I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It, By Frank Dello Stritto

We had so much fun reading books by Baby Boomers Bill Bryson and Stephen King that we decided to have one more summer lark, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It: Growing Up in the 1950s and 1960s With Television Reruns and Old Movies, the new book by film historian Frank Dello Stritto. 

Dello Stritto has written two excellent books of film history, Vampire Over London and A Quaint and Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore.  The first was the only in-depth examination of actor Bela Lugosi’s time in the UK and was essential reading for Lugosi completists; the second was a series of essays on the mythology of classic horror films.  Forgotten Lore was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking tomes on the meanings behind many of the classic horror films I had ever read, and it comes highly recommended.

So clearly, Dello Stritto has a deep affection for the classic monster films that were such an integral part of the Baby Boomer experience.  Fortunately, he takes a different track in I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It, writing, instead, about how a member of the first television generation learned about the world around him by watching television, and how those images became the template by which he judged everything else.  For anyone with an interest in Pop Culture and the influence of television, this book is a must.

Talking about television viewing is always, to one degree or another, an exercise in self-flagellation, and Dello Stritto spares himself nothing.  It seems that every Pop touchstone of the 1950s is here, from Howdy Doody and The Twilight Zone, to his love of Abbott and Costello.  (The title is a line from one of Dello Stritto’s formative experiences, viewing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.  His lengthy dissection of this film, which could be dismissed as a simple comedy from two clowns at the beginning of their decline, is nothing short of masterful.)

And while he manages to put a great deal of the era’s television into historical context, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It is a surprisingly personal and appealing narrative.  We cannot understand or appreciate what television meant to young Dello Stritto unless we understand the boy himself, and the author provides an in-depth look at his growing up, his family, and his friends.  It is all curiously affecting because any Baby Boomer, interested in television or not, can pick up this book and nod, yes, this was me, too.

Here is a brief excerpt from the Preface:

This book is about growing up in America—in New Jersey to be exact—in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a personal history, but one which, with some variations, is shared by many Americans of my age. It is a marginal history, and might be a trivial history but for a coincidence of timing. The postwar baby-boom generation and television—two of the pivotal components of 20th-century American culture—came of age together, and each helped shape the other. Watching television, and later going to the movies, certainly shaped me.

Much of a young person’s life is … an ongoing struggle simply trying to figure things out. We tend to imitate what we see, by watching our parents, family and friends, or by watching television.

Imitation starts early, and we have no memory of learning the most basic skills. I have vague recollections of learning to read and write, none at all of learning to talk or walk. I have no memory of first crawling to our old television set and turning its channel dial. On most 1950s televisions, the dials and knobs stand maybe two feet above the floor and pose some challenge to a very small child. Perhaps the need to reach up accelerates my ability to stand erect.

Among the early tasks that I have no memory of first learning is reciting the Lord’s Prayer. At the start of every school day, I and my classmates, like millions of children across America, struggle through the King James phrases. We learn the prayer long before we can read, and never think much about what we are saying. Only years later do I come to understand “hallowed be thy name,” or “forgive us our trespasses.” Reciting the phrases is a daily ritual, something that I do each day. The prayer always ends with a phrase I do not understand, “lead us not into temptation.”

There once was a boy—maybe an urban legend, but I believe in him—who like the rest of us recited The Lord’s Prayer every day. He always said “lead us not into Penn Station.” He never knew his daily error. I believe in him because asking protection from such places makes more sense to a child than fending off whatever “temptation” is. When I am a very young boy, my parents take me through the old Pennsylvania Station in New York City. Awesome and scary place; huge beyond belief; alternately chaotic and hauntingly empty; noisy, then silent. Strange sounds echo from far off. I think of that day whenever I see the 1931 Dracula. Doomed Renfield, looking like a beleaguered commuter who has missed the last train home, enters the cavernous halls of Castle Dracula, wondering what to do next.

I believe in the Penn Station boy because I see someone like him every day. He takes various forms. The two most common incarnations through most of my early years are Stan Laurel in airings of his 1930s comedy shorts and Lou Costello in reruns of his television series. They try to imitate the world as best they can, never really figuring it out, never quite getting it right. In every show, they do something akin to confusing “temptation” with “Penn Station.” Hilarious but spot on. As a child, and now often enough as an adult, I have exactly the same experience every day.

The Lord’s Prayer, via a Supreme Court ruling on prayer in public schools, and the old Penn Station, via relentless urban development, disappear from my life at about the same time. By then, both had done their job, exposing me to old world eloquence and elegance, to the power of words and image, of sight and sound. I may not have appreciated what I was saying or what I was seeing, but the memories are still with me.

One of the many fascinating things, to this reader, is Dello Stritto’s tacit recognition that pop cultural currency was a very fluid thing to the Baby Boomers.  Thanks to television’s new-found need for content, classic movies were broadcast almost incessantly.  To many of us, Laurel and Hardy, for example, were as famous in the 1960s as they were in the 1930s.  That kind of pop catholicism is missing in contemporary culture, and it saddens me to see generations share so few cultural touchstones.  A child of the 1970s myself, we were as interested in the Marx Brothers as we were in the television show Happy Days.  I’m no longer sure that such a thing would be possible in these days of Balkanized cultural consumption.

To be sure, I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It is not without some piddling problems: it is, perhaps, just a hair too long, and Dello Stritto may linger a little too long on the origin of his obsession with actor Bela Lugosi.  But these are quibbles.  I Saw is a book of tremendous resonance and sweetness, and it does something no other book of film history has done:  it made me feel young again. 

I Saw What I Saw When I Saw It can be ordered directly from the publisher, Cult Movies Press, at: http://www.cultmoviespress.com/.  You will not regret it.

Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer

After covering Stephen King’s Joyland yesterday, I thought I would write about another recent novel with a young protagonist, Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer.  Here is the opening paragraph:

Exmoor dripped with dirty bracken, rough, colourless grass, prickly gorse and last year’s heather, so black it looked as if wet fire had swept across the landscape, taking the trees with it and leaving the most cold and exposed to face the winter unprotected. Drizzle dissolved the close horizons and blurred heaven and earth into a grey cocoon around the only visible landmark – a twelve-year-old boy in slick black waterproof trousers but no hat, alone with a spade.

This is a remarkably adept debut novel from journalist and screenwriter Belinda Bauer.  Blacklands is set on Exmoor, and details the cat-and-mouse struggle between 12-year-old Steven Lamb and serial killer Arnold Avery.  Avery is a child-murder who, 18 years before, murdered Steven’s 11-year-old Uncle Billy, and never revealed where he hid the body.

This crime, committed long before Steven was even born, has soured the young boy’s life.  His grandmother spends her time watching at the front window, waiting for her missing child to return.  Her daughter Lettie – Uncle Billy’s sister and Steven’s mother – lives with her with her own children, and the atmosphere is poisoned by grief, withheld love and emotional impoverishment. 

Cut off from her mother’s love and weaned on misery, Lettie has never been able to form any lasting attachments, and both Steven and his younger brother Davey have had a succession of “uncles,” but no father.  Uncle’s Billy room is never disturbed, and it sits there, a decaying shrine in a dark and damp house at the edge of the moor.

Young Steven, drowning in this toxic atmosphere, decides to do the only thing that makes sense to him – he will dig up the moor until he finds Uncle Billy’s body, hopefully closing this chapter of their lives and moving to a brighter tomorrow.

With that in mind, Steven dutifully digs and digs – finding nothing.  It is only then that he gets the idea of writing Avery, asking for clues to where the body of his uncle might lie.

Of course, writing to young Steven is too much excitement for Avery, who manages to escape and make his way to the moor…

Bauer never grants Steven with abilities that are out of line with a young boy; in fact, the entire exchange with Avery comes about simply because one of his teachers (usually too oblivious to really know who Steven is), remarks in passing that he writes good letters.  Steven is a boy of average intelligence but too-little money: his family is the working poor and their drab lives are not improved by treats or possessions that others take for granted.  It also shows a decaying England, still ravaged by decades of Toryism run amok. 

However, the great pleasure of this rather grim tale is in watching Steven grow.  We watch as he grapples to understand the adult world, moving from potential victim to, ultimately, Avery’s nemesis.

Better still are the touches that show how deeds long since past ruin lives, poison relationships, and deeply affect our children.  Acts of violence do not happen in a vacuum, and the damage done by murder only begins with the dead body.

Though structured as a thriller, Blacklands is really a novel about murder, how it affects families and communities, and how cruelty sometimes builds a momentum of its own.  Though at times it is grim stuff, Blacklands is well worth reading.

Joyland, by Stephen King

Though the fact is probably sending Harold Bloom into cardiac arrest, it is past-time that we acknowledge that Stephen King (born 1947) is one of the Great Men of American Letters.  This has been a contentious point among critics and academics – King is an unashamedly commercial writer (of horror and fantasy fiction, yet!), is pointedly ‘non-literary,’ and, worse still, extremely popular.  Three points which would destroy the critical reputation of any writer.

But … King has proven to be just not any writer.  The author of 50 novels and some 200 short stories, his works have sold over 350 million copies, and that is not counting his screenplays, reviews and essays.  His novel, 11/22/63, takes as its conceit a time traveler seeking to stop the Kennedy assassination, and was one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in some time.

Why has it taken so long for King to finally be rewarded with critical acclaim he so richly (abundantly!) deserves?  I would venture to guess that much of it has to do with class.  Arts criticism in the US is largely conceived along lines of social class; most anything embraced by “the people” is instantly suspect, and critics who take it seriously do so at their peril.  This is not to say that all Pop Culture is worthy; most of it, in fact, is trash.  But not all success is suspect – sometimes, artists become wealthy and beloved simply because … they are good at what they do.

These thoughts were in my head while I started the summer by reading King’s charming, sweet and gently nostalgic novel, Joyland.  Though King is celebrated for his horrors and his deft control of suspense, for this reviewer, his real genius lies in recording the experience of the boyhood of American Baby Boomers.

King is, in fact, the Poet Laureate of Boyhood.  The portions of his novels that always affected me most were the sections featuring his young adult protagonists.  Adolescent males are found in books as diverse as It, Salem’s Lot, Christine, and Hearts in Atlantis, as well as his masterful short story The Body.  I always felt that King had a peculiar knack for describing the experience of boyhood, with its rich joys, its even richer longings, its glorious victories and its often unforgettable defeats.  It is the thing he does best.

Joyland is set in a North Carolina amusement park in 1973.  The protagonist is Devin Jones, a student at the University of New Hampshire who takes a summer job at Joyland amusement park. Devin finds that he has a talent for "wearing the fur," Joyland-talk for portraying Howie the Happy Hound, the park’s mascot. One day, he saves a child from choking on a park hot dog. The heroics earn him the trust and admiration of the park's owner, and he receives additional responsibilities.

As summer goes on, Devin and his friends learn that several years earlier a girl had been murdered in the haunted house attraction, and her ghost still haunts the ride.  Of course, Devin and his friends investigate the story; while doing so, Devin also befriends a frail, wheelchair bound boy and his mother.

   

It’s important to note that the tone of the book is much more important than its Hardy-Boys-At-The Fair plot, and that tone is one of wistful nostalgia.  Devin straddles childhood and adulthood throughout the novel.  He loses his virginity, learns the fragility of life, and comes to the conclusion that people are not always as they seem.  The book is told in flashback by the now-adult Devin, who looks on at his younger self with a sometimes rueful eye.

One of the many touching things about Devin is that he genuinely likes children, which is rare in a young adult.  Dressing up as Howie the Happy Hound is a noble calling, as Devin’s boss explains to him:  This is a badly broken world, full of wars and cruelty and senseless tragedy. Every human being who inhabits it is served his or her portion of unhappiness and wakeful nights. . . . Given such sad but undeniable facts of the human condition, you have been given a priceless gift this summer: you are here to sell fun.

It could almost be King’s manifesto.

At this point, I must confess that reading King in the key of Adolescent Boy will often make this reviewer cry.  I did not cry while reading The Body … I wept.  King connects with our collective youth in a way that few writers can, and whenever I read his books I am confronted by the stark, often terrible realization of all that I have lost with adulthood.  Somehow, there is a very young man deep inside of King’s psyche who remembers exactly how it was.  Much like Ray Bradbury, to read Stephen King is to be young again.

In that respect, Joyland does not disappoint, and I found myself crying as Devin made that often agonizing transition from boyhood to adulthood.  The plot of Joyland may only “get the job done,” but the character of Devin is the kind of thing that makes King, in all his messy glory, a “literary writer.”

Joyland is a novel about summer and about our shared American experience.  Read it before the season ends.

The World Loses Ray Bradbury, Part II

Yesterday, we were talking about Ray Bradbury and love.  His heart was huge and copious – it had room for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and Capt. Ahab and Shakespeare.  As with all great lovers, Bradbury was somewhat indiscriminate, but his passion could not be faulted.

Because of his love, others found love, too.  The artists inspired by Ray Bradbury in one way or another would read like a list of some of the most popular voices of the past several decades: Stephen Spielberg, Stephen King, William Joyce, Rod Serling, Robert McCammon and Michael Chabon.  All of these writers/filmmakers have mined that deep vein of American nostalgia laced with science-fantasy, a cornerstone of the American literary voice.

Bradbury loved the movies, writing several himself.  His screenplay for Moby Dick (1956), directed by John Houston (1906-1987), is a masterpiece of concision and a model of adaptation.  His screenplay for his own novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983), is something of a disappointment, as he felt the need to make changes to the plot.  These changes (including a whole reinterpretation of the Dust Witch, one of his greatest characters) greatly hampered the finished product, though it still has much to commend it.

In fact, much of Bradbury’s post-1960s work is a mixed-bag.  In The Bradbury Chronicles: The Lift of Ray Bradbury, Predicting the Past, Remembering the Future, biographer Sam Weller sums up Bradbury’s life from 1974 to the present in a scant 30 pages.  It’s possible that Bradbury, incredibly prolific and certainly promiscuous with his gifts, wrote himself out by the time he was 55 or so.  Sadly, the great man sought to sometimes go back to earlier masterpieces and ‘improve’ them, like a master craftsman handling his own work with wet varnish on his fingers.

But there was much to savor, still, in the later Bradbury.  Indeed Bradbury, always more of a short story writer than a novelist, actually started working seriously in the long form, producing some interesting work.  Perhaps the most interesting things about Bradbury’s later work was his persistent wish to rewrite his own life story.

A Graveyard for Lunatics, written in 1990, is a journey in nostalgic re-writing.  In this novel, young screenwriter Bradbury teams up with young stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen (both long-time real-life friends since adolescence) to solve a crime in a movie studio.  Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) rewrites his own experience working with Houston in Ireland on Moby Dick, and is a diverting fictional memoir.  From the Dust Returned (2001) is his homage to friend Charles Addams (creator of The Addams Family), inspirited by an Addams illustration intended for one of his books, but never subsequently used.  His two mysteries – Death is a Lonely Business (1985) and Let’s All Kill Constance (2002) – take him back to the Venice, California of his youth.

In 2006, Bradbury wrote a coda to what his perhaps his finest work, Dandelion Wine, called Farewell Summer.  In this slim book his protagonist, Douglas Spaulding (a thinly veiled Bradbury) experiences his own sexual awakening.

As the world mourns the loss of Ray Bradbury, perhaps it’s best to remember the things most notable about him: his gifts as a stylist, his love for all the artifacts of the great American Century, his central role as the bridge between High and Popular Art.  But more important, to your correspondent, is the man’s temperament.  Bradbury had a sense of wonder, and he wrote with a boy’s touch.  It was this eternal youth and strong sense of optimism that I think the world will miss the most.  Bradbury himself expressed this perfectly when, in an interview to have been published in The Paris Review, Bradbury spoke of the difference between himself and Kurt Vonnegut.

He couldn’t see the world the way I see it. I suppose I’m too much Pollyanna, he was too much Cassandra. Actually I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past—a combination of both. But I don’t think I’m too overoptimistic … It’s the terrible creative negativism, admired by New York critics, that caused [Vonnegut’s] celebrity. New Yorkers love to dupe themselves, as well as doom themselves. I haven’t had to live like that. I’m a California boy. I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I was lucky enough to meet Bradbury several times.  Each and every time I did, I made sure to tell him that he had a profound impact on my life and that I loved him dearly.  Today, I’m so happy to have had that chance.

The King of Broadway?

Jake La Botz as The Shape

Many theater buffs both in-and-out of New York have little idea of how formidable mounting a large-scale Broadway show can be.  While “straight” plays would seem to be easy, new plays are often rewritten or recast, directors changed, and sometimes, nightmare of nightmares, even sets and costumes can change days (or hours!) before opening night.

Now take those problems and multiply them by a factor of 1000.  That’s how hard it is to mount a large-scale musical.

One show that promises to come to Broadway is Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, a new musical with a book by Stephen King and music by John Mellencamp.  It is currently on hand at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, and initial reviews are little-short of ecstatic.

As could be expected from the American master of the macabre, Darkland County is Southern Gothic of the most delicious type.  The story shifts between 1967 and 2007, and chronicles the haunting of Joe McCandless (Shuler Hensley).  McCandless witnessed his two brothers die while fighting over a girl 40 years ago -- he now fears that history will repeat itself as his two sons are heading for a similar fate.  Connecting these desperate threads is The Shape (Jake La Botz), who functions as the Devil, the MC and Virgil to Hensley’s Dante.

Darkland has had a long gestation period, with King and Mellencamp working on it for 12 years.  The show missed its originally-planned 2009 debut when Mellencamp had disagreements with the original director, subsequently bringing on Susan V. Booth (who also runs the Alliance).

The show has opened to extremely positive reviews, with La Botz receiving the lion’s share of praise for his slithery turn as The Shape.  This handsome, talented actor and musician has been increasingly cast in featured supporting roles in big-budget films, and The Shape may be his long-deserved breakthrough part.  Darland County continues in Atlanta until May 13th.  If all continues to augur well, Darkland may create a new star in La Botz, and cement a Broadway triumph for both King and Mellencamp.

John Mellencamp (born 1951) is, of course, one of the country’s most famous rock stylists.  Stephen King (born 1947) is the author of 49 novels, many screenplays and countless short stories; it’s possible that King has sold more books in the 20th Century than any other living author.  His most recent novel, 11/22/63, takes as its conceit a time traveler seeking to stop the Kennedy assassination.  It is one of the most satisfying reads I’ve had in some time.

Will Ghost Brothers of Darkland County make it to Broadway?  Certainly the names Mellencamp and King have proven to be golden in the past, and La Botz is rapidly building a devoted fan base.  This is definitely a show to watch.