Monday, September 8, 2014

'Comic book movies' do not exist. Stop using that stupid, stupid term.

This is a scene from a movie, not a comic book.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the movie success story of both the summer and the year. I'll admit, I haven't gotten around to seeing it yet. (I know, I know. I'm the worst.) But the reviews and the word of mouth have both been excellent, and I've enjoyed previous Marvel movies in the past. 

I don't begrudge Guardians its box-office bonanza. My problem is that the film's commercial triumph has meant that I've had to endure a spate of articles and podcasts lately which use one of the dumbest cliches of pop culture criticism: the term "comic book movie." Guardians of the Galaxy is a movie based on characters and situations originally seen in comic books, so people are referring to it as a "comic book movie." 

This is, with all due respect, utter horseshit. Comics are a medium. Movies are another, separate medium. Calling Guardians a "comic book movie" is about as logical and helpful as referring to something as a "solid liquid," a "day night," or an "apple orange." If director James Gunn had taken an actual, printed issue of Guardians of the Galaxy and literally filmed its pages for 90 minutes, then it might almost make sense to call it a "comic book movie." But from what I've seen, he seems to have hired actors like Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana to, you know, say stuff out loud and move around. Like you would in a movie.

A  comic book movie?
Plenty of movies each year are based on text-only novels, yet we don't call these "novel movies," do we? Movies based on plays are not called "play movies." So why is Guardians of the Galaxy a "comic book movie?" I fear it's because people mistakenly think of comic books not as a medium but as a genre, and they feel that adding the descriptive "comic book" to the neutral word "movie" communicates something about a film's plot, characters, and tone. 

Now, it is true that the medium of comics has some longstanding relationships with a few specific genres, specifically superhero stories and so-called "funny animal" stories. And Guardians of the Galaxy (the movie) has elements of both of those genres. But those longstanding relationships I mentioned are not mutually exclusive by any means. There are plays and TV shows and even prose novels about both superheroes and funny animals. 

Moreover, comics can and have been used for a wide variety of purposes, far beyond superheroes and funny animals. Comics are an extremely versatile medium which can be used for any number of things: drama, comedy, action, romance history, surrealism, horror, biography, autobiography, education, etc. From Hell, 300, Ghost World, and Persepolis are among the movies based on comics, and yet we don't often refer to these titles as "comic book movies" because they don't fit the traditional "superhero"/"funny animal" mold. 

The rather silly term "graphic novel" is sometimes used to describe such works as Alison Bechdel's autobiographical Fun Home or Art Spiegelman's Maus simply because the public has a strong association between the perfectly good term "comic book" and images of super-powered musclemen flying around in tights or wisecracking mice who walk upright and speak English. Yes, comics can be used for these things -- and very effectively at that. But they can do so much more, and it's a mistake to confuse medium and genre.

For a brilliant and entertaining exploration of comics and their potential, please read Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. In the meantime, at least stop saying "comic book movie." It makes you sound like a dumbass.

P.S. - "Video game movies" don't exist either. But you probably guessed that by now.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Is Stanley Kubrick selling Nissans from the Great Beyond?

Top: A banner ad for Nissan. Bottom: (left) the carpet from The Shining; (right) a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The power was restored a little after eight this morning, and I immediately got back to the hard work of mindlessly bumming around the Internet in search of entertainment. One of my first stops, of course, was YouTube. And it was there I discovered an intriguing banner ad for the Nissan Altima. Apparently, they have some new model with what they're calling "zero gravity seats" or something, and their marketing wizards have cooked up a little animation involving a floating spaceman looking at various glowing information screens. I couldn't help but notice the resemblance between the ad and a couple of Stanley Kubrick movies. The astronaut himself (or herself; it's tough to tell under those suits) looks like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey, while the background pattern seems to resemble the carpeting from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. I wonder if the homage was intentional. Look at the images above and draw your own conclusions.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Powering down: My harrowing struggle with temporary loss of wifi

This is pretty much what it's like in my apartment right now.

It rained very heavily for about 10 to 15 minutes early Friday afternoon in the town where I live, a mid-sized suburb north of Chicago. That was enough to knock out the power for several days. There's still no power there now. I'm writing this from my cubicle at work. I actually commuted into the city on a Saturday for the privilege of being somewhere with air conditioning, hot water, and Internet connectivity. I'll probably come back here tomorrow, too, because the power's not supposed to be back on at home until late Sunday or early Monday. Remember that Louis C.K. routine about how, because of our reliance on technology, we've all lost "the ability to just be yourself and not be doing something?" Well, that's where I'm living, baby. I live alone in a one-bedroom apartment. Without power, this place really sucks. I wish I could escape into Imagination Land or something and be happy just sitting on the couch doing nothing. Just existing. But I can't do it. I suck. Hey, even that kid from The Never-Ending Story needed a book, right? He didn't just sit there and think all that stuff up. See how I had to explain my situation in terms of pop culture references? That's how addicted to media and technology I am. I am as soft as a freshly-made eclair. Hell, it's probably a pretty nice day out there, and I'm inside blogging about my petty problems. Am I not aware that there's an outbreak of the Ebola virus right now? Yes. And that's happening to other people. People who aren't me. I feel badly that people are dying of Ebola, but that doesn't lessen the fact that I can't tweet for a couple of days or even watch a lousy DVD. I have Ed Wood movies to review!

Anyway, this is an opportunity to talk about some of my online ventures which readers of this blog may not know about. I don't think I've mentioned it here yet, so let me give a plug for a project called Both of Them, Mary Worth! I basically took this Mary Worth comic strip, mutated it in a bunch of ways, and made a Tumblr out of it. Here's a recent example, which took the form of a Psycho parody:

Wouldn't you scream under these circumstances, too?

Speaking of Tumblr, if you haven't checked out edwoodwednesdays.tumblr.com, you really ought to. I've put some extra stuff there that's not part of the regular "Ed Wood Wednesdays" series. Think of the Tumblr as being the special edition with unrated, value-added bonus features. I've been tweeting more often lately, too, so maybe you want to follow @Joe_A_Blevins.  I'll try to make it worth your while. And this is as good a time as any to point out some of my past, failed attempts to win YouTube: songs, monologues, impressions, you name it. Nothing really got any traction there, but (god bless me) I kept trying. An example follows:



I guess that's all I really have to say right now. God, I'm bored.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 47: 'Nympho Cycler' (1971)

Awesome poster or misleading representation of the movie it's supposed to be advertising? Can't it be both?

"It's not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike.
It's more fun than a barrel of monkeys, that two-wheel bike."

-The Hondells, "Little Honda"

Heady times for Ed Wood.
Nineteen-seventy-one must have been a discombobulating year for Edward Davis Wood, Jr. Mired in an ever-worsening alcohol addiction and approaching 50 in a world that increasingly idolized and fetishized youth, Ed was adjusting as best he could under those unpromising circumstances to then-recent paradigm shifts in the entertainment business.

In such a fickle, volatile field, the brass ring tends to go to people who can either successfully predict where the industry is headed or those who can use their ingenuity and/or clout to change the industry's course, redirecting it the way a diversion dam changes the direction of a river. Instead of just "giving 'em what they want," the successful producer can give 'em what they're going to want or something they didn't even know they wanted.

But that's not how Ed Wood operated. Though the writer and director left his personal mark on nearly every movie and book he churned out over the course of his 30-year career and infused those works with his own peculiar fears and desires, he was neither particularly an innovator nor a tastemaker. The highly idiosyncratic and personal Glen or Glenda? (1953), his debut feature as a director, was an anomaly for Ed with its forward-thinking plea for transvestite tolerance and its combustible stylistic mix of woozy surrealism with sober documentary-style reportage.

Instead of making movies as difficult to categorize as Glenda, Eddie spent most of his filmmaking career trying to keep up with popular (or once-popular) trends and seemed to have a knack for showing up at parties just as they were breaking up. He had gotten into the motion picture game in 1948, for instance, with the intention of making the kind of simple, moralistic "cowboy movies" he had enjoyed as a child in Poughkeepsie, NY in the 1920s and 1930s. But by the late 1940s and early 1950s, these types of "white hat/black hat" films were already falling out of fashion and were being supplanted by "kiddie Westerns" on TV (cf. The Lone Ranger [1949-1957]), while theatrically-released Western features aimed for more thematic and stylistic sophistication (cf. the films of John Ford).

Still clinging to his dream of being the cut-rate Orson Welles, Ed's backup plan was to assay such crowd-pleasing and potentially lucrative genres as horror, science-fiction, and crime drama, which he did from 1954 to 1960. Even here, though, he was a man out of time, with plots and characters more suited to the Great Depression than the Fabulous Fifties and cast lists teeming with such past-their-prime performers as Bela Lugosi, Kenne Duncan, Lyle Talbot, Tom Keene, Johnny Carpenter, and Bud Osborne. Forget the future. Ed could barely keep up with the present.

Richard Nixon on Laugh-In.
The 1960s were, arguably, the most dramatic years of social and moral change in this young, dynamic country's history. By 1970, America barely resembled its innocent 1960 self. The nation had been transformed by political assassinations, large-scale riots, an unpopular foreign war, shifting tastes in music and fashion, and rapidly evolving opinions toward sex, drugs, and race. A seemingly irreparable schism had developed during this time between the young (the counterculture) and the old (the establishment). These bickering generations could not even agree what "entertainment" was, let alone what was "good," "bad," "acceptable," or "unacceptable." Hollywood didn't quite know what to do during all of this, but the suits knew there was money to be made from it.

One of the major showbiz trends of the decade was the attempt of the so-called establishment to capitalize upon, co-opt, and generally commercialize upon the counterculture in ways that simultaneously placated kids without offending their parents. Think The Monkees, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and Bob Hope in hippie drag. The 1968 presidential election of Richard Nixon, who had served as Vice President under Eisenhower in the 1950s and who memorably guest-starred on Laugh-In, can be interpreted as an attempt by the older and more conservative factions to restore America to its rigid, pre-JFK state of moral turpitude. The pendulum was swinging back to the right, so to speak.

Ironically, despite his unconventional lifestyle and the fact that he made his living from pornography, Ed Wood would probably have applauded this return to Eisenhower-esque values. In his books and scripts, Eddie demonstrated little to no affinity for the counterculture and likely longed to go back to the 1950s, the time when he was making the movies for which he is still best known.

One particularly thorny issue that divided the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a basic one: Is sex dirty? America's young people said no, but their parents said, "Oh, yes it is!" President Nixon agreed with the moms and dads. He was famously appalled by the lenient stance on pornography taken by the Presidential Commission's report on obscenity and declared with characteristic humorlessness: "So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life."

I thought about Nixon's words -- and the deeply unhealthy feelings behind them -- when I discovered this interesting and insightful quote from a Buzzfeed op-ed by Anne Helen Petersen about the recent Jennifer Lawrence nude photo leak: "Sex is only dirty when suppressed." By suppressing sex, Nixon was actually making it dirtier and inadvertently playing right into the hands of the pornographers of the era, who thrived on their audience's sense of guilt.

The members of the American counterculture were trying to remove the social stigma from sex and spread the message that it was simply a natural and normal part of human existence, nothing to be ashamed of. While they were doing this, sexually-explicit material was becoming an increasingly prominent part of the American way of life. But the so-called "smut racket" wasn't peddling its wares to the hippies. Hell, those freaks were giving it away! What did they need with movies or books when they were living it? Though these crazy kids may have been starring in porno films, they weren't necessarily the ones lining up to buy tickets to see these shows. The infamous report on obscenity made it clear that the audience for porn consisted mostly of middle-aged, middle-class white males -- the fathers of the counterculture kids. These were married men who had fought in WWII, held down respectable jobs, and sought refuge from their problems in booze rather than pot and acid.

In other words, these were Ed Wood's people. And it was for them, not the hippies, that he made this week's movie, a curious little biker film with plenty of female nudity and awkwardly-simulated sex. Though it evoked the counterculture, it was squarely aimed at the squares.

NYMPHO CYCLER(1971)

The opening titles of Ed Wood's Nympho Cycler starring the lovely Casey Larrain.

The brand new DVD.
Alternate titles: Misty [working title]

Availability: Thanks to the good people at Alpha Blue Archives, this movie is now easily available on DVD as part of the Lost Sex Films of Ed Wood series. Purchase it from Amazon or directly from Alpha Blue. In addition to the main feature, the disc contains three more Casey Larrain movies (Caught in the Can; Hedonist Hypnotist; and Scent of Love) along with an excerpt from the documentary Lovemaking USA, which repurposes some footage of Ed and Casey from Love Feast and adds some new narration.

Those wishing to see Nympho Cycler on the big screen will have the chance to do so on September 14, 2014 at 6:15 PM Eastern, when the film plays at Manhattan's Anthology Film Archive as part of a double bill with Necromania. This may well be Nympho Cycler's first theatrical engagement in over 40 years. In years past, Nympho Cycler was available in the UK as a Betmax tape through a company called Dapon, which seems to have specialized in adult films.

Additionally, Nympho Cycler will also be part of After Hours Cinema's upcoming release Ed Wood's Dirty Movies, which is due in November 2014.

The backstory: How does it happen, citizens? How does a movie allegedly made by Edward D. Wood, Jr. and undeniably featuring the man himself in full drag completely escape the attention of all the diligent, detail-oriented biographers and film historians in the world?

And yet that is precisely what happened to Nympho Cycler, a biker-themed softcore movie from 1971 that reunited Wood with his Love Feast co-star Casey Larrain. Originally released by a company called Valco Productions, which has no other movies to its name (at least none documented so far), this film has eluded all those who have lovingly chronicled Ed Wood's career. Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr. does not even mention the movie once. Neither does Rob Craig's Ed Wood, Mad Genius: A Critical Study of the Films or David C. Hayes' Muddled Mind: The Complete Works of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Though Wood historian Philip R. Frey tells me he is in the process of revising and updating his site, The Hunt for Edward D. Wood, Jr., even this exhaustive online compendium did not contain even a single fleeting mention of Nympho Cycler previous to the film's recent DVD release.

So where did it come from? I decided to go right to the source and ask David Naylor, the owner of Alpha Blue Archives. Here is his reply:

The credits that so intrigued David Naylor.
I purchased a collection of about 200 adult feature films from the early 1970s to mid '70s from a Southern California film dealer in 2007. I did nothing with the collection until the winter of 2013 when I started to check the films for potential release. It was then I located prints of Nympho Cycler, Necromania and The Young Marrieds. 
I have more films from the collection to go through but don't expect to find any more Ed Wood films, but perhaps something with the name "Valco" will turn up or recognizable cast members from Nympho Cycler. It was the name "TV Edwards" in the beginning credits of Nympho Cycler that caught my eye and then Ed Wood's role in the film that keyed me in to the idea that this must be another of his lost productions. As well [as the fact] that there had already been two other Ed Wood films in the collection [with] Casey Larrain in the cast as well. I found no mention of the film anywhere but thought that this must be an Ed Wood production and prior to the DVD release added the listing to IMDb.
California girl Casey Larrain
Naylor is to be commended for successfully decoding Ed's pseudonym in the film's opening credits. "TV" is a common abbreviation for "transvestite," while "Edwards" is a subtle variation on Ed's own real first name. "TV Edwards" also bears a strong resemblance to such verified Wood aliases as "Dr. T.K. Peters," "N.V. Jason," and "T.G. Denver," not to mention the title of Ed's 1977 novel, TV Lust.

As for Ed's leading lady, like most in her profession, Casey Larrain went by a variety of monikers during her relatively brief but prolific film career, which seems to have lasted from 1969 to 1972. Apart from "Judy Brooks," a name she only used on Richard Robinson's Adultery for Fun and Profit (1971), her other screen names were variant spellings of the same basic handle. The Internet Adult Film Database has her as "Casey Lorraine," for instance, and the IMDb lists her as "Lorraine Casey" and "Kasey Lorrain," too. Ed Wood fans will know the comely, slim-bodied brunette from her role in Joe Robertson's Love Feast (1969) as Linda, the gullible lass whom Eddie's lecherous Mr. Murphy cons into modeling a line of "invisible clothing."

Larrain must have made a positive impression on Eddie, as he cast her in his own X-rated detective film, Take it Out in Trade in 1970. According to the scant biographical information I can dig up, the actress was born in Hollywood in September 1946 and currently lives in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in LA's San Fernando Valley. A California girl through and through, she attended Cal State and was most recently employed by a real estate company in Encino. Her show business days are long behind her now, and she appears to be living a quiet, peaceful life out of the spotlight. In that respect, she is doing far, far better than many other adult film stars of this era.

It is important to note that there is no factual evidence to corroborate the theory that Ed Wood personally directed Nympho Cycler. He certainly acts in it, and the script has all the earmarks of his work as well, but it is dubious (at best) that he was at the helm of this particular production.

One reader of this column, Joe Rubin, feels that legendary X-rated filmmaker Joseph F. Robertson (a pal of Ed's) is a more likely candidate for that position. Rubin points out that Robertson directed Love Feast, Lovemaking USA, Caught in the Can, and Tomatoes, all of which feature Casey Larrain. Interestingly, Caught in the Can may have been written by Wood, Rubin feels, as it features two men who dress like women and practice walking, talking, and acting in a feminine manner. Rubin further feels that the alleged 1971 release date is inaccurate as well and that the film more likely came out in 1970.

Meanwhile, faithful reader Douglas North (aka hifithepanda) has reminded me of the fact that Joe Robertson actually mentions working with Ed Wood on a film called Misty, which would be a logical alternate title for Nympho Cycler since that's the name of the main character. In Nightmare of Ecstasy, Robertson is quoted as saying: "In Misty, he was in a Jacuzzi and all dragged out." There is indeed such a scene on the Nypho Cycler DVD.

Furthermore, although the movie is missing from the filmography, Nightmare does contain a reference to Misty in the section entitled "Edward D. Wood, Jr.: A Chronology," a year-by-year timeline of Ed's career and life. To wit:
1969        Wood writes and stars in Joe Robertson's The Photographer, Misty (uncompleted) and Jacques Descent's Operation Redlight (from Wood's novel Mama's Diary).
This also clears up another recent mystery, i.e. why a recent New York Times story about Ed Wood referred to Nympho Cycler as "unfinished." Based on my viewing of the film, I'd say that the film could possibly be incomplete and yet seems to have achieved release anyway. We'll get into this later in the article, but there are definitely times where the movie skips a few vital plot points and tries to compensate for their absence with narration.

Man and wife: Ed Wood and Casey Larrain.

As for the movie itself, all we can glean about it is what's up there on the screen. Running just shy of an hour, Nympho Cycler tells the story -- or, more accurately, offers a sketchy portrait -- of Misty (Larrain), a twentysomething free spirit, occasional model, and motor enthusiast. Despite the title of this film, I wouldn't necessarily classify her chosen mode of transportation as a motorcycle. It's more of a motorbike, and several characters even refer to it as a "scooter."

Whatever the vehicle is called, she's first glimpsed riding it through the scenic, tree-lined Hollywood hills while wearing nothing but a black bikini, the top half of which she doffs after the opening credits when she approaches her attractive-looking home. Misty narrates Nympho Cycler and introduces herself to us with the following, unmistakably Wood-ian monologue:
Have you ever met a nymphomaniac? Well, allow me to introduce myself. I'm Misty. I get especially horny riding my bike. They call me "the nympho cycler." This is our little shack in the Hollywood hills. Actually, it's Francis Edwards' place. But we're married... uh, sort of. Sometimes, a dip in the sauna pool calms me down. Mostly, though, when I get my clothes off, I keep wishing some nude guy would be there with me. 
Soon, a fully nude Misty is enjoying the benefits of the sauna and is joined by that "sort of" husband of hers: a mincing transvestite named Francis Edwards, portrayed by Ed Wood himself, complete with a blonde wig, a knee-length dress, falsies, and a fuzzy green sweater. Despite the comical incongruity of their union -- a sexually insatiable young tigress shackled to a queeny, dilapidated, middle-aged sot -- the two seem to coexist peacefully.

It helps that Misty and Francis (whom she tellingly addresses as "Ed") regard each other with giggly amusement, as if neither can believe what an incorrigible goofball the other one is. They interact like a Bizarro World equivalent of Stiller & Meara. "Your taste in clothes is atrocious," she says, lifting the hem of his admittedly frumpy frock. "It's your slip, dear" is his retort. They even frolic in the water a little, though Francis refuses to remove his underpants.

Man at work: Ed gives Casey some direction.
A more troubling aspect of their relationship is soon revealed, however, as Misty tells us through additional voiceover narration that her husband is a successful pinup photographer and that she married him solely to further her career as a model. There is a remarkable scene in which Ed Wood bossily "directs" Casey Larrain through a photo shoot, and even if it's a fictional scenario, it still feels like getting a glimpse of the eccentric director at work. "Tired or not," he tells her, "you're gonna have to come across, look, if you wanna pose for me."

In addition to photographing Misty, Francis also pimps the poor girl out to his middle-aged friends and professional associates. ("I'm in show business, all right," she cracks. "In fact, I'm about to show my business, if you'll pardon the joke.") Being a nymphomaniac who "loves sex," Misty doesn't necessarily mind this arrangement, but it's clear that her heart isn't truly in it. As evidence of this, we in the audience endure an uncomfortable, phlegmatic scene in which she dully "entertains" one of these soft-dicked Lotharios to the strains of a syrupy instrumental version of Donovan's "Sunshine Superman." (Later in the film, we'll hear a Muzak version of "Some Velvet Morning" by Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra. Throughout, the film's groovy uncredited score really lends it the flavor of a bygone era.)

It should be noted that this and all other "love scenes" in the movie are strictly softcore. As in the movies of Stephen C. Apostolof, the put-upon performers in Nympho Cycler must arrange themselves in a variety of silly positions in order to obscure the fact that no one is actually penetrating or fellating anyone. And, naturally, Ed Wood has to point his camera carefully in order to maintain the illusion, too. In truth, the difference between hardcore and softcore is subtle sometimes. Like football, it can be "a game of inches."

Misty doesn't feel like going on any more of these prearranged "dates" set up by her husband, so she hops on her bike and hits the road. Now, on paper, this may sound like a Thelma & Louise-type act of rebellion by a fed-up wife; but in the movie, it plays more like a spur-of-the-minute decision on Misty's part with very little forethought or emotion behind it. Again, Wood tries to give Misty a little more complexity through the voice-over, with the audio giving us information that the video alone doesn't supply. "It always soothes me," she explains as she rides her bike down a winding road. "Well, soothes isn't exactly the word. The wind seems to blow away the cruddy sham of my phony marriage. The powerful machine between my legs, I can make it go where I want when I want."

From this point onward, Nympho Cycler is mainly a series of vignettes in which Misty meets and casually fucks attractive strangers. First is a pair of lesbians who pick our heroine up after her motorbike runs out of gas. (Some original setup, eh?) They waste precious little time in divesting our heroine of her duds as they take her back to their pad and give her (gasp!) a joint as a prelude to lovemaking. Ed seems uncharacteristically squeamish about the depiction of Sapphic love, and the all-girl three-way is shown through a series of rapid-fire close-ups through a reddish-orange filter.

Mystery date: Carl the Sailor Man
After this bit of fun, the lesbians return Misty to her bike with a full can of gas. Is she grateful? Not exactly. "They wanted me to stay with them, but I was frustrated and, very frankly, needed a man. After I changed my clothes again, I went on the prowl." This narration, again demonstrating Ed Wood's unease with lesbianism, is necessary because Casey Larrain has indeed traded her customary sundress for a pullover and slacks, even though Misty apparently brought no luggage with her on her trip.

In any event, the young lady's next dalliance is with Carl, a grinning Norwegian sailor with a bald pate, muscled arms, goateed chin, and ever-present knit hat. When she first spots him, the Nordic seaman is astride a real motorcycle, a powerful-looking machine that makes a convenient metaphor for his sexual potency. And Misty takes the hint! Just a few minutes after their first encounter, Misty and Carl decide to pull over to the side of the road for some open-air fornication. "What's your name? Just for the record," she asks him before they engage in sexual intercourse by the freeway.

Barely taking time to savor the afterglow of amour, Carl and Misty then decide to ride with a co-ed biker gang for a while. This leads, predictably, to a nighttime fireside orgy replete with fuzz guitar music and lots of enthusiastic thrusting by all involved parties. The fellows in this motorcycle gang look suspiciously clean-cut, in my opinion, but a few of them do wear grungy ponchos.

After the biker sequence eats away a few precious minutes of screen time, we are treated to a montage in which Misty and her new temporary beau go sight-seeing in Hollywood, including glimpses of such recognizable landmarks as the Capitol Records Building, Grauman's Chinese (now TCL Chinese Theatres), and the market on Olvera Street, where a sombrero-wearing shopkeeper (seemingly not an actor) scolds Misty and Carl for climbing on his stall.

A skeevy-looking scoundrel.
Many Ed Wood movies take what I would call "unsignaled left turns" in their final stages, and that is precisely what happens with Nympho Cycler. As Carl and Misty romp through Tinseltown, they are unaware that they are being watched by a balding, skeevy fellow whose long, thin face is framed by a ratty-looking beard. He watches them with an unnerving intensity, but Misty is too focused on the pigeons and drinking fountains to notice. And the Norwegian sailor is too fixated upon his companion. This, sadly, spells disaster for them both.

"Going through an alley," Misty explains on the soundtrack, "three guys jumped on Carl. They started beating him. They must have been hired by my husband. It was terrible." In the movie's only real "action" scene, we see three punks working Carl over with a length of chain. Ed Wood actually splurged and got some credible-looking stage blood for this. As the sailor is left bruised and bleeding in an alley, the thugs take Misty off to be raped.

None of this is in keeping with anything we've seen before in the movie. Francis was exacting as a photographer, but he certainly didn't seem like the jealous type. He even told Misty point blank that he didn't care what she did on her own time, and it seems like her unscheduled motorbike excursions were common events. The idea that he would hire three goons to terrorize her is far-fetched to say the least. Furthermore, in a movie that is otherwise devoted to the joyous exploits of a sexually voracious young woman, why spoil the mood with a downbeat sequence in which she is humiliated and punished?

Perhaps this plot twist is included to appease the men in the audience who might be uncomfortable with the idea of a woman defying her powerful husband and finding sexual fulfillment in the arms of another man. Having Misty raped by one of Francis' hired hands is a way of "putting her in her place." That's an ugly sentiment, I realize, but it expresses the tenor of the times in which this movie was made.

Once again, however, there is a severe disconnection between the audio and the video. The narration tells us that the strange man is raping Misty, but the actors do not seem to have been informed of this and play the scene quite gently. To explain the rapist's suspiciously delicate manner, Misty says: "This last guy must have been some kind of a fruit or something. He nibbled around, trying to have sex. It seemed to go on forever." It almost seems like the director filmed a consensual sex scene with some very light bondage play, then realized how dull it was and tried to impose a different narrative, that of a rape, on the footage through Casey Larrain's voiceover. Misty's escape from the men is not documented. All she tells us is that she "finally got away." How? We never find out.

In the finale, a barely-worse-for-wear Carl and Misty are happily reunited, just as it's time for the beaming sailor to board a train for San Diego. ("The hospital patched him up pretty good," Misty tells us. "I wonder if they got his hat off.") The movie makes strong use of location footage throughout its entire running time, and true to form, the last scenes of Nympho Cycler take place at Los Angeles' striking Union Station. (This Depression-era building has also been depicted in such films as Blade Runner, Silver Streak, Pearl Harbor, and The Way We Were.) As she watches Carl depart from her life, perhaps forever, Misty is philosophical:
He's the only guy of the whole bunch I'd like to ball again. Must be because he's the only one I picked out for myself. I wonder if we'll ever meet again. With my luck, he's probably got a wife in Norway.
These are Misty's final lines in the movie. The last we see her, she is standing alone on the platform next to the train tracks, looking absolutely forlorn. This is as close as you'll come in the Ed Wood canon to the last scene from Anna Karenina. 

Although it's unfortunate that a character as fun-loving and full of life as Misty ends the movie on such a down note, the finale at least treats her with sympathy and stresses the importance of letting women make their own sexual choices. One cannot help but wonder what is next for this young lady. Obviously, she is not going to return to Francis. Or is she?

The literary progenitor of this film?
The viewing experience: Quintessential Ed Wood. There is no point in claiming that Nympho Cycler is a hidden gem or that it's "good" in any traditional, film critic-y sense of that word. It isn't.

From a storytelling standpoint, it barely coheres into a unified whole. The ragged plot, thin as it is, relies heavily on Casey Larrain's narration to smooth over many narrative rough patches. As in Crossroads of Laredo (1948), Ed's first-ever filmic venture, the existent footage alone is not sufficient to tell the tale, so the soundtrack has to work overtime to compensate.

 Aesthetically speaking, Nympho Cycler is club-footed and tin-eared. The production is haphazardly photographed, sloppily edited, and lurchingly paced. The dialogue, as is common to the movies of Ed Wood, strangely feels as though it has been translated inexpertly from another language. The plot may as well have been constructed through one of those party games in which someone starts a story and then hands it off to the next person to continue. Why else would there be such a tonally discordant third act that clashed so violently with the rest of the movie?

This, though, is the soul of Ed Wood. I keep having to resort to terms like "dreamy" and "dream logic" to describe many of the films in this project, because that's truly how Ed's movies feel to me. Events flow into and out of one another but without the strict cause-and-effect relationship we expect from "normal" movies.

In a way, then, Nympho Cycler is vaguely reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871) with Casey Larrain as Alice and Ed Wood as a combination of the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts.

By the way, before I conclude this article, I should also describe its indelible, organ-drenched theme song, which both opens and closes the film. Sung from the perspective of (but not sung by) the movie's main character, "They Call Me Misty" offers some insight into the mindset of a deeply confused woman who is clearly dissatisfied with her lot in life and yet cannot break out of her self-destructive habits. The world defines her as an erotic plaything, essentially a sentient sex toy with little value as a person, and she has begrudgingly accepted that definition. And yet she seems to yearn for some other, more satisfying life. Reliant on clumsy rhymes and tortured syntax, the theme from Nympho Cycler invites easy dismissal as mere doggerel. And yet, when considered in isolation, there is something naively poignant and sadly desperate about it. Though I doubt Ed Wood had any hand in its creation, the song nevertheless seems to channel the spirit of both the man and his filmography:

They call me Misty, all those who kiss me. 
Though they abuse me, they always choose me. 
Sometimes I wonder what fate I'm under.
Dreams torn asunder. My life's a blunder.
I always cry, "Say goodbye to all that's wrong! Sin be gone!"
Though I try, here am I with Satan's song.
Come, dear, and kiss me. How sweet can bliss be? 
You'll love it with me so don't resist me. 
Come to your Misty.

Thanks to Scott Huntley on Facebook for helping me discern the lyrics of this song, Joe Rubin and Douglas North for filling me in on some vital historical data, and Alpha Blue Archives' David Naylor for supplying some background on his company's release of Nympho Cycler.
In two weeks: "Start spreadin' the news! I'm leavin'... well, not today but soon." Friends, the time has come for Ed Wood Wednesdays to go on its first-ever field trip into the great wide world in search of knowledge and enlightenment. As regular readers of this column will know, the Anthology Film Archive in New York City is holding an extensive, week-long Ed Wood film festival between September 11 and September 18. 
Though I cannot be there for the entire event due to other responsibilities, I felt I owed it to myself as an American to see at least some of this unprecedented event. And so, in that spirit, I have decided to make the great trek Eastward. By this time in a fortnight, if everything goes according to Hoyle, I will be in the city that never sleeps. I don't know if I'm going to file any reports from there or not. I guess you'll just have to wait and see.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

So who is Karl Wiedergott, anyway?

German-born actor Karl Wiedergott in the movie 2 Days. Inset: one of Karl's many, many Simpsons characters

Bill Clinton on The Simpsons
If you have been following the 12-day Simpsons marathon on FXX, there is one name you have undoubtedly seen in the cast credits but may not be able to immediately connect to any particular role. Born in Germany in 1969, Karl Wiedergott lent his vocal talents to a staggering 248 episodes of the extremely long-running animated series, joining the cast in 1998 and staying with the show until 2010 when he left the United States.

In addition to its six principal cast members (Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, etc.) and recurring guest stars (Kelsey Grammar, Marcia Wallace, et al.), The Simpsons employs a talented and versatile troupe of additional voice actors, nearly all of them women. Performers like Russi Taylor, Tress MacNeille, Pamela Hayden, and Maggie Roswell have been with the show for decades, voicing a slew of child and adult characters.

The odd man out here, in more ways than one, is Wiedergott. Not only is he male and German, but (unlike the women I just mentioned) he doesn't really have any recurring characters on the show. Instead, along with impersonating celebrities like Bill Clinton and John Travolta, Karl Wiedergott spent his time on The Simpsons bringing life to such parts as "Care Worker," "Angry Man," and "Boyfriend 2." Ironically, this thankless work is probably what Wiedergott is best known for, even though he has appeared in dozens of television shows and movies for nearly 30 years. His CV includes such well-known titles as Coach, Columbo, 21 Jump Street, and Star Trek: Voyager. In 2003, he wrote and acted in Two Days, an indie drama whose cast included Paul Rudd, Adam Scott, and Donal Logue. Other film credits for the actor include 18 Again! (1988) and Breakfast of Champions (1999), in which he coincidentally plays a character named Homer. So there you have it, folks. That's the scoop on Karl Wiedergott. And now you know... the rest of the story.
      

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Novel ideas: A comprehensive guide to the books I didn't write

"How you, uh, how you coming on that novel you're working on, huh?"


"Me, I'm a cab driver."
"Working on my novel" is one of the great cliches/lies of the Internet, a statement as comforting to those who make it as it is annoying to the ones who have to read it.

There's a whole Twitter account devoted to people's laughable claims that they're working on novels. This account has recently been turned into a book of its own by Penguin, an impressive feat since it consists only of retweets from supposed authors bragging about their creativity and productivity. Obviously, if you're on Twitter (or any social media site), you're not working on anything, especially not your novel.

And even if you do happen to write a novel, who will actually want to read the thing? Virtually no one. But, still, it's a tempting fantasy. We don't want to admit that we're bank tellers, janitors, or substitute teachers, so we tell ourselves that we're really "writers" and that the things we actually do for money are mere "day jobs." This goes for all the aspiring "artists" and "musicians" out there, too. No one is really fooled by this. And yet the charade continues.

It's hardly a new phenomenon created by the Internet either. In the pilot for the sitcom Taxi in 1978, career cabbie Alex Reiger (Judd Hirsch) counsels newcomer and aspiring art dealer Elaine Nardo (Marilu Henner) on her first day as an employee of the Sunshine Cab Company. When she says she's "not really a taxi driver," Alex responds:
"Oh, yeah, I know. We're all part-time here. You see that guy over there? Now, he's an actor. The guy on the phone, he's a prize fighter. This lady over here, she's a beautician. The man behind her, he's a writer. Me? I'm a cab driver. I'm the only cab driver in this place."
And you can see his point. There comes a time when you should drop the pretension and admit what you truly are.

Well, I'm proud to say that I am most definitely not working on any novels. I wrote one once a few years ago as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). It is called Perforated, and it is profoundly unreadable, perhaps even stubbornly anti-readable. I've tried to read it myself and found that this is impossible. (I dare you to get through it.)

Even though 2014 is the first year when I was first actually paid for writing something, I would never ever call myself a writer. I'm not one. Jim Thompson was a writer. Dashiell Hammett was a writer. James M. Cain was a writer. I just work for a market research company. That's the real me, as reluctant as I am to admit it.

But there's a part of my brain that won't stop coming up with ideas for novels. I will confess that I've put myself to sleep many nights thinking about these would-be books, imagining both their composition and eventual reception. I'm never going to actually write any of these books, but I want to get some mileage out of them before consigning them forevermore to the cemetery of expired dreams. So here, for your reading pleasure, is a fairly comprehensive list of my "aborted" novels. I'll give you their titles if I have them, plus a general description of their contents. I'm not including The Secret Testimony of Miserable Souls, my never-to-be-completed second NaNo novel, because I actually did finally make a short story out of that.
NOTE: These are not "joke" ideas fabricated solely for this article. The following are all ideas I legitimately considered fleshing out into novels at one time or another.

THE MARITIME TRILOGY

This is the big one, the magnum opus that would have defined my career as a writer. Vaguely inspired by the writings of Herman Melville (Moby Dick, Billy Budd) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter), it's actually three very separate, distinct volumes, published years apart and linked only by the vague thread of "the sea" and those who make their living from it. As such, it only makes sense to discuss these non-books one at a time.
A fitting soundtrack to the book.

The Scarlet Stevedore - This book would run a couple hundred pages and have the same general sense of pacing as a typical romance novel, though the plot is not romantic in nature. I imagined that this would be by far the most popular entry in the series.

As the title indicates, this novel is about the dockworkers who load and unload cargo from ships. Most of these fellows, at least in the book, are brawny in appearance and coarse in manner. But the title character, whose name would have been something like "Adrian," is distinguished by his unsullied good looks, lovingly maintained blond hair, and relatively refined manners. His coworkers don't resent him because he's actually good at his job. Here, the word "scarlet" refers to his rather scandalous lifestyle as well as the bright red scarf he often wears. 

Along the way, Adrian manages to seduce men and women alike, strictly for his own entertainment. Shallow and selfish, he rather enjoys breaking people's hearts. He is not a cruel person, but he does not take life seriously and is amused by those who do. 

The stevedore's fatal mistake is courting a woman who, up to that point, has led a very pious and religious life and has been a faithful wife and mother. Spurned by Adrian, she hangs herself from a rafter in her modest home. As usual, the stevedore shrugs this off. 

But one day, the woman's husband, driven mad with grief and intent on revenge, confronts Adrian on a pier and challenges him to a fight. A lifelong coward, the stevedore backs away until he is standing at the edge of the pier and has nowhere else to go. Assessing his options, he calmly steps off the pier and disappears into the water. No more is seen of the stevedore, but his red scarf does rise to the surface. The end.

You like old-timey ships?
The Sea is a Briny Mistress - This is the centerpiece of the trilogy, and I wanted it to run at least a thousand pages, maybe more. My desire was for The Sea is a Briny Mistress to become one of those difficult-to-read "classics" assigned to bored and resentful teenagers in high schools across America. As such, the plot would move extremely slowly and the language of the book would be very poetic and flowery, with lengthy philosophical digressions. In short, I wanted this book to be a slog for readers so that, when they finished it, they would feel like they had truly overcome something. 

The story concerns a young man who grows up in a shipping town in the Northeastern United States in the 1850s. Everyone in town is very practical and business-minded, but he is intellectual and curious as a child and is always asking impossible questions that the adults in his life cannot and will not answer. Frustrated, he takes comfort in staring at the Atlantic Ocean and develops the fixed idea that this vast body of water must hold some answers for him. 

As soon as he is able, then, he joins the crew of a cargo ship and embarks upon his new life on the ocean. But the people on the ship are, if anything, even more practical and hard-nosed than the people with whom he'd grown up. They offer the protagonist no answers to his questions. The young man becomes even more frustrated and focuses his attention on a fellow crew member, a grizzled, bearded old man who never speaks. 

Years pass in this manner, and ultimately the man gives up on his philosophical pursuits and settles into the reality of his life on the ship. There are storms and outbreaks of scurvy along the way, but these are presented as mere factual events with no symbolic significance at all. 

One calm night, however, the sky turns a rather incredible shade of reddish-orange, and the man temporarily regains at least a little of his old curiosity about the universe. He stands at the railing, staring at the sky, when he is unexpectedly joined by the bearded old man. The young man senses the presence of the older man but does not turn his head to look at him; neither wants to avert his gaze from the sky. "The silence of God," says the young man, "she is deafening." "Aye," says the old man. It is the only conversation they've ever had. The ship sails on towards its next destination. The end.

A Life Asea (or: Elysium on a Tramp Steamer) - After the ponderous tome that was The Sea is a Briny Mistress, the so-called "Maritime Trilogy" would end on a light note with this slip of a book that barely qualifies as a novel and clocks in at only about a hundred pages. It's simply a series of gently nostalgic monologues by an old salt who reminisces about his life, shares some anecdotes about his experiences on a tramp steamer, and indulges in some crude philosophizing about the nature of existence. Though vanity and memory loss make this fellow a less-than-reliable narrator, he nevertheless manages to convey a genuine contentment with his lot in life. I want to note that I first envisioned this book at least ten years ago, well before the 2013 release of the movie Elysium.

CUSTOM OF THE AGE IN THE HOUSE OF INNOCENCE

Edith Wharton, my taskmistress.
In college, I had two consecutive courses in which the career of Edith Wharton was covered in great detail. Along the way, I managed to read most (or a great deal) of what she had written and eventually came to resent her the way anyone might resent a demanding boss, though I got some enjoyment out of the novel Custom of the Country and the short story collection entitled Roman Fever.

I felt that Wharton ended up repeating a lot of the same ideas and themes in her writing again and again, and I decided that I could write a Wharton-type novel myself.

The plot would have centered around a handsome but weak-willed man who meets a beautiful, slightly mysterious woman at a snooty society party. They converse only briefly, and the height of eroticism is reached when his glove accidentally brushes her elbow. He is engaged to be married, for reasons of social convenience rather than love, to another woman; and she has a vaguely scandalous background, so a relationship between them is unthinkable. But, still, they obsess over that one fleeting encounter.

The elbow and the glove haunt their memories. Nothing much else really happens here. They both spend about 27 chapters feeling lousy about this arrangement, and eventually one of them dies. The other considers attending the funeral but ultimately decides against it. The end.

LIFE WITHOUT THE POSSIBILITY

This probably would have ended up as a short story, but who knows? I might have padded it out to novel length had I really been overtaken by inspiration.

This is the strange, supernatural saga of an unrepentant, irredeemable criminal (most likely a child murderer) who is given a very lengthy prison sentence and then, defying all natural laws, virtually stops aging. The plot would unfold over several decades, maybe even a century. The world outside changes, but this one particular criminal never does. He leads a very quiet, orderly existence inside the prison and rarely speaks, preferring to spend his time reading, but the other inmates give him a wide berth because there is something deeply unsettling about his very presence.

Prison officials try to suppress the story of the seemingly deathless inmate, but eventually word gets out and he becomes internationally famous. There is a widespread belief that he is the Devil or God incarnate, and cults form in his honor with devotees around the world. Scientists, too, take a keen interest in this most unusual man and demand to study him. I don't know where the plot would have gone from there, but I would have read a lot of Stephen King to get in the proper mindset for this one.

THINGS GOT SUPERPORNY SUPERQUICK

This would have been one of my few attempts at writing something in a purely contemporary vein. I pictured this as the kind of slightly "hip," irreverent novel that might be a minor success in paperback form at chain bookstores.

This would be a sort of modern picaresque novel about a fellow who more or less blunders his way into situations reminiscent of pornographic films, minus even a hint of eroticism. Our protagonist and narrator (calling him a "hero" would be pushing it) is dumpy and underemployed, as are most of the people he bangs in public lavatories and other equally unappetizing locations as he goes about his day.

The weirdest thing about this guy is how blasé he is about all of the unlikely events of his life. The title of the book gives you an indication of his sloppy, informal way of talking. He's fond of adding the prefix "super-" to words, for instance.

This is a tough one to explain in the abstract. The humor of the novel derives (one would hope) from the main character's way of talking, thinking, and behaving. After spending a chapter or so with the guy, the reader would get a sense of what he was like and how he tends to react to things.

THE VERY IDEA OF IT

I don't know why, but I tend to think about The Very Idea of It just about every time I use the bathroom at work. Gross, I realize, but nevertheless true. The title comes from The Very Thing That Happens, a 1964 collection of "fables and drawings" by Russell Edson. I've never seen or read Edson's book, but a copy of it appears in Daniel Clowes' Ghost World comic, and I suppose that sparked my imagination.

My book, The Very Idea of It, would start out as an Agatha Christie-ish mystery: a locked room murder in a stately English home. Chief Inspector Pembroke of Scotland Yard is brought in to solve the case, and he interviews the handful of relatives and servants who were also on the grounds that day. But none of these folks strike Pembroke as suspicious, and no clues are forthcoming. The dead man's will is read, and everyone is satisfied with it. There is no conflict over the distribution of his estate, and no one seems to mourn the dead man at all after a while.

The story quickly fades from the headlines, and Pembroke moves on to another case without having solved the locked room murder. His reputation is slightly tarnished by this but still basically intact.

Meanwhile, however, Pembroke is secretly miserable. A man has been brutally murdered, and yet there's no outpouring of emotion for him, no public or private outcry over this terrible crime. And Pembroke, the supposedly great detective, has been revealed as impotent in the face of evil. He takes to drink. His marriage falls apart. He loses interest in his job and stops showing up at work.

The novel ends with a drunken Pembroke sprawled across the bed in a cheap hotel room, leafing through a folder of evidence related to the locked room murder in a futile effort to make sense of what has happened. He repeatedly mutters to himself: "The very idea of it... the very idea of it..."

The Caballeros; Chuck, Buddy, Elvis, Jerry Lee, and, Richard.

THE LOST CABALLEROS

Perhaps my favorite of the unwritten novels. This one requires a little bit of music history.

In October 1957, Little Richard was so unnerved by the sight of a piece of the Sputnik satellite falling to earth that he temporarily renounced popular music and joined the ministry. In March 1958, Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army. In May 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis suffered a major career setback when the British press made a front page scandal of his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin. In February 1959, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash while on tour. In December 1959, Chuck Berry was arrested under the Mann Act for transporting a teenage girl across state lines for immoral purposes.

And so, in a little over two years, five of the founding fathers of rock 'n' roll music were felled in one way or another.  By 1960, it really seemed like rock music had been little more than a passing fad. Was this all coincidence or were there sinister forces at work?

This novel suggests that these five young men were a victim of a rather outlandish plot by the Central Intelligence Agency (then a fairly new organization) to "reclaim" America's youth by destroying the corrupting influence of rock 'n' roll. One by one, these five men are rounded up by the CIA and told that they have been selected to take part in a top-secret government mission and that their participation is not optional.

They meet in a secret sub-basement deep below the White House, where a CIA agent informs them that they will be going undercover to collect information on communist subversives hiding in the United States. Their cover is that they will be disguised as a mariachi band from Mexico called "The Los Caballeros." Buddy Holly, a Texan, informs the CIA that "los" means "the," so the band's name translates as "The The Gentlemen." Begrudgingly, the CIA changes it to "The Lost Caballeros."

In truth, none of this matters. The CIA just wants to control the lives of the five men for a while and get them conveniently out of the way so that the seeds of their downfall can be planted elsewhere. (Buddy's plane is tampered with; Elvis' induction process is set in motion; even the Sputnik incident is orchestrated.)

Meanwhile, the Caballeros embark upon their manufactured mission and encounter internal problems of their own as they travel incognito through the United States playing mariachi music to smallish crowds. Ornery, money-hungry Chuck Berry becomes the group's leader because no one dares challenge him. Buddy is the naive small town boy who treats this as a great adventure. Elvis is the flirtatious ladies' man, more interested in chasing skirts than hunting reds. Little Richard is the religious one who believes he has a direct pipeline to God. And Jerry Lee is a whirling dervish of chaos never more than a few seconds away from a fight.

Naturally, a woman comes between them at one point. Specifically, Buddy meets and falls in love with a young lady named Riley Switch, with whom he carries on a chaste, sweet courtship. He even writes a song for her, a tune he thinks will be a smash hit: "Riley Switch/Riley Switch/You done make my heart a-twitch." Later, he finds Riley in bed with Elvis in the motel where the Lost Caballeros are staying, setting up an epic Holly-Presley fistfight. Later, Buddy changes the lyrics of his song ("Riley Switch/Riley Switch/She's a low-down cheatin' bitch."), then discards them altogether and uses the melody for a song called "Peggy Sue."

I was toying with the idea of having the entire story be told by an elderly Jerry Lee, who is supposedly writing his memoirs from the Missouri ranch where he has retired.

THE GELDED GIFTHORSE

Never got too far with planning this one, but The Gelded Gifthorse was to be a savage parody of young adult (or YA) novels in general and ones about horses in particular. The "hero" is Trevor, a dishwater-dull lad of 11 or 12 whose parents are so bored with him that they send him to live with his aunt and uncle who have an estate in the country. There are no other children on or near the estate, and Trevor spends much of his time in the stables, carrying on one-sided conversations with the horses. After a while, he is given a steed to call his own: a sullen, broken-down gelding named Toby who is just about ready for the glue factory.

Trevor puts a lot of time and effort into bonding with Toby and even invents an elaborate fantasy life for the two of them, but the disgruntled, phlegmatic animal is having none of it. In the climax, Toby kicks Trevor in the head, leaving him simple-minded. The uncle considers shooting the horse but ends up shooting the boy instead.

GAMESHOW! (or: CA$H AND PRIZE$)

This is not a "novel," per se, but rather a themed collection of short stories. The idea for this took hold in my mind when I bought an album of TV game show theme songs. Looking over the track listing, I noticed that the titles of these programs often suggested danger, drama, conflict, and intrigue. Some of them sounded almost like vintage spy novels. But these names could be applied to all kinds of situations. So Gameshow! would consist of stories called "Password," "To Tell the Truth," "Jeopardy!," "The Wheel of Fortune," "Let's Make a Deal," and more.

None of these would have any direct connection to the shows for which they are named. The titles would just serve as inspirational starting points. Maybe "Password" is about a double agent with a lousy memory who forgets an important phrase he's supposed to say at a crucial time. Or "To Tell the Truth" might be a humorous story about someone who is forced by circumstances to tell an uncomfortable truth about himself in a social situation, perhaps meeting his future wife's parents for the first time.

Anyway, this book would have been a chance for me to indulge in my love of game shows without actually writing about them.

THE BIG BOOK OF ROCK 'N' ROLL FABLES

This is one of the more recent additions to the roll call of books I'll never write. Like Gameshow!, it's another collection of short stories built around a single theme. In this case, the idea would be to write an alternate-universe version of rock history, one incident at a time. The stories would be wildly fictional, but the characters would all be drawn from reality. "Crazy Man Crazy," for instance, is about the declining years of Bill Haley, arguably rock's first superstar; it would have been written in the style of Cormac McCarthy. "The Lost Caballeros" (see above) might have been reborn as a short story for this collection, too.

And best of all might be a twisted tale called "The Last Sullivan Show." In reality, The Ed Sullivan Show ended in 1971 after 23 years of presenting some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Elvis and the Beatles. In my alternate timeline, however, it ends in 1978 when Ed reluctantly agrees to have the Sex Pistols on his show. The story builds to an incredibly violent and bloody climax with Ed Sullivan and Johnny Rotten fighting each other to the death on network television.

PINK FLAMINGOS

Yes, this is a novelization of John Waters' 1972 cult classic movie about the battle between two families for the title of "the Filthiest People Alive." But it's not what you're thinking. Most novels based on movies are artless, mercenary hack jobs that merely take a film's script and turn it into clumsy prose. It's not so much writing as it is reformatting. But I wanted Pink Flamingos to be a genuine, honest-to-goodness satirical novel. It would actually be written in the style of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and would treat the events of the movie as if they were absolutely real.

THE DULLARD TRILOGY

I never really got as far as imagining the plots or characters of these novels. The general idea, however, was to write a series of books with the most boring and uninviting titles imaginable. They'd be "normal" novels on the inside, whatever that means, but the titles and covers would make them look like unimaginably tedious textbooks. I have decided to call this a "trilogy," but the series would have gone more than three books if I could have come up with more titles for them. For now, the trilogy consists of Ice Floes of Norway, The Lost Art of Scrimshaw, and The Mating Habits of Migratory Seabirds. You have no idea how much pleasure I've taken in imagining people's bafflement over these non-books.

TROLLEYTOWN FROLICS: The Making and Unmaking of an American Classic (and other pseudo-reference books)

An example of the fictitious Trolleytown Frolics comic strip. There are so, so many more.

I'm just wild about pseudo-documentaries, mock biographies, manufactured histories, and utterly fraudulent reference books, so there's a whole file drawer in my brain devoted to such projects.

The most dominant of these is probably Trolleytown Frolics: The Making and Unmaking of an American Classic, the story of the creation and development of a comic strip that debuted in the 1930s and is still (supposedly) running today, even though its original creator is long dead. Loosely inspired by the sad saga of cartoonist Percy Crosby, Trolleytown Frolics is the story of how an artist has his creation basically stolen from him, leaving him broke and insane. His comic strip passes from artist to artist over the years, with each transition taking it further away from its roots. New characters are added, others dropped, and the gentle whimsy of the early days evaporates over time.

The current version of the strip is churned out by an assembly line of anonymous writers and artists, and the cast is a confusing jumble of human and animal characters, only a few of whom actually date back to the Great Depression. With newspapers in decline, the very existence of the strip is now in doubt.

I was much more interested in the Trolleytown Frolics saga several years ago, when I wrote and (crudely) drew dozens upon dozens of examples of the strip, mostly from the later "bad" days of the feature when it had become a pale clone of Garfield. My ardor has since cooled, but I still have a thick folder filled with Trolleytown Frolics strips, most drawn in ball point pen or pencil on lined notebook paper. In addition, I still occasionally draw characters from the strip -- Rabbit Sam, Thirsty Lad, Mean Maxine, Sadie Nightingale, Skippy the Wonder Boy, and Uncle Penguin -- on any scrap of paper that lands in my possession.

I have a couple of other false history projects, too, but nothing so well-documented or baroque as the history of Trolleytown Frolics.

One is the saga of the most tampered-with television series of all time. It starts in the late 1950s as a frothy domestic comedy called Oh, Those Lembecks! and ends in the early 1970s as a gritty cop drama simply called Lembeck. Never really a hit, it stays on the air mainly due to network politics and the exchange of favors among the top brass. Over the course of 13 years, this television show inadvertently manages to reflect all the changes in television programming over the course of an extremely volatile period of American history, not just shifts in audience taste but in morality as well.

Without intending to do so, the producers of Oh, Those Lembecks! managed to create the perfect document of mid-Twentieth-Century American popular culture. Along similar lines was the story of a Martin and Lewis-esque comedy team and their rise and fall in show business. I can distinctly remember typing up a complete timeline for this duo, including various milestones in their career.

THIS IS US AT THE LAKE HOUSE
These five friends reconvene at Copco Lake every 5 years.

Considerably more straightforward and sincere than most of my proposed novels, This is Us at the Lake House was directly inspired by the Five-Year Photo Project, in which a group of five friends recreate the same vacation photo once every five years at California's Copco Lake.

I don't know why exactly, but I was truly fascinated by these otherwise unremarkable photos and what they conveyed about the nature of time and its often devastating effect upon our lives and our bodies. I made a collage of the mens' faces to show how they changed over the course of 30 years. That collage was essentially going to be my "outline" for the novel, which would have spanned the years from 1980 to 2010.

I tried to avoid learning anything about the real-life guys and their lives. I wanted to make up all that stuff on my own. Judging these five men solely by their faces, I developed character profiles for each of them.

The central character is a smart, sensitive guy who acts as sort of the Kevin Arnold/Gordie Lachance of the group. He notices and remembers things more than the others do. Then, there's the unshakable zen master, the one who simply accepts whatever happens to him and is fond of quoting fortune cookie messages as if they were profound philosophical statements.

There's also a shy, nerdy guy who acts as a sort of sidekick/tag-along to the group and never feels like he quite belongs among them. He's nicknamed "Me, Too" because of his overuse of that phrase.

And then there's "Bulldog," a short but scrappy fellow who makes up in loyalty what he may lack in refinement. He's always there when you need him, and he is very protective of the rest of the group.

Maybe the most interesting and dynamic character is the one guy who's a wild card: possibly brilliant, possibly insane, possessed of great talent and potential but also dogged by a fearsome self-destructive streak. His life is much more up-and-down than those of the other guys, but he keeps making it back to the lake house every five years, right on schedule.

There are marriages, divorces, successes, and failures along the way, and through all of these calamitous events, the five men still find the time to meet and reconnoiter at the lake house they once knew as teenagers.

PRESCOTT, WEST PERTUSSIS

I'll end this survey (for now) with a sentimental favorite. I read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio as an adult and realized that it would have had a profound effect on me when I was 14 or 15. As an adult, however, all I could think to do was parody Anderson's book and the characters and stories contained within it. I can remember coming up with ridiculously frumpy names for the townspeople, like "Hearth Haverbrook" and "Mercy Pumpkinquaver."

Here's a representative example of the text, one of the few cases where I actually bothered to write something down for a potential novel:
     Boredom is an inevitable fact of life in Prescott, West Pertussis.  A layer of dullness covers the town like a fine, even coat of whitewash on a good picket fence.  It is the kind of place where the prevailing form of birth control is apathy and dreams regularly go unfulfilled without significant protest.
     To Chalk Whitcomb, Prescott was simply "regular."
     "Yes, sir," he'd often remark, "what we have us here is a "regular American town," and all who heard this statement were inclined to agree, for Chalk knew of which he spoke.  In his capacity as editor-in-chief of the Prescott Morning Bee, Chalk Whitcomb had diligently chronicled the goings-on in the town, such as they were, for some thirty years.  No one in Prescott, not even the Reverend Milksop, was better acquainted with the very heart and soul of the town than Chalk.
     The summers are hot here in Prescott.  Winters cold.  Middling in between.  The town went for Roosevelt in the last election and seems poised to go for Taft in the next. Does it matter that both Roosevelt and Taft died decades ago? It does not.
And that'll just about do 'er. If I ever abandon another novel, I'll add it to this article.