⏲MAN ON THE CLOCK: HAROLD LLOYD vs METROPOLIS

I have wanted to do a comparison of these two for a long time now. Was there a link? Probably not, unless Fritz Lang liked to copy things from Harold Lloyd movies. And yet - there IS something surreal about his man on the clock, a tiny figure struggling to hold on to the huge hands, the hat falling off, the face of the clock alarmingly falling forward - the crowd gasping below. I have never sat through all of Metropolis, as it's just too bloody long and even boring, but I've seen excerpts which really do seem to be prophetic. But prophetic of what? Do I spend my life, my one and only life which grows shorter with every passing day, contemplating Armageddon, the apocalypse, Dystopia? No thanks. I'd rather make YouTube videos and watch birds and collect trolls and fuss with my plants. It's what I do. Crying doom, if doom comes, and so far it hasn't, is a waste of time anyway, as it won't change anything. If it's too late, I might as well make the best of the time I have. 

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Harold Lloyd's foreign language posters

A remake of Safety Last? Here it is! (I think).

Safety Last - teaser from Philip Lee on Vimeo.

Safety Last is a remake of Harold Lloyd's 1923 classic silent film. While preparing to pitch this romantic comedy script to Dreamworks SKG, director Will Bigham couldn't figure out how to adequately describe this one scene. Figuring that "seeing is believing", we culled a bunch of favors and shot this on the Universal backlot with almost no money to demonstrate how this unusual scene could work.

The picture is currently in development at Paramount Pictures.

Directed by Will Bigham
Director of Photography: Philip Lee


Now this is a really strange one. Several years ago, I heard that the Lloyd family had sold the rights to Safety Last to Sony Pictures so they could do a remake. The whole thing seemed impossible, but then I found this little clip (on YouTube, actually - it doesn't seem to be there any more). I have to admit that I find the idea of a remake excruciating, and I have no idea why the Lloyd family decided to do that, how they could so casually sell the rights to such a masterpiece, which surely would receive a mediocre treatment at best. But there it is.

And to think, they could have had the rights to my novel and make a really GREAT picture! But I dream. . . I dream.

This video is the wrong size, of course, but I'll run it anyway just as a curiosity, and because I really didn't expect to see it again. I've mentioned it to a few people (Rich Correll?) and gotten the blank stares I so often seem to inspire when I know something they don't. 

For one thing, no one seems to believe the rights were ever sold or has even heard of the idea, or believes in the possibility of it. It's either an internet rumor or something I cooked up all by myself.  I'm in a different universe, apparently, but at least now I have some sort of proof.

Safety Last in 28 seconds!

 

Harold's moment of glory

Ten seconds of movie history! The scene that secured Harold Lloyd as one of the three great geniuses of silent comedy.

Harold Lloyd on the clock: here's how he did it

On the brink

This is without a doubt my favorite moment from Safety Last (and I just broke down and bought the Blu-Ray version, which is so sharp and clear I think we see things we weren't even supposed to. In fact I bought a Blu-Ray player just so I could play it.)

Anything I could write now would not help The Cause, which is I don't know what at this point. Any advice I have been given is so bad and offputting that I want to just put my head under the pillow.

I still enjoy Harold and always will. He is an addiction, but quite a pleasant one, with no serious side effects. Unlike a great many poets, I am not likely to fall prey to the seductions of Happy Hour. And to be honest, I think I wrote a pretty good novel, not "about" Harold but "around" him. Where it goes is anyone's guess, but I'll always have Paris.

It's just too bad the news is always so dire around publishing. It shouldn't be, because the truth is people are always going to crave a good story. It gets their minds off their lives, and once in a long time there's an insight, a connecting point that stays with the reader, maybe even tells them something important.

I write because I have to write. It's what I do. Have always done. We're a team. In some ways it's the only thing that makes me feel like myself, makes me feel better when the world closes in. Which it does, sometimes.

This novel was such a labor of love, a highly unlikely thing, like having a baby at age 50. Similarly, I had mixed emotions about writing another book after what I thought of as the failure of my first two. What, try to get pregnant again? Are you out of your mind?

But there it was.

This is the point at which things begin to get complicated. I wasn't born to hustle, and actually loathe the very thought. I can't get into complicated schemes like endorsing someone's work just so they will endorse mine. Don't they cancel each other out? At the same time, I love taking part in readings and other writers' events, and enjoy doing interviews and talking to people about my book. So what's the problem?

It's like I have a son, and I think he's potentially a very talented son, but I can see he's not going to do well. Something will happen to him. I know that's a gloomy attitude and I know I could be wrong. I also know he has much to contribute, and I hope he has a chance to do so.

In closing, ahem, let me quote an article by Russell Smith from the Globe and Mail. I suppose I should have been all huffy and insulted by this piece, but I thought it was one of the best and most honest things I'd read about publishing in a very long time:

There are big winners and there are losers – the middle ground is eroding. Publishers are publishing less, not more. Everybody awaits the fall’s big literary-prize nominations with a make-us-or-break-us terror. Every second-tier author spends an hour every day in the dismal abjection of self-promotion – on Facebook, to an audience of 50 fellow authors who couldn’t care less who just got a nice review in the Raccoonville Sentinel. This practice sells absolutely no books; increases one’s “profile” by not one centimetre; and serves only to increase one’s humiliation at not being in the first tier, where one doesn’t have to do that.

So again, what is to be done? What does any artist do in the age of the blockbuster? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except keep on doing what you like to do. Global economic changes are not your problem (and are nothing you can change with a despairing tweet). Think instead, as you always have, about whether or not you like semicolons and how to describe the black winter sky. There is something romantic about being underground, no?

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Thistledown Press 

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Amazon.com

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Chapters/Indigo.ca

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The Glass Character: an excerpt (the rainstorm)

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s.  The story  is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences in Hollywood from approximately 1921 to 1932, during which she develops an obsessive relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd. In this excerpt, Muriel is working as an extra in a Lloyd film and is unexpectedly caught in a torrential rainstorm. Then comes an encounter she has both dreamed of and dreaded.

On a particularly vile day when we were supposed to be doing outside shots, I got caught in a downpour such as I had never seen before: a California monsoon of sorts. As everyone ran blindly for some kind of cover, I heard an unmistakeable voice under the rolling thunder:

”For God’s sake, Muriel, get in here.”

“Mr. Lloyd – “

”Forget that nonsense, call me by my name.”

He held out his hand and pulled me in next to him, in a tiny dry patch under a doorway. “You’re the girl who mussed my hair,” he said, beaming at me. I wondered once again if stars had electric fixtures installed behind their faces, to give off such incandescence.

This was a small space, very small indeed, and I had conflicted feelings about it. I had never been really intimate with a man, so had no knowledge of being this close to a man’s body, clothed or not. It was not just his heat, but the incredible racehorse energy in him which startled me: held back in the starting gate, he was restless and aching to go. I felt dizzy, swoony almost, with a hammering heaviness below, a warm wetness gathering as I felt him tensely breathe.

At one point he turned and smiled at me, and my heart sank, for this was the antic impersonal smile of the Glass Character, jaunty in the face of any pickle. I remembered being allowed to touch his hair, to tousle it like a little boy’s.  I ached to have him touch me, to want to touch me. I felt ashamed of what was happening in my body, but at the same time I felt a sort of awe, caught up in a powerful force that seemed to be lifting me off my feet. Our bodies were literally pressed together, and when I tried to edge out of the tiny dry strip into the hammering downpour, his hand came out, gently but firmly grasped my shoulder, and pulled me back.

“Now Muriel, there’s no need to get soaked. Let’s wait it out.” He talked as if he had all day. He was using a different sort of voice now, the kind you’d use at Frankie’s to get in. He did not look directly at me; that would have killed me. I was close enough that I could not ignore the smell of his dampened, stunt-dusty clothing; the white greasepaint on his face that rendered him magical; the hot scent of his sweat.

I wasn’t aware of the large drop of rain hanging off the end of my nose, but he saw it and smiled – a real smile this time, with marvelous relaxed eyes – reached out with a forefinger and flicked it off.

And I would have died right then and there, his unnervingly lovely gaze sustaining me for the rest of my life, when I noticed something about him, something (even in my naiveté) I could not quite believe.

Virgin though I was, I had kissed and petted with boys before, and knew what happened to their bodies as a result. Without having to look, I realized with shock (and elation, and shame, and despair) that I was not alone in the feelings I had been struggling with.  Whether he willed it or not, he was responding to me powerfully, the blossomy scent of my hair released by the freshness of the rain.

Then, incredibly, instead of dissipating, the downpour increased in intensity, gushing down with frightening force, almost like a monsoon. There was a terrific, bone-shaking clap of thunder.  Harold let out a mad whoop of laughter, then jumped out into the downpour, throwing his head back, opening his mouth, stretching out his arms like some demented forest creature driven mad by the moon.

“Come on out, Muriel, it’s marvelous!” He spun around and around in mad circles, stirring up a tremendous muck under his feet. I would not have been surprised if he had got down and rolled.

“Muriel, Muriel, come on out!” The man was an absolute infant, a case of arrested development, an embarrassment to the acting profession.  And – I did what he said. I came out into the rain, a steamy, mucky, uncomfortable mess, my hair sodden and my skirt weighed down. Harold’s clothes were glued to him, not just caked but clumped with mud. He was jumping up and down like a toddler, a wild smile on his face, and after a while, reluctantly, I joined him. He grabbed my hands and swung me around and around. I prayed that everyone else had run for cover and would not see us cavorting like naughty babies.

“Muriel, Muriel – “ And he did the thing I had dreaded and prayed for, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me almost violently close. I knew he was in a state of high arousal, any fool could see that, but what worried me was my own arousal, the part of me that wanted to toss caution to the wind.

“Let me kiss you,” he said breathlessly.

“Harold, you can’t.”

“Only once, I promise.”

“Harold.”

“Muriel, mmmmmmmmm.” He grazed my mouth with his lips.  For a long time he just stood there, barely making contact. I wondered if this would be a chaste kiss, the kind you would give your sister.

Then I remembered what the girls had said.  Ladies first. The way he carefully prepared his. . . victims.

I knew I should have pulled away, and I didn’t because I was crazy in the head for him.  I understood at last what being drunk must be like. We swayed slightly, almost as if we were dancing. His mouth pressed gently on mine, then just the tip of his tongue parted my lips.

This is what it should be like. Not having some stupid boy stick his tongue down your throat, with beery breath and fumbling, clumsy fingers. Harold lightly caressed my face while he kissed me, soft as roses. The man is an absolute master, I thought.

By the time his tongue grew a little more bold, I was in such a state that I wondered if I could even remain upright. The rain had just about stopped. The ferocious black sky was breaking up, the clouds dissipating. We were two mud statues embracing, our tongues entwining as everything dripped all around us.  The heady freshness in the air mixed with the smell of sex, a smell that was beginning to be familiar to me. And below and beneath that, the rude smell of mud.

Then, oh horrors, the worst thing possible:  “Harold! Jesus!”

What happened next was a scene straight out of one of his movies: he jerked back from me, looked at me in shock, turned around and looked at Hal, then back at me, as if he had no idea who I was.

“Harold, if  I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. Don’t screw

the extras!”

”I’m not! We were just having a little. . . talk.”

“Jesus, right out in the open. Haven’t  I warned you about that?”

“It was raining out. Everybody went inside.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Yes, I guess I am.” 

“No more ‘little talks’. He talks with his hands, miss. And other parts.” Hal stalked past us, and shocked me by reaching out and slapping the back of Harold’s head, hard.

Harold ducked, winced, looked truly contrite. His little innocent dalliance had turned bad, and he knew it had embarrassed me.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with his sad little-boy face, his eyes.

I didn’t know what to say. To cry would be disaster. It was plain he’d kiss anything with a pulse. It occurred to me that I would be within my rights to slap his face.

Just as I had the thought, as if he’d heard it, he said, “I deserve to be slapped, Muriel.”

“Oh, Harold, don’t be ridiculous.”

”No, I mean it. I broke the code of honour. Slap me.”

”Harold!”

”Slap me.” He grabbed my wrist and wrestled with me.  I was dealing with a crazy person. I wrenched away from him.

“You deserve to be slapped, you self-important, ignorant little hick! But  I won’t, because you’d probably enjoy it. That’s how hopelessly immature you are.”

All the air seemed to go out of him. He did not look like a movie star, ankle-deep in mud, his rain-streaked makeup ashy and unnatural. He looked awkward, defeated, a small-town boy out of his depth.

“I don’t know what to say. I really am sorry.” He was back to Harold the human being again, shocked at his own outrageous behaviour.

“Stay away from me from now on.”

”Muriel, I really do like you. I mean it.”

“You like a lot of girls, Harold. I see it going on right under my nose.”

“But wouldn’t it be nice if we could be – “

”No, Harold.”

"Muriel, you don't know how lonely. . . I mean, I just don't have time for friends. I think you're special."

Even though my body screamed forgive him, even though another part of me told me to slap him hard, to give him what he (and I) wanted, I had to walk away from him with my head high, and not look back.

After screaming abuse at him, let alone being caught kissing him out in the open, I was sure I would be immediately dismissed. But I was in for yet another surprise. The next morning the wardrobe mistress, the same one with the pins in her mouth, handed me a small folded-up note.

Dear Muriel, I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the way I acted last night becaus I know I insulted your dignity and your womanhood and I would not be surprised if you didn't want to speak to me, ever again, But I hope you will stay with us, we  think you have talent and even the chance for a career someday if you keep out of the way the likes of me,  I am most awfuly sorry and I hope we can still be friends, Id like that very much. In my deepest apology, 

Harold

It was as if a small boy were apologizing for stealing an apple. It did not help that his handwriting looked almost like grade school printing, that his writing style was awkward and unsophisticated (the remnants of going to a dozen different schools). I wanted to tear it up, throw it out, burn it, but I folded it in half and secreted it in my diary, along with a photo of Bea, a copy of the Twenty-third Psalm, and a lock of my mother's hair.

For your copy of The Glass Character, click on the link below.

The Glass Character: Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

The most romantic kiss in screen history!

The most romantic kiss in screen history. . . not Scarlett and Rhett. . . not Rick and Ilsa. . . not Bonnie and Clyde. . . but. . .

HAROLD AND JOBYNA!

Having written a novel about his life, a novel which I hope will find wings in the year 2013, I feel like I know Harold Lloyd personally sometimes, and I certainly know the course of his career. He probably made a couple hundred movies all-told, starting in 1917, but his classic films came out in the early-to-mid '20s. In rating his best pictures, most silent film buffs would probably name The Freshman (which is about . . . a freshman, a nerdy overaged college boy desperate for popularity) and Safety Last, in which safety comes last as Harold climbs up the side of a dizzyingly-tall building and hangs off the hands of a huge clock.

I like those, yes, love them in fact, and never tire of watching them (in fact I may watch them again tonight), but there is more pain and poignancy in The Kid Brother, and more still in Girl Shy, in which his characters are passive, even downtrodden youths who haven't yet discovered their manhood. This revelation/transformation always happens through love: Harold Lloyd's films are among the most romantic ever made, and none more romantic than my personal all-time favorite. . .

Why Worry?

This movie has the best title ever written, since it essentially means nothing and signals the fact that we are about to watch the very first screwball comedy. Never mind that the actual first screwball comedy would come out more than ten years later.

Against type, Harold plays a wealthy idler with all sorts of imagined ills who escapes to a tropical island with his gorgeous nurse (played by the sad-eyed, kewpie-lipped Jobyna Ralston). Said nurse is madly in love with Harold, who doesn't even seem to see her except in moments of unexpected contact: i.e., when she trips and falls into his lap as he sits in a totally unnecessary wheelchair. The slow-blooming smile on his face before he dumps her onto the ground communicates a subtle but very real sexual tension that will permeate the whole film.

She pines for him, he ignores her: it's the antithesis of practically every other Lloyd film, turning everything on its ear and releasing a madcap energy that outstrips anything in his other comedies. To add a little excitement, a dangerous anarchist plans a revolution on the island, causing all sorts of feverish violence that makes Harold exclaim, "You fellows must stop this. I came here for my health."

This shot illustrates one of the best Harold Lloyd gags ever: mountain-climbing up the side of a giant to try to remove his rotten tooth. (Never mind, you had to be there.) Wacky gag follows on wacky gag as Lloyd reaches a sort of fever pitch of brilliance and mad originality. At one point his nurse, dressed as a boy (a most unconvincing disguise) becomes furious with his self-centredness and hypochondria and begins to cuss him out as only one can in a silent movie. She's standing up, he's sitting, in the passive position, and once again that dreamy smile begins to play across his face before he tells her she has very beautiful eyes.

This comedy breaks every convention of the era, including the rule of the silent screen kiss: almost always quick, comedic, and preferably behind a screen. When Harold suddenly realizes he is madly in love with Jobyna, he doesn't just peck her but seizes her in his arms and kisses her with ferocious passion, something I've never seen in any other silent film, not even The Sheik. She resists for a second, then melts into his arms with a subtle leg-pop that conveys complete surrender.

How many takes were required to capture that volcanic kiss? I wonder. In any case, I envy Jobyna. There are murmurings that they were "involved", as he was involved with so many women in his lifetime. There was something seductive and bedroomy about his eyes (along with the canny intelligence and a touch of wildness) that was there for a lifetime.

And so: today, after literally years of searching, I've found a picture of that kiss! I can't find a video of it, I'm sorry, so you'll just have to watch the whole movie. Better yet, buy the DVD set, The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, superbly remastered with charming, energetic scores by Robert Israel and Carl Davis.

Harold, Harold, you have basically ruined my life! I have probably gained 25 pounds because of you, due to all my fretting, my unproductive fuming. I need to tell your story so badly I ache with it. I KNOW I can do this, I feel it! I have it in me, I have the goods. And I'm not always this confident about my work. 

What is it about a person who has the power to wreck your life from this distance? We were alive at the same time, yes, but he died when I was just a teenager. We were on the same planet together at the same time. Aieeeeeee! My heart! When will this hopeless yearning end?

SYNOPSIS: THE GLASS CHARACTER  by Margaret Gunning

I would like to introduce you to my third novel, The Glass Character, a story of obsessive love and ruthless ambition set in the heady days of the Jazz Age in the 1920s. This was a time when people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day - with one very significant exception.

 

Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was a slight, diffident man named Harold Lloyd. He hid his leading man good looks under white makeup and his trademark black-framed spectacles.  Nearly 100 years later, an iconic image of Lloyd remains in the popular imagination: a tiny figure holding on for dear life to the hands of a huge clock while the Model Ts chuff away 20 stories below.

With his unique combination of brilliant comedy and shy good looks, Lloyd had as many female followers as Gilbert or Barrymore. Sixteen-year-old Muriel Ashford, desperate to escape a suffocating life under her cruel father's thumb, one day hops a bus into the unknown, the Hollywood of her dreams.  Though  the underside of her idealistic vision is nasty and fiercely competitive, she quickly lands extra work because of her Pickford-esque ability to smile and cry at the same time.

When her idol Harold Lloyd walks on the set, her life falls into a dizzy whirl of confusion, attraction, and furious pursuit.  Muriel tries on and sheds one identity after another: bit actress, waitress in a speakeasy, "girl reporter", script writer - while Lloyd almost literally dances in and out of her desperately lonely world, alternately seducing her and pushing her away.

While researching this book, I repeatedly watched every Lloyd movie I could get my hands on. I was astonished at his subtlety, acting prowess and adeptness at the art of the graceful pratfall. His movies are gaining new popularity on DVD (surprisingly, with women sighing over him on message boards everywhere!). The stories wear well and retain their freshness because of the Glass Character's earnest good nature and valiant, sometimes desperate attempts to surmount impossible challenges.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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