to this.

This is the story told in Historic Photos of Los Angeles, a book of neat pictures by Dana Lombardy. It’s a compilation of archival photos: page after page of buildings, vintage cars, movie stars, pricey bars and salty tars, presented with helpful captions explaining their historical context. 

It made me realize how history-starved I am. My complaint about this town has long been that there is no history here; I’ve been to London and every third pub has a plaque over a corner chair reminding you that Dickens used to drink right here or Henry V killed a couple of his wives here after hours. In Los Angeles that pub would have been torn down a dozen times by now and replaced with newer, flimiser pubs. Here in this book is the evidence, the buildings that are long gone; the ones that inexplicably survive surrounded by entirely new buildings.

Lombardy has an eye for good pictures too. It’s all monochrome fare from 1870-1967 (the last shot is of the first Super Bowl at the LA Coliseum) and mostly gorgeous, though one cannot guarantee quality when all the shots come from different photographers, let alone different camera technologies. And as a history of Los Angeles it’s imperfect; the captions are written around the pictures, so whatever history you get is designed to explain the image. If there isn’t a picture of William Mulholland, you don’t learn anything about the guy who brought us all that water. And I don’t know if there is one because there isn’t an index. I didn’t find a picture anyway. I did, however, have a glass of water while looking for it.

Still, why quibble. Your home town could produce a book like this but I bet you wouldn’t find a shot of Lana Turner or Lizbeth Scott. Or a shot of Frank Sinatra getting fingerprinted when he applied for a gun license. 

You know what? Maybe we got history after all.

According to the style manuals a film is a singular work, and should be shown as distinct in text. Daniel uses all caps to delineate movie titles (SHOWGIRLS). I use italics (The Waterboy). Both are correct.

Dan’s convention comes from both the earlier Internet (where italics weren’t an option) and college composition, again to indicate titles absent any other typographical method.

I got my style from college as well. When I was a-studenting the “little red schoolbook” of film theory was “A History of Narrative Film” by David A. Cook. This thick, floppy softbound text was colloquially called the “Cook Book” and was required for a number of film courses, from history overviews to genre-studies classes to screenwriting. In it, all film titles were italicized, and any student with a word processor was encouraged to follow “Cook Book” style.

As I said, both conventions are correct, but they read a bit differently on a gut level. In the default font and type size used in TPN:: Box Office Weekly, all caps look a bit like YELLING, and italics look a bit like whispering.

Just to make matters more complicated, the New York Times and Variety both distinguish film titles with quotation marks (”Saw IV”). As they are publications of record, this is also correct.

Television citations are a little more problematic. Series names are supposed to be in quotation marks (”Police Squad!”), but they are often shown in italics. Dan does his in ALL CAPS, to be consistent. Individual episodes are considered “dependent or abbreviated works” and, like short films, are always supposed to be in quotation marks (”Rendezvous With Death”).

This has been a public service of Box Office Weekly, where stile rains supreem & good grammers is never worng grammers.

–Skot C.

Martian Child

So, another John Cusack comedy-drama is gonna be released (set in Chicago, no less, so we can see John in his cinematic “natural environment”). From what I can glean, I believe I can wait for Martian Child’s cable premiere, DVR it, then watch it while writing or practicing the bass. But then I read the film was based on the novella “The Martian Child” written by David Gerrold.

Take out your Trek-O-Meters, kids!

Interesting to see that name pop up again. David Gerrold is justifiably famous for writing the “Star Trek: the original series” episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” one of that series most tightly scripted (and genuinely humorous) installments. A fan favorite. But Gerrold created some works just as significant and often overlooked a few years after the the original series was canceled in 1968: He penned the paperback books The World of Star Trek and The Trouble With Tribbles in 1973.

What’s so significant about that? Take it into context. In 1973, Star Trek barely existed. On television, it shared the same ephemeral presence as “I Dream of Jeannie” or “The Munsters,” stripped for syndication, chopped-up 16mm prints running daily on local channels between 4 and 7 p.m. There were no tie-ins, no action figures, and the first Star Trek convention took place at roughly the same time.

David Gerrold’s books were the first non-fiction publications that took Star Trek seriously. World was the first to report of the post-cancellation fan phenomenon, the first to examine the Star trek universe as creation of cultural significance. He used his inside knowledge of the show to sort of evangelize the show, and in doing so legitimized it’s fandom. And his book on the writing of “Tribbles” is still one of the most insightful looks at the seriously compromised business of network television writing ever written. It’s a bit dated (a lot of his problems came from using the wrong kind of typewriter) but if you ever considered penning a TV script it’s a must-read.

(I have a yellowed copy of The World of Star Trek on my desk right now which used to belong to my brother-in-law. Inside, I found an equally yellowed bookmark: An IBM punch card. Whoa.)

As Star Trek content availability went in 1973, these books were pretty much it. But they were the fulcrum point: The animated series premiered in 1973, then there were more conventions, more buzz, culminating in the first Star Trek movie in 1979. And the rest… is available at a video store near you.

It can be argued that the establishment of Paramount’s most profitable franchise owed quite a bit to his early advocacy. Therefore, I would have thought David Gerrold would have been booted up to a place of recognition, riding the franchising wave, but that sort of didn’t happen. During the height of the ST wave he mostly wrote sci-fi novels– though he was apparently the uncredited writer of the “bible” for “Star Trek: the Next Generation.” He managed to write a “Tribbles” sequel in 1974 for the animated series. He did NOT write the OTHER sequel on “Deep Space Nine,” which re-purposed footage from the original episode with the contemporary cast digitally inserted– “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Two to Beam Up” if you will.

But his absence of involvement in the Trek franchise juggernaut was always a bit of a puzzlement. Then again, Gerrold admitted he admired the famously cantankerous and litigious sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison, so maybe he emulated him in the wrong way.

So David Gerrold popped up again, as the autobiographical source of a John Cusack movie. He also wangled an executive producer credit, but then again so did Seth Bass and Jonathan Tolins, the actual screenwriters. I suspect a deferred-compensation deal.

About his only recent contribution to the Star Trek franchise is an episode on the online-only, semi-authorized “Star Trek: The New Voyages.” I can’t tell you if it’s great or it sucks: I can tell you I haven’t yet been able to play even one of the episodes. From what I was able to parse, it looks like a convincing argument AGAINST watching TV on your computer.

–Skot C.

Come December, it will be released as 5-disc (!) DVD set. A Christmas gift that will take until New Year’s Day to finish.

All of this current hoopla aside, I was quite taken by this film back in 1982– narration, happy ending and all. It’s look was unprecedented; the subject matter was fascinating; It had Indiana Jones in it. I’ve since seen this film many times. When the first (or second) “director’s cut” came out in 1991 I saw it under rather momentous and creepy circumstances. Me and a friend caught it at the Castro during a matinee, and when we came out a long plume of black smoke bisected the sky over the theatre, so thick it blocked the Fall sun and chilled the air. The Oakland Hills firestorm had started while we were watching the film.

But now I’m in the process of revising my estimation of Blade Runner. Ridley Scott, former commercial TV director with a strong visual style, makes the film work with incredible art direction and effects. Fred Kaplan, in his New York Times review of BR:TFC, says the same:

What’s hypnotic about the film is its seamless portrait of the future, a sleek retro Deco glossed on neon-laced decay: overcrowded cities roamed by hustlers, strugglers and street gangs mumbling a multicultural argot, the sky lit by giant corporate logos and video billboards hyping exotic getaways on other planets, where most English-speaking white people seem to have fled.

True, all true. Notice he’s talking up the peripheral details? The plot is, in the long view, plodding and oddly static. The main character is a reactive, dull punching bag, trying to solve a whodunit that is decidedly unsurprising in it’s denouement. It’s a warmed-over Film Noir shell surrounding a gooey Philip K. Dick center.

It’s a great center, though. Philip K. Dick has had a surprisingly good run in big-budget films for an allegedly drug-addled sci-fi novelist who died in 1982, several months before Blade Runner premiered. I think he was such a favored source of big-budget Hollywood science fiction because the conceptual theses of his stories were so untethered from realpolitik it was exceedingly easy to greenlight his stuff.

Science Fiction can generally be broken down into two camps: High-Concept and Speculative. High-Concept, in which Philip K. Dick was a pioneer, explores ideas so original and strange they bear little resemblance with, or are incongruent to, our intrinsic reality. Speculative is an extrapolation of our current world, which then often reflects back as social commentary.

Dick’s High-Concept ideas were so far out they actually had little bearing on the world around us. This made the job of building a film around them easy, as he didn’t deal much in disturbing dystopian jeremiads, which tend to make investors nervous. (You may notice that even with the high profile of An Inconvenient Truth nobody is exactly lining up to remake Soylent Green.) I ain’t saying there was not a “the world has gone to hell” feeling in Blade Runner, but as said above it was mostly conveyed peripherally as detail and art direction. One can see the pattern of studio approval based on concept divorced from relevancy:

BLADE RUNNER (based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if androids thought they were people?” RELEVANCY: next time I see an android, I’ll ask it. That’s the right way to address them, right? “It?”

TOTAL RECALL (based on “We Can Remember That For You Wholesale”) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if virtual vacations seemed totally real?” RELEVANCY: Wouldn’t it be cool if vacation hotels served seemingly real food? Let’s perfect that first. Baby steps, people.

MINORITY REPORT (based on short story) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool if cops could solve crimes before they happen?” RELEVANCY: Hey– this film raised a lot of important constitutional issues concerning people thinking about doing stuff, then maybe not doing them.

PAYCHECK (based on short story) CONCEPT: “Wouldn’t it be cool to make millions and not remember how you made it?” RELEVANCY: Huh? Besides, this was a Ben Affleck movie, and it came out the same year as Gigli. You won’t be tested on it.

–Skot C.

Dear Powerful, Connected American Film Producers (you know who you are!):

I was reflecting on the Henry Darger article and it got me thinking about L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I read them all– My family inherited my great-grandmother’s original hardbounds, and they were the first full-sized books I ever read. Producers, I’m throwing out this challenge: produce the Oz Books as a movie series! Here are a few reasons why:

• They are imaginative as hell. Modern digital effects should serve to finally produce the sights, creatures and characters of the Land of Oz as they were envisioned by L. Frank Baum and his primary illustrator John Neill. (The first book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was illustrated by W. W. Denslow. Not as good.)

• They are surprisingly psychologically complex. Dark themes of estrangement, abandonment, sexual identity and general malevolence run strongly behind the fairy-land front stories. L. Frank Baum was a sick man (ill health forced him to live in Coronado, CA towards the end of his life) with a traumatic childhood (all of his brothers died as children), and his work reflects it to some degree.

The Marvelous Land of Oz, the sequel to the first book, has one of the oddest endings in children’s literature. The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the seventh novel, sets a path of redemption for the protagonist (Ojo the “unlucky”) which makes Dorothy Gale’s look like a casual stroll.

Contemporary author Gregory Maguire penned several revisions to the Oz universe (Wicked, Son of a Witch and the upcoming The Cowardly War), in tones more mature than the originals, but just as imaginative and compelling. So it can be done.

• Oz books are short. I estimate a condensation of the second book The Marvelous Land of Oz would probably play out in 90 minutes.

• They don’t have to be musicals. The 1939 MGM production is a towering classic, but if you break it down maybe half of the credit for it’s greatness is in the source material: the remainder is a combination of Golden Age Hollywood production values and stellar song writing.

And even then, the technology was simply not available to show half the interesting stuff from the book. Even the effect techniques available for Walter Murch’s Return to Oz (1985) were not quite up to snuff.

• A fantasy-cinema Boston tea party. Harry Potter: British. Lord of the Rings: British. Narnia: Really, really British (have you ever tried Turkish Delight? It’s like eating a gel insole soaked in Hi Karate aftershave). I think it’s everyone’s assumption these days that when a CG-created creature shows up in an epic fantasy pic is it will open it’s computer-generated mouth and say “What’s all this, then? Blimey!” Dorothy Gale is from Kansas, for corn’s sake.

I’ll admit not all the books will translate well to film: Some are episodic road trips. The fifth book The Land of Oz is not much more than Dorothy and some of her friends gallivanting through the outskirts of Oz en route to Ozma’s birthday party. Nonetheless, L. Frank Baum wrote some of the books with production on stage or the silent screen in mind.

What is needed is the stewardship of a Peter Jackson-like filmmaker with the talent and vision to bring the Oz universe to vivid life. Jackson showed a well-crafted fantasy film cycle can wildly exceed all expectations for success.

And finally: I believe all the Oz books are public-domain. So get going!

–Skot C.