@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 6/09/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 50
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. We are continuing on our theme talking about the classic days of
radio. I explained why I think that horror works better on radio
than in movies or in books. Radio forces you to see your own
frightening images in your own mind, but does not give you the
autonomy to control the pace that the story progresses.
A big contributor to the effect of the horror were the sound
effects people. Some of these people used amazing creativity in
how to create effects. The script would call for something like
"stepping on spiders." Now just how do you create the sound effect
of stepping on spiders? The sound man bought several bunches of
grapes and stepped on them. For each grape you hear a little pop
and a squish. Delightful. The capsule unscrewing in the famous
"War of the Worlds" broadcast was actually a large jar being
unscrewed inside a toilet bowl. (More on this broadcast later.)
One of the most famous sound effects was a man being turned inside
out. Imagine being told to create this sound effect. What would
you do? What they did do was have one sound man step on
strawberries to get a muffled scrunchy sound while another pulled a
tight-fitting rubber glove off his hand. I bet that one had the
kiddies screaming.
In many ways you can do more with a radio play than you can with a
film. The spoken word is frequently a more efficient way of
telling a story than the visual media is. The first reasonably
faithful cinematic version of Bram Stoker's DRACULA was the three-
hour COUNT DRACULA that the BBC made in the mid-1970s. It is a
long enough novel that it is difficult to do it faithfully. But in
1938 Orson Welles's Mercury Theater had done a very accurate
version of the novel and he managed it in only an hour. Films were
not long enough to have much of the plot, but an hour long radio
play really did. One can describe in seconds a scene that would
take minutes to do on the screen. "The dog jumped to the deck,
over the edge of the boat, and ran down the beach." It takes about
three seconds to say it, but would take much longer to render on
film.
Of course Welles is best known for his Mercury Theater broadcast a
few weeks later of Howard Koch's play "Invasion from Mars" based on
H. G. Wells's WAR OF THE WORLDS. That broadcast is so frequently
discussed that we need not go into it here. For those who can get
sound working on their PCs, the entire Welles oeuvre can be found
on the web at http://www.unknown.nu/mercury/. The same site has
Welles's seven-part adaptation of Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES, the
best adaptation of that novel to another medium ever done. It ran
on the Mutual Network in 1937.
Orson Welles, of course, is the great remembered genius of radio.
There are also forgotten geniuses. These are names I respect, even
if one hears of them only in relation to radio. Lucille Fletcher
is one, based on two really great suspense stories "The Hitchhiker"
and "Sorry, Wrong Number." The former was re-dramatized on
TWILIGHT ZONE and undoubtedly was the inspiration for the film
CARNIVAL OF SOULS. The latter was mis-produced into an over-blown
film with Barbara Stanwick.
Another great forgotten genius of radio was Norman Corwin. Corwin
produced a program a series of radio plays, sometime in verse,
sometimes very powerful, often just strange, always remarkable, and
never like anything the listener had ever heard before. One or two
were hour-long poems about the state of the war like V-E Day's "On
a Note of Triumph." I am not that much of a poetry fan, but these
are riveting.
Next week we will talk about some more of the better radio shows.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
2. FRANKENSTEIN (1910) (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: This is a film long thought lost to
the world and then held for ransom. Finally it
is being seen by a limited set of people. It
is a crude film, as one might expect. But in
some ways it seems to have inspired later
films. It is a very different interpretation
of the nature of the monster than has been seen
since. (It is hardly reasonable to rate a 1910
film.) Spoiler warning: this review includes a
complete synopsis of the plot.
Back in 1894 Thomas Edison was a pioneer of the American film
industry and was claiming (not entirely truthfully) to have
invented the motion picture. He did however sell a Kinetoscope and
the he had to make films to show on his Kinetoscope, much the same
a Vu-Master has to make slides for their viewer. His was not big
scale film production, today it looks amateurish. But he built a
small studio barely the size of a truck, and started grinding out
one-minute films. The Black Maria was the world's first film
studio and built at Edison's West Orange laboratories where it
still stands. It was called the Black Maria because of its
resemblance to a police wagon.
In 1910 (eight years after Georges Melies made his famous A TRIP TO
THE MOON in France) Edison made the first movie adaptation of Mary
Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. The film was just fourteen minutes long
and starred Charles Ogle as the monster. When I first heard about
the film it was considered a lost film. There were stills of
Ogle's make-up and some descriptions left--that was all. So many
old films were lost forever, it was not surprising that this one
was also. In the mid-1990s the claim was made that a copy had been
found. Soon there were also stories that the man who had found it
owned the print and wanted one million dollars for the cinema
relic. And that was how things stood. Yesterday I heard that a
poor reproduction of the film was available on the web in
Realplayer format. It is a terrible reproduction, but it was a
film that many people had wanted to see for years and any means
seemed good.
Most Frankenstein films assume the title character built a monster
of dead bodies and animated them with electricity. But the films
have been made in an age of science. Mary Shelley is very vague
about how the monster is created, but the approach seems to be more
alchemy and mysticism than the rationalistic approach taken in the
films. Shelley had the monster be more a mystical creature,
created like the medieval mystics created homunculi. That is the
approach of the 1910 film.
The story is told very briefly in ten or twelve sentences with
action filmed to illustrate the story. Frankenstein goes to
college. There within two years he discovers how to create life.
He decides he will prove himself by making a perfect man, then to
return home to claim his bride. Mixing some volatile chemical
together, he puts them in something that looks like a cross between
a gas chamber and a kiln. As he watches through a little porthole
the chemicals form a skeleton and meat forms on the skeleton.
When the monster is being created it just moves its arms up and
down mechanically. Surely a marionette artist at the time could
have given it more realistic movements. But for that the creation
sequence is fairly effective with burning pieces of body just sort
of assembling themselves magically. When a bony arm sticks out of
the creation chamber the film comes closest to having a genuine
scary moment. Certainly Frankenstein is horrified by what he has
created. He faints and the monster disappears. Frankenstein had
wanted to create a perfect man, but not all recipes work out. What
he got was a ragged and shambling monstrosity, its features and its
very expression are horribly distorted. It has long stringy hair
and a nondescript torso.
Frankenstein returns home to the arms of his fiancee. But the
monster finds him. Frankenstein has the monster hide in a closet
so as not to frighten his bride. The monster cooperates but then
comes out and in a fit of anger attacks Frankenstein. Frankenstein
lives only because the monster sees his reflection in a mirror and
is frightened off.
Frankenstein is married, but in the night the monster returns. The
bride sees the monster and faints. But before the monster can do
anything terrible he sees himself in the mirror and apparently
realizing he is too ugly to ever win such a bride, he just
disappears. The presence of love does to him what sunlight and
thwarted love does to Count Orlock in NOSFERATU. It simply
dissolves him. This seems to imply that like Dracula, the monster
is an incorporeal being and is more magical than scientific.
The film appears to be on different film stocks to get a slight
feel of color, brown-tone for daytime and black for night. Being
made a full eight years after the Melies A TRIP TO THE MOON yet
being so much more crude and primitive in style one has the feeling
that film would not have advanced much if Edison had controlled the
American film industry had he tried to do.
I am not rating this film since there is no objective criteria to
rate it with modern films. It is really just a very short telling
of the story and filmed illustrations, filmed with a stationary
camera looking at a stage. One reason that this film disappeared
may have been the poor quality of the production. Still, it is an
amazing circumstance that the film is visible at all and it was a
great pleasure to see it after so many years. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com