely announced to a journalist that the original film would be split in two. Incidentally, Harvey Weinstein makes a few cameo appearances in the book, and is an intimating presence. Carradine refers to him at him at one point as a "master of the universe", (a seemingly complimentary but perhaps a knowingly ambiguous description), and admits "Harvey's not someone you want to be mad at you". Elsewhere Carradine writes: "Harvey showed up with a young actress in whom he is showing an interest" which prompts a shudder.

As I came to the end of The Kill Bill Diary, I felt a touch of sadness that Carradine never benefited from his change of fortune. As Carradine closes out his work on the film, with a whirlwind of globe-trotting promotion, Carradine is optimistic that better roles in bigger films were to come following his acclaimed performance in Kill Bill Vol. 2. But despite the prestige of appearing as the titular character in a Quentin Tarantino film, Carradine never did escape the low-budget film circuit where he continued to work until he was found dead in a Bangkok hotel room in 2009 in what is best described as strange circumstances.

In preparation for reading the book, I watched Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2 back to back, and it was interesting to revisit them in one single sitting. In fact this was my first time seeing the films together, strange considering I've owned the Japanese DVDs since 2004. Probably I was holding off for a release of the long rumored Whole Bloody Affair edition which has had a few select theatrical screenings but has yet to emerge on home video. But now that I’ve seen both films together, I have to wonder though how they ever knitted together in the first place, considering how distinctive both films are from each other - Vol 1, the fast, flashy, psychedelic blood feast, and Vol 2. the languid, introspective character study. 

I suspect Quentin Tarantino had originally envisioned Kill Bill as a big take-the-day-off-work roadshow event a 4-hour magnum opus deserves, but eventually conceded that the epic length was too demanding for theatrical audiences. And to retain as much of his director's cut as possible, he was forced to split the film into two easily digestible halves. I now think that this was the best thing for the film, not because it breaks up the excessive run time, but because the story (assuming it follows the structure of Vol.1 and 2), no longer peaks much too early with the House of Blue Leaves massacre. I wonder had the original 4-hour version come out in 2003 would audiences have criticized the film for the quite drastic shift in tone from the stylish pyrotechnics of the first half to the comparatively quiet and reflective second half ? We'll never know. Almost 20-years later, it's impossible to think of Quentin Tarantino's fourth film as anything but his fourth and fifth and even if the Whole Bloody Affair does eventually get a home video or streamed release, it will surely be seen as a novelty item much like The Godfather Saga...

War and Peace

Farewell to War and Peace ! I made a new year’s resolution in the dying candlelight of 2019 to finally read Tolstoy’s behemoth, the quintessential large trophy book of my collection which I’ve been saving for a long prison sentence. I managed to read it in just less than a month (not quite life-without-parole), and for the most part I enjoyed it immensely, despite it soaking up almost all my spare time (hence my absence from this place). The sheer scale of the book was daunting - and there was a moment when I reached 900 pages or so, that I felt like a marathon runner about to hit the plateau, the finish line, an unreachable 700-odd pages away. But having come so far there was nothing left to do but relax my pace, regulate my breathing and drive on. I’m making it sound like some foolish death march, but the joy of War and Peace is in its length - after a couple of hundred pages I had moved quite comfortably, bag and baggage into Tolstoy’s world. A Guardian columnist wrote a piece on the book in 2016 and claimed he read the book in just 10 days, and while I’m not doubting his fitness, it seemed to me that such a sprint could not do justice to the book’s grand sweep and the changes the war brings to the lives of the principle characters.

That’s not to say the book wasn’t maddening at times. My edition of the book, an e-copy of the 2010 Oxford edition (featuring a well-regarded translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude) includes the French dialogue which the characters would slip in and out of mid conversation (as was the custom among the Russian elites of the day it seems), necessitating the tapping of the footnotes to read the translation, and disrupting the pace of the scene. Another point of irritation was the morphing of character names from first names to family names to nicknames, sometimes within the one paragraph - another Russian convention that had to be grappled with. One particular aspect of the book I enjoyed was reading the battle scenes, which surprised me - my eyes generally glaze over the complex details of military maneuvers but Tolstoy writes his war scenes with clear, vivid language, and I felt a tremendous sense of the sound and fury of war.

Much of my reading was accompanied by various ambient music, the more minimalist and unobtrusive the better, which sometimes lent an agreeable Malickesque quality to the book as characters expressed their innermost thoughts, and for the early sections of the book, I was pleased to use Keith Jarrett’s 1987 album, Book of Ways, a double-CD of improvised clavichord recordings, an instrument featured in the book, providing a nice bit of cross-pollination between the book and my record collection. I finished the book at the weekend and went straight into William Mann’s Brando biography, but I can still feel the pull of War and Peace days later, the sense of time and place, but mostly the characters and a profound sense of loss for their passing.

Shaun Hutson's Terminator

The fly crawled into the wound, feasting on the dark fluid within. Terminator ignored it as it nudged deep into the gash on his face. The skin was torn in many places, some of the cuts mottled green and blue where gangrene had begun to set in. The flies swarmed over the putrescent repast like gourmets. The cyborg could smell its own odour. The tiny hotel room was rank with it, a thick fetid stench which clogged the air and was made worse by the stifling heat...

Shaun Hutson, The Terminator

It seems an unlikely pairing, James Cameron’s stylish hi-tech sci-fi thriller and splatterpunk novelist Shaun Hutson, but back in 1984 UK publishers Star commissioned Hutson to write a novelization of Cameron’s film to tie in with its January 1985 release in the UK and Ireland. By all accounts neither party was terribly enthusiastic about the project. Hutson reportedly completed his assignment in just 15 days, and the novelization was not published in the US. Instead a more substantial, expansive and what might be best described as official novelization was penned by Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher and published in the US in November 1985. Of the two Terminator novelizations, the Frakes and Wisher book is probably the one best recommended for Terminator scholars. I've read in tandem with Hutson's novelization, a advanced draft of The Terminator screenplay, dated April 20th 1983 and the novelization closely follows, almost scene-for-scene, the screenplay, even dialogue in most cases remains unchanged. That’s not to say Hutson’s pass at the film should be disregarded. Before the advent of the 2001 Special Edition Terminator DVD, Hutson's novelization was one of the few sources of information on scenes that never made the final cut, and even today, with The Terminator mythos thoroughly explored in numerous books and websites, the novelization can still surprise with a few interesting diversions.

Two scenes that most likely were not filmed involve two supporting characters. Early in the novelization, readers are introduced to redhead Ginger Ventura and boyfriend Matt, when Sarah meets both at a gym. It's a minor, lightweight scene that no one would miss. The second lost scene is more substantial though and serves to introduce the character of the weary lieutenant Ed Traxler, first seen attending the home of the second murdered Sarah Connor:

Lying face down was a young woman, although it was hard to ascertain her age at first glance. Her upper body was a torn mess, a congealed puddle of blood having spread out around her. Part of the back of her skull had been blasted away revealing the sticky grey brain matter beneath.

‘Sarah Connor?’ he said. ‘That can’t be right. That’s the name of the one from Valley Division this afternoon.’

Vukovich shrugged and handed something to his superior

‘No doubt about the name. Here, we got her driver’s licence.’

‘You gotta be kidding me,’ Traxler said. ‘Jesus Christ. A one-day pattern killer. The newsboys will be short-stroking over this one.’ He looked down at the driver’s licence, hoping that there was some kind of mistake. There wasn’t.

Cameron judiciously transposed this bit of exposition to the police station for the film, but the scene as originally written lends Traxler a more profound connection to the unfolding events - when Sarah is later stalked by the Terminator in the police station, the critically injured Traxler hands Reece his gun and implores him to keep Sarah alive, suggesting that he believes what Reece had spoken about during his interrogation.

If the Frakes and Wisher book is now considered the definitive novelization of the film, Shaun Hutson's book has at least one important plot point not found in its US counterpart. After Sarah and Reece regroup at the Tikki motel, Sarah tries to convince Reece to destroy the Cyberdyne Systems plant which she locates in the phonebook. The plan is ultimately scotched when the Terminator resumes his pursuit but by a strange twist of fate, the climactic battle between Sarah and the Terminator takes places at the Cyberdyne manufacturing plant, where two of its personnel recover one of the cyborg chips. Interestingly there seems to have been some confusion on Hutson's part about what the computer system that waged war on humanity is actually called, referring to it as Skynet, but also as Titan. The word Titan eerily anticipates James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic but I could find no evidence that it sprang from an early Terminator screenplay draft. Perhaps Shaun Hutson was sneaking in a reference to Trident, the United Kingdom's nuclear missile programme established just a few years earlier in 1980.

A noteworthy aspect of the book is the naming convention used for the cyborg assassin. For the bulk of the novelization, Hutson refers to the T-800 as simply Terminator, without the definite article, which is not restored until the story's climax. This initially threw me off, thinking it was an ill-advised idiosyncrasy of the author, but the inconsistency is explained in the April 1983 screenplay which contains this bit of action:

The last flakes of flesh are falling from him like burning leaves. His gleaming structure is revealed in all its intricacy. No longer a 'He', but an 'It'. It looks like Death rendered in steel.

And for the remainder of the screenplay, the cyborg is referred to as The Terminator, which Hutson duly follows for the rest of the novelization.

Bernard Gordon: Screenwriter

I revisited Horror Express at the weekend courtesy of Arrow’s terrific Blu-Ray, and had the rare luxury last night of actually watching the extras before the disc is returned to the shelf. By far the best video supplement on the disc is the 30min conversation with veteran screenwriter and Horror Express producer Bernard Gordon, filmed in 2005.

Much of the talk centers around the difficulties Gordon experienced with HUAC and the blacklist - his leftist politics and pro-union sympathies ended his career as a promising writer at Universal, but after a brief hiatus, Gordon resumed screenwriting under a pseudonym, taking whatever jobs came his way (which included the occasional B-movie like Zombies of Mora Tau). The talk then turns to the era of the international co-production when Gordon found himself working in Spain for film producer Philip Yordan (who often took credit for Gordon’s writing), eventually leading to Horror Express. I won’t say anymore save to say this is a fascinating interview and highly recommended to anyone who might have skipped over it previously (it also appears on Severin's 2011 edition). Gordon was well in his 80’s when David Gregory filmed him and he reminded me of one of those aging New York wiseguys that turn up on the fringes of Goodfellas or Casino – still sharp and still tough.

After watching the Gordon interview, I reached for my copy of Patrick McGilligan’s 1997 book Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, which devotes a chapter to Gordon (who’s in much more prickly form for the interview in the book), and it’s another illuminating insight into the difficulties of maintaining a writing career after coming to the attention of HUAC, with sad stories of talented screenwriters forced to work for change on underwhelming assignments and frequently relinquishing credit for their work, such was the stigma of the blacklist, a situation cost-cutting producers were all too keen to take advantage of…

In the depths of Hell

Lead Cenobite Doug Bradley peers out from under the skin of the British quad poster of Hellraiser…

I’m currently reading Paul Kane's 2006 book The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, and it’s good to be back in the world of Hellraiser again. I saw the original film on VHS in 1988 and at the time it was far more intense a Horror film than I was used to seeing. Subsequent viewings over the years have diluted some of the film’s power, while Hellbound has improved, and remains my favorite of the series. Stefan Jaworzyn was notoriously cranky about Hellbound in the pages of Shock Xpress, comparing the dusty corridors of Hell to a bad Lucio Fulci set (there’s some truth to that), but I can enjoy the absurdities of Hellbound, and the outrageous gore.

Paul Kane’s book provides some good analysis of the films, enough to make me go back and see the core trilogy again, but if truth be told, I’m skimming thru the chapters devoted to the sequels Bloodline, Inferno, Hellseeker, Deader, Hellworld, Revelations, and Judgement (a roll call of the damned if there was ever one, and none of which I’ve seen), picking out the passages which delve into their productions, all of which seemed plagued with reduced budgets, reduced ideas, and a dearth of talent on both sides of the camera. I don’t know how the Children of the Corn or Puppet Master series have fared, but I can’t think of another Horror film franchise that has fallen from grace in such spectacular trash film style. I’ve read that the penultimate film to date, the universally loathed Revelations was cobbled together over 11 shooting days by Dimension Films to safeguard the film rights which were due to expire. A television series is now in the works, which I have no doubt will be absolutely missable…

Ripper Territory

I’m thinking of the title of the George Harrison song, Beware of Darkness… I’m currently reading Michael Bilton’s 2003 book Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, and am finding it a harrowing but compelling read. I should add upfront, that this is not a subject I’m entirely comfortable with, I find true crime books too sensationalist, or too disturbing to enjoy, and for the most part I find their attraction as mystifying as say Mondo films. That said, I picked up Bilton’s book on a whim, just to sample the first few pages, but was immediately drawn into a world that I recognized from Sidney Lumet’s film The Offense - gray, damp, depressed, Industrial. Chronologically, I’m 5 murders into Peter Sutcliffe’s reign of terror, and the only thing more excruciating than the missed leads and mishandled information are the murders themselves, and the volcanic rage that fueled the extraordinary violence that was inflicted upon these poor women. So I have much ground yet to cover, but I’m already looking ahead to David Peace’s Red Riding novels and the 2009 C4 series. Incidentally there’s plenty of Industrial Music out there to serve as a musical companion for a book about Peter Sutcliffe, and I must say I did think of Kevin Tomkins’s power electronics outfit Sutcliffe Jugend, and the 10-cassette collection We Spit On Their Graves, from 1982, which takes its inspiration from the Sutcliffe case. I have an mp3 copy of the entire 10-hour run (Christ!) and while I initially thought of sampling a little, a quick visit to the Discogs page reminded me that all 20-sides of the tapes were named after Sutcliffe’s victims, which I find rather distasteful right now. Evidently Cold Spring did as well – their single CD digest edition dispenses with the names altogether on the disc’s artwork...

Gravity all nonsense now...

I saw an item on TV last night, about alien invasion movies, and among the films featured was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Douglas Trumbull recalled that the look of the mothership was based on the idea of a spacecraft as floating cityscape, complete with skyscrapers and other urban architecture, and that notion put in mind the various illustrations used for the quartet of James Blish novels better known in their omnibus form as Cities In Flight. The individual books, published between 1955 and 1962, posited a future where whole cities blast off for the stars to wander interstellar space like economic migrants in search of more prosperous living conditions. When the American science fiction journal Analog serialized the third novel of the quartet, A Life for the Stars in the September/October 1962 issues, artist George Solonevich depicted a city, still moored to the earthen rock it was built on drifting through space, and it's this concept which seems to have inspired subsequent designs. Solonevich's idea was not without precedent - the 1955 US first edition of Earthman, Come Home also depicts a city as celestial vessel, but Solonevich's painting is far more striking. I wonder was Solonevich influenced by Magritte's 1959 painting The Castle of the Pyrenees which depicts a citadel sitting on top of a enormous floating rock, and I wonder too had Steven Spielberg been influenced by Solonevich's painting, which a 16 year old Spielberg might have discovered on the newsstand in the summer of 1962.

In 1970 US publisher Avon sensibly anthologized the four novels in one single volume as Cities In Flight, and for the cover of their paperback, cleverly incorporated the intergalactic itinerant cities into the book’s title. In 1974 UK publisher Arrow Books issued their own edition of Cities in Flight, as well as the four books in stand-alone editions. For the cover designs, Arrow commissioned the great sci-fi futurist Chris Foss who indulges his love for impossibly enormous constructions and practical industrial design. In fact the covers for They Shall Have Stars and Earthman, Come Home bear a striking resemblance to the look of the huge refinery that the Nostromo starfreighter is towing back to Earth in Alien. a film Chris Foss contributed design ideas to.

Speaking of Chris Foss and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I was leafing thru the excellent 2011 compendium Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss, and I was reminded of Foss' artwork for the 1977 Panther paperback edition of J.G. Ballards's novel The Drought, and its similarity to that famous shot in the Spielberg film of the SS Cotopaxi cargo ship marooned in the Gobi Desert. Rick McGrath, collector extraordinaire of Ballard first editions was dismissive of Foss' artwork for Panther's late 70's editions of High-Rise, Low-Flying Aircraft and Crash and while I agree that Foss' designs are an ill-fit for the complexities of Ballard's work, I do think his artwork for The Drought is a good match. It's worth noting that Gobi desert sequence was not part of the original Close Encounters cut, but was film in 1979 for what became known as the Special Edition, and I did wonder if Spielberg chanced upon The Drought paperback, but a quick check of Michael Klastorin's superb 2017 book Close Encounters of the Third Kind The Ultimate Visual History reveals that Spielberg included the ship-in-the-desert sequence in the second draft of the screenplay dated September 1975.

First look at FAB Press' Scala book

I should have posted this back in November last when FAB Press' long awaited chronicle of the legendary Scala Cinema landed on my desk with a heavy thud. I've only skimmed thru the book so far - the sheer size and weight (over 10 lbs) requires an ergonomic space to enjoy it in, but I can tell from just a few casual passes, that this book is something very special indeed. Author Jane Giles charts a colorful 15 year history of the cinema beginning in 1978 when Palace Pictures co-founder Stephen Woolley launched the Scala film club with an aggressive repertory programme that shoved a finger in the face of an increasingly draconian Thatcher government. The Scala closed its doors in 1993 due to spiraling rent and a scarcity of funds for a long overdue redevelopment, but not before it turned generations of film fans onto the delights of flagship Scala films like Eraserhead, Pink Flamingos and Thundercrack!, plus a steady monthly diet of American Exploitation, European Horror, transgressive Art Cinema and mind-boggling Experimental Film. The genius of the Scala in bringing these seemingly disparate strands of Cinema under one roof is reflected in the Scala's extraordinary monthly programmes, all 178 of them, which are lavishly reproduced in the book.

I've taken a few pictures of the book to give you a flavor of this epic production. I was lucky enough to order an early copy of the book which came in a hard slipcover adorned with beautiful Graham Humphreys artwork. In the final pic in the series, I've strategically placed my Eraserhead DVD and Thundercrack! Blu-Ray alongside the book just to give an idea of the scale. Step over to FAB Press for more info....

A Sorcerer by any other name...

Preview picture spread for Sorcerer, from the August 1977 issue of UK film journal Films and Filming... I spotted this earlier whilst leafing thru an issue of Films and Filming and I was surprised to see William Friedkin's film presented to British and Irish audiences under its original title, rather than the international Wages of Fear title. Films and Filming often ran previews well in advance of release dates, and I wonder was it the intention of the UK distributor, at this early stage, to release the film under the Sorcerer title, and reap the benefit of the tenuous link to the The Exorcist ?

I couldn't nail down an exact theatrical release date for the film on this side of the Atlantic, but it seems the film was in UK theatres by February 1978 - enough time perhaps for the UK distributor to rethink its strategy in the face of the dismal Stateside performance of the film. The director himself writing in his 2013 memoir, offered a combination of theories for the film's failure, among them, the ill-advised choice of title which seemed no more profound than the director borrowing it from Miles Davis' 1967 album which he had been listening to at the time. Friedkin himself wanted to call the film Ballbreaker, which might have looked good stenciled on one of the trucks, but studio boss Lew Wasserman flatly refused. Interestingly,  Films and Filming's review of the Wages of Fear eventually appeared in the May 1978 issue and its inclusion almost feels like an afterthought, considering the lag behind the film's roll out across UK and Irish cinemas earlier in the year. The magazine's chief critic Gordon Gow praised the film's moody atmosphere but felt the film was "careful but dull". To further dispel interest in the film, Gow signed off his review with a touch of regret that the Wages of Fear was a clumsy abridgment of the longer Sorcerer and warned this version of the film had been disowned by its director.

And then there was the matter of Star Wars. The unveiling of George Lucas's film preceded Friedkin's by a week but it proved a disastrous bit of scheduling - while the queues were snaking around the corners for Star Wars (with some patrons making their second and third visit), Sorcerer was playing to empty theatres. It was enough a signal a sea change in the tastes of film goers who evidently had grown tired of pessimistic character-driven dramas, embracing instead Star War's swashbuckling juvenile fantasia. And yet, four decades on, Sorcerer has been rediscovered by a younger generation who cherish the films made in that halcyon era of American Cinema when art briefly trumped commerce, the film now considered one of the finest films of the decade, and the high-water mark where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The Comeback

I’ve just finished reading James Kaplan’s 2010 book, Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan’s two-book chronicle of the life and times of Frank Sinatra, concluding in some dramatic fashion with the making of Fred Zinnemann’s 1953 film From Here To Eternity, and the re-making of Sinatra’s faltering career. I found Kaplan’s book to be a little tacky in places, too frequently the author indulges in the kind of coarse vernacular Sinatra used when his temper flared (“She didn’t give a flying fuck. She wanted to see her husband” writes Kaplan about Ava Gardner), but this final section of the book made for compelling, absorbing reading. Previously I had only a sketchy knowledge of Sinatra’s life (and music) and it came as some surprise to discover how low Sinatra’s post-war career had sunk – by 1952 Sinatra was regularly playing half-empty theatres, and was once spotted walking in Times Square alone and unmolested, the bobby-soxers long since retreated. What’s remarkable is how finely tuned Sinatra’s instinct was for what a part like the scrawny but tough Italian-American street guy Angelo Maggio could do for his career.

Even before Columbia announced their acquisition of James Jones’ novel, Sinatra had earmarked the part for himself, obsessively learning the character’s dialogue and Brooklyn speech rhythms, and in the months that followed, campaigned vigorously for the role, firing off weekly telegrams to Columbia czar Harry Cohn, always signed Maggio. Despite Sinatra negotiating a demeaning cut-price salary with the studio, Cohn still favored Eli Wallach for the role but it was Fred Zinnemann who finally settled on Sinatra after seeing screen test footage of him performing two scenes from the film. Watching From Here To Eternity again, I was surprised to see how slight Sinatra actually was, his thin bony frame momentarily put in mind Richard Wordsworth’s emaciated prisoner of war in Hammer’s 1958 film Camp On Blood Island. But regardless of his modest physical stature (and he was perfectly cast in this regard, the character in the novel a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt), Sinatra is superb as Maggio, and the equal of his co-star Montgomery Clift – no small thing considering Sinatra on previous pictures delivered his scenes in one or two takes.

Sinatra was no Method actor but I wonder did some of Clift’s technique rubbed off on set – one gets the impression that Sinatra was harnessing that fierce temper and perhaps the sense of anxiety he often felt in those lean years - look for that genuine look of weariness on his face when he falls into the clutches of Ernest Borgnine’s sadistic stockade warden. The performance earned Sinatra an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but in later years it seems his triumph was tinged with a certain ambivalence, remarking that his portrayal of heroin addict Frankie Machine in The Man With the Golden Arm was more worthy of an Academy Award (Sinatra was nominated but lost out to his former tormentor Ernest Borgnine who picked up the statuette in 1956 for Marty). And much later Sinatra’s involvement in From Here To Eternity was the source of some embarrassment for the singer after the release of The Godfather, which propagated the myth that Sinatra had employed the services of the Mob to land the part of Maggio. If the down-on-his-luck crooner Johnny Fontane sprang entirely from the imagination of Mario Puzo, perhaps the novelist was remembering an earlier rumor that Sinatra used unsavory connections to release him from his contract with bandleader Tommy Dorsey, a story Sinatra always brushed aside but nevertheless persists to this day…

Rattus Italiano

Some Bruno Mattei borrowed with thanks.... I've just polished off James Herbert's 1974 debut novel The Rats, and while there's no explicit association between Mattei's post-apocalyptic thriller and Herbert's novel, I very much approached the book as if it were an early 80's Italian splatter movie. I don't wish to belittle Herbert's skills as a writer, but imagining the film as an over the top Italian import acclimatized me to some of the more ludicrous parts of the novels - an infant torn to shreds in its cot, a nymphomaniac alcoholic stripped to the bone, and in one of the book's biggest set pieces, a London Underground station besieged by hordes of flesh-hungry rats. Mattei would need a considerably bigger conveyor belt for that sequence but the films of Mattei and his contemporaries are the perfect foil for Herbert's novel - neither of them apologetic about being in the Horror business.

Thinking about it now, The Rats could have easily ran as a series in those early issues of 2000AD, perhaps Invasion, with rats replacing Volgans, the hard-as-nails anti-establishment Bill Savage the only thing standing in the way of the UK being reduced to a vermin-infested wasteland... Lair is next...

Covering King

For the past few days I've been re-reading the excellent 1988 book Bare Bones: Conversations on Terror with Stephen King, which gathers 30-odd interviews with the Elvis Presley of Horror fiction (as editor David G. Hartwell calls him in his introduction to the short-story anthology The Dark Descent). In one of the more interesting chapters in the book, the conversation turns to King's book covers - a subject little explored in most interviews. Not surprisingly, this interview first appeared in Heavy Metal magazine, and while it makes for fascinating reading, I was frustrated that there were no illustrations to accompany the text. Digging out my scanned copy of the February 1980 issue of Heavy Metal, the original interview is also bereft of graphics, so with that in mind, I thought it might be worthwhile to present the entire section of the Heavy Metal piece with the appropriate illustrations.

* * * *

Bhob Stewart: We broke off last issue with a mention of New American Library designer Jim Plumeri's visual concept for King's Night Shift collection: a clever double cover with six eyes peering through die-cut eye slits in the dark blue background. Opening this front cover to page one you discover that the eyes are actually socketed into the palm, thumb and fingers of a half-bandaged hand, a Don Brautigam illustration of King's story I Am the Doorway about an astronaut back from Venus who finds that aliens inside him are metamorphosing his body. Brautigam's skilled use of surrealism techniques earned him a Society of Illustrators award for this airbrush/acrylic painting. Equally effective are Plumeri's other award-winning covers for King titles. "I call them occult solutions" says Plumeri. "When I did Stephen King I was looking for the most unusual solutions I could possibly find. My job is to make people stop and pick the book up. I can't drag them to the cash register. but I can sure as hell make them pick it up."

For the first million copies of the paperback edition of The Shining, Plumeri devised a small, faceless head and had it printed in black on a glistening silver mylar. "I don't have to have that kind of visual now. I can just put "Stephen King". By the time The Shining comes out by Kubrick, with Jack Nicholson in it, I think all I have to do is put a big STEPHEN KING on the cover. The Shining is Kubrick's baby; whatever he has for his advertising visual I will do. In all movie tie-ins the movie usually supplies us with their advertising art and typography. It's a chance where they get extra exposure and we get exposure. One hand washes the other."

Plumeri's occult solution for the initial paperback printing of Salem's Lot won an award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. This was a cover of lustrous solid black - no title, no blurbs, no byline - with a single, tiny drop of red blood at the mouth of an embossed head hardly visible unless held and angled so that the embossing can catch the light. Plumeri chose type designer Pete Gute to handle the illustration because Gute had previously worked with embossed type. A follow up version of this cover added a silver embossed title above the embossed head. In its final form (the one currently in bookstores), the embossed cover was replaced by a photograph of the same head with regular flat printing. "That happened because we ran out of the special black stock." Plumeri explained. "I had photographed the original head see how it would work with dramatic lighting on the raised surface. When we ran into this emergency. I pulled this photograph out and decided that it could be used for art."

The paperback jacket for The Stand has a frightening beauty that goes beyond the merely hypnotic to become a trance-inducing glissade into ethereal evil. It combines a Richard Rossiter type design with a Brautigam airbrush painting based on a Plumeri concept sketch. "I use paint or pastel - whatever is available to give me the effect that I'm trying to portray to the artist" said Plumeri. "The sketches are rough. but they can see the concept without any problem. Don and I work well together. Throughout The Stand the evil character is described with these burning eyes, almost red, and the there is a symbolism of a crow that pops into the book at different parts. Someone sees the red, glaring eyes. and for a second thinks he sees this evil character. At that point I thought of this double image using the black crow and the evil and letting one eye work for both to give it this supernatural quality. "

Where Jim Plumeri's conceptual transpositions of King's writing into innovative paperback covers have been appropriate, relevant and ambiguously intriguing, the Doubleday hardbacks with a yawning indifference to King's fresh slant on contemporary horror fiction, have featured only mundane designs and illustrations so trapped in tradition that they lack any genuine imaginative thrust. Stephen King's own reactions to the art that wraps his words kicks off Part 2 of this serialized interview:

Bhob: The jacket on the hardback Carrie has nothing to do with the book.

Stephen King: Yes, well. it doesn't. My editor and I had a concept on that, but of course, one of the things about Bill Thompson, my editor, was that he was a man with relatively little power at Doubleday and it kept showing up in funny little ways. When I left Doubleday, they canned him. It was kind of like a tantrum: "We'll kill the messenger that brought the bad news." Our concept of the jacket would have been a Grandma Moses-type primitive painting of a New England village that would have gone around in a wrap to the back. But the jacket was done by Alex Gotfryd, who does have a lot of power at Doubleday. What he gave us was a photograph of a New York model who looks like a New York model. She doesn't even look like a teenager.

Bhob: How do you feel about the montage on The Shining hardback?

King: Don't care for that either. It makes the people look too specific. It's almost a Gothic romance jacket. There are some nice things about that jacket - I object to the faces of Jack, Wendy, and the little boy, but I like the concept of having the hedge animals. The hardback Night Shift has a classy jacket of just words, but it looks like a Doubleday-type jacket for a book they didn't expect to sell. There's nothing really exciting about that graphic.

Bhob: The long-distance view of the town on the Salem's Lot hardback doesn't indicate the book's true nature.

King: I think that was intentional. The flap copy on Salem's Lot is a real collaboration: my editor wrote part of it, his secretary wrote part of it, I wrote part of it, and my wife wrote part of it. It was just an effort to say something without saying anything. Of all the Doubleday jackets, I think that I like The Stand the best, but Salem's Lot runs that a close second. I like the idea of the black background with the town inset in the "O" of Lot. You can look into the town, and you see the Marsten house. That's a pretty decent jacket. That was the best produced book by Doubleday: all the way around, that was a good piece of work.

The illustration for the hardback of The Stand was taken from a Goya painting, The Battle Of Good and Evil - it was repainted. I was mad that they didn't give poor old Goya a credit.¹ There are a lot of people who are rather literal-minded, kind of nerdy about book jackets, who don't like it because they say that it doesn't look like what the book is about. But it looks like what the spirit of the book is about. New American Library's The Stand cover is super. I think that it's a good one: I like the dark blues and turquoises in it. The paperback covers have always been better because paperback people seem to understand how to market books, how to go about that. Illustrators and designers don't get credit on paperback jackets the way they do on hardcovers.

Bhob: Then there's The Shining in mylar...

King: Except that it was discontinued, as was the dead black cover on Salem's Lot. Both of those were expensive covers. The Salem's Lot cover cost seven cents right off the top of a book that originally sold for $1.95. The mylar was nine cents, and in addition, the mylar cover buffs. It doesn't peel, but the lettering and picture gradually buff off the book. Now they just have a plain paper cover with the same picture: it's not as eye-catching, but it lasts longer.

Bhob: Did it occur to you that the wearing away of fragments of The Shining's cover produces a strange, corrosive effect that some readers might consider an additional horrific bonus?

King: I hadn't thought of it that way - maybe it is. There are people who treasure those copies: some
day maybe those will be worth some money, especially the ones that are in good condition, because on the ones that have been read. the cover wears off very quickly. The mylar was really discontinued not just because it buffed in people's hands, but because it buffed in the boxes when they were shipped. I also like the paperback Night Shift cover: it's a deep. dark. rich blue. Some of the editions are perfect, and on some, the holes are not over the eyes. Again, that was a difficult one to do: there is such a thing as being too clever by half.

Bhob: What was on the Carrie paperback before the movie tie in?

King: That cover has gone totally out of print. The original paperback had no title, no author, no printed material of any kind on the front cover. It simply showed a girl's head floating against this blue backdrop — a pretty girl with very dark hair swept back. It was a painting. a rather nice one(by James Barkley). Inside, there was a second jacket. Originally. it was to have been die-cut down the side in a two-step effect: the title, Carrie, reading vertically down the right-hand margin, was supposed to show and, at the last minute their printer told them that he couldn't do it. Inside there's this town going up in flames, and that is an interesting effect. You reach the end of the book, and there's a photograph on what they call the third cover of the same town crumpled up into nothing but ash. I don't know if that's ever been done before: having another picture inside the back jacket. These were photographs (by Allen Vogel) of flames and a model town that looks as though it was one of these origami things created out of cardboard.

Bhob: The One + One Studio's design for The Dead Zone (Viking) illustrates the repetitive wheel-of-fortune device used throughout the novel.

King: I like that jacket pretty well. I think that, in a large measure, it's been responsible for some of the book's success because it's a very high contrast type, something I think Viking might have lifted from the paperback houses. It comes out at the reader there's so much black. The thing I don't like is the photographic effect: I've never cared for photographed jackets. I can't really even say why, but they seem too realistic to me. I would have liked that jacket better if it had been that same cover design - only painted. By the time you get up to six books, you have mixed feelings. Salem's Lot was the best produced of the Doubleday books. Night Shift would be second, and probably The Shining, third. The Dead Zone is the best produced of all the works. But it's more than just cover. The cover is something that, you hope, entices readers who don't know your work to look. But it probably doesn't mean that much to people who have read you before. If they really turn on to what you're doing, they look for the name, and they'll buy the book on the basis of that. Like this new Led Zeppelin album packaged in brown paper with "Led Zeppelin" stamped on the front - you buy the name. I like books that are nicely made, and with the exception of Salem's Lot and Night Shift, none of the Doubleday books were especially well made. They have a ragged, machine-produced look to them, as though they were built to fall apart. The Stand is worse that way: it looks like a brick. It's this little, tiny, squatty thing that looks much bigger than it is. The Dead Zone is really nicely put together. It's got a nice cloth binding, and it's just a nice product.

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1. I'm not so sure Goya deserves a credit here. I've long heard about Goya being the inspiration for the painting that adorns this edition of The Stand, but I'm not aware of any Goya painting entitled The Battle Of Good and Evil. I wonder is King referring to Fight with Cudgels, one of Goya's Black Paintings which the Spanish artist painted in the early 1820's.

Picture Credits: All the graphics in this post were sourced from the following locations:
The excellent Too Much Horror Fiction blog, which "collects and reviews vintage horror literature (mostly from the 1960s to the early 1990s) and celebrates its resplendent paperback cover art." Images borrowed too from the terrific, comprehensive Stephen King blog, The Truth Inside the Lie. Other images were lifted from rare-book auction sites.