Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
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Authors: Howard Waldrop
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Essays & Correspondence, #Essays, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories, #TV; Movie; Video Game Adaptations
DREAM FACTORIES
AND
RADIO PICTURES
by Howard Waldrop
ElectricStory.com, Inc.
®
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
Howard Waldrop
What if the post-apocalyptic world was inherited by the android avatars of a famous duck, mouse, and dog? What if every '50s Bugarama monster-movie nightmare came true at once? What if Cloudbuster pioneers had transformed the arid American Southwest into a subtropical paradise? What do you mean, what if? They're real, they're here, a life-giving downpour in a desert of mundanity, right from the cranium of Howard Waldrop, one of the best, most original writers in America. For the first time, the greater part of Howard's media-related tales are brought together in one place. TV, radio, movies—they're all right here. Plus original essays by the author. Plus a never-before-published novelette: "Major Spacer in the 21st Century," about the triumph of McCarthyism over a space-opera serial, the subsequent death of democracy, and the country's eventual second shot at freedom. In this collection, Howard brings to life the kind of historical trivia nobody else can imagine. Oh sure, you can laud his insights into the technical and social development of our dream factories and radio pictures. But what will blow you away are his wacky ideas—the way he brings together things that you'd never imagined on the same bookshelf, much less the same page of the same story. And yet, once he lays them out, you wonder why no one else thought to see it that way—his quirkiness exposes the romance of it all better than any cinéma vérité ever could.
DREAM FACTORIES AND RADIO PICTURES
Copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop. All rights reserved.
Ebook edition of
Dream Factories and Radio Pictures
copyright © 2001 by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
ePub ISBN: 978-1-59729-083-8
Kindle ISBN: 978-1-930815-09-4
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This novella is a work of fiction. All characters, events, organizations, and locales are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously to convey a sense of realism.
Cover art by and copyright © 2000 Cory and Catska Ench.
Original Ebook conversion by ElectricStory.com, Inc.
Additional editing by Robert Kruger.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Der Untergang des Abendlandesmenschen”: First published in
Chacal
No. 1, Winter 1976.
“Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me”: First published in
Nickelodeon
No. 2, 1976.
“All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past”: First published in
Shayol
4 (Vol. 1, No. 4), 1980.
“Heirs of the Perisphere”: First published in
Playboy
, July 1985.
“Hoover’s Men”: First published in
Omni
, October 1988.
“French Scenes”: First published in
Synergy
II, ed. George Zebrowski, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ), 1988.
“The Passing of the Western”: First published in
Razored Saddles
, ed. Joe R. Lansdale and Pat LoBrutto, Dark Harvest, 1989.
“Fin de Cyclé”: First published in
Night of the Cooters
, Ursus/Zeising, 1990.
“The Effects of Alienation”: First published in
Omni
, October 1992.
“Occam’s Ducks”: First published in
Omni
, February 1995.
“Flatfeet!”: First published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, February 1996.
“Mr. Goober’s Show”: Previously published in
Omni Online
, March 1998; and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September 1998.
“A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .” and “Major Spacer in the 21st Century!”, prefaces and introductions appear here for the first time and are therefore copyright © 2001 by Howard Waldrop.
Thanks and a tip of the iceberg to Andrew P. Hooper for help in the research for “Mr. Goober’s Show” and to Gordon Van Gelder for a better story title.
For Mr. Utley and Mr. Potter and the lady who knows what she wants.
Preface
W
HAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ
is a collection of all my stories about movies (
dream factories
) and television (
radio pictures
) from my first four collections, plus an
unpublished article
and a
new story
. There’ll be an introduction to each category. The movie part’s divided into
Dream Factories: The Past
, stories about motion pictures from the beginning circa 1895 to one set in an alternate 1970s.
Dream Factories: The Future
is a couple of my 1980s stabs at where films and (well . . .) famous characters were going or could go. There’s an
Interlude
for the new article; then we plunge together manfully forward into
Radio Pictures
, three stories dealing with television since before the beginning in the 1920s to now. (Well, June 2000 anyway, one that didn’t happen.)
There’ll be a new introduction to each story (I always do that, usually to give people who’ve read all the stories a reason to buy a collection of mine). My introductions usually deal with the actual writing, Strange But True facts uncovered while researching them; you know, writer stuff. . . . There’ll be some of that here; mostly the new intros will be about the stories as they fit into (or outside or alongside) the history of motion pictures and television.
Why am I telling you this up front? First, I’m an upfront kind of guy. Second, this is my first ebook (and the far-seeing and astute Robert [Bob] Kruger at ElectricStory.com should be congratulated on his taste [and his quick contract and check]). I don’t own a computer, a telephone, or, up until a year ago, a refrigerator; that being said, I do have a website (kind friends set it up) at
http://www.sff.net/people/waldrop
(last time I looked, the bibliography hadn’t been updated since mid-’98, but any day now I hear . . .). This is also the first (mostly) retrospective collection of mine. Stories here come from all four (
Howard Who?
, Doubleday 1986;
All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
, Ursus 1987;
Night of the Cooters
, Ursus/Zeising 1991;
Going Home Again
, Eidolon Press, Perth, Australia 1997/St. Martin’s 1998, with various American paperback and foreign regroupings and additions and subtractions) of my previous short-story collections.
Most readers have the general impression of me (if they have any at all) of being a guy who writes about extinct species (only two stories), rock and roll (only three and a half stories), or alternate history (well, touché—a lot, including some overlap in all the other categories, including this one).
But as this collection shows, a lot of my stories have been about film and television; their evolution, their heights and depths, some side channels they could have or should have taken but didn’t; actors, directors, technicians, hangers-on, all that Raymond Chandler/Nathaniel West Southern California stuff; other places, too, where movies and television evolved; what effect they have had and will have on us. These kinds of things will be in the individual sections.
There’s more stuff from film, TV, etc., popping up in other stories of mine that aren’t here. “The Sawing Boys,” for instance, which is essentially the Bremen Town Musicians partly told in Damon Runyon style, set in the early 1920s, which allows a backwoods Kentucky musical-saw quartet to come on like a bunch of Beirut
klezmorim
because of the spread of mass communications (radio). But that’s buried so deep in the story that when I tell most people what it’s really about, they look at me funny. “It’s the Bremen Town Musicians, with musical saws,” they say. They could be right.
Anyhow: These are the stories that are directly (or mostly—see the individual intros) about movies and television; personalities, history, projections, alternatives, guesses, and the effects they had on everybody, especially me.
And, as John Barrymore said, after staggering up the center aisle, still in his street clothes, after they’d held the curtain for him thirty minutes, turning to the audience: “You sit right there. I’m going to give you the goddamndest King Lear you’ve ever seen. . . .”
●
PART ONE
●
Dream Factories
Dream Factories: The Past
W
ITH HUMANS, IT GOES LIKE THIS
:
- You’re born.
- You learn to move.
- You learn to talk.
- You learn to tell stories and jokes.
The movies got it all wrong.
They were born. They learned to move. Then they learned to tell stories and jokes. Finally, they learned to talk.
* * *
The stories in this section are about film, from the beginnings to (some other) circa 1970. There’s plenty of stuff here on grammar and orientation, on personalities and genres; all the stuff we love that the movies have done for the past 105 years.
Film was the first mass medium, one capable of taking a product to millions of people at the same time. (Music recording was first, but it took the product—mass-produced—to a few people at a time. Plays had large audiences, but someone seeing the same play in NYC and Cleveland is seeing two different plays; for that matter, someone seeing a matinee and an evening performance of the same play in the same theater with the same cast is seeing two different plays.) The movies—once past the Kinetoscope-card one-viewer-at-a-time penny-arcade version—showed the same thing every time to everyone who ever saw it, no matter where in the world. It was for forever (or as close to forever as celluloid nitrate stock could be), and because it was forever, it changed the way people looked at their transiently beautiful world. . . .
You’ll see in my introductions to the individual stories what I call the Waldrop/Sennett universal plot [hereafter, “W/S u-plot”]: Tom Oakheart, Teddy the Keystone Dog, Oil Can Harry, Pearl. You can illustrate almost anything in film with the likes of
Teddy at the Throttle
(1916). Buddy movies? Tom and Teddy. Romance? Tom, Pearl. Drama? That plot itself. Psychodrama? Why does Oil Can Harry want to saw Pearl into wet kindling when she won’t put out for him? Isn’t that counterproductive? And so on. (If you think this is outdated: the film-within-the-film in
The Player
, the one that’s always being pitched and talked about is the W/S u-plot: Tom Oakheart [Willis] with Teddy [his Land Rover] rescues Pearl [Julia Roberts] from the sawmill [gas chamber], where Oil Can Harry [The State of California] is killing her. Yes or no?)
These things are imprinted on you and me from childhood as surely as if we were baby ducks. The movies are as real (or more real) than the first grade or the SAT or your second car or ’Nam or whatever else we call life. They’re part of it; they’re escape from it. What I’m saying in all these stories is that they’re beside life; a place we went that’s better or worse than what we have here, now . . .
* * *
Remember this while you’re reading these stories about the movies’ past: How real they are.
Reporters waited outside the theater where the world premier of
The Robe
(1953—the first movie using the Cinemascope screen) took place. It was over. Sam Goldwyn, always good for a mangled quote, came out.
“What was
The Robe
about, Mr. Goldwyn?” they asked him.
“It was about a guy with fourteen-foot lips,” he said, and got in his limo, and left.