On the edge

It's very clear

Rummaging through my files of scans - and of course I didn't find the item I wanted - I came across this, obviously scanned from a book. But most of my book scans turn out shitty, grainy or covered in criss-cross lines. That's partly due to the fact that my scanner costs  $14.99, but this - this actually came out nicely, with a lot of detail, a sense of infinity which lends it that lovely sense of certain doom.  I had to tweak it a bit to bring out the contrast, as Harold sort of greyed out and blended in to the building. These types of shots are posed promotional photos, nothing like screenshots, and there must have been tons of them, which necessitated hanging on to the wall and remaining absolutely still with the right facial expression. Some have noted that there is a naturalness to HL's stills which makes people think they were taken directly from the films. You find these little nooks and crannies of craftsmanship when you study Harold. He took the trouble, and whether his fans consciously knew it or not, it's one of the reasons they kept coming back for more.

Girl on the Clock: Harold is everywhere!

How did this ever happen? Perhaps the YouTube video is now unplayable, but I don't think so. Did I delete this post (or a facsimile of it) about the incredible Sofia Vergara Cover Girl makeup ad in which she dangles from a huge clock just like You Know Who?

Anyway, it was here, and then it wasn't. And now it's here again, and I have no idea why I deleted it in the first place, except that maybe I was having one of "those days" when I thought that everything I did was pointless and would never get off the ground.

I don't know if it's my imagination, but I don't think it is: Harold Lloyd seems to be everywhere these days. A few months ago I saw this ad and was astonished. Vergara isn't nearly as cute as Harold, and her heavy accent makes the slogan come out as, "Ea-see, grea-see, beaudd-iful Coavr Grrl."

So what is going on here? How much of it is real, and how much is wishful thinking on my part?

The 2 1/2 people who religiously follow this blog (one-and-half of whom are Matt Paust) will realize that my sole obsession over the past five years or so has been Harold Lloyd and my novel centred around his life and career, The Glass Character. After moaning for several years that no one in publishing would give me the time of day, a publisher DID give me the time of day and I signed a contract. To my relief and joy, it will be coming out in the spring with Thistledown Press.

So what will happen then? Will doors swing open for this novel, will I be able to tell my story the way I've longed to for years? Has Harold really penetrated the popular culture the way he did back in 1923? There's something oddly contemporary about him, with his natty suit, specs and neat straw boater. No outlandish makeup, no crossed eyes or facepulling or stony non-expression. Did he have a gimmick? Not really. I think he was merely good.

Make that great.

It's hard to be possessed by something, to not know where it will take you, but at the same time it's incredibly exciting. Some performers don't go away, or else - eerily, we know not how - they come back. It has been a long trudge, with many a twist and turn, and wherever "there" is, I'm not there yet. Do I enjoy the journey? Sometimes. But other times, dear God, I just want to stop for a drink of water.

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Twilight Zone: fifteen seconds of terror

OK, so. Here's how this started. I sort of go on and off some things, for example, The Twilight Zone, which I like watching (sometimes) because I remembered watching it as a little kid and being scared out of my mind. I wasn't allowed to watch it coz it was too scary, but I watched it anyway, or I had my older brother Arthur describe them to me, which was sometimes even better than the show.

He also described a show called Medic, which I now realize had Richard Boone in it whom I later liked in Have Gun, Will Travel and Hec Ramsey. At the time Medic was considered extreme because it dramatized medical procedures that you weren't a-spozed-ta know about. I never did see Medic, though I did find out something about gangrene.

With The Twilight Zone, everyone remembers certain episodes. They just stick in your mind somehow. This is unusual because the show went on for years and years and must have had hundreds of episodes. I'm watching them again on a very strange Newfoundland channel I stumbled on the other day. It's supposed to be "Canada's Superstation", but it isn't even in HD and has the most lame local programming, wrestling shows and entertainment hostesses with strong Newfie accents. 

Every night they show something called Scenes of Newfoundland, and it's always the same old guy singing a sea shanty and shots of a golf course. I won't get into the other shows, such as Newfoundland and Labrador Paranormal, which consists of two guys in lumberjackets sitting on the floor of a kitchen at night smoking cigarettes and yelling, "Hey! Come out of there!"

But they do show The Twilight Zone every night, which is what got me watching them again.

Rod Serling strikes me as an earlier incarnation of Stephen King, with his squinty-eyed looks and odd voice, his slight creepishness which - well, did he really talk that way all the time? When he talked to his mother, for example? Never mind. Certain episodes stick in your head, and in my case I think it was exactly three.

The one EVERYBODY remembers is the guy on the plane, the nuts guy just out of the asylum who starts seeing a giant teddy bear running around on the wing. It's one of the early examples of Shatnerian excess, and it's wondrous to behold. We forget how beautiful Shatner was back then, a real matinee idol - this was well before Captain Kirk, don't forget, when his hair had already begun to thin and his waistline to expand. (And isn't it strange how he has more hair now than he did then?)

There are a couple more Shatner episodes in the series in which he's much more subdued, but no less a fox. I always watch out for them.

This is a personal favorite because I like watching people fall out of windows. Three do in this episode, but this is the important one. In fact, I think four do, cuz the French guy ends up falling out too, but you know what? I left to get a drink of water, so we'll never know.

This one, though. It's the ultimate, the one I will remember on my deathbed, about the meek little man whose wife bosses him around and doesn't let him read, and then there's a nuclear war and all of a sudden he has all the books he wants, and all the TIME he wants, and his glasses fall down and then. . . When I saw it this last time, it was interesting because I had forgotten all about the giant clock lying on the ground. Of late I've been reflecting on such things, not just time but the way we keep time (as if we can keep it!) and try to clutch on to it. The surrealistic clock images in Safety Last! and Metropolis have a strange kinship with this dark dystopia, this blasted library full of books so long overdue they're nearly vaporized. I will leave to better minds the profound existential significance of that Cover Girl ad.

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Any good idea is worth beating to death!

Compare and contrast: one is dark and moody - in fact it's kind of broody - Fritz Lang's 1927 expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis. The anonymous worker helplessly grapples with the hands of a huge clock, a piece of machinery that seems to rule everything (including time itself). This is one of the film's creepiest and most disturbing images.

And then there's this guy who plays it for comedy - Harold Lloyd in his own masterpiece, the 1923 comedy Safety Last! But what sort of thunderbolt of inspiration gave him the idea to dangle from an enormous clock? If we free-associate, we come up with a few things: the hands on the clock/HIS hands on the clock, time running out, turning back the hands of time, the clock striking midnight, the crash of the stock market that ended the dizzy joy of the '20s: and who knew it was coming, who could hold back that inevitable stroke of doom?

This guy is also swingin', and it can't end well. The bizarre scrambled numbers on the clock face make no sense (for surely they ought to go to 11), and neither does the constant, frantic manipulation of the hands to avoid some sort of industrial disaster. The size of the clock doesn't quite square with Harold's, but the idea? Did it come to Lang in a dream? Was he thinking of Harold Lloyd at all?

Harold's fear is height, and the Metropolis drone's fear is immolation, a literal meltdown. In any case, they have to hold on, though the struggle seems hopeless. 

Exposed like the Wizard of Oz, here the clock becomes a bizarre mechanical wheel of fortune, its awful impersonal gauges and dials a reminder that technology is always in charge (and I have to say this, it also looks quite a bit like a banjo, a pie plate, or maybe even a tambourine). . .

. . . whereas Harold is just a scared little man trying not to die, a tiny surreal black figure swinging for his life. Is Lang's vision Harold turned inside-out or fed through the evil machinery of his imagination? Does Metropolis reflect the "mechanical" quality some critics claimed detracted from Lloyd's work? Are the cogs and flywheels that endlessly whirred in Harold's mind making themselves manifest in this horrorscape? Or is the whole thing just a big fat coincidence?

We'll never know now.

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Haunted by Harold

OK, then. I've told you all about Lloyd synchronicity, and in case you don't remember what it is, it's examples of the name Lloyd coming up over and over and over again through the course of a single day.

It happens and happens, and has been happening for months and maybe even years. I've had as many as five a day, and once I had four in a single movie (a little British comedy called The Wrong Box), but the ones that really make my scalp prickle aren't just things like seeing the name Lloyd on the side of a train or on a street sign or a realtor's sign or TV credits or a dog's ID tag. . . they're examples of actually SEEING Harold Lloyd, usually when I least expect it.

It happens fairly frequently on Turner Classic Movies, and this isn't so very unusual because they have championed the re-release of many of his magnificent silent comedies. But tonight. Oh God. I was minding my own business watching William Shatner's Weird or What? (one of my favorite educational programs) when an ad break came on, and. . .

And there was this woman dangling from the hands of a huge clock.

A Safety Last! clock. An ICONIC clock. WTF? Have I fallen into the freaking Fourth Dimension or something?

Not only was the ad in black and white, it had little lines running down it to make it look like an old movie. She wasn't dressed like Harold Lloyd, but still, the derivation was obvious.

A Harold Lloydian, Safety-Lastian, clock-dangling, cliff-hanging, danger-defying, "high and dizzy" thrill-picture scene in a goddamn Cover Girl cosmetics ad!

Listen, ever since I started researching my novel The Glass Character, and all through the writing of it, and even now, long post-Lloyd, this has been happening. It seems to come in waves, and now I'm in some sort of a bizarre tidal wave.

When I fell in with Harold Lloyd and his legend, I fell into enchantment. A state not so easy to enter, or, for that matter, to escape. I wish somebody would tell me what it all means.

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