So who IS my favourite character in The Wizard of Oz?

I found myself writing this mini-essay in response to someone who posted something on Facebook about The Wizard of Oz. It's something I maybe, oh maybe wrote about already, but I want to write about it again because, ohhhh, I just do!

Everyone plays that game where you ask people, "So. Who was your favorite character in The Wizard of Oz?" Almost everyone chooses the Lion because he does slapstick comedy (really, old-fashioned vaudeville) so well, and sings in that quavery voice like every hammy tenor you've ever heard. But the point of the game is that your choice is supposed to reveal your deepest inner nature. One day it came to me, not so much "who is my favorite" as "who is the most important character?" NO ONE ever mentions this, I swear. It's not Dorothy or the Tin Man or Scarecrow or even the Wizard.

It's Toto.

Think about it: if it weren't for Toto, there would be no story at all. If Toto hadn't (deservedly) bitten Miss Gulch, she wouldn't have taken him away in her basket and Dorothy wouldn't have had to go rescue him (which in fact she didn't have to: he got away!). And thus, when the "twister" came up, she would've been at home and just gotten into the storm cellar with everyone else.

But no! She landed in Oz, where Toto always ran on ahead of her and was her companion and guide. It was Toto who discovered the Scarecrow and Tin Man, Toto who flushed out the lion from the bushes (feisty little thing), Toto who got away from the Witch when Dorothy was imprisoned in the castle (remember him jumping off the drawbridge?) and ran to alert her three friends so they could rescue her.  And all this with the Witch's evil henchmen throwing spears at him!

AND. . . (drum roll, please - this is turning into a blog post!) - just who was it who pulled back the curtain and revealed that the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was in fact a fraud? 

At any rate, this Timeless Tale would not even exist without that scrappy little Cairn terrier, who is not a cute or a glamorous dog at all, nor even a Brave and Noble dog. He's just Toto, scruffy and nondescript. He's a little implausible as a farm dog, unless maybe he was a ratter (and can't you picture it? This dog is not afraid of anything). Dorothy is in some ways the classic heroine in that, at one point, she is literally imprisoned in the tower and must be rescued by the three heroes. But it is Toto who actually does the rescuing, risking his own doggy life in the process.

 I'm not sure what-all this says about me. Hmmmm - greatness is never recognized?

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

The Interview: the day the lights went out

Power Outage During Final Moments of 'The Interview' Startles Audience

Dec 26, 2014, 3:55 PM ET

By MEGHAN KENEALLY

MEGHAN KENEALLY More From Meghan »

Digital Reporter

Allwood Cinemas 6 in Clifton, New Jersey appears in this screen grab from Google Maps.

Google Maps

Everyone knew what was coming -- the controversial death scene in the movie about a fictitious assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un -- but then the lights cut out.

One packed movie theater was left bewildered when a sudden power outage struck 1,300 customers in Clifton, New Jersey, including Allwood Cinemas at a critical moment towards the final moments during a screening of "The Interview."

Barry Cohen, who attended the 1:30 p.m. screening with his wife and grown son, said they "had no idea" what was going on.

'The Interview' Opens to Singing, Sold-Out Crowds as Sony CEO Explains His Decision to Show Film

What People Think After Seeing 'The Interview'

"When it lasted more than five seconds, we though that maybe it was part of the movie and then we realized that it wasn't," Cohen told ABC News.

Even though a power outage would have caused confusion in any circumstance, the threat issued by a hacking group that it would attack theaters screening "The Interview" led to understandably hyped tensions, moviegoers said.

"Some people ran out of the theater," Cohen said. "There was another couple near us, the woman turned to her husband and said, 'Let's get out of here!' She didn't even wait for a refund or anything."

Allwood Cinemas did not immediately respond today to a request by ABC News for comment, but a spokesperson for the power company, Public Service Electric and Gas Co., confirmed that there was an outage in Clifton on Thursday afternoon.

"At 4:01 p.m. on Thursday, December 25, a downed wire on Market St. caused approximately 1,300 customers to lose power in Clifton. PSE&G crews arrived on the scene and restored power to all customers at around 4:15 p.m.," PSE&G spokesperson Lindsey Puliti said in a statement.

Cohen said that after realizing that the blackout was not part of the movie, he went out into the lobby -- where the lights were still on -- and asked for a refund once it was clear that the theater was not going to be able to rewind the scene to fill in the gap.

He and his family got refunds, went home, and downloaded the movie on Google Play so that they could see the final 15 minutes, Cohen said.

"Anything Seth Rogen does is going to have gratuitous violence, gratuitous sex scenes, gratuitous baseless humor at times," Cohen said. "I give it an A-minus."

BLOGGER'S OBSERVATIONS. This was a strange one, but no stranger than anything else I've heard about this situation.  I'm just glad I wasn't there. It all screams of Halloween prank, fun-house effects designed to thrill and chill and gather attention from the media. And apparently, it worked.

The audience should just play along. Be good sports.  After all, they knew there was still some shred of danger from going to this thing, so the laugh's on them, right? I'm not too sure about that.

This whole thing is just getting too creepy for me. It wasn't a good concept from the start. Who thought it was a good idea to make a gross, frat-house-style comedy about a dictator with dangerous power? Did anyone actually think this through?

Then the whole "Sony hack" thing, which Sony will eventually have to admit was either an inside job or the work of some 19-year-old high school dropout with an IQ of 276.

But it was still a lousy idea. Incendiary. Maybe this is how far you have to go to get people's asses in seats. There has to be a trumped-up element of scandal (someone insulting Angelina Jolie's eyebrows, or something equally horrendous), a sense of lurking danger. But danger may lurk nonetheless.

Wouldn't that be ironic - if the world ended, not by climate change, the gathering storms and surging floods washing away the Biblical weight of human sin - but repercussions from a bad comedy.

But on second thought: isn't life itself a bad comedy, one that even lacks a plausible ending? Few lives wind up neatly. As a matter of fact, in most cases, the same thing happens as in Allwood Cinemas 6 in Clifton, New Jersey. Everything just goes black.

P. S. I just noticed something when I read the piece again. When customers dashed out of the dark theatre and into the lobby, THE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON. Emergency lights, maybe? I don't get it. Why would there be emergency lights in a movie theatre?

The Donner Party Movie: worse than the restaurant

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Defamation, March 18, 2010

By 

Mick McAllister - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Verified Purchase(What's this?)

This review is from: The Donner Party (DVD)

It's hard to come up with a single positive thing to say about this miserable, nasty film. It was shot at Truckee (Donner) Lake, but the photography is so mediocre that even this doesn't count for much.

As for the story: It doesn't merely "stray from the historical record," it invents malicious lies about people who deserve better. As one of many examples: In the film, Bill Eddy is depicted as a selfish hoarder who refuses to share with the rest of the suffering families. In fact, the opposite was true. Eddy's entire family died, in part because he foolishly shared food with people who, when the time came, did not reciprocate. Never mind that none -- not a meager few, but NONE, not even the least friendly -- of the historical records agree with this bizarre assassination of Eddy's character. Eddy is depicted as the paid leader of the party, when in fact his was merely one small family among nearly a dozen. This would not be significant, except that "Mr. Foster" (who is depicted as the financial and spiritual leader of "the Donner Party" for reasons never explained) berates Eddy for taking money to lead them and then causing the disaster of their entrapment in the Sierras.

Foster, of course, was a minor player, a son-in-law of one of the older women, not the central figure of the group. The film goes on at great length about Eddy's refusal to share a cabin with the "Fosters" (actually the Murphys) when in fact Eddy DID share a cabin with them. But that's only the beginning, as far as twisting the facts is concerned. The Donners, the Reeds, and the Breens, making up 70% of the camp population and the real leadership, are simply not present in the film (except for one reference to the "30 people" left behind at "the Donner camp"). Will McCutcheon and Milt Elliot (two singularly different people) get conflated into one character, and then killed off in his first scene. Eddy finally makes it to help by abandoning the rest, who end up killing each other in a squabble.

So it's fiction, tricked out with historical names for no discernible reason. As fiction, it doesn't fare much better than as history. The viewer is faced with some problems that didn't need to be there. First, the cobbled-up "cabins" that we see from the outside (one appears to be bedsheets on a clothesline), turn out to have interiors that would have been spacious living quarters in the era, complete with tables, lamps, and dinnerware. Second, in the spirit of casting perversity, the characters are all plump, round-faced, and obviously well-fed (and at least three of the men appear to have made their careers on the strength of their resemblance to William Peterson), so the jawing about hunger is no more convincing than Mrs. Quayle's appeal to her missing lunch. For reasons no one explains, the "Forlorn Hope" carries the snowshoes they made so laboriously instead of wearing them; no, I did not make that up. There is one brief scene, a few seconds long, around the middle of the hour-long depiction of the trek, in which they wear them. However, they do frequently use them as walking sticks. And the "handmade" snowshoes, by the way, are beautifully crafted top-of-the-line REI specials.

Of course, the "money shot" in the story is the cannibalism (which is, frankly, the least interesting element of the real story of the Donner Party), and they even manage to botch that. The moment they run out of food, someone says, "Well, I guess we'll have to eat each other," and they immediately begin working out the details. The tone is almost, "Well, I'M not missing lunch!!" Suffice it to say that the details end up being a brave soul marching out into the snow so another brave soul can shoot him. Then a character who borders on obese (who cast this thing?) kills himself to add to the ham stock. By the time they get to "Sutter Fort" (they can't even get that right), they have killed four members of the party and chewed on some chunks of what looks like thawed chicken breast. We should be grateful, probably, that the producers couldn't afford "special effects."

Watching this film, with its dopey, stilted dialog (everyone refers to everyone as "Mr." and "Mrs.", even while chowing down on the addressee's spouse), its bizarre culture fantasies (on at least three occasions, husbands put their uppity wives in their place, once with the threat of a backhand, and the group spends as much time praying as they do marching), the cheesy cost-cutting (there is no blizzard, and the snow is at most a few feet deep), and its garish insincerity (much is made of the common humanity of the Indian "Louis," but the actor playing him is not listed in the credits!), I have to think that "straight to disc" is too good for it. What were they thinking?

Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 

Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Report abuse | Permalink

Hoo-eee! It's American History time, folks, and this Amazon customer review of the ludicrous straight-to-video fiasco The Donner Party is probably a lot more entertaining than the actual event. (I mean the movie, of course.)

What brought this on? I phrase it thus on purpose, as if I am trying to trace the source of some vile illness. Something - oh, it was Matt Paust, not "something", and his close, perhaps too-close association with the Jamestown famine/massacre in Virginia back in 1609 - triggered a re-fascination with the Donner Party. A revisiting. Nice to know that cannibalism had a precedent in the annals of Americana, but the Donner story is so much more dragged-out, so forehead-slapping in the sheer incompetence and hubris of those who felt they could take an untried, impassible shortcut to get to the Promised Land in California.

So somehow that led me back to a documentary that I find almost dangerously enthralling. It has been aired on PBS several times, then I bought the DVD and watched it some more, then I lost it - the DVD, I mean, though the story brought me near that point. If you're a serious Donner buff, don't miss this thing, because I guarantee that if you watch 10 minutes, you'll be stuck for an hour and a half.

I know because I did it again last night, on YouTube, and did not get to bed until after 1:00 a.m. Was this the third time through, or the fourth? I wasn't even aware until now that this film, written, produced and directed by someone named Ric Burns, was made 22 years ago.

The low-key presentation and narration combined with vintage photos of people who look as if they are half-demented contribute to an atmosphere far more macabre than sensationalism would provide. (In fact, I did not notice until today when I attempted to make a few gifs that virtually the whole thing is made up of still pictures and narration, with none of the ludicrous "re-enactments" that make some documentaries so detestable). We can't let our minds go there, and yet we can't stop. As with Lord of the Flies, civilized behaviour soon begins to fray around the edges before becoming completely unstuck. The party is frighteningly inexperienced in meeting adversity along the trail and seems to think the experience will be a smooth scenic ride with the oxen doing all the work. None of them knew how to build a weather-tight cabin or even a proper tent, rations were lamentably short (four months' worth for a trip that lasted twice that long), the livestock RAN AWAY for some reason - had they not heard of ropes, did they not realize they'd have to eat them later? - and in fact, unlike the local natives, they did not seem to know how to dry strips of meat (let alone strips of people) so that they could put something by for the even-worse times ahead. So impractical were they that they ate the leather laces holding their snowshoes together, so that they flailed helplessly around in the nine feet of snow that held them captive all winter. 

Back when I had that disastrous Open Salon blog that ended so badly when I realized it was just an I'll-scratch-your-back-if-you'll-scratch-mine sham, I think I did try to address the Donners, no doubt after a viewing of the same documentary. And I swear, when looking up suitable images, I saw signs for a Donner Party restaurant. But now I can't find a single trace of one. I can see it being shut down by historians quivering with indignation, but wouldn't there be SOME remnant, at least a photograph?

People have squeezed a lot of mirth out of the Donners, most recently Jess Walter in his delicious novel Beautiful Ruins. I had a little problem with the over-the-top humour of something that has already been done (a crappy movie about the Donners). But the thing is, you don't need to stretch the facts in this story. It is so unbelievable that it can only be true. The fact that roughly half the 80-odd pioneers squeaked through this ordeal attests to the importance of body mass and a taste for steak tartare.

(The fateful turnoff. Go right, young man - go right! But it didn't work out that way. Insisting on taking a hard left, the Donners found themselves on the road to nowhere.)

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

James Cagney and other cool cats

I promised you gifs, and here they are. It's a treat to watch Cagney dance like a cat, in a sinuous manner that is nevertheless always intensely masculine. Nobody else had a style even remotely like his, lending itself naturally to alley-cat leaps and predatory slinks. I see traces of his carnivorous style in Gene Kelly, who purposely seemed to take a step away from the elegance of Fred Astaire. Instead of whirling his gorgeously-gowned girl in the air, he'd lift her up by the inner thigh and let her slide down his body. (Gifs to follow. I promise.)

Ruby Keeler was always the star of these extravaganzas. It's strange, because she isn't nearly as beautiful as some of the other dancers - she's more sweet or cute than beautiful, like the girl you'd take to the drive-in (if they had them back then). She couldn't act, and her singing voice was pretty awful. But she could dance. And there was something about the way she inhabited her body, some indefinable quality. (Or maybe Busby was banging her, who knows.)

I love the choreography in the early musicals - it's about as hokey as it gets. How I wish I still had my YouTube video of Broadway Melody, the first big all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza of 1929. There was a luscious number in it called Wedding of the Painted Doll, and if I had it now I'd gif it to death.

Meow-meow-meow, chow-chow-chow. . . 

Classic Busby Berkeley. Imagine smiling like that for 17 takes.

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Eraserhead: turn off the sound!

There are many things I love about the internet - and it's all the same stuff that I hate about the internet.

It's like Alice's Restaurant - you can get anything you want - and if there's nothing there, try coming back in a couple of months. It is ever-evolving, a ravenous monster engulfing mostly garbage and crap, but once in a while. . . 

What I don't like about it, since I am such an avid collector of images, is the utter impossibility of finding the provenance of nearly all photographs. Yes, there are various methods to trace the sources, and I've tried them all, but they don't work. These images, pretty much all of them, have been Pinterested and Tumblrd and Flickred and Facebooked and blogged and reblogged so many times, no one knows where they came from.

So I always feel a bit guillty about using them. Only once did I take a post down because someone protested I had used an image that belonged to him, and when that happened I was happy to oblige. 

But now and then. . . 

I was up late, too late as usual. My hours have been as inverted as a dabbling duck in the past few years: I used to wake around 5:30 in the morning, and go to bed by 8:30 or so. Now it's. . . I hate to tell you, but sometimes my husband has to wake me up by bringing me coffee at 9:00 a. m. (a pretty good deal, come to think of it).

So. . . last night. . . or, early in the morning. . . I was nosing around Google images, probably looking for more from the tens of thousands of Harold Lloyd images on the net, and found. . .a couple of weirdies. 

I don't get the first one, I don't. It's some demented-looking guy surrounded by rolls of paper towels. He looks a little like an insane James Mason. Beams radiate from a point on his forehead. The whole thing has the feeling of a nightmare.

Then there's. . . this. He or it has holes for eyes and the look of an embalmed corpse. I don't want to look at it, or him, someone or something from a silent movie that never should have been made.

As always happens on the internet, one thing leads to another as surely as in an incipient affair. And creepiness is magnetically attracted to creepiness. Last night, or morning, in my near-stupor, I stumbled on the David Lynch horror classic Eraserhead on YouTube - the whole thing. It was late enough that I had turned the sound off my computer. It became a silent classic, complete with John Nance as a sort of Twilight Zone Harold Lloyd with his hair perpetually standing on end. 

I had heard things about this movie, how horrific it was, a surreal and almost senseless drama about a man fathering (?) a deformed, screaming "baby" with a head like E. T.'s bastard child, its body all wrapped up in layers of gauze like a bad injury.

But without a sound track, it was - well, it was actually kind of stupid. It couldn't have been less scary, even boring, and the special effects were laughable, even the live chicken dancing around on the main character's plate. 

Alfred Hitchcock, who knew everything about horror and jerking his audience on a string for 2 hours, once said that it was the sound track that made a horror film resonate on a primal level. Think of the stabbing scene from Psycho: without that screeching music and the awful sound of the knife penetrating  flesh, it would be nothing.

Why is this? In the womb, babies are very sensitive to sound. We hear before we see. I can attest to this. Having been pregnant twice, I recall my babies jumping at loud noises (particularly my daughter, the kind of child who used to be called "high-strung" and is now called ADHD, QRSTUV, and any number of other dire disorders. By the way, she's 36 now and just fine.)

Point is, we need sound to anchor us in reality. Think then of the magic of a silent movie. Think of how actors had to make up the deficit, the anchoring we all depend on for a movie to make sense.

How did they do this? At first, kind of badly. Over-gesturing, over-the-top facial expressions (even in dramas - ever seen Birth of a Nation or Intolerance?). Very gradually over the 25 years or so that movies evolved towards sound, acting became more subtle. But it must have also been much more demanding for the actors. 

The switch to sound movies, then, must have been a horrendous jolt, because suddenly the medium had to take an unprecedented leap. The missing element was plugged in, the baby could hear again, and another part of the brain had to be engaged to make sense of it at all.

And you can imagine what the actors went through.

I knit a lot while "watching" TV, and in many cases it's more like I'm listening to the radio. But if the sound were turned off, what I was watching would make no sense at all. It would make very little sense even if I were actually watching it. Dialogue tells us how to feel, where to laugh or cry. For the most part, it tells us everything we need to know. 

So how did actors communicate so well during the silent era? It was a new kind of acting, nothing like stage acting, that would - eerily - disappear forever in less than three decades. Silent film (which until then had been called "film", or rather "pictures") would seem as irrelevant as some inane Marcel Marceau walking-against-the-wind sketch from the Red Skelton Show.

Ah, but now it emerges from the grave. People are sick of Charlie Sheen barking at us and are in the mood for some real acting. This strange twilight medium has begun to tunnel its way into the light. The fragile frames take us to a "there" that no longer exists, and can never be duplicated.

CODA: As always, there are post-blog reflections, but this time they are mighty strange.

This morning I decided to watch at least part of the YouTube video of Eraserhead, which I (mostly) watched last night with the sound turned off. I couldn't find it. The complete video of it that I had watched had been taken down, with one of those intimidating crooked face-things on it. Gone.  I doubt if I will have a chance to watch it again (somehow I don't think it will be shown on Turner Classic Movies), so I will always wonder how much the sound track contributed to its stomach-turning atmosphere. 

One wonders at the timing. I was only given one chance. But creepiness leads to creepiness. Something else will ambush me - soon.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

I have nothing to say about this

More Lloyd synchronicity: brought to you by your Uncle Marty!

(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)

LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How did it affect comedies?

SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the freedom after the war.

LEACH: Two foils.

SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era, it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.

Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it interesting. And they do.

LEACH: I’ll bet.

SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound came in, it changed again completely.

LEACH: The movie industry is America’s greatest presentation to the world in terms of public diplomacy. For instance, Charlie Chaplin was truly universal. You didn’t have to translate it into any language.

SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could identify with it.

LEACH: Well, we thank you.

SCORSESE: Thank you.

(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Did somebody mention George?

I dreamed I was in a movie with George Clooney.

He was very well-dressed and impeccable through the whole movie and had a Cary Grant manner about him. Through the whole movie I felt this longing for him, wanted to kiss and make out with him,  but at the same time I looked on him as a prize Arabian horse or something, just unattainable.

I was both in a movie with him, and watching a movie with him in it. Some parts of the dream were in a movie theatre and I remember trying to snuggle up to him. I wanted everyone to see that I was with George Clooney and he was snuggling up to me. He allowed this, then seemed to sort of lose interest.

I didn’t have too many clothes on during this and was maybe in my late 20s. The movie (an art house film) involved Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson in Mad Men) who was a poor struggling harpist living in a garret. I remember seeing her in one scene very badly miming harp playing, with awful out-of-tune music, and wondering why they hadn’t tried harder to make it seem convincing.

It became obvious as the dream went on that I WAS the Peggy Olson character and was both watching her in the movie, which seemed to take place in an old apartment house with winding staircases in Europe, and BEING her in the movie. I was also somehow sitting with George Clooney in the audience.  He did not seem to like the movie, and as I kept on draping myself over him, it also became apparent he was bored. There was some sort of play-within-a-play happening in the movie that involved Elizabeth Moss, some gorgeous European scenes (? I think), and other famous actors who now escape me. I looked down and noticed I had very hairy legs, and so did the Elisabeth Moss character. George Clooney was now frankly bored by the movie which did not seem to have a point to it. He said “Let’s get out of here” and we left, and I grabbed his hand which he didn’t seem to want.  I hoped as we left that people in the theatre would notice I was with George Clooney, though I continued to worry about my hairy legs.

Similarly to the old apartment building in the movie, the theatre also had very elaborate winding staircases with windows at each landing. I said “Let’s play a Dorothy Parker game.” I grabbed his hand and we began to run up the stairs. When we got to a  window I’d look out at the view and say, “Is this a good place to jump?” Then we’d run up another level. I was disappointed there were only a couple more levels, but then we burst out onto a sort of balcony. The view was mostly obscured by some sort of black-painted glass barrier, but George wiped off a bit of condensation and I could see through it. I just began to gasp at how beautiful it was: snow-peaked mountains, glaciers, blazing-white snow sparkling everywhere. “Oh, it’s just like Alberta,” I sighed. “Switzerland,” George said, by now very bored with me and testy, probably staying just to be polite.

In another scene I was trying to make my way through a maze of corridors (in the movie apartment, not the theatre) which at one point led to a convenience store. I bought two enormous bags of popcorn and felt guilty about it, but it was so cheap, two for one!  I blundered around trying to find my way back. When I finally found George, he was totally annoyed and said, “Don’t you ever go anywhere?” I tried to tell him I had no sense of direction and got lost in restaurants coming back from the ladies’ room. (I didn’t have the popcorn any more.)

Other parts of the dream have already got lost or muddled. One involved Catherine Zeta-Jones who had a very short skirt on. At one point I pointed out to George (who was barely with me by now) that she had no panties on, and he took a look. Renee Zellwegger was there but I don’t know what she was doing. I think Robert Downey Jr. was in it. I had the thought that celebrities just had to stand around to be impressive. At one point I felt like I was in that old Disney cartoon, Mickey’s Gala Premier, in which every celebrity of the day appeared. I still wasn’t quite sure if I was IN the movie or just watching it, but I definitely felt outclassed.

I don’t know if this scene is related or not. It involves bugs, an infestation of them. They were crawling out from a crack in the baseboards which had huge gaps in it. Some of them were enormous cockroaches which made me want to scream. I didn’t know how to get rid of these bugs and ended up spraying very heavily out of a can all along the baseboards (and there weren’t really any baseboards, just wall and floor with big holes and gaps). The bugs retreated quickly, including the cockroaches, and at one point I tried to crunch one under my foot and couldn’t kill it. I knew they would be back.

Another scene (related somehow) had the theatre manager talking to a lot of audience members out in the lobby. He was going on and on about American Presidents. This is garbled in my memory, but the gist was we should be proud and fascinated by how many Presidents had been represented in movies that had played in that particular theatre. At one point he said, very proudly, “We’ve even had an assassination.” The audience was waiting around for some sort of bonus or prize, but I don’t think it ever happened.

I don’t know what happened to George Clooney.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Glass Character: an excerpt (the glove scene)

The Glass Character:  an excerpt (the glove scene)

My third novel The Glass Character is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences in Hollywood from approximately 1921 to 1932, in which she develops a relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd which evolves into an obsession.


The story:

Muriel Ashford, a. k. a. Jane Chorney is working as an extra in a Harold Lloyd movie and will do anything to be close to him. Lloyd's right hand was badly injured in an explosion at the start of his career in 1919.  In this scene, Muriel comes upon him preparing his prosthetic right hand before facing the camera.

One day while I was trying to find a hat I was supposed to wear in the next scene (a hat with a veil, meaning my face would be totally obscured: what a great opportunity for an unknown actress like myself!), I stumbled upon Harold preparing himself to become the Glass Character.

He was usually quite secretive about this, so I was taken aback that he was dressing in the prop room. His character was only half there, still wearing the white pants he often wore on the set. His sweater was off, revealing a hard but hairless chest. Once again, without his glasses, I had the impression of a much-better-looking Douglas Fairbanks: all that was missing were the riding breeches and the self-important smile.

He was at a quarter turn with his back to me, and didn’t hear me at first. I began to literally walk backwards, knowing I should not be there, but unable to stop looking at him. Then, stupidly, I ran into a large metal pole (what was that doing there?), banging my head hard. My scalp began to smart so much that tears rushed into my eyes. At the metallic ringing noise, he started, suddenly turning around.

For half a second I saw confusion, even alarm in his eyes. Then he quickly covered it with his usual smiling graciousness: “No, no, come in, Muriel. (He knew my name?) I’m just getting ready.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean. . .”

“It’s all right, don’t be.”

There was something strange about Harold’s eyes. You couldn’t get away from them. But he was so pleasant most of the time (I had never been at the receiving end of one of his famous explosive tirades) that you wondered if you were imagining it. His eyes tugged hard, drew you in as if you were being pulled on a chain. I gave way to the tug, and stood shyly while he fiddled with his prosthetic glove.

All the while he talked to me in the most flattering way, asking about where I had come from, how it felt to be working in movies, about my aspirations.  I am afraid my responses were stilted and not very truthful. The fact was, I wanted to be Mary Pickford, and fast. This sitting in the background reacting as a choir with two dozen pretty but untalented girls was wearing thin. Most days I did not even see Harold.

While he worked at the glove, which had to fit as tightly as a second skin, I saw what was left of his right hand. I was very surprised that he would allow me to see this, though I knew he did not wear the prosthesis in public, rightly believing that hiding it would only make it more apparent. Oddly enough, maybe due to his magician's sleight-of-hand, nobody ever seemed to notice it.

I had assumed there would be some vestige of thumb and forefinger left, but they were sheared off clean, with half the palm gone. Later I was to find out that the doctors had to keep removing tissue to prevent gangrene.

The glove was hardly just a glove. That was only the part that showed. What held it on was a tightly-wound bandage reaching all the way up to his elbow. At times the edge of that bandage showed just past his cuff, but the primitive cameras of the day did not reveal it. 

When the glove was on, he held both hands out in front of him.

“Quite a sight, eh?” he said, with a little Harold smile. Not a trace of self-pity. There were certain emotions he simply would not harbour.

“So what do you think?” It was an impossible question, even a bit cruel. What was I supposed to say?

“It looks fine, Mr. Lloyd. I’m grateful you recovered so well.”

“Please – “

I knew what he meant.

I fought to get the word out. “Harold.”

He gazed at me a moment with a speculative look. I allowed myself to wonder if he was going to kiss me, or do worse, which seemed to be his way of breaking in new girls. But I knew I was too far down in the pecking order (so to speak) to receive this kind of favour.

“Muriel, would you do something for me?”

In my heart, I said: anything, Harold. Anything.

“Would you dance with me?”

My heart dropped. Dance, as in the razz-ma-tazz contests he and Bebe Daniels used to win almost every night with their fire-breathing versions of the Charleston and the Black Bottom?

“I – don’t know what you  - “

“Like this.” He reached out with his good hand, touched my shoulder, drew me to him very gently.

My head reeled. I could smell his white makeup, the pomade in his hair. He pulled me into his orbit, and propelled me around so lightly that I soon forgot my utter incompetence on the dance floor. I was reminded of Arab sheiks who controlled their steeds with a silk thread.

This close, I could feel his radiant body heat. Harold wasn’t very tall (he had fought as a bantam-weight in his youth), so we were almost the same height, and at one point his forehead lightly bumped against mine.

We slow-danced (as slowly as Speedy could ever slow-dance) for one complete turn around the room. Thank God it was early enough that no one came in.

Then he put me away from him. Did not step back, did not push me, but  put me away.

“Thanks, Muriel. Just wanted to see if I could still do it.”

“You can do anything.” As soon as the words had escaped, I knew I had gone much too far.

(CODA. It's rare to find a photo of Lloyd without his prosthesis, but a couple of them do exist. In this one he is bowling with a custom-made ball to be used with three fingers.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm