Stromata Blog

Nevertheless, It’s a Wonderful Movie

’Tis the Night Before the Night Before Christmas, and the world surely can use a holiday from Donald Trump and Ukraine and Twitter and omnium gatherum spending bills and inflation and crime and all those other grim tidings that overflow my e-inbox. I know that I can.

Medieval theologians speculated that souls in Purgatory were granted an occasional refrigerium from their present pains, in which they were vouchsafed a foretaste of the joy that would be theirs when their sins were at last washed away. In that spirit, this blog will be politics-free until Boxing Day, at which point it will be only proper to resume rhetorical fisticuffs.

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries few paragraphs, the lead-in to a sober piece about how “accidents, chance and serendipity can be crucial to success”, that I would like to quote:

The movie had every ingredient of a hit when it opened right before Christmas. By the new year, it was a flop. In fact, when the copyright on this film expired, nobody even bothered to renew it. It was so forgettable that it was quite literally forgotten.

This is also the reason that people are still watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

It might very well be the most iconic Christmas movie. It became that way by accident.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” fell into the public domain once the copyright lapsed 28 years after its release, and television stations began running the film around the clock because it didn’t cost a penny. It wasn’t Frank Capra or Jimmy Stewart or the enduring power of cinema that made it a lasting success. It was neglect. “The damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra himself once said.

That may all be old hat to movie buffs, but I had never run across it, and it was a delightful tidbit. What’s more, it delighted my wife, who thinks that the movie is sappy and boring. (I have similar feelings about her Christmas favorite, Love, Actually.)

Poking around the Internet, I see that the film’s budget was an estimated $3,180,000 ($44,000,000 in today’s diminished dollars), and the opening weekend box office was $44,000 ($610,000 today). That makes She Said and Lightyear look pretty good.

The Wall Street Journal implies that, without the lucky break of relegation to the public domain, It’s a Wonderful Life would have faced as bleak a future as Bedford Falls without George Bailey. And that’s almost certainly correct.

If the copyright had been renewed, it would have been set to expire in 2003, by which time changes to the law would have extended it automatically to around the middle of the 21st Century. Is it at all likely that, after renewal, the studio would have pulled this flop, which had lain neglected for 28 years, out of its vault and hyped it with a publicity campaign on a par with the torrent of royalty-free reshowings?

Perhaps Clarence paid a visit to the clerk who was supposed to mail the renewal to the U.S. Copyright Office and thereby won his second set of wings.

A Brief Comment on Yesterday’s Most Earth-Shattering Event

For missing my regularly scheduled Sunday posting, I have an excellent excuse: I was traumatized by the news that Will Smith had assaulted someone at a large public event. Just what Major League Baseball needs at a time like this, I thought glumly. How badly will Rob Manfred mishandle this embarrassment? Moreover, my wife is a Dodgers fan and will be upset if the team loses its starting catcher for some large part of the season.

I could easily imagine how it happened. Sunday was the day before Will’s 27th birthday. Probably a big birthday bash, too many drinks, the inevitable sequel.

The trauma dissipated when I learned that the assailant wasn’t the Dodgers’ Will Smith or even Atlanta’s, but just some actor. By then, though, I couldn’t face a keyboard, so I went to bed and awoke to a new trauma in the morning when one of our dogs suffered a spell of diarrhea and vomiting. Perhaps he watched the Academy Awards. (The vet gave him medication and expensive dog food but says that there’s nothing seriously amiss.)

So that is why this blog fell silent. At least, it’s my story, and it’s as good as any that Joe Biden tells.

Wise Words About Star Wars

Jim Treacher – always witty, often curmudgeonly – says “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”:

The more ruthlessly Disney exploits the Star Wars franchise, the more I wish the original movie had bombed in 1977. In some alternate 2021, you’d catch Luke and Obi Wan and the gang on Turner Classic Movies at 2 in the morning, and you’d say, “Man, this is such a fun, goofy, exciting flick. Too bad it never made any money. That Han Solo cat was great! I think I saw him on an episode of The Fall Guy, too bad he never made it.” Star Wars would still be the same movie, but it wouldn’t be saddled with all this toxic fandom and corporate groupthink.

It’s also the best movie in the franchise, because you don’t need to see any of the other movies to understand what’s going on. It’s perfect. Put it in a time capsule all by itself and let future generations forget what we did to it.

Further Reading: Eric Diaz, “5 Ways Marcia Lucas Gave Star Wars Its Heart”

Year-End Observations

Any day now, I’ll get back to regular posting. The past couple of months have been too filled with events, including the sad (scroll down) and the joyous (the arrival of a new great-niece, Elsa Mae Oien, two and a half weeks ago), to leave much time or energy for this blog. It is not, however, abandoned forever, to demonstrate which, here are some miscellaneous thoughts as the year comes to a close.

■ The great disappointment of the season was the cinematic mangling of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My faith in Hollywood’s ability to spoil a good book is almost boundless, but I’d had a smidgeon of hope that this picaresque tale would flow easily onto the screen. Ha, ha, ha.

In a triumph of dogma over esthetics, the movie makers decided that Caspian’s voyage had to have a better motive than curiosity about what lies beyond the horizon. Hence, his nominal purpose – to discover the fates of seven noblemen who years ago fled his evil uncle King Miraz – is converted into a videogame-like quest for seven ancient swords to lay on Aslan’s Table to break the spell of an “island of evil” that generates a green mist that evaporates the mothers of cute little girls.

To make space for this uninteresting ueberplot, the incidents that make the book worth reading are stripped of their flesh. We lose Caspian’s bold bluff to recover the Lone Islands and his classic retort to their slave-trading governor. (“Have you no idea of progress, of development?” “I have seen them both in an egg. We call it Going bad in Narnia.”) Eustace’s dragonification takes place off-screen. The Dufflepuds are whisked in and out in a few minutes. Lucy’s temptation by the Magician’s Book is barely intelligible. The Island Where Dreams Come True is now just a font of unexplained wickedness. Ramandu never appears. The final journey to the Utter East is dull rather than lyrical.

If one seeks dramatizations of the Narnia chronicles, a better choice – and less expensive than a movie ticket – is Focus on the Family’s radio adaptation.

■ According to liberal commentators (and some conservatives, too), the lame duck session of the 111th Congress was a surpassing triumph for Barack Obama. This “triumph” consisted of the deployment of huge, soon-to-depart Democratic majorities to repeal the legal restrictions on military service by homosexuals (thus leaving this and future Administrations free to adopt whatever policies they want and can slip past hegemonic judges) and to ratify a not very significant arms control treaty with Russia. Both measures could have been passed before the election, but the Democrats were afraid to bring them up, lest they aggravate November’s rout. Lame duck enactment was, at heart, a Dem F— Y— to the voters.

Yet even the waning majority wasn’t enough for an F— Y— on matters of greater moment. The White House and its Congressional allies gave up on tax increases for “the rich”, an extravagant spending plan for 2011, the cap-and-tax energy panacea and the abolition of secret ballots in union organizing elections, formerly high priorities. All in all, the President “triumphed” by surrendering most of the ground on taxes (and in as sullenly ungracious a manner as possible; even airhead Obamacon Peggy Noonan noticed), whimpering helplessly as his budget plan tanked, abandoning key elements of his agenda, and consoling himself with the two items least offensive to conservatives. The repeal of DADT will make military operations more challenging, but the Armed Forces can handle challenges, and one must concede that homosexuals have powerful reasons to take the lead in fighting Islamic supremacists. New START does little harm; the argument against it is that it does no good and feeds the pretensions of Tsar Vladimir.

A few more triumphs like this, and the President will have ample leisure in 2013 for the writing of his third autobiography.

■ The high risk pools that were supposed to mitigate the plight of Americans who can’t buy medical insurance (pending Obamacare’s forced draft of youngsters to subsidize their less healthy elders) have been a spectacular flop. Enrollment is less than 1/40th(!) of the forecast level, yet the $5 billion set aside for subsidies is likely to be insufficient. From this experience, I draw two morals:

First, the problem of uninsured people with pre-existing conditions, while sometimes tragic for individuals, is too small in scope to justify an upheaval in our country’s health care system. Based on the Medicare actuary’s projections, barely one in 800 Americans needed high risk pool coverage. Hardly one in 40,000 took advantage of it. These are magnitudes of misfortune that charity and, if necessary, public welfare can handle.

Second, the experts know little about the consequences of the giant, jerry-built scheme that constitutes Obamacare. In other areas, progressives are risk-averse advocates of the Precautionary Principle. Regarding health care, they choose to leap from Sears Tower with an untested parachute sewn by blind seamstresses.

. . . . More to come.

Anti-Stratfordianism on the Screen

This could be hilarious:

Fresh from annihilating the entire planet in 2012, Roland Emmerich is soon to set to work on the reputation of the Bard himself, William Shakespeare, with Anonymous.

It’s a major departure for Emmerich, who’s abandoning global cataclysms and puppies-in-peril for sonnets and subterfuge, and swapping CGI for live action. Anonymous tackles the thorny theory that's circulated for the past 100 years that Shakespeare’s plays were, in fact, written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford. . . .

So how does Emmerich describe Anonymous? “It’s a mix of a lot of things: it’s an historical thriller because it’s about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It’s the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled ‘William Shakespeare’.”

The reporter goes on to confuse Robert Cecil with his father William, Lord Burghley. Whether that muddle comes from Mr. Emmerich, I don’t know, but the casting of David Thewlis, languid romantic werewolf, as old, fat, gouty Burghley suggests a certain casualness about mere historicity.

What I look forward to is learning which of the batty Oxenfordian theories about their idol’s political role will wind up on the screen. Roger Stritmatter’s notion that he fathered the Earl of Southampton on Queen Elizabeth and resented her refusal to name the child as her heir? Nina Green’s that he was the prime mover in James VI of Scotland’s accession to the throne? Ron Hess’s that he ran an European-wide intelligence network and used the plays of “Shakespeare” to chronicle his life-long rivalry with Don John of Austria? Paul Streitz’s that he was Elizabeth’s son as well as her lover? It’s not impossible that Anonymous will make 2012 look relatively sober.

Historical Footnote: Oxenford played a role in the drama over the succession to the throne, though not at all like the one apparently assigned to him by director Emmerich. In March 1603, a few days before the Queen’s death, he invited the Earl of Lincoln, a rather dissolute and worthless nobleman, to supper and proposed a scheme to derail James of Scotland’s seemingly inevitable ascension. In James’s place, he put forward Lincoln’s nephew, an 18-year-old with a remote royal claim in the Yorkist line. (He was a direct descendant of George, Duke of Clarence, of butt-of-malmsey fame.) The idea was that the lad would travel to France, gather supporters there, and bring back a French army to vindicate his pretensions. Oxenford was confident that the French would back any alternative to James, “how small soever his title were”.

The proto-plot was, of course, crack-brained, though some figures at the French embassy may have encouraged it. Lincoln had the good sense to report the conversation to the lieutenant of the Tower of London, who passed the word onto other authorities. No one, however, felt any need to take action. Oxenford was even allowed a nominal place on the council that handled English affairs pending the new King’s arrival. He had no money or influence. Arresting him would have thwarted no real danger, but might have reflected badly on important men to whom he was related, notably his first wife’s half brother, Sir Robert Cecil, and the husbands of his two eldest daughters (one an earl, the other a baron).

This minor incident displays Oxenford at his vainglorious and ineffective norm. He would be a better subject for a comedy than a thriller.

Sources: Alan H. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, ch. 81 (2003); Sir John Peyton, Letter to Robert Cecil (Oct. 10, 1603).

Degeneracy Prime

At the moment, I happen to be in Las Vegas, which is supposed to be the epicenter of Western decadence. A future Laclos will, however, portray it as a place of simple, straightforward morality compared to what one might call “Global Hollywood”.

In Vegas, drunken couples contract insincere “marriages” in fake chapels, hawkers thrust prostitutes’ calling cards at passing tourists, and “comedians” think George Carlin’s “seven words” are the only funny ones in the English language. But nobody promotes sex-with-drugged-13-year-olds as a harmless amusement verging on a civil right. To reach that level of degeneracy, one must turn to Whoopi Goldberg and other film dignitaries defending fugitive from justice Roman Polanski.

An enterprising reporter might want to ask the celebrities who pledged allegiance to Obama last January what they think of their leader’s indirect complicity in the apprehension of roamin’ Roman. Which is more important to them: bowing down to their “sort of god” or upholding the modern version of droit de seigneur?

I hope, BTW, that the Justice Department underlings who took note of Polanski’s stepping outside of sanctuary and acted swiftly to take advantage of it will receive bonuses and promotions, though I realize that, if publicly identified, they may never be able to rent a DVD again.

Addendum: Not being someone who follows Roman Polanski’s movements – until a couple of days ago, I couldn’t have told you whether he was dead or alive – I was unaware that he “has been traveling between his main residence in Paris and his chalet in Gstaad[, Switzerland] for years” and could have been nabbed several Administrations ago. Cheers, then, to the Obama Justice Department for doing the deed. I hope that the President will stand behind his subordinates in the face of the wrath of Woody Allen et al.

Correction: I’ve been informed that it was California rather than federal authorities who arranged for the Swiss to nab felon-on-the-run Polanski. I’m sorry to have to withdraw my praise of the Obama Justice Department but hope that I’ll have an occasion to say something nice about it in the near future, perhaps when the attorney general stops stiff-arming inquiries by the Civil Rights Commission.

Charlton Heston on Shakespeare

Death brings forth the secrets of a man’s life. Not being a movie buff to any degree, I always associated Charlton Heston with Ben Hur, Planet of the Apes and the NRA. Now I learn, via Power Line, that he was an enthusiastic Shakespearean actor and even weighed in once on the Shakespeare authorship pseudo-controversy, in a letter a decade ago to the Weekly Standard. He was prompted to write by the magazine’s review of Alias Shakespeare by Joseph Sobran, a foolish tome that pushed the 17th Earl of Oxenford as the true Bard. Unlike some other actors, Heston didn’t try to display superiority to the groundlings by parroting anti-Stratfordian malarkey:

Paul Cantor scathingly dissects Joseph Sobran’s conviction that the Earl of Oxford wrote the plays bearing William Shakespeare’s name. I would like to add a few words. . . .

Shakespeare was exactly the parvenu player from the country Sobran describes, scribbling away on the South Bank and turning out the 16th-century equivalent of Movies of the Week. It took the richness of the middle plays for London to realize his true size. The world began to catch on only after his death, when Heminge and Condell published the Folio, prefaced by praise from his fellows. (They did not ignore him, as Sobran states.)

Being a writer, Sobran misreads Shakespeare as academics do: He treats him as a writer. I know, there he is on the page, but that’s not where he or his plays live. Shakespeare leaps alive in air, in the spoken sound of his words. Only actors really understand this, though audiences sense it subliminally, in performance. When you’re redacting the plays in rehearsal, you make the changes in terms of the sound as much as the meaning. Also the pauses.

That’s what Shakespeare did as actor/manager. His plays loom so massively over all the other writing in the world because of his sublime gift, but it was a poet-player’s gift. He created those men and women to live on a stage, seen in light and sudden dark, heard in cries and whispers. Exploring them there reveals more than a lifetime in a library can.

I began working on the plays when I was in high school, and I guess I’ve played his people more than any other current American actor. I know how they defeat you, leave you bleeding on your knees in the sand, aching to try again.

When I was adapting Antony and Cleopatra for a film, fearing the outrage of scholars over some radical redactions I’d made, I asked Laurence Olivier’s advice. “Do what you think he would’ve done, laddy,” he said. “They none of them f--g know.”

That’s as good a summary as I’ve seen of why the fundamental anti-Stratfordian premise, that writers of genius can be identified by their biographies and credentials, that the Sobrans and Ogburns “f--g know” what it took to be a London playwright 400 years ago, is fundamentally absurd.

Anti-Narnia on the Screen

Now that Philip Pullman’s imaginative, fascist-tinged Golden Compass is coming to theaters everywhere, I see that Tom Smith (the law professor, not the milblogger) has much the same view as I did a couple of years ago. In Professor Smith’s words,

The villains in the Golden Compass and sequels are the Catholic-Nazis – a fair characterization of the book’s point, since anytime you have villains running concentration camps with medical experiments, that is psychic charge you are invoking. But in fact, if you want to experience the flavor that contemporary fascism would have when translated into first rate children’s literature, you cannot, in my view, do better than Pullman’s series.

To be fair, I am not saying Pullman is some sort of neo-Nazi. I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let’s run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons – their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has – he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930’s.

I’ll be interested to find out how the producers of the movie have handled the last few pages of The Golden Compass, where Lord Asriel, sounding as megalomaniacal as an intoxicated gauleiter, advances his cause by torturing a small boy to death. At that point, the reader doesn’t know whether Asriel is a hero or a villain. The movie audience is unlikely to be in the same state of doubt. How will kids react if the counterpart to Dumbledore, Gandalf and Aslan speaks and acts like the Asriel of the book? I doubt that the film makers want to find out. Will Hollywood’s talents for sugar-coating and watering-down be equal to the challenge?

Watch Your Back!

John J. Miller notes that the narrative of The Puppet Masters, Robert A. Heinlein’s nearest approach to a horror novel, begins on July 12, 2007. I read the book as a teenager, missing all its potential political implications but taking away a habit, with me to this day, of occasionally patting my back to make sure that no slugs are attached.

A small budget 1994 movie, reportedly even more dismal than the travesty of Starship Troopers, was made from the book, or at least swiped its title. I’m surprised that a big studio didn’t try to do it right years earlier. After all, how often does the plot provide a good reason to display dozens of starlets in halter tops?

But maybe a flick in which hidden enemies are opposed by a super-secret government agency that finds it essential to strip away (pun intended) civil liberties isn’t what Hollywood is looking for these days – especially not when it ends with mankind taking the war to the mufsidun aliens.

Hugo Movie Nominees: A Year for No Award

For the sake of being an informed Hugo voter, I have watched all five nominees for Best Dramatic Production (Long Form), i. e., Best Movie. Some of them weren’t wretched; I didn’t feel an impulse to hurl rotten vegetables at the screen, though I will never voluntarily see them again. A couple had no redeeming aesthetic value. Overall, 2006 was not a good year for stfnal or fantastic film. I have a slight suspicion as to why, though a reason may not be needed. There are tides in the affairs of Hollywood, and this one was taken at its ebb. Just a few years ago, after all, voters could choose among Galaxy Quest, The Sixth Sense, The Matrix and Being John Malkovich.

Last Nanosecond Hugo Nomination Idea

Finding the Future: A Science Fiction Conversation is an independently produced documentary, much of which was filmed at Chicon 2000 and in which I get about 15 seconds of celebrity. I saw a pre-release version two years ago at Loscon and liked it. Now the producer has sent me a copy of the DVD, which was issued in 2006. Hence, I believe that it is eligible for the Hugo Award for “Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form”. Based on what little I know about this year’s crop of SF and fantasy films, I think that it deserves a nomination.

The Prisoner’s Return

OpinionJournal Political Diary provides more than just politics for $3.95 a month. Today it reports that one of the great TV show concepts of all time will be returning to the screen:

No TV series – not even “Star Trek” – has quite achieved the quirky cult status of “The Prisoner,” which first ran on British and U.S. networks almost 40 years ago. It now looks as if the show, which still airs in re-runs in some 60 countries, will be making a nearly simultaneous comeback on both movie screens and a TV network.

In the original 1967 version, Patrick McGoohan played Prisoner No. 6, a former British secret agent who is kidnapped and dumped in a strange seaside village where everyone is known only by a number and where he is told that “by hook or by crook” the reasons for his resignation as an agent will be extracted from him. For 17 surreal episodes, the series explored profound issues of privacy, individualism and mind control. . . .

Universal Pictures, which has movie rights to the series, is producing a feature-length picture directed by Christopher Nolan (“Batman Begins”). At the same time, the AMC cable network is set to launch an updated version of the show for a planned January 2008 airdate. “What we’re doing is an entirely new reinterpretation that stays true to the components of the McGoohan [show’s] vision,” an AMC executive told Daily Variety.

That quote sounds ominous. I suppose that the “new reinterpretation” will take the suicide pact view of the Constitution. Still, it’s the Christmas season, so one can hope for a pleasant surprise.

Be Careful What Your Children See

This story is one that I wouldn’t believe for an instant if it didn’t come from Scripps Howard, which is not, to my knowledge, a fount of Christian fundamentalist overreaction. A movie produced by a Baptist congregation, portraying the travails of a burned-out high school football coach whose depression is cured through the revival of his faith in God, has been rated PG by the Motion Picture Association of America – not for dubious language or excessively violent tackles, but because its content is too religious (first seen at Hoystory).

Facing the Giants cost $100,000 and resembles a fusion of the Book of Job and a homemade Hoosiers, or perhaps a small-school Friday Night Lights blended with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association movies that used to appear in some mainstream theaters. Sherwood Pictures used local volunteers as actors and extras, backed by a small crew of tech professionals.

The movie includes waves of answered prayers, a medical miracle, a mysterious silver-haired mystic who delivers a message from God and a bench-warmer who kicks a 51-yard field goal to win the big game when his handicapped father pulls himself out of a wheelchair and stands under the goal post to inspire his son’s faith. There’s a prayer-driven gust of wind in there, too.

Obviously, this has the potential, done badly, to be as sappy as the Left Behind novels, but it certainly could be done well. This account of a conversation between the coach and a player described as a “rich brat” holds out hope of something above the “pray and get rich” level of evangelism:

The coach says that he needs to stop bad-mouthing his bossy father and get right with God.

The boy replies: “You really believe in all that honoring God and following Jesus stuff? ... Well, I ain’t trying to be disrespectful, but not everybody believes in that.”

The coach replies: “Matt, nobody’s forcing anything on you. Following Jesus Christ is the decision that you're going to have to make for yourself. You may not want to accept it, because it’ll change your life. You’ll never be the same.”

That sort of talk is evidently too controversial for the MPAA. The vice president for marketing at the film’s distributor (a Sony subsidiary) was told that the raters had “decided that the movie was heavily laden with messages from one religion and that this might offend people from other religions”.

Those “people from other religions” must be awfully sensitive. It would be all right with the MPAA, one strongly suspects, if the “mysterious silver-haired mystic” were a wizard spouting New Age platitudes and the miraculous field goal wafted through the uprights by magic.

There is, I’ll concede, a sense in which “Parental Guidance” is the right advice. Parents ought to pay attention to anything that young children watch, however innocuous it sounds on the surface. Kids differ too much for one rating to fit all. Still, the MPAA in its wisdom does hand out “G” ratings, and if Facing the Giants is potentially offensive to some segment of our society, I wonder what isn’t.

Addendum: No, I do not buy the theory that Sony pleaded for an “R” rating to attract the sort of audience that it’s used to and had to settle for “PG” instead.

Abramoff of Hollywood

Did you know that Jack Abramoff, currently awaiting sentencing for an array of crooked political and business dealings, wrote and produced a motion picture? Oh, you saw Red Scorpion? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It grossed $40 million – respectable for 1989 – so somebody saw it, and readers of this blog likely fall into the target demographic.

Okay, did you know that Abramoff at one time wanted to put out a book on “The Making of Red Scorpion”? Unless you’ve already read the brand new issue of The Weekly Standard, I doubt it. He went so far as to interview a potential ghostwriter, Mark Hemingway, who recounts the experience in “My Dinner With Jack”.

There was, it seems, quite a story behind what looked like a routine action-adventure flick. The idea for a movie depicting the alliance of a disillusioned Soviet agent and an idealistic African anti-communist to thwart a Red takeover of the latter’s country came to Abramoff during a rather weird international conference of right-wing guerilla groups held in Jamba, Angola, then controlled by Jonas Savimbi’s Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Following up after his college graduation, he signed Dolph Lundgren to star, raised a few million dollars, lost that financing when Swaziland revoked permission to film, then found a few million more and succeeded in completing the picture in less than peaceful Southwest Africa (now Namibia).

They had star trouble. Lundgren was wildly erratic on the set. Abramoff and the other producers felt physically intimidated by the onetime karate champ. Lundgren spent his downtime carousing up a storm in Johannesburg, and he did not want his girlfriend back home to find out. It became the producers’ responsibility to keep him out of the South African tabloids. (For bonus points, Abramoff casually let it drop that the girl back home whose delicate sensibilities Lundgren sought to protect was none other than Paula Barbieri, the Playboy Playmate who moved on to dating O.J. Simpson, only to break up with him the day Nicole Brown was murdered.)

Then there was the problem of the film’s other star – the authentic African bushman they had cast in a pivotal role. In Jack’s opinion, he’s the best actor in the film. Most people who’ve seen the film agree. Regopstaan, the very spry 95-year-old bushman, agreed to do the film only if his entourage, er, tribe was allowed to follow him around. Then there was the small matter of payment. Regopstaan’s terms included the condition that the producers find him a wife. By this point in my evening with Abramoff, I was expending all my energy keeping my jaw off the floor, so I never did hear how that particular problem was solved. But I trust Jack found a way.

Presumably. We’ll probably never know what it was, for Abramoff decided soon afterward that he was too busy to proceed with the book project. On the other hand, “he’s going to have a lot of time on his hands in prison, and,” Hemingway ends hopefully, “I hope he still has my résumé”.

There is, in a way, a sad side to this tale. Red Scorpion made a substantial profit, which Abramoff used to capitalize his nascent lobbying firm. If the film had failed, he might be laboring at Heritage or AEI or Cato, still be the energetic idealist who impressed so many conservative leaders back in the 80’s. Alternatively, if he had been greedy then, he would have doubled down on another movie. After a few projects, he would either have blown his wad or become settled in the business. Maybe he would have been at this year’s Oscar ceremony, laughing at the anti-Bush jokes.

I must, of course, end any post about the deplorable Mr. Abramoff with my favorite quote concerning his operations, from OpinionJournal Political Diary (only $3.95 a month, delivered daily to your inbox):

“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”

So far, Abramoff has been found guilty only of cheating his clients and business associates. Whether he bought favors from legislators is still up in the air, so it may be that the Democrats who benefited from contributions that he directed their way (such as Harry Reid) are innocent victims of guilt by association. We shall no doubt find out eventually. Meanwhile, Abramoff the movie mogul is a fascinating image. I do hope that he still has Mark Hemingway’s résumé on file.

The Hugo Season Begins

Word has just arrived, via the Interaction mailing list, of the 2006 Hugo Award nominees. An official announcement will, I’m told, appear on the L.A. Con IV Web site RSN. (I hope that I’m not guilty of breach of the Fannish Espionage Act.)

I’m particularly pleased to see that my friend John Hertz made the ballot for “Best Fan Writer”. For reasons why I think that John in a good choice, vide my review of his zine Vanamonde. He is, I realize, an underdog against the co-favorites, perennial winner David Langford (who also has a topnotch entry in “Best Related Book”) and up-and-coming Cheryl Morgan, who came close to ending the Langford string last year.

In the other categories, I’ve read or seen some of the nominees but not all, so I’ll forbear comment. My biggest disappointment is that Thud!, IMHO Terry Pratchett’s best novel since Pyramids, wasn’t nominated. Least surprising nominations, aside from the usuals in the Artist, Editor, etc. categories, are Connie Willis’ “Inside Job”, featured in my “Recent Fiction” sidebar on the left, Serenity and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which Famous Fannish Bookseller Larry Smith literally forced into my hands.

The “Best Interactive Videogame” category, which L.A. Con created as a one-off for this convention, didn’t attract very many nominations (to my complete non-surprise, though I tried to help by consulting 20-something friends and making the nominations that they recommended) and was dropped from the ballot. In a way that’s a pity, since familiarity with high-tech weapons systems instilled by hours of pointing, clicking and shooting in Quake, Doom, etc. is reportedly one of our soldiers’ big edges in Iraq.

In the “Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form”, “Best Professional Artist” and “Best New Writer” (Campbell Award) categories, ties resulted in more than five nominees.

The complete list of nominees appears in the continuation.

Serenity: A Half-Thumb Up

My plan for yesterday was to go the Maryland Renaissance Festival in company with old college buddies. Unluckily, eastern Maryland was under the spell of Tropical Storm Tammy. Last year we went to the Festival in the rain and didn’t have to prove anything by reprising the performance. Instead, we saw Serenity, the Firefly spinoff movie that has been buzzed very favorably by both SF-oriented and mundane bloggers.

I’ve seen two episodes of Firefly, the two that were nominated for Hugos. One was pretty good; the other was the umpteenth Seven Samurai remake, with a true touch of absurdity: bad guys shooting their lasers from horseback. So I entered the theater with a slight bias against what I was about to see – and came out with feelings pretty much unchanged.

Serenity is basically a series of high-tech shoot-’em-ups, mostly exciting and all well-done, around which are draped hastily sketched characters and a preposterous, government-conspiracy-driven plot. Well, that’s too harsh. The action sequences display a high degree of imagination, and the characters have the limited, but real, virtues of space operatic commedia dell’arte. Within the confines of their types, they can be striking: As a cynical trader/smuggler/mercenary, Mal Reynolds (Natan Fillion) makes Han Solo look like a soft-hearted sissy.

In fact, realizing that not every movie can be The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I’d give Serenity a hesitantly upraised thumb. What cuts the thumb off at its joint is the plot and, particularly, its political subtext. The basic outline is ho-hum: a Terrible Secret that the Evil Government doesn’t want exposed. The twist is that the Evil Government is a parliamentary democracy, which seizes one of the heroines right after she criticizes its “meddling” with the uncivilized parts of the galaxy. While one could, of course, develop a believable setting like that, the movie takes it for granted that barbarism and civilized society are moral equivalents (except that the barbarians are freer and nobler) and that democracy is an illusion. In my boyhood, those prejudices were harmless. In the midst of a war against barbarians, it is surprising, to put it mildly, that they are part of the mental furniture, too ingrained to question, of someone making films for distribution to civilized audiences.

During the Cold War, there were pro-communist motion pictures, but they weren’t innocently and unconsciously pro-communist. Their auteurs knew what they were doing. I’m quite sure that Joss Whedon doesn’t.

Noticed Hither and Yon

A few items that I noticed or thought of while catching up on my reading:

• In “The New Litmus Test”, Dean Barnett describes the most striking lesson in Democrat Paul Hackett’s near-win in the recent special election in Ohio’s 2nd District. “In spite of [his] being adamantly for gun owner’s rights, unequivocally against pulling out of Iraq until victory is achieved (‘We need to get it right, and we need to do it now,’ he said), and repeatedly disparaging his opponent for supporting Ohio’s tax-raising governor, the left-wing blogs who typically loath centrist Democrats adored Hackett.” The reason was his foul-mouthed invective against President Bush, which he prudently uttered only out of earshot of the people whom he hoped to represent. For the Angry Left, rhetoric outweighed policy. Daily Kos, MyDD and dozens of lesser lefty blogs raised lots of money for the Hackett campaign and now are eager for him to run for the Senate. If, as Mr. Barnett anticipates, this program of substance-free hatred comes to dominate the Democratic Party, American politics in the future will be even less civilized than at present. That the GOP is likely to emerge from that state of affairs as a permanent majority party will be little consolation.

• A few days ago, the President fell into the bog of trying to give a politically soothing answer to a question about whether the “intelligent design” theory should be taught in schools. This is a pseudo-issue, kept alive by the media in hopes of generating tension within the Right. ID proponents have no hope of getting their doctrine into 98 percent of school districts, and, if they did, the detrimental impact on education would be trivial compared to such trends as Moslem propagandizing, neglect of foreign languages and politically correct arithmetic textbooks. To get rid of the controversy once and for all, let me offer a peace proposal:

  The cornerstone of the ID movement is Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, which, in its publisher’s words, “focuses on five phenomena: blood clotting; cilia, oar-like bundles of fibers; the human immune system; transport of materials within the cell; and the synthesis of nucleotides, building blocks of DNA”. I propose that students be introduced to Dr. Behe as soon as they have mastered those topics well enough to read his book with understanding. If high school biology classes reached that level, the improvement over the status quo would be so spectacular that I doubt that any rational Darwinist would complain.

• When I first saw this list of movies-in-the-works (via Midwest Conservative Journal), I took it for a parody. It isn’t. Think of how World War II might have gone if Hollywood had churned out a stream of films featuring self-sacrificing Nazis, heroic Japanese, villainous Anglo-American-Jewish plotters, and the horrors of war. Future historians, assuming that there are any, will find liberal loathing for the West as vast and perplexing a field as the Fall of the Roman Empire.

• “Cheap Hope” by William Stuntz, a disabled Harvard Law professor, is about pain, hope and Heaven, and is too packed with insights to excerpt. As some guy says, Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day

From the OpinionJournal Political Diary (a bargain at $3.95/month):

“You make a radical Muslim mad, and he won’t rip off your bumper sticker, he’ll rip off your bumper – then your car will be found in another state, and he’ll put a fatwa on you. I think fearing for your life is a pretty good reason not to do it” – veteran TV producer Larry Gelbart on why the film industry doesn’t make movies portraying Islamic extremists as bad guys (quoted in the Hollywood Reporter).

ROTS? No, Not Really

When all the film critics and millions of former fans are quietly rooting for a movie maker to fail, he does well to pay close attention to acronyms. Revenge of the Sith was a real gamble as titles go. So many charming possibilities for review headers: “Yep, It ROTS”, “ROTS from the Head Downward”, “A New Hope ROTS Away”, “With All That Wooden Acting, Of Course This Flick ROTS”, and so on.

What I think of ROTS’s actual merits doesn’t matter a lot, as every other American of movie going age saw it before me. Nonetheless, I’ll offer my belated opinion, based on viewing it yesterday in an extremely uncrowded Las Vegas theater: This is the best of the Star Wars movies since the first one and so far superior to its immediate predecessors, so much so that I wonder whether George Lucas has been replaced by a cinematically savvy pod person.

There are, admittedly, a few plot slippages: Anakin and Padmé are living in the same apartment, yet Obi-Wan Kenobi figures out only at the last minute that Anakin is the cause of Padme’s rather obvious pregnancy. (I guess that the Jedi are more like monks than I thought.) Neither the Jedis’ special powers nor the advanced medical technology of the Galactic Republic are aware that Padmé is bearing twins. (Is our civilization atypical in having invented ultrasound before FTL travel?) And Padmé still looks pregnant at her funeral, which is rather disconcerting. (I hope that this doesn’t mean that Natalie Portman has gotten fat.)

Incongruous with the ultimate conclusion of the series, if not an actual plot hole, is Anakin’s slaughter of the Jedi younglings. On no other occasion does Anakin/Vader engage in gratuitous (emphasize gratuitous; blowing up a rebel planet is purposeful) violence against innocents, a fact that made his redemption at the finale of Return of the Jedi morally acceptable. In light of what we now know, he has no right to such cheap grace.

On larger matters, though, Revenge of the Sith moves forward plausibly, with some deft ironies. Three are particularly worthy of note. First, in a twist as old as Greek legend, Anakin’s efforts to avert the prophecy of Padmé’s death lead to its fulfillment. Second, Anakin’s crisis of conscience over killing the helpless Count Dooku influences his crucial decision to save the seemingly helpless Chancellor Palpatine from death at the hands of Jedi Master Mace Windu. Finally, though this is evident only when one thinks ahead to Episode “IV” (the real and original Star Wars), the lie that brings Anakin fully over to the Dark Side – that his own angry blow killed Padmé – removes any motive for tracking down their child and thus leads to the Sith Emperor’s ultimate defeat.

So far as spectacle is concerned, this movie at least equals any of the others in quantity and quality. After the cheesy special effects in Attack of the Clones, which reminded me a lot of Flash Gordon, without the excuse of a minimal budget and primitive technology, we are shown thunderous space battles, dazzling planetscapes and not-too-bad light saber duels. So what if gravity in space acts arbitrarily or Obi-Wan needs a long time to think of just shooting General Grievous instead of sparring with him.

I’ve seen many warnings against the insinuation of politically correct, anti-War on Terror themes into ROTS, and a few are indeed present. They are, however, contradicted by the main thrust of the film. Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” was doubtless intended as a shot against President Bush, but it has no force, because Sith do not “think in absolutes”. Palpatine bases his appeal to Anakin on the necessity of going beyond narrow-minded hostility to the Dark Side, and Anakin, after his transformation into Darth Vader, declares that evil depends on one’s point of view. The Sith are power-hungry moral relativists. That the Jedi misapprehend them fits with the order’s limited imagination and intelligence. Luke Skywalker’s image of the Jedi Knights, built on Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s nostalgic mythmaking, is an idealization. The Jedi of the first three Episodes are in many ways like the popular image of the knights of the middle ages: physically powerful but short on subtlety and easy to deceive.

The Jedis’ shortcomings are a key to Anakin’s conversion to evil. Their overt distrust, repressed jealousy and misjudgement of the young knight’s idealism push him toward the Dark Side just as much as Palpatine lures him. Thus, as in a proper tragedy, evil arises from the flaws in good men, not simply the machinations of villains.

What a pity that George Lucas lost his touch so badly in Episodes I and II. But what a consolation that it was not lost for good.

A New Hope?

John Hiscock of the Daily Telegraph stirs up almost dead embers of hope with the headline, “Star Wars Comes to Violent End in Masterful Climax”. Could it be true? Has the momentum of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones been reversed, a feat that one would have thought scarcely consistent with the laws of physics?

The fans who have been camping out for weeks in front of cinemas across America will not be disappointed. Lucas has created an eminently satisfying, albeit surprisingly violent, final instalment that brings the story back full circle to the first film.

It contains all the ingredients that fans have come to expect: aerial dog-fights, swirling light-sabres, Jedi battles, evil droids – and it packs an emotional wallop. . . .

Now, with Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Lucas has come up with a masterly conclusion to the complex tale of treachery, heroism and intrigue, although it is considerably darker than anything previously seen in the Skywalker soap [sic] opera. . . .

There is no surprise in the fate of Anakin Skywalker because it has been well documented in previous films that he goes over to the Dark Side and becomes the evil Darth Vader; but there is subtlety and unexpected poignancy in how this is achieved – through the insidious treachery of Chancellor Palpatine, marvellously played by Ian McDiarmid.

Faced with a choice between losing the love of his life, Senator Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman), and giving up his soul to gain the power to save her, Anakin sacrifices his character, his integrity and his very being for love.

Despite George Lucas’ own flirtation with the Dark Side (hint: one of the villains is “Nute Gunray”), I would rather have the pleasure of seeing a good movie than the satisfaction of watching an overblown ego get deflated. Hence, I’m crossing my fingers (figuratively – I can’t actually type with them crossed) that the Telegraph has better luck with its movie picks than it did with yesterday’s election returns.

Is Star Trek Obsolete?

Orson Scott Card says “no”: it was never worth watching in the first place (via Professor Bainbridge):

So they’ve gone and killed “Star Trek.” And it’s about time.

They tried it before, remember. The network flushed William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy down into the great septic tank of broadcast waste, from which no traveler…. No, wait, let’s get this right: from which rotting ideas and aging actors return with depressing regularity.

Now, I’m not the world’s most avid defender of the Star Trek franchise. In fact, I stopped watching midway through the first episode of The Next Generation, at the point where the Enterprise goes into Battle Stations mode by jettisoning the pod containing the women and children’s quarters. Right there, I knew that this would be a series where the writers were inventing rather than imagining. I’m told that quality picked up as time went by. Maybe so, but I remain a fan only of The Original Series and a Laodicaean fan at that. Mr. Card can’t be accused of any such lukewarm attitude:

As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance.

Which was a shame, because science fiction writing was incredibly fertile at the time, with writers like Harlan Ellison and Ursula LeGuin, Robert Silverberg and Larry Niven, Brian W. Aldiss and Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke creating so many different kinds of excellent science fiction that no one reader could keep track of it all. . . .

Here’s what I think: Most people weren’t reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren’t reading at all. So when they saw “Star Trek,” primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.

A plausible analysis, Orson, but utterly ahistorical. If anybody was reading the “so many different kinds of excellent science fiction” of the 1960’s, it was the hard-core fen who attend World Science Fiction Conventions. They were bestowing Hugo Awards on writers like Heinlein and Ellison and Aldiss and Niven and Silverberg, and Heinlein-Asimov-Clarke was the acknowledged grandmaster triumvirate.

At the 1966 Worldcon Gene Roddenberry, known till then only for an unsuccessful cop show, showed the pilot of his new SF television series to this audience and received a reception that I have heard described by an eyewitness as “rapturous”. During the three years that Star Trek ran, it had a devoted trufan following, and some of its “grade school” scripts came from the pens of figures of the “science fiction revolution”: Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, David Gerrold, Jerome Bixby.

I’m not surprised that someone who calls those posturing, post-modernist bores Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (what a waste of a great title) “the two finest science fiction films of all time” thinks that Star Trek: TOS “was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad”. De gustibus non disputandum est. Still, let’s get history right. If Star Trek appealed to non-readers getting “their first glimpse of science fiction”, it also won a following among the SF intelligentsia. Its time may now be past, but it did have a time.

Addendum: In a comment on Trufen.net, Dr. Gafia (rich brown) gives more detail about the original Star Trek’s writers:

The problem with Card’s comments (besides the ones others have provided here) is that the first three seasons of Star Trek had numerous episodes written by names that would be familiar to any science fiction reader.

Starting with one of the writers Card mentions, Harlan Ellison (“City on the Edge of Forever”). But also including George Clayton Johnson (“The Man Trap”), Richard Matheson (“The Enemy Within”), David Gerrold (“The Trouble with Tribbles”), Norman Spinrad (“The Doomsday Machine”), Jerry Sohl (“The Corbomite Maneuver,” “Whom Gods Destroy”), Theodore Sturgeon (“Shore Leave,” “Amok Time”), Robert Bloch (“What Little Girls Are Made Of,” “Catspaw,” “A Wolf in the Fold”) and Jerome Bixby (“Mirror, Mirror,” “By Any Other Name,” “Day of the Dove,” “Requiem for Metheselah”).

Quote of the Day

M. J. “Simo” Simpson”:

Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do.

– From a review of the new movie version of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so negative that it makes Dr. Johnson on Ossian sound like unbridled praise, e. g.,

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really unfunny jokes . . . with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide without the jokes truly would be Hamlet without the Dane. I shudder.

Reliving Noreascon Four

Wow! This is just like living in the 21st Century! Almost ten hours of video from last year’s World Science Fiction Convention are now available in a boxed DVD set. Included are all of the “big tent” events: Opening Ceremonies, Hugo and Retro-Hugo Awards, Masquerade and Closing Ceremonies. One special feature is a time-lapse motion picture of the entire convention, from the beginning of setup through the last vestiges of teardown in about 15 minutes. The price is $59.95, less than you would pay for many a mediocre television series.

Marc Gordon, Noreascon’s Events Director, and his crew deserve mega-kudos for this production, which is not only a first for Worldcons but was accomplished without subcontracting to professionals.

Noreascon is still refining its press release and Trufen has nothing yet, so this post may be the very first public announcement. It’s fun to be a news source once in a while.

The Shakespeare After Tomorrow

According to press reports, Roland Emmerich, director of The Day After Tomorrow (remember? the flick that the Loony Left was sure would elect John Kerry), “wants to shed his reputation for making special-effects blockbusters by shooting ‘more difficult, socially relevant’ films”. His debut in that new role is rather surprising:

Emmerich’s first feature under the Reel Machine label will be “Soul of the Age,” a political thriller set in Elizabethan England that explores the controversial theory that William Shakespeare was not the author of his famous plays.

“I am convinced that the William Shakespeare we know was a fraud,” Emmerich said, “that he almost certainly did not write the Shakespeare plays.” He plans to begin shooting “Soul” in England in the fall with an all-British cast.

“This will be a chance for me to show people I can work with actors, that I can direct drama,” he said.

Emmerich said he will use substantial special effects in the film – including re-creating the entire city of London in the 17th century.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with making a “political thriller” out of an absurd historical theory, but I do wonder what “socially relevant” message Herr Emmerich derives from the idea that the greatest works of English literature were written by a dissolute aristocrat rather than a hard-working bourgeois. That genius depends on birth? That the middle class is untrustworthy? (Hollywood warned them, but they voted for Bushitler anyway.) That historical evidence is mostly the product of conspiracy and fraud? That the soul of Western civilization is a lie?

Whatever route the production follows, we can be confident that the final cut will be supremely silly. Better would be a second Emmerich Godzilla. There is the consolation, though, that it will be difficult to slip Global Warming fantasies into Elizabethan England.

Loscon Highlights

Were I a more dedicated blogger, I would have posted regularly from Loscon instead of treating it as a vacation. But if Instapundit can occasionally take time off, so can minor participants in the blogosphere like me. Belatedly, then, I present a few notes and comments from last weekend’s convention going.

Loscon was the second convention in a row I’ve attended that has this year exchanged a long-standing home for new digs. Windycon had been 20 years at the Woodfield Hyatt, Loscon eleven at the Burbank Airport Hilton. The former’s transition was smoother. The new Loscon hotel is the LAX Marriott, an imposing structure that seemed to have a little trouble adjusting to the peculiar demands of a science fiction convention. The most visible blunder was Catering’s refusal to believe that fans would really consume the quantities of ice cream ordered for the Friday Night Social. Less than a third of the required amount showed up, leading to a long delay while convention staff raided nearby supermarkets. I was lucky enough to get in early and thus was one of the few to savor the macadamia ice cream provided in honor of Fan Guests of Honor James and Kathryn Daugherty (residents of Maui and other locales). In fact, I was able to eat to satiety and leave while most of the con as still waiting patiently (sort of) in line. Now I know how it felt to be a French aristocrat gazing contentedly upon the starving mob.

The concomm, too, seemed in need of time to adjust its habits. Signage was initially inadequate, though the deficiencies were corrected quickly, and the program book was less useful than it should have been. Among the more conspicuous absences were descriptions of the program items; only not-always-informative titles were printed. Also left out were the locations of the Art Show, Dealers’ Room and Con Suite.

These teething pains did not prevent the convention from being a success, and next year will doubtless be better. We’ll have to see whether the con settles in for as long a run as it enjoyed at the Hilton.

My personal convention was dominated by the Prime Time Party (see below), which came off with only a handful of hitches. The worst was post eventum: the loss of John Hertz’s absinthe spoon. Attendance and the consumption of food and drink were down marginally from last year, probably because some other parties remained open later than in the past. Given that our hidden agenda is to revive the fannish tradition of late night party going, we won’t complain about that development.

Two bits of the rest of the con stand out. One was Mike Glyer’s interview of Author GoH Tim Powers, one of the best sessions with a writer that I have ever seen. Powers’ description of his meticulous approach to constructing a novel, which involves spreading hundreds of note cards across his living room carpet, was hilarious, even if the method is unlikely to be adaptable to households with children, pets or unsympathetic spouses. His current work in progress is set in Pasadena in 1987 and involves the consequences of Einstein’s residence there half a century before. He seemed fascinated to learn during the discussion that the Pasadena Hilton was the site of that year’s Loscon.

A second highlight was a chance to view Finding the Future, an independently produced documentary that was largely filmed at Chicon 2000. After watching the director and his crew swarm about for days, I heard nothing further and had wondered what had become of the project. It was a pleasant surprise to run into the producer at Loscon and be told that there would be a screening Sunday afternoon. (I’ve since learned that it was also shown at Noreascon, but I missed it there.)

The movie melds two subjects: SF fandom – portrayed with more emphasis on its intellectually pioneering spirit than its oddball denizens – and contrasting visions of the future, from the extravagant optimism of Ben Bova through the gloom of Global Warming alarmists. While there are a lot of heads talking (including, for about fifteen seconds, my own), they generally say succinct, interesting things, and the visuals are first rate. The footage gives a good sense of what a Worldcon looks like and is supplemented with inter alia photos of early conventions, rare movie clips and montages of pulp magazine covers.

A number of threads weave ongoing debates. For instance, several clips make a point of the SF community’s fearlessness of the rapid pace of change. Later, a writer avers that a warmer climate wouldn’t be so terrible per se, but it’s just happening too fast.

Although most of the wordage comes from big names – Bova, Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Forrest J. Ackerman et al., there is also screen time for rank-and-file fen. Columbus fan Jim Green, to take one example, gets a couple of appearances, as do Bandit and a fellow I don’t know called “Orange Mike”.

Finding the Future doesn’t yet have a distributor, rendering its Hugo prospects negligible. Still, it’s worth any fan’s while if it shows up at a local con.

Contrary to my wont, I have nothing much to say about Worldcon races this time. The only bid party was for Chicago in ’08. It seemed to go well. At least, Dave McCarty and Helen Montgomery got rid of all of the dozens of hot dogs that they brought along. Any real developments for 2008 or any other year will doubtless come next week at SMOFCon, from which I shall send back a report unless this week’s travel schedule (I’m on the road except for two half days in the office) leaves me too weary to blog.

Addendum: Joe Major informs me that “Orange Mike” is Michael Lowrey, a Midwestern fan and editor of Vojo de Vivo

Gandalf LIED! People Died!

Are you fed up with simplistic good vs. evil story lines? Want your heroic fantasy with a dash of nuance? Let me recommend Fellowship 9/11, a new documentary that exposes the truth behind that neoconservative volume of Bushitler LIES, The Lord of the Rings.

One of the most controversial and provocative films of the year, Fellowship 9/11 is Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep.

With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering – or if necessary fabricating – the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn and where it has led us.

He looks at how – and why – Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by Isengard.

Fellowship 9/11 shows us a Middle Earth kept in constant fear by “Orc Alerts” and lulled into accepting a piece of legislation, the Patriot Scroll, that infringes on basic civil rights. It is in this atmosphere of confusion, suspicion and dread that Aragorn, backed by the secretive “Fellowship Group,” makes his headlong rush towards war in Mordor – and Fellowship 9/11 takes us inside that war to tell the stories we haven’t heard, illustrating the awful cost to soldiers and to orcs and to their families.

It’s time for regime change in Minas Tirith!

Where Indiana Jones Should Have Gone

Having lived for centuries in near solitude, connected to the rest of Christendom by only the frail thread of the Patriarch of Alexandria’s once-a-generation appointment of its Abuna (Archbishop), the Ethiopian Church has nurtured unique customs inspired by the Old Testament, including circumcision, animal sacrifice and, in some circles, observance of the Saturday Sabbath. Now, via Cronaca, I learn that Ethiopia should have been the setting for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indeed, in a sense, it witnessed an actual plundering of the Ark of the Covenant 136 years ago.

On April 10, 1868, a British punitive expedition defeated the Ethiopian Emperor Theodore II at the Battle of Magdala (or Magdela or Maqdala). The victors seized a vast quantity of loot, which was auctioned off for the benefit of troops. One of the most active buyers was a representative of the British Museum, who had been foresightedly sent to accompany the force. His purchases included ten “tabots”, replicas of the Ark of the Covenant that are essential to the consecration of Ethiopian houses of worship. A church’s tabot is carried in procession on the feast day of its patron saint and the Feast of Epiphany. At other times, it is kept shrouded and may be viewed only by priests. The original Ark allegedly resides in the Church of Our Lady of Zion in the former Ethiopian capital Axum. For fear of divine wrath, no outsiders are allowed to look upon it (quite consistent with Stephen Spielberg’s story line).

The descendants of the raiders of 1868 have grown more accommodating toward foreign beliefs. The Art Newspaper has this account of the modern fate of the plundered tabots:

British Museum (BM) director Neil MacGregor has decided that there is one small group of objects within his care that no one, not even he, should be allowed to see. These are tabots, which are regarded by Ethiopian Christians as representing the original Ark of the Covenant, the wooden chest which once housed the Ten Commandments. . . .

The Art Newspaper can reveal that the BM’s tabots were moved earlier this year from its ethnography store in Hackney to their own special room in the basement of the museum’s main building. They were carried by a senior member of the Ethiopian church in Britain and were covered during the transportation. Once inside the special room, and alone, the priest placed the tabots, wrapped in cloth, on a shelf covered with conservation-quality purple velvet. No museum staff, not even curators or conservators, are permitted to enter the locked room.

It is, of course, somewhat pointless for a museum to hold objects that can never be seen by scholars, let alone by the general public. Delicate discussions are therefore underway for a long-term solution.

The BM has begun discussions which could lead to the loan of the tabots to the Ethiopian Orthodox church in London, possibly on a renewable five-year basis.

The tabots would then be housed securely in the London church, where they would remain out of view.

While I won’t condemn this instance of multiculturalism, it is only fair to observe that the British were able to steal the tabots only because they had previously been taken from church buildings by Emperor Theodore in the course of his campaign to subordinate the Abuna to his political authority. Had the little arks remained in their appointed places, they would never have left their native land.

Quick Reads

James Bowman on the real agenda behind the ostensibly anti-Bush remake of The Manchurian Candidate:

John Kerry’s Democratic convention last week prompted the thought in me that maybe we were getting it all wrong. Maybe, in spite of appearances, it was not Bush who was the film’s target but his opponent. For surely Raymond Shaw, the zombie-like programmed “candidate” played by Liev Schreiber had a lot more in common with John Kerry than he did with the President. Though obviously lacking not only in charisma but even in human warmth, Shaw was like Kerry in basing his whole claim to fitness for leadership on his past military record, and he was apart from a meagre assortment of pieties employing the word “strength” — Candidate Shaw’s equally meaningless slogan was “Compassionate Vigilance” — extremely vague about what he would actually do if he were returned to power. . . .

Could it be merely accidental that Jonathan Demme’s updating of a 45 year old novel has produced a hero who so much resembles this year’s Democratic nominee? Could it be possible that he only put in the anti-Bush stuff and hired anti-Bush actors like Miss Streep as camouflage to cover an anti-Kerry agenda? Perhaps Michael Moore or some other left-wing conspiracy theorist should make his next movie about this sinister plot.

John Lomperis of the Institute on Religion and Democracy details the plans of the mainspring of the Religious Left, the Executive Board of the National Council of Churches in “Church Council Plans for Finances, Liberal Political Activism”. Combining political dogmatism with religious flexibility, the NCC’s leaders are quite open in their commitment to fostering “a powerful, new progressive faith movement” and their scorn for Christians who disagree with them on secular issues. In the piper and tunes department, it is interesting to learn –

. . . that the NCC was largely saved from financial ruin by a $6 million gift given last year by a single donor (whose identity the NCC refuses to divulge) in appreciation for the council’s political activism. Although the NCC uses its resources to speak in the name of all of the members of its affiliated denominations with its frequent political pronouncements, this organization-saving donor was not even a member of any NCC-affiliated denomination.

Some other donors are identified:

The funds “Received” column of an official document distributed at the meeting lists $10,500 from the Sierra Club, $3,000 from the left-wing advocacy group USAction, and $14,686 from performers/activists Vanessa Redgrave and Peter Yarrow. The “Pledged” column lists $100,000 from ice cream guru Ben Cohen and another $100,000 from the thoroughly partisan MoveOn.Org group, with both gifts expected “June first week.” According to NCC documents, the church council is also looking at ACORN, the Ford Foundation, and anti-Bush billionaire George Soros as promising potential sources of large grants.

Meanwhile, faithful Christians may wish to note that the financial foundation of this political pressure group is royalties on the RSV and NRSV translations of the Bible. “According to [NCC General Secretary Bob] Edgar, if it were not for the latter source of revenue, ‘this council would have gone out of business years ago.’”

The Rev. Ken Joseph, Jr., an Assyrian Christian priest, summarizes a secret report on the oppression of his co-religionists in Iraq during the Ba’athist era. Unfortunately, the article provides no information on the provenance of the document. Internal evidence suggests that it was prepared by the post-Saddam authorities and is being withheld to avoid offending international relief organizations that turned a blind eye to the persecution. Whatever their source, the facts, personally verified in many instances by Fr. Joseph, are appalling.

Harry Potter and the Philosophe's Moan

Evidently short of material, today’s New York Times translates a Le Monde op-ed denouncing the Harry Potter books as propaganda for “neoliberalism” (which you know, if you keep track of European leftist bogeymen, is only slightly less fascistic than international jewry neoconservatism). According to a certain Ilias Yocaris, “professor of literary theory and French literature at the University Institute of Teacher Training in Nice”, J. K. Rowling’s wizardly universe celebrates all of the vices of the present day Amerikkka-dominated dystopia:

The underlying message to young fans is this: You can imagine as many fictional worlds, parallel universes or educational systems as you want, they will still all be regulated by the laws of the market. Given the success of the Harry Potter series, several generations of young people will be indelibly marked by this lesson.

It’s instructive to see how outraged a European leftist is by “ritual complaints about the rigidity and incompetence of bureaucrats” and how scornful of the notion of a “fight against Evil”. We aren’t told in so many words that He-who-must-not-be-named is a misunderstood victim of capitalist oppression, rather like poor Saddam Hussein, but the subtext is legible.

Steve Sachs, a graduate student at Merton College, Oxford, traverses M. Yocaris’ effusion line by line and draws out the perverse humor in its ploddingly serious exposition. Definitely worth reading to lighten your day and enhance your contempt for French intellectuals.

Arthur Sans Romance

Nothing that I have heard about the new cinematic King Arthur — certainly not the prospect of watching Keira Knightley cavort in blue paint — encourages me to see it, but I do approve of the concept of Arthur without the romantic panoply that sprang up around his legend in the Middle Ages. A quasi-historical Arthurian epic would be stripped of Guinevere, Lancelot, knights in armor, the Grail and such like accretions. If Arthur was a real man, he probably (though probabilities are faint in this fog) spoke Latin and Welsh, fought on foot, styled himself "Imperator" and clung to tradition by appointing Roman consuls each year. It would be possible, as several historical novelists have attempted, to devise a stirring (not to mention timely) tale of his struggles to stave off the advancing tide of barbarism.

None of the novels directly devoted to that theme is memorable enough for me to recall at the moment, but I'll use this hook to plug Alfred Duggan, whose Conscience of the King, scheduled for reprinting in the near future, introduces Arthur on its periphery. Its anti-hero Cerdic (reputed ancestor of the Anglo-Saxon kings) is a kind of counter-Arthur, working, albeit unconsciously, to sweep away rather than preserve the shards of the Roman order. Duggan, also a favorite of John Derbyshire, was going out of fashion in my youth, during the general collapse of the market for historicals, but appears to be reviving in these latter days. According to the Amazon U.K. Web site, several of his novels are back in print or will be soon, and used copies are easy to find at ABEBooks. Conscience of the King happens to be one of his best, but I also especially recommend Lord Geoffrey's Fancy (set in Crusader-occupied Greece), Leopards and Lilies (the reign of King John), Count Bohemond (the First Crusade, which was the setting for both this, his last book and his first, Knight With Armor), Winter Quarters (Gallic mercenaries on Rome's Parthian frontier) and Castles and Elephants (a/k/a Besieger of Cities, Demetrios Poliorcetes).

Azkaban in 15 Minutes

For those who don't have time for 2½ hour flicks, here is a PG-13 rated abridged version of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban".