Below is a nice little unexpected comment on a YouTube video I made several years ago, about Harold Lloyd and my struggles to capture his energy and personality in my novel, The Glass Character. The novel didn`t exactly take off, though I`m comforted to think it`s immortalized in electronic form and won`t be ``pulped`` like my first two published novels. That`s what happens to novels that don`t sell, as they just don`t have shelf space for them. They DID offer to let me buy back some of them at 40 per cent off, which struck me as strange, as they were about to destroy them anyway, so why not just let the author HAVE them, if I paid the postage. But no, that`s not how it works in the publishing world. They lost money on me, so I still had to pony up to rescue my own books from the mush heap. But every once in a very long while, I hear something like this!
Lady Walker Highlighted reply 5 hours ago @ferociousgumby Margaret, I got your book at last and read it from cover to cover and I couldn't put it down!!!! It was wonderful it made me feel close to Harold and your own love for him, infused in the narrative shone through. Many fans I'm sure enjoyed this book and I shall read it over and over again. I really love it!! The only reason that the readership may not have been huge is that love of silent films is a Niche Market. If you had written about a silly pop star or footballer it may have been higher. All I can say is that you are a great Writer. @Lady Walker Thank you SO MUCH for this! It`s the most gratifying aspect of publishing a book if one person reads it, loves it and takes the time to tell the author so. Publishing can be a popularity contest, as is everything else these days, but writing it was an act of love, and I am so glad you share that love and appreciate Harold for the brilliant artist and great human being he was.
At long last, I was able to post the clip where Harold refers to his screen alter ego as THE GLASS CHARACTER. Almost everyone else referred to "the glasses character", and no one is sure why Harold didn't, but it made a much more poetic name for my novel about his life and work (not to mention this blog and a Facebook fan page!): The Glass Character: a celebration of Harold Lloyd
Reviewed
in the United States on May 29,
2017 Having
become recently absorbed, nay, obsessed by all things Harold Lloyd I found
myself drawn into Muriel's world---and what a world! I think one would be hard
pressed to find a novel that captured the zeitgeist of the early years of
motion pictures. The author did a superb job of balancing the events in
Muriel's story with Harold's life. I was hooked and highly recommend it to
anyone who likes the silent era of filmmaking, smart storytelling and the
delicious Harold Lloyd :-)
In
case the name doesn't ring a bell, he's the guy with the straw hat and Woody
Allen glasses, in the suit, dangling from a clock on the side of a building so
far above a busy avenue the cars below look like ladybugs on wheels.
Harold Lloyd.
Movie comedian of the
silent 1920s. Called himself the "Glass Character" because his
trademark glasses were fake. No glass in them. The guy was a nut. Blew one of
his hands to Kingdom Come fiddling with what he thought was a stage prop bomb.
It was real. Deliberately gave himself powerful electric shocks to get his hair
to stand straight up. Did his own stunts--the clock dangle, the shocked hair,
pretending to trip and stagger on building ledges up in the sky, netless--a
brave, some would say foolhardy, genius. Nut.
Knowing this and being
acrophobic, I can't watch his movies anymore. It even scares me to look at the
photos. I'll let Margaret Gunning watch the movies and look at the photos, and
I'll read her reports. Well, then again, I don't have to anymore. I've read her
book, "The Glass Character". It's all in there.
Margaret, poor girl, is
in love with Harold Lloyd. It started out as just a fascination with soundless
images. Love snuck up and struck her dumb somewhere amid the exhaustive
research she was conducting for a book about what was then still just a
fascination. Love. Alas. Margaret is happily married and has two lovely
daughters and four darling grandchildren, yet is far too young to leap the gap
into the day when her beloved Harold held sway with the girls of a baby Hollywood. Fortunately, for her and for
us, she's a novelist. She has the skill to weave the magic carpet to carry her
backward in time to those days of yore, those Harold heyday days, and set her
gently down along the path the love of her dreams must follow should he wish a
rebirth in the imaginations and hearts of admirers forevermore. She's woven
that carpet. It's large enough to take us with her on that long strange trip. I
rode along on a test flight. We made it back, and I'm still agog.
When we stepped off the
carpet in la la land I saw that Margaret had changed. No longer the familiar
author of two of my favorite novels--"Better than Life", and
"Mallory"--she'd become sixteen-year-old Jane Chorney, a virgin and
erstwhile soda jerk in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a terrible crush on movie
idol Harold Lloyd. Soon after we landed, Margaret /Jane (and later
"Muriel", as you will learn) decided to pack up her meager
belongings, cash in her chips (two cents shy of fifty bucks) and head to
Hollywood and into the arms of her eternal love. I might have tried to instill
sense in her were I anything more than invisible eyes and ears. Unfortunately I
had lost my voice and corporeal substance upon alighting in the Santa Fe dust.
So it was off to Hollywood via a wearying, bumpy bus
ride, Margaret/Jane/Muriel full of glitzy dreams and innocence, and me hunkered
weightless, mute and unseen on her delicate shoulder.
I won't say more. I took
no notes and had to avert my gaze any number of times during moments that
really were none of my personal concern. The Glass Character is
Margaret/Jane/Muriel's story, not mine. What I did see and hear, and learn
during our holiday in history is captured with such lucid, insightful poignancy
I can't help but wonder if Margaret didn't in fact remain there, dictating her
journal to a holographic image of herself in the distant future tapping on a
keyboard somewhere in a place called Coquitlam, B.C.
I
couldn't resist turning page after page when I started reading this novel. It
is as fast-paced, frenetic, frantic, as the jumpy quick movements of silent
film action. To say this book captures the spirit of the silent film era, of
the flashing, double-dealing, over handed and underhanded Hollywood of the 1920s and onward, is a
disservice. The reader is drawn right in, involved totally with the heroine of
the story. The story is about her, but it is also a thorough portrait of the
great film Comedian, Harold Lloyd. He comes to life in these pages, a three
dimensional fully rounded fictional character. The good, the bad, the
surprising, the ugly. He is totally human and his motives and circumstances are
clear.
I've read Gunning's two
earlier novels, Better than Life, and Mallory. The Glass Character is far more
ambitious in its depth and breadth. It is longer, more expansive than the early
works. Gunning has presented her master piece, in this novel. She fully comes
of age as a serious, yet entertaining writer, who displays a lovely choice of
words and a often refreshing turns of phrase. If you haven't read
Gunning yet, start. If her latest novel doesn't win, or at least get nominated
for the top literary prizes, there is no justice. Don't miss an engrossing,
absorbing read. By the way, you'll definitely want to hit YouTube to find full
length Lloyd films, outtakes, and documentaries. Don't leave yourself hanging
from the clock hand, get the silent era spirit and enjoy the book!
Reviewed
in the United States on December
18, 2014
You're
in for a real treat with Margaret Gunning's Novel "The Glass
Character"
If you enjoy traveling
back to the time when many of our parents frequented silent films as the prime
source of entertainment, then you will love to bury your nose in this madcap
treatise on the time and personalities of that era.
If the name Harold Lloyd
doesn't ring a bell, you will know him intimately by the time you reach the
last page.
We know so much about the
entertainment industry today, but so little about what went on behind the
scenes of the Silent Film era. You will be shocked by Gunning's expose of that
wildcap period of our history.
Don't miss this treat
from the pen of a very gifted author.
This, my friends, is the whole reason I began this blog. The Glass Character, in case you haven't heard, is the name Harold Lloyd gave to his glasses-wearing screen persona (and why he said glass instead of glasses, nobody knows, but it was a hell of a lot more poetical). It is also the title of my third novel, which practically no one has read. I gave up on posting links to Amazon, my author's page, etc. because it made no difference whatsoever. I sold, like, three copies last year. Nevertheless, it IS a good novel, even my daughter liked it (and like Mikey, she hates everything), and though it quickly disappeared into oblivion, and the Lloyd family treated it like some sort of poison, I am still proud of it because I am basically out of touch with reality.
A friend of mine wondered why I was so hurt when he wrote an article about The Glass Character in a feature called Friday's Forgotten Novels. He simply could not understand it, and thought I should appreciate the attention and publicity. Hey, no one remembers this book at all! I'm sure that would make you rush out to buy it. But never mind all that, it WOULD make a good feature film, because it's about Harold Lloyd, and no one has ever made a feature film about Harold Lloyd, or ANY sort of film. Eventually, someone will, and if it is ripped off of my novel, which it might be, there is really nothing I can do about it.
Margaret is the author of The Glass Character, a novel about the life and times of silent screen comedian Harold Lloyd. She loved researching and writing this novel and believes it's her best work to date. The Glass Character (Thistledown Press)is available in bookstores, libraries, Amazon.com, Chapters/Indigo.com, Thistledown Press.ca, Barnes and Noble.com, Kindle, Kobo, and everywhere fine books are sold.
A published novelist since 2003, Margaret is a seasoned writer who has published her work in a variety of venues (columns, newspaper articles, poetry, short fiction and book reviews). Her first published novel, Better Than Life (NeWest Press, 2003) received excellent reviews, with the Edmonton Journal calling it "fiction at its finest" and the Vancouver Sun naming it as a worthy contender for the Leacock Award.
This was followed in 2005 by another novel, Mallory (Turnstone Press), a harrowing tale of a social misfit ostracized and bullied by her peers until she finds dubious acceptance in a group of teenagers living on the fringes of the law. Of the many reviews this novel received, not one was negative.
In addition to The Glass Character, Margaret has written a book of poetry (The Red Diary, based on the diary of Anne Frank) and Bus People, a novel about the inhabitants of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside. She hopes these books will soon find a place on the shelf beside The Glass Character. See more
This is more-or-less a transcript of my Amazon Author Page. I used to include a link to it every few posts, not so that people would buy my books - that's too much to ask, I think - but to just let people know, if they are interested, that I am the author of three NOT-self-published novels. I did it the old-fashioned way, with traditional publishers, and paid for it in blood. It was not a pleasant experience, not because of the writing - hey, that was great, tons of fun - but because of the long, arduous process of trying to get them promoted and noticed. Because they did not become bestsellers, because I was not anointed into the hallowed halls of CanLit, I was left with the feeling that I had failed. No one tried to talk me out of that feeling, by the way. But here they are, my life's work! It's something, I guess. I never wanted to make money with it, but once you're in the marketplace, there is incredible pressure to sell your product. To me, that feels like selling one of your kids, or at least a chunk of your own soul. No one thinks of this when they eagerly strive to be a Published Author, because it is the best-kept secret of publishing. Besides, everyone is sure their book will win the Giller and the Booker and, perhaps, the Nobel, top the New York Times Review of Books for a year, then be made into a big-box movie that wins an Oscar for Best Picture - or will, if that Price-Waterhouse guy is on the ball. I had all those dreams too, but damned if they weren't right all along - the writing really is the best part.
So what is this? Anyway?? For a long time, I posted a gif at the bottom of my blog entries, along with a link to my Amazon author page. It was a kind of signature, along with a little publicity for my actual work. So why did I stop? I got soooooooo sick of doing it, and felt it was so utterly futile ( I mean, WHO goes on my Amazon author page?) that I dropped it. But I was left with this super-cute collection of signature gifs. I have a few thousand gifs in my collection, most of which I made myself. It would be nice to think that SOMEONE might go on my page, just to take a look at everything I've written - and by the way, all three of my novels are still for sale! Maybe I'll start doing it again. Doesn't seem likely, but maybe.
I went and tweaked the title of my Facebook page for the novel. Let's face it, nobody knows what a "glass character" is! Harold's name probably should have been there from the beginning. It has morphed into more of a fan page now, so I guess I'll keep it going for a while.
With all this Dylan-ish stuff in the air, I've been dipping back into some of the biographies, most notably Down the Highway by Howard Sounes. It has a modified version of this picture on the cover, a very famous (one might even say iconic, if one could stand that word) image of Dylan from the mid-'60s:
At this point in his career, Dylan had become a piece of art, a very fashionable Warhol-esque figure with pouty lips and supermodels like the doomed Edie Sedgewick lopped onto his arm. Not long after that he had his celebrated Motorcycle Accident (which some claim didn't exist, but was an excuse for getting out of record contracts/concert obligations for a while). He came back a changed man.
But never mind all that.
When my novel The Glass Character came out, I was a bit gobsmacked to see the cover. In spite of what the reading public thinks, authors have little or nothing to do with cover art, and the several suggestions I gave my publisher (because they asked me) had been completely disregarded. So I was left with half a green Harold-face with his hair standing up. The hair-on-end picture is almost as iconic (forgive me) as the man-on-the-clock shot, but on my novel it simply doesn't work. I don't think it represents the story very well, if at all. But the novel still holds up, as far as I am concerned, just waiting for that elusive movie deal.
So today I got looking at that half-a-Dylan face, and wondered how it might look put together with MY book's half-a-Harold-face. After all, these are both world-famous images of world-famous men from wildly different times/places.
What did I have to lose? Oh, a couple of hours I'll never get back. But I had to try it!
First I had to split the Dylan face so that it looked like this:
Then I had to convert my book cover to black and white, an easy task. I didn't have to worry about cutting faces in half because my publisher had already done it for me.
Can you see it, is it starting to take shape? But it was not as easy as it sounds. Face-scanning equipment can tell you that even if two faces look similar, features can be totally different in relation to each other. I'd never get an exact match.
But the results surprised me.
Creepy-looking, I know! But take another look at it. The hairline is very close, though it's hard to see under Bob's curly thatch. If Bob bugged out his sleepy eyes a little, they'd align almost perfectly. The nose - just look at how that nose matches up! It's incredible. And the upper lip is so exact that it scares me. I swear I did not retouch this thing in any way, just tried to match photo sizes. The biggest discrepancy is in the jaw and chin. Harold had a sort of leading-man jawline, and Bob does not. His facial features back then were almost childlike. But just look at the rest of it!
So what's the point of all this? I just had to find out what it would look like.
And take a look at this. Since the chin is the feature that matches the least, I decided to crop it out. Now you see the close harmony between eyes, nose and mouth in two men who look not even remotely like each other.
And for one more little Dylan treat, here's the back cover of Down the Highway:
This is a negative of the original cover photo. Here is the same effect with the black-and-white of my cover:
I once had an editor who liked to say, "It doesn't matter what they say about you, so long as they spell your name right on the cheque." And I guess it doesn't matter how bad a book cover is, so long as they can still read your name.
I didn't get far with the Oscars tonight, bailed on it well before the end, telling myself I could always watch it on my DVR tomorrow, commercial-free (which I probably won't). I did enjoy Chris Rock's razor-edged swordplay more than I thought I would; we've had far too many wooden or too-predictable hosts (and since when does a movie star know how to work a crowd? Most of these people have never even stood in front of an audience before!), so watching him blow on taboos that were already teetering on the verge of collapse was gratifying.
Blather about fashion usually supercedes - I won't say "trumps" because that word has been ruined forever - blather about Best Picture (which went, unexpectedly, to Spotlight, a glaring expose of a ruthless and rotten crime against humanity which festered underground for decades). More often than not I find myself groaning over the gown. Is Lady Gaga really wearing a dress AND pants? What's that red thing Charlize Theron has on, and how is it staying up there?
But soft - here's a dress, and one somebody put on their WORST-DRESSED list! This is Brie Larson, who won Best Performance by an Actress for a movie called Room. It's one of those ripped-from-the-headlines stories in which someone endures years of confinement at the hands of a demented sadist. The exposure of long-hidden atrocity seems to be a theme this year, unusual for Hollywood with its celebration of the callow and the shallow. Does this mean the motion picture industry is finally growing up?
Anyway, here's Brie Larson on the red carpet in a gown I absolutely love. Those little pleats and flounces, the way the thing drapes, the saturated jewel-tone colour - look, I am anything but a fashion maven and go about in sweaters and cords, but this thing - just look at it! It floats and drapes and just looks perfect. The belt is to die for. I wish I could see it up close. Doesn't seem fair that someone so accomplished could look this beautiful, but there it is.
MY red carpet moment will come when someone finally wants to make The Glass Character into a feature film. Hell, it could happen, couldn't it? When it does, when I'm sitting in the audience waiting for them to announce Best Adapted Screenplay, as they read the winner while Ron Howard gives me the thumbs-up, it won't matter a dingity-dong what I'm wearing because I'll be in such a trance of happy unreality.
Didn't it start out just as an idea in my head? And end up as a book 49 people bought - if that - because I just don't have the magic secret of how to write a bestseller? But never mind. It took Kirk Douglas TEN years to get anyone interested in his screenplay of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (one of my favorite movies: mental patients as fully-realized characters, gutsy, funny, crazy in their woundedness, wounded in their craziness), and by the time Milos Foreman finally signed on, Douglas was too old to play Randle P. McMurphy and they had to bring in Jack Nicholson.
They can bring in anyone they want, as far as I am concerned. Anyone. But I want Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though he looks nothing like Harold. He has the chops, and the twinkle, and the bust-out energy and impudence and charm, and I know he could pull it off. Being an A-lister, I'll probably have to get Ron Howard on-board first before we can sign him up.
Or not. But I can see it. Do I harp on this? Oh God. So I apologize to my three or so really loyal, die-hard readers who will soon peel off because they're sick of reading this. EVERY author wants a movie version, and it's not just so they can move a few copies. If it's "literary fiction" - the kind nobody reads - the need is even more imperative. Otherwise our publishers will just sigh over us and get very depressed. But I swear to you, I swear to you, in this case it's different. The Glass Character, my third published novel, revolves around the life and times of one Harold Lloyd, the silent movie guy who hangs off the clock in his most famous film, Safety Last! Though it isn't a Lloyd biography and isn't even "about" him, strictly speaking, without him the novel would have no heart, no soul or even a core. What it's really about is fandom in its more extreme form, the story of a young woman who will do anything, anything at all to get close to her idol, even to the point of tossing her life into the fire.
And she does, but even that isn't enough. As she hurtles through one incarnation after another, as bit-player, secretary, waitress in a speakeasy, high-class hostess, screenwriter, and (finally!) novelist, Harold dances in and out of her life, maddening, intoxicating, irresistable. Almost daily, I have to tell myself: this story has legs. It not only has legs, it has wings. Though I'm the only one who thinks this, at this point, I try to keep the door of possibility open. Why? Because I am an utter lunatic. I fell in love with Harold watching The Freshman on Turner Classics. I tuned in halfway through, during the disastrous dance sequence where, piece by piece, his cheaply-sewn suit falls apart: the dream we all have of being naked in public, but done in an awful, slow-motion striptease.
I began to realize I was watching a genius who made you laugh till you cried, but in truth, what he was doing was about as funny as a dental cleaning: one slip and the hygienist is going to hit a nerve and you will be in agony. But because he is just so exquisitely good at what he does, that jab never quite happens. It threatens, and we watch his suit, and Harold, fall apart (though never in a way that cries for sympathy). But we're just this side of it, and not just laughing but going "ohhhhhhhhh" in that way you do when you're watching something that plays very skillfully around the edges of social humiliation. Which, of course, we all love to watch. So that was it. I needed MORE, more, more MORE Harold Lloyd. I had to find out more about Harold Lloyd. It was piecemeal at first: whatever far-out-of-print books I could get from Amazon (hardly any), YouTube snippets, internet and Wikipedia entries (slipshod and contradictory). When I found an old VHS tape of Kevin Brownlow's superb two-hour documentary The Third Genius (now, FINALLY, available on DVD with the Bluray of Safety Last!), I was in Harold heaven. The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection, a boxed set with most of his stuff after about 1919, rounded out my knowledge, but it only made me hungrier. For. More Harold. Lloyd.
One day I was sitting in my office downstairs (we now call it the Cat Room because our new cat eats in there), and it hit me like a brick to the head. Harold Lloyd. I HAD to write about him, had to had had had to, and I had no idea what to write. But with the typical idealism of the mentally ill, I pulled myself up to the computer and began to write. Three hours later, I looked up, looked down, and realized I had started my novel. I can't and won't spill the rest of it here, except to say - God, my gut, my soul - it took THREE YEARS to get a book contract, and it was flukey. I had sent out so many dead-end queries that I was ready to give up (not: I never give up), but there were a few I hadn't heard back from. I sent out three emails, and only one came back: "Oh! Yes! We'd like to see it, please."
Just like that, except trying to sell a book now is just about as pleasant as a root canal. I just don't know how to do this any more. But with a certain stupid doggedness, I still believe Harold deserves another shot at the big screen. I've gone through several casting sessions, and I won't tell you the exact details of this except to say we have a fold-out bed in the cat room. Jake Gyllenhaal was a front-runner for a while because he has the same head-shape, hairline, jaw, and bow-shaped lips, though the nose is wrong and the eyes are more dreamy than piercing (Harold had an unsettling gaze). But somehow it wasn't a good-enough match, and as he beefed up and became more of a jock, I became restless and discontented. I took on Zachary Quinto next, mainly because he was so damn dishy in Star Trek. He had a sort of Mediterranean quality which didn't quite work however, and a sort of gravitas that didn't match the mercurial Harold.
Then I hit on - very recently - Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and bing bing. Bing! He could do this, even if the physical resemblance isn't too strong. He has the compact body type, the lovely big head, the charismatic eyes, and the fizzy frisson I am looking for. And the energy. Oh, the energy. Why do I do this, when it does me absolutely no good? Any movie people who ever see this might say, "God, she's so naive she thinks she can cast a movie that will never exist." Probably true. But it's not that, not that at all. This movie is here already, it's made. It exists. It only has to be put up there. Don't tell me I'm crazy, please. I am convinced that, no matter how hard Harold worked on his movies, piecing them together gag by polished gag, they were born in his heart and head first, and it was a whole thing and it only had to be actualized. That's what a good workman does, and hell, he was one of the best. The Glass Character exists as a movie already. It is there, it's a whole thing, and it only has to be actualized. Just put it up there, please. Harold needs to live again.
