"Out, out, into the storm!"

This is a most inferior way of making a point. My book The Movies, which I just received yesterday and disappeared into (I don't want to get dressed, go out, etc., but why should I anyway? Give me one good bloody reason to get dressed), has yielded up some photographic treasures, along with some duds. This was a tricky one, as it involved a classic scene from a silent movie called Way Down East. Believing she has had an illegitimate baby (and of course, she hasn't - she has been secretly married to someone the family doesn't approve of), Papa throws Lillian Gish out into the storm. I am not sure this caption even appears in the movie - I didn't see it when I watched it for the first time on TCM fairly recently. But perhaps it should.

The point is, however, that only a bit of tinkering brought out a startling amount of relief (meaning detail) in this smudgy old photo. This is only fully visible when the photos fill the screen - in fact, I realize now you can hardly see the differences and this whole enterprise, which took me about five hours, was an almost complete waste.

But never mind, the differences are there, if more subtle in this reduced size. Compare the sepia-toned original with the black-and-white "corrected" version. Faces which were an overexposed wash now have some features, and some expression. Every fold of clothing is visible, such as the wrinkles in Lillian's sleeves and the folds around her waist. The tooling at the top of Papa's boots is now plain. And so on. Were all these details buried, embedded in the original? They can't have been created by a primitive scanner and ridiculously simplistic photo program. Uncovered, perhaps?

I've spent the morning on this, not even eating, my back aching. I am in somewhat of a slump. Call it "white depression" rather than black (it comes in all colours, did you know that?). So I bury myself in this. There are other surprises: how stunning some of the minor stars like Mae Marsh and Dolores Del Rio were.

A different style of beauty, of course - and they all had those "bee-stung" lips, carefully made up, bowed and tiny, so unlike the blown-up blubber-lips of the collagen-injected stars (or is it fat from their butts?) that it's downright refreshing. But you sure would not be able to eat or drink. 

I also notice just now that Del Rio resembles Jobyna Ralson, one of Harold Lloyd's leading ladies (though I wasn't even going to mention Harold - we're divorced now, did you know that?)

This is a beautiful photo of early cowboy star William S. Hart, whose Westerns may have been the most realistic ever made. My Dad loved to do facial impressions of him, pulling his face down into a stony expression.

Tom Mix's wedding ceremony, on horseback. Mix ws the Roy Rogers of early cinema, slick and glamorous. His movies were as addictive as those old Zane Grey novels I used to read.

One of those old theatre signs, similar to "Ladies, Please Remove Your Hats" (with a picture of a man climbing a ladder behind the offending hat) or, even better, "If You Expect to Rate as a Gentleman, You Will Not Expectorate on the Floor." As for being annoyed at the theatre, let's bring those signs back, shall we?

This was startling. One of my first silent movie obsessions, back when I was a kid I mean, was Rudolph Valentino. Can't tell you why. I decided not to include Sheik pictures because there are approximately one billion of them on Google images. But this quaint shot is sweet, and brings me to one of my Separated at Birth thingies: to me, he looks quite a lot like a very young version of a well-known leading man.

There are lots of other shots, but I'm too tired to dig them up.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

Order The Glass Character from:

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A fool there was. . .

In other words, I just got my library copy of The Movies by Richard Griffith and Arthur Mayer. I've barely leafed through it, but already I've found some things I remember from when I was a child. I was movie-hungry even then, and this book was an excellent primer, especially about the silent era. It fairly radiates excitement and boyish enthusiasm. My only problem with it so far is the near-drooling about Chaplin, about whom he writes about twenty pages, while Harold Lloyd gets maybe two. No clock-dangling, no nothing. Here's a sample which I also remember:

“Intellectuals lured into the movie houses in search of the source of his fame found that this world hero was a homeless tramp whose shabby elegance and careless poverty bespoke a spirit equal to life’s cruelest and most humiliating blows. They found in him as many things as have been found in Hamlet. They found him sly, cruel, pretentious, disdainful, crude, witty. They found a touch of madness in him, and a bottom of hard common sense. And behind this urban lover of nature, this hopeless, hoping lover who snapped his fingers at the universe, there was something that hurt.”

Oh yes. I suppose that's the common point of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd: not just that they were superb and superior comedians, unique talents that would never come around again, but that they came from deprivation, pain and shame. It could be argued that Lloyd got off the easiest, since he never lived in hovels or was thrown across the stage like some inanimate prop. But the family moved every year or so, and his father was shiftless and unreliable - not quite a crook, but seen as a charming failure. Finally his parents divorced, which was nearly unthinkable then, no doubt causing people to murmur that Harold came from a "broken home". Even worse, his mother had to work as a milliner to help keep the family afloat. Tension must have abounded, and Harold went out and worked three or four jobs at a time, furiously trying to make up for the awful abyss at the core of his childhood.

"The Vampire" poem at the start of this post is loosely based on a Kiplng poem, which in turn inspired a wildly-popular movie starring Theda Bara in 1915. That long ago. There's no credit for the delicous and memorable parody, so it likely came from a movie mag of the period. 

The Vampire

A fool there was and he made his prayer

(Even as you and I!)

To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair

(We called her the woman who did not care),

But the fool he called her his lady fair

(Even as you and I!)

Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste

And the work of our head and hand,

Belong to the woman who did not know

(And now we know that she never could know)

And did not understand.

A fool there was and his goods he spent

(Even as you and I!)

Honor and faith and a sure intent

But a fool must follow his natural bent

(And it wasn't the least what the lady meant),

(Even as you and I!)

Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost

And the excellent things we planned,

Belong to the woman who didn't know why

(And now we know she never knew why)

And did not understand.

The fool we stripped to his foolish hide

(Even as you and I!)

Which she might have seen when she threw him aside --

(But it isn't on record the lady tried)

So some of him lived but the most of him died --

(Even as you and I!)

And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame

That stings like a white hot brand.

It's coming to know that she never knew why

(Seeing at last she could never know why)

And never could understand.

-- Rudyard Kipling 

Bonus verse, gleaned from a 1928 newspaper whose name I have forgotten. . . 

A fool there was and he saved his rocks
Even as you and I;
But he took them out of the old strong box, 
When the salesman called with some wildcat stocks,
And the fool was stripped to his shirt and socks,
Even as you and I.

I want to say to the poet: stick around another year, and you'll lose your shirt, too.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

Order The Glass Character from:

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

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

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Amazon.ca
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Something truly wonderful

This is probably my fourth post today, but it simply had to be. Today I got something in the mail, a paper-something, the old-fashioned way. It had flown through the air via airmail, all the way from Britain. I knew Kevin Brownlow was going to send me something because he told me, after my last email about his Tramp and the Dictator (brilliant) documentary. I also mentioned the short story about Valentino I wrote as a kid, and the book The Movies (which I will soon see again for the first time in some 45 years - !).

What he sent me along with his lovely letter - you can hear his whimsy and friendliness in his writing, and it is as balm on a stinging wound - is nothing short of a treasure, an old yellowed, lacquered post card with Valentino on it. Obviously vintage. On the back, though, is something that looks almost like ghostly writing, or ink that has vastly faded with time.

So the rewards don't come when or where you think they will. But when you are afraid they won't come at all, something like this happens. Something wonderful.

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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: Here comes Harold Lloyd!

At last: my love has come along!  Harold Lloyd, who has obsessed my brain and ruled my heart for SIX years, is ready to show his face on the cover of my forthcoming novel, The Glass Character.

I've been looking at him for so many years, it seems strange that now he's looking back at me in one of his most famous (alarmed porcupine) poses. And though The Glass Character (Thistledown Press) won't be available for a few weeks yet, the cover has been finalized, and my excitement knows no bounds.

It's hard to know where to begin. Why Harold Lloyd? some people have asked me, and I have never completely figured it out. It's not as if I suddenly thought "this subject would make a good next novel", because I wasn't thinking in those terms. After two well-received but not-spectacularly-selling novels, my mind was turning to blogging and other more practical things.

Then Hurricane Harold moved in, a storm-front who knocked over whatever order there was in my life. Broke the whole thing wide open, sometimes quite painfully.

Harold Lloyd - and I've given this blog over to him, pretty much - was a legend in silent film, known variously as "the guy with the glasses" and "the man on the clock".

Like so.

I must have seen one of his movies on Turner Classics - in fact, without Turner Classics this novel never would have existed. I think I tuned in partway through The Freshman, the scene where his suit falls apart. I started laughing and didn't stop.

The thing about Harold Lloyd's comedy is -  it's funny. It makes you laugh. It isn't cerebral, it isn't sociological, it isn't "of its time" - it's of this bloody time, and  funny enough to knock you right out of your chair.

Harold Lloyd rocks.

So how did that initial fascination leap across the gap to an actual story, sustainable for 307 pages? Hard to say. Suffice it to say I fell in love. And a story of romantic/erotic obsession was born.

Now that we're out of the finalized-front-cover starting gate, I'm going to be writing more and more about this, because it would be too bad if this one (like the other two) got splended reviews and hardly any readership. Everything has changed since my last novel - and, more to the point, I have changed in ways that can't really be quantified.

("Quantified" - sorry about that!)

When I tell people I've spent six years on this project, they always say, "Oh, man, that must have been slow to write." They don't understand. It took a year and a half to write, and three and a half years to get to the point where it is actually in the starting gate and will soon (soon, soon. . . ) be in the stores.

On the shelves.

Whew.

I can't possibly get it all in now. I'm still trying to believe it. And though I will do everything I can think of to get the word out, I realize it's a whole different world: not only since I published my last novel Mallory, but since I began writing The Glass Character in 2008.

2008 sounds like a million years ago. So much has changed, I don't know where to begin. But he's coming soon to a book store or Kindle near you, folks: The Glass Character, Thistledown Press.

At last. . .

Order The Glass Character from Amazon.com

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Order The Glass Character from Chapters/Indigo.ca

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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.

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"This is Harold Lloyd": Kevin Brownlow's brush with greatness

I HATE HATE HATE transcribing material from books - it's the sort of thing I had to do back in 1973 when I was a secretarial student - but there it is, if I want to post this I have no choice. It's part of the introduction to a great book about Harold Lloyd, one of my earliest sources, called Harold Lloyd Master Comedian, written by Jeffrey Vance and Suzanne Lloyd. 

Kevin Brownlow, need I tell you, is undoubtedly the world's foremost expert on silent film, and some say he almost singlehandedly rescued the medium from the brink of oblivion at a time when nobody knew or cared. In the early '60s he was an earnest young film student who was already beginning to realize that rescuing and restoring silent movies would be his destiny.

"When I was young and saw Lloyd's best-known film, Safety Last!, uncut and in an excellent print, together with Dr. Jack, in a Wardour Street film library, I was encouraged to write a fan letter to the great comedian. One day I planned to write a book about the silent era, and with this in mind I asked him questions about his career. Lloyd did not reply. He was a successful businessman, after all, hardly likely to have the time to answer letters from fledgling film historians. A pity, but there it was.

By then I had left home, joined the film industry, and was living in a bed-sit in Hampstead, North London. It was Saturday, June 2, 1962 - my twenty-fourth birthday. I was sleeping late, having a most delightful dream. D. W. Griffith was conducting me through the corridor of a spacious clapboard building somewhere in the United States (I had not yet been there). It was a home for retired movie people. He gestured at one door and mentioned the name of a famous film editor; at another, a great cameraman. Before we had time to meet anyone, a telephone began to ring at the far end of the corridor. We set out toward it, and I woke up, realizing the phone was ringing in my corridor. I staggered out of bed, down the hall, and picked it up.

"This is Harold Lloyd."

I was young enough to have friends who played practical jokes, and I had often been taken in. But there was an authenticity about the voice that, coming out of my dream, caused me to hesitate. It was indeed Harold Lloyd. He was in London for a few days; was I free for lunch? Come over to the Dorchester. . . how about 11:00 o'clock?

What better birthday present could any film historian have? Nonetheless, I was apprehensive. Many comedians are dour and humorless offstage. I remembered meeting Groucho Marx, after a scintillating appearance at the National Film Theatre, in which he had us all in fits, and being astonished at his coldness. He had done his act, and now he was off - that was it.

Lloyd, by contrast, was charming. He was in his late sixties, still good-looking, with a dazzling smile, and a naivete reflected not so much in what he said as in how he said it. He spoke with the inflection of an eager midwestern youth, with a smattering of "Gees" and much laughter. The glasses were now permanent. When we shook hands he used his left, and I saw that his right hand was missing both thumb and forefinger. Not until later did I learn about the bomb that had shattered his hand and nearly wrecked his career during a still photo session.

Lloyd put me at ease, answered all my questions, and behaved exactly as I wanted the characters in my dream to behave. He conjured up the challenge and excitement of making pictures in the silent days with effortless ease; his heart lay in that era, and he soon recognized that mine did, too.

Lloyd had that effusive, hail-fellow-well-met manner that in younger people makes me instantly suspicious. With many, it is simply a sign that they have read Dale Carnegie's How to Make Friends and Influence People, and it reveals them as door-to-door salespersons, real-estate agents, or film producers. With Lloyd, the sincerity and bonhomie were genuine, It was as though he was the model on whom Dale Carnegie based his book."

There is more, oh-so-much more, including Lloyd talking about his Glass Character - yes, he really did call him the Glass Character, though no one could quite figure out why he used the singular when everyone else said "Glasses". 

DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY? Do you, do you? It's so I'd have a better title, a much more poetic title for my novel than The Glasses Character, which would have been totally lame (just kidding!). Thank you, Harold Lloyd, for handing me that, and for all  the "Glass pictures" you made that will stand forever as hilarious works of art.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

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

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

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

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Pig drama: like you've never seen it before!

(Ready for some more? I didn't think so.)

Sweet dreams.

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