A view to a killer cover

Damn, the covers on some of these first editions of the original James Bond novels are wicked cool. But while I have a bit of the collector in me, the price range on Ian Fleming first editions puts them way out of my league. Do you have $3,500 lying around for a first run of Diamonds Are Forever? Hey, how about 30 thousand sterling for a complete set? That’s only a little more than 58 thousand bushbucks. Not for me, I’m afraid. Not unless I get really good at baccarat.

The centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth is coming up later this month, and as should be expected the Brit publications are outdoing themselves with coverage. The Guardian has this nice rundown of the best villains from Fleming’s James Bond novels (as opposed to those in the films, though there is some overlap). This nifty Charlie Higson piece compares Fleming with his creation:

Fleming enjoyed gambling, but was cautious and none too successful. He loved fast, powerful cars, but, unlike Bond, was stopped for speeding in the United States, and his most serious accident was when he reversed into a milk float. So did he share Bond’s taste in food? The books are filled with mouth-watering descriptions of lavish and exotic meals, but Fleming was a conservative and undiscerning eater who liked nothing more than a plate of scrambled eggs. His tastes in women were closer to Bond’s. Fleming was certainly a womaniser, charming and witty but callous. Ben Macintyre quotes one of his conquests as saying: “For Ian women were like fishcakes. Mind you, he was very fond of fishcakes, but he never pretended there was any mystique about eating them.”

Like Bond he had a fear of commitment and marriage, preferring the safety of affairs with other men’s wives, and, like Bond, he eventually caved in and got spliced. But whereas Bond’s wife, Tracy (for once his genius with names let him down), is conveniently killed on their honeymoon, Fleming stayed married to the end of his life - though it was a troubled, plate-throwing kind of a marriage. In fact, it was probably the shock of getting married that compelled him to finally get around to writing the books he’d had knocking around in his head for some years. Soon after the wedding he decamped to Goldeneye, his villa in Jamaica, and wrote Casino Royale in about five weeks, pausing only to go snorkelling, have a smoke and down a cocktail, though not necessarily all at the same time. Like Bond, Fleming drank and smoked heavily, but he felt the effects most acutely, whereas there are only two recorded hangovers in all of the 14 books, despite Bond’s staggering consumption of booze. The first comes in Casino Royale, when, after a heavy night at the gaming tables, Bond sighs “Champagne and Benzedrine! Never again!” After this Fleming obviously decided that Bond’s appeal was that he could live the life his readers dreamed about without suffering any ill effects.

Goldfinger has the distinction of being not just one of the better Fleming novels, but also the best of the movies. Unfortunately, the Bond novel I started with was . . .

. . . You Only Live Twice, the worst of the Fleming books and the worst of the initial Sean Connery flicks, though each is terrible in its own highly distinctive way. I was barely 10 years old when the movie came out, but that was the perfect age to see one’s first James Bond movie. A rocket base hidden inside a volcano? A steel-jawed spaceship that captured space capsules in orbit? A master villain who dropped incompetent subordinates into a decorative tank full of piranhas? What’s not for a 10-year-old boy to love? It hardly mattered that the plot was ridiculous and Sean Connery was visibly bored in many of his scenes.

So I paid my 75 cents for the paperback of Fleming’s novel and learned the hard way about how little the movies had to do with the novels, and how the chronology was screwed around. After all, Fleming introduced Bond’s arch-nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Thunderball, had him kill off Bond’s new bride in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, then had Blofeld die at Bond’s hands following a bloody swordfight in You Only Live Twice. Instead of the cool stuff from the movie, the novel had Bond grieving for his murdered wife and losing his grip on his job. After a long, wandering introduction and midsection, the novel picked up steam as Bond infiltrated the Japanese hideout of Dr. Shatterhand and discovered his suicide garden of poisonous plants (where the piranha pool also figures) but it was all a bit much for a 10-year-old.

I find that with most people, the first James Bond novel they’ve read is usually their favorite. After my bad experience with You Only Live Twice, I was well into my thirties before I tried Fleming again. I decided to work through the series in sequence, and while I enjoyed the increasingly loopy plotting and characterization in the books and stories, I still prefer the relatively low key Casino Royale.

I dunno about you, but I think the opening credits of the recent film version of Casino Royale very knowingly incorporate elements of the jacket design, which Fleming himself suggested to his publisher.

The big wheeze

The advance word on this new Indiana Jones movie is pretty bleak – considering how tired the whole franchise had become, 10 minutes into the second movie, the prospect of a fourth go-round with two decades of extra cobwebs sounds like pure chloroform.

In fact, hardly any of the big popcorn movies front-loaded this summer sound like they’re worth the trouble. The new Narnia movie is a big deal for Dances With Mermaids, so I guess I’ll be duty-bound to take her to that. I prefer my memories of Speed Racer as a daffy, crummy looking cartoon from Japan, as opposed to a daffy special effects spectacle from the Wachowskis. (Remember their lean, sardonic debut — Bound? More of that less-is-more spirit in the future, guys.) Iron Man is supposed to be good, but I’m not a comics fanboy – maybe I’ll rent it. 

I took another look at Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom last night and I’d forgotten the sheer balls-out nastiness of the thing, with its army of enslaved children being whipped and burned, the gross-out banquet of bugs and brains, and the coarse insult-slinging between Harrison Ford and Kate Capshaw serving as a poor replacement for the fizzy banter with Karen Allen from the original movie. Except for the fleet-footed opening sequence in the Shanghai nightclub, the movie was leaden and coldhearted, with endless action scenes and moments of gore that courted an R rating. I’d forgotten that the uproar over this movie led to creation of the PG-13 rating. If I’d taken my kids to the movie, I’d have been pissed off too. 

The Dark Knight looks really interesting, chiefly because of Heath Ledger’s fresh, weird take on the Joker, which should be a big improvement on Jack Nicholson’s overrated hamming. I’ll want to see that one in the theater.       

Local hero’s journey

David Bordwell, blogging about the recent Ebertfest in Chicago – where else? — talks about festival attendee Bill Forsyth, the Scots filmmaker whose 1981 teen romance flick Gregory’s Girl remains a cult favorite in the U.K., and whose comedy Local Hero has been on my personal Top Ten ever since I saw it on its initial 1983 run. 

On first acquaintance, Local Hero brings to mind the best of the old Ealing Studio comedies like The Man in the White Suit or The Lavender Hill Mob, with its gentle humor and quietly observant way with the eccentric locals of a Scottish seacoast village. However, this wee unassuming film has a roll of quarters hidden in its fist, and while it doesn’t sucker-punch you, it does get pushy and even downright tough in its quiet way.

The first surprise is the way it stands cliches on their heads: the protagonist, a Texas oil exec sent to buy up the village for a planned oil refinery, falls in love with the splendor of the place, but the locals can’t wait to sell out and get rich — “You can’t eat scenery,” one of them says. The second, which comes at the very end, is harsh bordering on brutal and sharply rights a film that was threatening to tip into twee whimsy.

According to Bordwell’s report, the return to Texas — and the piercingly lonely image it sets up — was to be the final shot of the film:

The original cut ended with Mac returning to his Houston apartment and staring out at the dark urban landscape—beautiful in its own way, but very different from the majesty of the Scottish shore. There the original film ended, but the Warners executives, although liking the film, wanted a more upbeat ending. Couldn’t the hero go back to Scotland and find happiness, you know, like in Brigadoon? They even offered money for a reshoot to provide a happy wrapup. Forsyth didn’t want that, of course, but he had less than a day to find an ending.

The movie makes a running gag of the red phone booth through which Mac communicates with Houston. Forsyth remembered that he had a tail-end of a long shot of the town, with the booth standing out sharply. He had just enough footage for a fairly lengthy shot. So he decided to end the film with that image, and he simply added the sound of the phone ringing.

With this ending, the audience gets to be smart and hopeful. We realize that our displaced local hero is phoning the town he loves, and perhaps he will announce his return. This final grace note provides a lilt that the grim ending would not. Sometimes, you want to thank the suits—not for their bloody-mindedness, but for the occasions when their formulaic demands give the filmmaker a chance to rediscover fresh and felicitous possibilities in the material.

Bordwell also has a very thorough and insightful analysis of Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet, which aside from fleeting annoyances — mainly, the stunt-casting of Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon, Billy Crystal — remains one hell of an impressive work.        

A turn in the south

Oh hell — Tom Waits won’t be coming anywhere near New Jersey during his “Glitter and Doom” tour. Considering that the royalties from Springsteen’s cover of “Jersey Girl” will probably keep him in gongs and hubcaps for the rest of his days, it would be an act of noblesse oblige for Waits to venture a little bit north, but noooo. We’ll just have to satisfy ourselves with this video of his press conference announcing the tour dates.

I shoulda been there

Maybe someday I’ll get to go to a rilly big book festival, like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. James Marcus went there, and he got to see Gore Vidal live in concert:

Vidal, in a wheelchair, was at the top of his game, whether he was taking Exxon to task for its mendacious, nature-loving commercials (”I sit there and pound the floor with my stick”) or putting George W. Bush through the wringer. His comic timing is better than ever–he works those pregnant pauses like a patrician Jack Benny. And as always, there’s a sense that the dramatis personae of American history are Vidal’s intimates, his playmates, his significant others. “I’ve been lying for a years about having read all of Aristotle,” he mused at one point. “Now I see what I’ve been missing.” For most writers, this would be an incidental mea culpa. But for Vidal, it’s merely a means of contact with the most pragmatic of our founding fathers, as if they belonged to the same book club: “Now, Benjamin Franklin was also reading Aristotle at one point….” Egged on by Smiley, Vidal gave Thomas Jefferson high marks for his prose: “He was the poet of democracy–until Whitman, who wrote a bit better.” He had less use for Ayn Rand: “Preaching greed? You don’t do that to Americans. It was in our first Christmas stocking.” Perhaps some of these zingers have been recycled from previous interviews, and as another friend (and Vidal zealot) later pointed out, he has “an entire herd of hobby horses tethered nearby.” Still, I felt very fortunate to be in the same room with this phenomenal man, who saved some of his best lines for the Q-and-A. Did he have any final thoughts on the late William Buckley? Long pause. And then: “I hope it’s not too hot.”

Marcus had some harsh words for Point to Point Navigation, Vidal’s followup to his wonderful memoir Palimpsest, and I had to agree — it’s an unworthy successor to Palimpsest.  
 

So it went

How a musical version of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle, conducted by an 8-year-old, led Maureen Johnson to write a novel called Suite Scarlett. An interesting trip, all told. 

Do or diorama

Turns out that I missed a trick when I was promoting my book The Last Three Miles. Instead of just focusing on readings, public talks and trying not to grunt too many times during radio appearances, I should have been doing like Sloane Crosley, who not only constructed dioramas illustrating each of the essays in her book I Was Told There’d Be Cake, she also recorded a video tour for each diorama.  

Since the paperback edition of The Last Three Miles probably won’t be out until the fall, I have some time to contemplate building a diorama of the Pulaski Skyway, with profiles of Frank Hague and Teddy Brandle looming in the background while little bursts of gunfire flash in the phragmites below. Since interest in the book was significantly goosed along by the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, I should consider building it in a way that would allow me to demonstrate what a Skyway collpase would look like. 

Sunday Bookchat

I.F. Stone and a right-wing lie that won’t die, books about Muslims that Muslims aren’t allowed to review, and a Spice Girl abandons music for literature. Read all about it.

Goading the geeks

Site traffic must be falling off at Salon. That was my first thought when columnist Andrew O’Hehir boldly ventured forth to declare that he didn’t think it such a hot idea to have Guillermo del Toro direct a film version of The Hobbit. And if O’Hehir thought that riling the rubes — or, in this case, goading the geeks — would bring hordes of fans storming in to defend the honor of del Toro and Peter Jackson, who is producing the thing, he must be disappointed. As of this morning, I saw a mere 62 comments in response to his article after a week online. For a man who wanted to strike a mortal blow to the very heart of geekdom on earth, that’s pretty small potatoes. Why, the Tolkien fan sites do better than that in the first five minutes after posting such questions as: “Ian McKellen, Boxers or Briefs?”

The problem, I guess, is that O’Hehir’s argument is rather lame:

First of all, hasn’t anybody noticed that del Toro has repeatedly said he doesn’t like Tolkien, and that he never finished reading “The Lord of the Rings”? Here’s what he told me in Cannes in 2006, when I asked him about the influence of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis on his own work: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery, I hate all that stuff.”

Let’s see, he doesn’t like “little guys and dragons” or hairy-footed hobbits, and “The Hobbit” would be a movie about what, exactly? Seriously, I think del Toro was speaking from the heart, and I think he’s right. His aesthetic is darker, more Gothic and more grotesque than the Tolkien-via-Jackson universe; it derives more from the medieval mire of middle-European fairy tale than from the high-toned, pre-modern northern European epics Tolkien was channeling. And I’m riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving “3993″ (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone”), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” or his “Doctor Strange” blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.

Oddly enough, the news that del Toro isn’t much of a Tolkien fan convinces me he’s the perfect director for The Hobbit. If love for the source material was all it took, then Richard Linklater’s adaptation of A Scanner Darkly would be the masterpiece too many Philip K. Dick think it is. Give me a filmmaker who combines respect for the material with clear-eyed understanding of the structural and narrative demands imposed by film.  Del Toro’s movies may be closer in spirit to the Brothers Grimm than the Icelandic sagas, but his understanding and appreciation of fantasy will carry him over that gap.

Lest we forget, Peter Jackson and his screenwriting partners were pretty ruthless when it came to reshaping Tolkien’s baggy epic, and the three films of The Lord of the Rings came out all the better for it. I never much liked the books either — they had great scenes and characters in them, buried in great stretches of dreariness and inert plotting — but I’m a complete fool for the movies. Getting rid of Tom Bombadil, amping up the fear-factor for the Ringwraiths and turning Aragorn into a self-doubting hero rather than a confident king-in-waiting brought The Fellowship of the Ring to life, and while The Hobbit is a more focused work than its elephantine sequel, I’m sure Jackson’s team will do it the same service.  And the skill with which they rescued the Arwen love story from the appendices and made it a significant part of the main story bodes well for the planned follow-up film, which will troll through Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings.

So, bring on The Hobbit and its hairy-footed sequel. I’m pumped. And this time, I’ll be able to take my kids to the theater with me. Bring it on.

A James Bond joke

I never heard of James Bond jokes, and I’m old enough to remember the days when a new Bond movie was something that people actually got excited about. But here’s an example, via Eric Alterman:

007 walks into a bar and takes a seat next to a very attractive woman. He gives her a quick glance, then casually looks at his watch for a moment.

The woman notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”

“No”, he replies, “I am here alone. Q has just given me this state-of-the-art watch and I was just testing it.”

The intrigued woman says, “A state-of-the-art watch? What’s so special about it?”

“It uses alpha waves to telepathically talk to me,” he explains.

“What’s it telling you now?”

“Well, it says you’re not wearing any panties …”

The woman giggles and replies, “Well, it must be broken because I am wearing panties!”

007 taps, taps his watch …

and says “Damn thing must be an hour fast.”

Cue sassy, John Barry-orchestrated saxophone.