THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
08/15/14 -- Vol. 33, No. 7, Whole Number 1819
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
A Good Word to Know (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Phantoms of the Opera: A Survey of Adaptations (Part 3)
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Retro Hugo Award Winners and General Hugo Comments
(comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE? by William Manchester (book review
by Greg Frederick)
This Week's Reading (CHINA ROAD) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: A Good Word to Know (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
"Tsundoku": Japanese word for the books we have bought but not yet
read which are piling up on our shelves. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Phantoms of the Opera: A Survey of Adaptations (Part 3)
(comments by Mark R. Leeper)
1987 Michael Crawford (Theatrical Version)
I review a lot of things and see or read a lot more. It is not all
that unusual that I come away from some and consciously say that it
is the best of a certain class I have ever seen, read, or whatever.
I thought that the remake of CAT PEOPLE was the best shape-changer
horror film I had ever seen. But of course that is the best of a
small class. It is far rarer that I would say something is the
best play. But I will say that for me PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was the
best play. By artistic merits alone Amadeus was a better play, I
suppose, but PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was the most enjoyable and even
the most meaningful play. It is a pot-boiler melodrama based on a
pot-boiler melodramatic novel and I loved it. Sometimes even a
pot-boiler can hit you squarely on target and you are absolutely
floored. I hope Margaret Thatcher, who attended the same
performance as I did, enjoyed it as much.
I really believe that the play may be more faithful to the novel
than the Lon Chaney film. It certainly reveals more of the
Phantom's background and tragedy. The Phantom is shown to be the
genius he was in the Gaston Leroux novel and the victim of an
unfeeling world.
To fit as much of the plot into a musical of all play forms is
incredible. They did eliminate the Persian, who is a major
character of the novel, and many chapters from near the end of the
novel, particularly those involving the torture chamber scenes
which are telescoped to a few seconds on the stage, but I don't
think the impact has really been lost.
Most of this could be told from the record. What I could not have
expected is the brilliance of the set design. When you are first
sitting in the theater, the stage seems small. What they do with
that tiny stage is hard to believe. Many effects are impressive
but none so impressive as the descent to the lake below the opera
house, which has to be seen to be appreciated.
It matches the scene in the film--no small feat for a stage play.
Less impressive is the falling chandelier, which is much less
convincing. But the moment when you first see the Phantom is a
cold chill like nothing I remember seeing in any film or play.
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is really a superb adaptation of a story I
have loved for years.
Now for a few minor quibbles. Andrew Lloyd Webber's music is
spectacular as long as he is simply having his characters sing, but
he does some funny things when he is representing other composers'
music. Presumably his song "Evergreen" is an aria from the opera
HANNIBAL by Chalumeu. From the style of opera of the period, and
from what we do hear of the opera, it is clear that the song simply
would not fit in. It is not of an operatic style and Lloyd Webber
did not want to take a chance on his audiences not appreciating the
beauty of the operatic style. Further, it seems absurd that a
musical genius like the Phantom would write an opera in which the
music is just unappealing scales and with phrases like "Those who
tangle with Don Juan...." That sounds like it came from a poverty-
row Western rather than an opera written by a musical genius.
1987 ??? (Animated Version)
As is probably obvious by now I do like the novel of THE PHANTOM OF
THE OPERA and I consider one of the most important virtues of an
adaptation accuracy to the source material. One cinematic version
of the story stands head and shoulders above the others as an
adaptation faithful to the novel. That is its main and just about
its only virtue.
A British company called Emerald City Productions provides to cable
animated films that are sort of the equivalent of the old "Classics
Illustrated" comic books. Like "Classics Illustrated" comics they
are written close to the plot of the novel. They take some
liberties with plots but on the whole their adaptations are
generally pretty artless turn-the-crank affairs. Take the plot of
the novel, transfer it to script form, then animate it. The
adaptation does simplify things, perhaps too much. This version
eliminates Carlotta and her rivalry with Christine. By doing that
the fall of the chandelier is misplaced in the plot, and it is left
ambiguous whether the fall is sabotage or accident. Also Erik has
a violent death as he does in all versions but the novel and the
Lloyd Webber play. On the other hand, the 1987 version includes
the very important character of the Persian. Erik's background is
vastly simplified to being just a killer who has escaped from the
Persian police. This denies us the possibility of considering
siding with the Phantom. It was an unfortunate decision. But I
guess for a young audience murderers must be made villains and they
must die in the end.
The face of the Phantom as illustrated here is exactly as Leroux
described it. It is more accurate than even the Chaney
visualization. Since the artists are not limited by makeup effects
they can make it look like anything they want and they use the text
of the novel, taking it literally. This requires little
imagination, I suppose. But the history of adaptations of this
novel has been plagued with too much imagination and not enough
trust in the source to be sufficiently compelling. Emerald City's
Phantom partially justifies that mistrust. It certainly is not a
particularly compelling telling. Luckily the Lloyd Webber play,
which is nearly as faithful, is also nearly as compelling as the
book.
1989 Richard Englund
It is clear that somebody was serious about making a version of the
semi-classic story and somebody else was not. Nominally Dwight
Little is the director of the new film, though his name is pasted
over somebody else's on the posters. So what we get is an
exquisitely clumsy cross between a lackluster but traditional
telling of the story and an episode of "Freddy's Nightmares."
Christine Daae is an opera singer in modern-day Manhattan who
finds an old piece of music by a forgotten composer who was also a
serial killer. She decides to use it for an audition for an opera.
During her audition she is coshed on the head by a sandbag and
suddenly, with no apparent bewilderment, she is an opera singer
from the chorus in 1884 London. The story that is then told is
just barely recognizable as a version of The Phantom of the Opera.
A great but unknown composer has made a pact with the Devil that if
his music should become immortal he would sell his soul. The Devil
adds his own little amendment by gouging pieces out of the
composer's face. The Phantom can make himself almost normal, but
only by sewing pieces of live flesh into his face--so much for the
romance of the mask. The Phantom now lives under the opera house
and teaches his Christine, mercilessly torture-killing anyone who
gets in his way. He skins two people alive and beheads two others.
Meanwhile Christine is bewildered as to why she is able to remember
the words to sing to the Phantom's music--not remembering that she
learned them in New York. Classic scenes such as the chandelier
scene and the unmasking are dispensed with entirely--well, sort of.
Later when the story returns to the present it turns more into a
traditional supernatural molester story.
I cannot imagine how this film turned into such an unholy mess.
Only part of the mess can be explained by saying they had a gory
version of the traditional story and well into the shooting they
decided they wanted to turn it into a totally different film. That
would explain the change of directors. It would also explain the
credits "Screenplay by Duke Sandefur, Based on a screenplay by
Gerry O'Hara." Somebody must have decided they could not sell
Robert Englund as anything but a supernatural, unstoppable killer
like his Freddy Krueger. The result is a sort of a "Peggy Sue
Sings for the Phantom of Elm Street" that is a crude hoax that will
disappoint Phantom fans, Freddy fans, and everybody in between. I
would like to say this film has no redeeming value and is not
really an adaptation of the story at all. But for a little nice
opera and a few scenes that were almost an okay adaptation of the
story I will count it where I do not count only slightly more
bastardized versions like PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE.
1990 Charles Dance
The day that Tony Richardson's made-for-television version of THE
PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was due to be shown, my local newspaper did a
feature on it quoting the writer Arthur Kopit as saying, "[After
having read the novel] what struck me was that this story ...
wasn't very good. Still it captured the imagination of people.
Why? What bothered me about [the previous dramatic] versions, what
I thought they essentially missed, was that you never knew why the
Phantom was in love with Christine."
I had very high hopes for this version. There were four announced
film adaptations in the wake of the success of the Broadway play.
One starred Richard Englund, whose most famous role was the razor-
gloved Freddy Krueger; one was simply a film version of the
musical; one was set in Nazi Germany. Of the four versions, the
only one that sounded like a genuine new adaptation of the novel
was the announced four-hour television version. Then I read
Kopit's quote.
What Kopit is saying is that he has no respect for the material
itself, only for its ready-made market. He also thinks that the
dramatic versions missed the point of why the story is popular. I
could easily believe his comment if it really were the novel that
people remember but, in fact, the book has not been what people
have liked. For most of the years the story has been liked, Gaston
Leroux's novel has been hard to find. Andrew Lloyd Webber tells an
anecdote about how difficult it was to find a copy of the novel
when he wanted to read it. The dramatic adaptations that Kopit
thinks missed the point of why the story is remembered are really
what made the story popular. And here they cannot have missed the
point. Actually I would contend that they have all missed what I
like in the novel, but not what has made the story popular.
The novel is about a man with a great intellect and a horribly
deformed face. All his life he was treated as a freak and just
occasionally exploited for his genius. Eventually he finds the
opportunity to build for himself an empire in the darkness beneath
the Paris Opera House. There he can enjoy the music and can be
seen only when he wants. This is Gaston Leroux's Erik but he has
never been done satisfactorily in a film or play. I had hoped that
in the three and a half hours or so of story there would be time to
show Erik's history. In fact, this version did show Erik's history
but it bore little relation to anything in the novel.
Kopit missed the point entirely by making his Phantom a petulant
young man (played by Charles Dance of THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN), who
is being shielded by a former manager of the opera house (over-
played by Burt Lancaster).
Kopit's screenplay intends this Erik to be likable and steers clear
of the question in the novel of whether Erik might be psychotic.
This Erik does not kill, at least in the course of the film. Oh,
his face may startle and early on this causes a death, but that
does not appear to be Erik's fault. This Erik has lost the feel of
the sinister and instead controls the fate of the opera house with
practical jokes. Even the cutting down of the chandelier is not a
murder attempt but an act of angry vandalism intended to vent rage
and for which the audience was intentionally given time to get out
of the way. Of course, this Erik had less reason for rage than the
one in the book. The script claims that Erik's mother at least
found his face "flawlessly beautiful." In the book Erik's mother
gave him his first mask because she could not stand to look at his
face.
There are a few nice touches to the script. One of them is the
issue of how to handle the unmasking. Sort of independently of the
quality of the rest of the production there is the question of how
to shock audiences when they do see the Phantom's face. The
approach here was unusual and not badly done, though it was perhaps
dictated by the screenplay's efforts to keep Erik as a romantic
Phantom. Less endearing is Erik's unexpected forest beneath the
ground. It isn't like the metal forest of the novel but a real
forest with live trees and unexplained sunlight. It appears that
Erik must have built himself a holodeck.
Charles Dance is a little whiny for my tastes, as well as not being
sufficiently sinister. Lancaster as the former manager is overripe
and Teri Polo as Christine Daee. In the book Daae is unmemorable.
She and her lover Adam Storke as Phillipe, Comte de Chagney, are
pretty people but boring actors. (Again, they got the name wrong
on the Comte. The character's name was Raoul. Phillipe is the
name of Raoul's brother, older by twenty years.)
The whole mediocre revision of the story is directed by Tony
Richardson, who directed TOM JONES. I am not a fan of that film
but it certainly was better directed than this slow-moving version.
If I had never heard of the story before I would have liked this
version better, but as it is, I would call it the better than only
the Herbert Lom and Richard Englund versions. Incidentally, Arthur
Kopit has also adapted his version of the story as a stage musical.
The score is actually quite enjoyable, but the story is essentially
the same as the television version. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Retro Hugo Award Winners and General Hugo Comments (comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In keeping with my on-going Hugo coverage, I can report that Loncon
3 received 3,587 Hugo Award final ballots (from 8,784 eligible
voters), almost 50% more than the previous record (Renovation's
2,100). They also received 1,307 Retro Hugo Award ballots. (Note
that this means that any category on the regular ballot that
doesn't get 897 voters will not be awarded, not any category on the
Retro ballot that does not get 327 voters.)
Loncon also got 2,690 new Supporting members (i.e., Supporting
members who had not voted in Site Selection), of which 345 had
joined prior to nominations opening, 605 joined during the
nomination period and 2,340 joined during the voting period. (My
suspicion is that the last group was due in large part to the
widely touted news that the Hugo packet would include the entire
fourteen-book "Wheel of time" series. (I saw several blog posts
indicating that the poster was buying a Supporting membership for
that reason.) I would be curious to know how many ballots will end
up with "Wheel of Time" given a first-place vote and everything
else in Novel left blank.
The "irony" of all this is that nowhere along the line did anyone
do anything contrary to the rules, or even to the customs, of the
Hugo process. People have always recommended or suggested
candidates for nomination. Publishers and authors have been
solicited to provide copies of nominated works for the Hugo packet.
Ironically, Tor is getting some flack for providing their entire
nominated work ("Wheel of Day") this year, while Orbit UK is
getting flack for providing only excerpts of their three novels.
The result of Orbit UK's decision may well be that voters who
bought a membership to get (and presumably vote for) "Wheel of
Time" would actually have read the other novels had they been
provided, but as it stands, probably will not.
The Retro Hugo ballot also seemed to benefit from greater
participation, and I was actually far more interested in the
outcome there than in the current ballot. Since the Retro Hugo
Awards were announced at a much earlier ceremony than the current
Hugos, I already know the results for those--and here they are (the
numbers in parentheses are number of nominating and voting ballots,
respectively):
Best Novel (208/1196):
The Sword in the Stone, T. H. White (Collins)
Best Novella (125/1042):
"Who Goes There?", Don A Stuart [John W. Campbell] (Astounding
Science-Fiction, August 1938)
Best Novelette (80/839):
"Rule 18", Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science-Fiction, July
1938)
Best Short Story (108/963):
"How We Went to Mars", Arthur C. Clarke (Amateur Science
Stories, March 1938)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form (137/1058):
"The War of the Worlds" by H. G. Wells. Written by Howard Koch
& Anne Froelick; Directed by Orson Welles (The Mercury
Theater of the Air, CBS)
Best Editor, Short Form (99/786):
John W. Campbell
Best Professional Artist (86/704):
Virgil Finlay
Best Fanzine (42/471):
Imagination! edited by Forrest J Ackerman, Morojo, and T. Bruce
Yerke
Best Fan Writer (50/812):
Ray Bradbury
(If I'm reading the statistics correctly, in Best Editor 136 voters
out of 786 ranked Campbell first and ranked no one else in the
category, in Best Dramatic Presentation 185 out of 1058 ranked "The
War of the Worlds" first and ranked nothing else, and in Best Fan
Writer 153 out of 812 ranked Bradbury first and ranked no one
else.)
[-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: A WORLD LIT ONLY BY FIRE? by William Manchester (book review
by Greg Frederick)
This book is a look into the dim world of the Dark Ages which
encompassed much of Europe after the fall of the Western Roman
Empire in the 400's AD. The time period covered by the author
continues until the beginning of the Renaissance. When the Western
Roman Empire fell scientific and engineering advancements came to a
halt in that region. There was a type of de-construction of
knowledge going on also. Ancient Greeks like Aristotle knew the
Earth to be a sphere but in the Dark Ages around the 6th century a
monk, Cosmas, wrote a treatise interpreting the Bible which the
Roman Catholic Church supported. This treatise which many accepted
stated that the Earth was a flat rectangle and a much smaller Sun
orbits a mountain in the north of this flat Earth. Roads, bridges,
waterworks, and buildings were not maintained and fell into dis-
repair. Even though the old Roman roads where not maintained they
were still at times the best roads available for limited travel.
Illiteracy was the norm. Even many of the Kings who came to
dominate the region were illiterate only the church officials
tended to be literate. A mixture of pagan superstition and the
Catholic faith pervaded the everyday lives of the people.
Typically there might be three years of normal harvests followed by
1 year of famine. The harshest times were during famine when the
peasants would sell everything they had for food and resorted to
devouring bark, grass, roots even white clay to survive. In
general life was brief, half the people in Europe died usually from
disease before reaching 30 years of age. For women live expectancy
was around 24 years of age; the toll from childbirth as appalling.
People were smaller then; the average man stood five feet and a few
inches and weighed about 135 pounds. Vast forests covered much of
Northern Europe with small isolated villages that were widely
separated from each other.
The abuses of some of the Roman Catholic Popes and higher clergy
were legendary and helped to create the Reformation Period started
by Martin Luther. The church at that time ignored Luther and did
not correct the abuses therefore Protestantism was born.
Early Renaissance scholars began to rediscover the lost knowledge
of the Ancient Greeks and realized that the Earth was a sphere.
The rediscovered knowledge allowed Magellan to take part in his
great journey. A large section of the book tells the story of
Ferdinand Magellan who with five ships set-off in 1519 to
circumnavigate the World. Magellan died in the Philippines but his
remaining crew with just one ship left completed the trip back to
Spain. Magellan was from Portugal but he could not convince the
king of Portugal to finance this journey so he went to Spain.
Portugal had complete control over the very profitable spice trade
from Indonesia at the time. Magellan with his experience and some
of the best information of that period convinced the Spanish king
to back his plan. The key to convincing King Carlos came when he
told him that he would seize control of the Spice Islands for
Spain. Explorers like Magellan and others helped the Europeans to
shake off the long sleep of the Dark Ages and enter the
Renaissance.
Manchester's book is an enjoyable read for those who like to learn
more about history. [-gf]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
CHINA ROAD: A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE OF A RISING POWER by Rob
Gifford (ISBN 978-0-8129-7524-6) is a merged travelogue of NPR
reporter Gifford's two trips along Route 312, a.k.a. the Silk Road,
from its eastern end at Shanghai to its western end (in China,
anyway) at Korgaz, on the border with Kyrgyzstan. One trip seems
to have been in 2003 or 2004, the other was in 2005. In the
acknowledgements section he says, "Although this [merging] offended
my journalistic sensibilities, there was no other way to do it."
The book was written in 2007; a lot has changed since then, and a
lot has not.
For example, he tells someone about his theory that "Xinjiang and
Tibet are like Scotland. They could end up like England's northern
within the United Kingdom, contained within a country they don't
want to be part of but, after a few centuries, unable or unwilling
to make the effort to secede." Check back with me after September
18 on that.
He writes of "talks between Beijing and representatives of the
aging Dalai Lama ... seem to be going nowhere. And one day,
probably quite soon, he will die, and the Chinese will supervise
the selection of a new Dalai Lama, and that will be that." Almost a
decade later, Tenzin Gyatso is still going strong (though he is the
longest reigning Dalai Lama).
He writes about cities twice as big as Dallas that most Americans
have never heard of, of cities where officials have sealed up wells
that have been famous for centuries in order to force the
inhabitants to buy their water from companies the officials own, of
cities polluted beyond belief. (Someone once tweeted that he
wished all those who believe in unregulated capitalism should be
forced to spend a week breathing the air in Harbin. Lanzhou is
even worse.)
Throughout China Gifford found innumerable stories of corruption,
unchecked by any effort of the legal system. This is due in part
to a Confucian system that trusted "rule by example" more than
"rule by law", but also of a Party that cannot afford to have any
systems of checks and balances, which would ultimately lead to a
loss of power.
So while there is less oppression than under Mao, there is still
oppression. On the other hand, there is much more opportunity for
advancement. Farmers are not trapped on their farms, and if the
working conditions in factories are horrible, and the pay abysmal,
they are still better than staying on the farms, or there would not
be such a mass migration to the cities.
Gifford himself says that his mood swung back and forth between
optimism and pessimism as he journeyed along the road. Ultimately,
he seems to feel that what will determine China's fate is how it
(i.e., the leadership) deal with the decade between 2012 and 2022.
In 2012, he writes, Hu Jintao and his associates will step down
from leadership and a new generation will take their place. How
this new generation deals with the problems, particularly if the
economy slows dramatically, or there is a global oil shortage, or
some sort of widespread epidemic, will determine China's future.
As of this writing, the new leader, Xi Jinping, does not seem to be
implementing any substantive political reforms. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The computer can't tell you the emotional story.
It can give you the exact mathematical design,
but what's missing is the eyebrows.
--Frank Zappa