The Celluloid Heroes book I have been writing for the last several years has been an all-encompassing, all-engrossing project. The first draft of it clocked in at roughly 180,000 words. The current iteration sits comfortably at 140,000.
But during the winnowing down part of the rewrites, a great deal had to go. Turning these 40-odd films into a narrative non-fiction biography, essentially, of my entire life to date meant chapters I was (and remain) very fond of had to go.
Which brings us to this month’s episode about Battlestar Galactica.
Now you look at the above trailer and go “wait a minute, I thought Celluloid Heroes was about the cinema going experience”. Battlestar Galactica being a TV series would seem to be outside that purview on first glance, being a short-lived yet fondly remembered ABC TV series that aired between 1978 and 1979.
And you’d be right … save for the fact I was one of a relative few who first got to see Battlestar Galactica in a movie theater two months before its television debut.
And months before the toys began to show up:
How is this possible?
Well … the answers are, as always here:
Celluloid Heroes Episode Three is the kickoff to a mini-series-slash-trilogy of episodes I like to call Attack of the Killer B’s in which my focus shifts to three lesser-known, lesser-celebrated sci-fi epics I saw in theaters while living in Vancouver British Columbia between 1978 and 1980. All of them could be considered “B” pictures. All of them also began with the letter B. Sound off in the comments below which have been enabled, unlike last episodes’ posting (sorry about that) about which films you think those other B’s are, and make your predictions as to the remaining films I’ll be covering over this first 12-episode Season (hint: we end the narrative in late 1983 calendar-wise).
And so without further ado here’s a fun selection of images from this month’s episode. Listen on Spotify, Apple, Youtube, and on the Longbox Crusade Podcast Network.
Summer always seems endless when you are younger and the first week of summer vacation was always my favorite. School was wrapped up for another year, and the memory of those hallways, those lockers, those desks lingered fresh in the mind as we embarked on what was two full months of freedom from pencils, books, and teachers’ dirty looks. Living in Brockville Ontario at that time was a definite advantage; being a river town swimming and boating on the St. Lawrence were the norm and I recall many afternoons spent piloting the small outboard boat we owned around the bays and inlets lining the Canadian side of the river (and occasionally the American side as well – you could do that pre-9/11).[1] Before July and the official start of the summer season began, that last week to handful of days remaining in June were an oasis of calm before summer “really” started, with its jobs, its family trips, its obligations, and with its hopeful leisure time.
Summers for me back then was also extra-special because that was when the best movies were released. Not “best” as in critically because they frequently were pretty mediocre or downright bad, but “best” as in “this is a movie where you munch popcorn and allow yourself to be transported”. Unlike now where a “summer movie” can be released in the dead of winter) back then Hollywood made us wait until the warm months to unleash a horde of summer-friendly cinematic fun upon us. They didn’t have to be all-time greats; they just had to be good enough to be a good time[2] and I, like so many others of my generation, were fortunate to have lived through the Golden Age of the Summer Movie: Jaws, Star Wars, Grease, The Empire Strikes Back, The Shining, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Dragonslayer, Superman 2, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, The Thing, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Tron, Blade Runner … and that carries us up to only 1982.
By 1989 movies were very much at the forefront of my mind as well as I was very much focused on pursuing a career in the entertainment biz. But doing so back then was difficult verging on impossible when you were a kid in a small-town far from the bright lights big cities of New York, L.A. and Toronto. There wasn’t much in the way of opportunity for a Brockville teenager like there was one who hung his or her hat in Studio City, Van Nuys, or Santa Monica. There also wasn’t much opportunity to learn the ins and outs of moviemaking, in this pre-DVD behind the scenes and audio commentary world of 1989. Learning the ins and outs of the movies themselves meant going to the cinema, renting the VHS, or watching every movie-related program TV had to offer.
Thankfully I had two great lifelines courtesy of TVO – TV Ontario to those of you not from Ontario Canada. If you are from Ontario though, those three letters will signify something. TVO was and remains the province’s public broadcaster, airing special interest programming, news, multilingual documentaries, children’s programming, all of it funded from the public purse. It is, like PBS in the states, one of the finest examples of our tax dollars at work we can genuinely see and access. TVO was also producer of two informational TV shows I watched pretty religiously.
The first was Prisoners of Gravity, created and produced by Mark Askwith; a well-known comics luminary (who I would come to know quite well as my career took off) who later went on to become a segment producer at Canada’s Space: The Imagination Station – Canada’s answer to the Sci-Fi, later SyFy Channel. Along with host Rick Green (of the famous Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics), Prisoners of Gravity chronicled the happenings in the sci-fi community with an emphasis on literature and comic books. Interviews with luminaries like George Clayton Johnston, Robert F. Sawyer, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Julie Czerneda, Tanya Huff, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison and Spider Robinson. Prisoners of Gravity (or “PoG” as fans referred to it) aired weekly on TVO between 1989 and 1994 on Friday nights and I watched it any chance I got. PoG dug deep into the art of writing, of ideas, of crafting stories that genuinely provoked thought rather than just passive distraction. Outside of Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson I wasn’t a huge sci-fi and fantasy literature fan when I started down the PoG road, but by the end I was a full convert.
The second TVO show was actually a block of films that aired Saturday nights titled, appropriately, Saturday Night at the Movies, hosted by a kindly looking elderly bald man with glasses and a broad grin named Elwy Yost.
Elwy was what we would call one of the great ones; a man clearly in love with films, and whose love of them was infectious. The program for Saturday Night was simple; two films aired back to back, with an intermission comprised of interviews with the actors, filmmakers, and behind the scenes personalities behind those films. Hitchcock and Ford, Hawks and Curtiz, Donen and Wise were favorites of Elwy’s, but he also introduced me to the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, Billy Wilder, and Francois Truffaut among others. Saturday Night excelled in introducing you to the movies that in some cases you couldn’t see elsewhere. While home video was certainly well-entrenched in the late 80s I would never had a chance to see 1968’s The Swimmer or 1964’s The Americanization of Emily without Saturday Nightat the Movies.
This is all to say I spent many a Saturday night at home, watching Elwy and TVO when other teenagers were out cruising the strip, getting drunk, and getting laid. It wasn’t uncommon to make up some excuse to friends as to why I couldn’t go out on a particular Saturday, just so I could stay home and watch Matewan with an accompanying interview with its director John Sayles, or Jason and the Argonauts because Elwy’s guest that night in conversation was none other than fellow Canadian James Cameron, who himself looked as delighted to be talking with Elwy as Elwy was with him.
The films aired without commercials and uncut, and my home library of video tapes back then included many episodes of Saturday Night at the Movies. I could have just set the VCR to record and gone out but for me watching them in the moment was a lot more satisfying, in the same way see in a film in the theater always is. It was the immediacy, the “blink and you’ll miss it” element that to this day has me leave my phone locked in the car or left on the dresser at home when going to a show.
My interest and education in film was largely self-taught, through Starlog and Premiere magazines, through video rentals and newspaper reviews but also by going to the movies. Summer movies were a big deal back then and had been since Jaws devoured the box office in 1975. Up until Jaws movies were generally slowly rolled out across the country, opening first in the larger markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Toronto. You would frequently hear about a movie like The Godfather or The Exorcist for months before you got to actually see it. But with Jaws and then Star Wars the movies began to open bigger, and wider. Throughout the 80s the summer movie season became Hollywood’s Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and Birthday rolled into one two-month stretch where you could more or less make your year. And if one of the many movies released became an all-time classic of its genre like Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, or Beverly Hills Cop, you would continue to rake in the dollars on home video. Over the intervening fifteen or so years since Jaws the summer season became bigger and longer, with the first “summer” movies debuting in mid-May and running more or less through August.
In the list all-time Legendary Summers of my lifetime, three from the 1980s stand out. 1982 gave us Star Trek II, The Thing, E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner, Conan the Barbarian, and Tron. 1984 had Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Last Starfighter, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Purple Rain, and The Terminator.[4] 1985, with Back to the Future, The Goonies, and Cocoon seems almost quaint by comparison. The trajectory by then was well-established, and movie critics would groan collectively as Hollywood dumped its biggest releases into the summer months, and pine for the relatively calmer, saner, “better” films of autumn.
But the Summer of 1989 was different and everyone recognized those differences in the moment. Dubbed “The Summer of the Sequel” we had Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Star Trek V: TheFinalFrontier, Ghostbusters II, The Karate Kid Part III, License to Kill and Lethal Weapon 2 among the pickings, along with Honey I Shrunk The Kids, The Abyss, When Harry Met Sally and Uncle Buck.[5]
But to look at 1989 and the Summer Film in general, we have to look at the third film from a quirky filmmaker who, after Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and Beetlejuice (1988) was handed the reigns of a comic book character best known to audiences as the star of his very campy 1960s TV show. And while Tim Burton’s Batman, released to theaters 35 years ago this day of publication, is campy in numerous ways, it ably demonstrated especially to me the role a director played in turning the everyday into the extraordinary, in those rare cases when the right director meets the material best suited for him. Simply put: Batman 1989 would have been a very different film if it had been directed by anyone other than Burton.
Now let me add a quick little 2024 aside: I love Batman. I love the character, I love Gotham City and its Rogue Gallery of Villains. Heck, the wallpaper of my iPad is, you guessed it …
But in 1988-1989 Batman was kind of hokey to me. My prevailing memory of watching the old 60s Batman TV show likely dominated this belief, as did the old Superfriends cartoon series. And while friends in Brockville had talked up The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Killing Joke as being dark, adult stories, I had yet to be converted.
Burton’s film would change all this.
Like many of us, Burton was the weird kid. Growing up in sunny suburban Burbank California, he was obsessed with Universal horror, Vincent Price, Edmund Gorey, German Expressionism, and monster movies on TV. Graduating from Cal Arts he became an animator at Disney before branching out into directing. His unique visual style was his calling-card, and crossing paths with comedian Paul Reubens, Burton’s star would climb when Reubens picked him to direct Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. He followed that with Beetlejuice; a truly odd film that proved to be a big hit, and introducing Gen X to one of its seminal poster girls (and personal movie crush); Winona Ryder. I saw Beetlejuice with a group of kids from school, and could hear the girls we were with unimpressed by Winona’s Goth Lydia Deetz, calling her gross and weird and creepy but those preppy teenage girls just didn’t understand the appeal of being strange and unusual.
It was shortly after seeing Beetlejuice in the theater in 1988 that a friend mentioned that Burton was directing the upcoming Batman movie. That Michael “Beetlejuice” Keaton would be playing Bruce Wayne, with Jack Nicholson taking on the role of the Joker. At first I thought this friend was having me on, but an issue of Starlog confirmed it all later that month. In that pre-internet age news traveled slowly; movie news particularly so. It wasn’t uncommon to learn a movie even existed until you plopped down in a theater seat and saw the trailer pop up on the big screen. This was the case when in early 1989 when going to see a movie whose title escapes me now, seeing the trailer for Batman. You can still find it on YouTube and it’s quite a stark difference from the slickly produced trailers of today (and to be fair even back then). There was no music, basic production sound, no narrative. Just clips from the film which looked like nothing any of us had seen before. It looked dark, gothic, expressionistic, seeming to straddle multiple eras all at once, with the duster coats and fedoras of the criminal gangs contrasted with the Batman’s hi-tech gadgets and car:
Bat-mania developed slowly over the first months of 1989. We all knew the Batman movie was coming, but so too were the returns of the Enterprise Crew hot off the smash success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and the Ghostbusters were back as well. Even Indiana Jones had his Last Crusade, indicating this third film would be the final entry in the Indiana Jones series.[6] So yes, Batman; but would it be a hit? Would audiences who grew up on Adam West and Burt Ward and the notion that comic books were kid’s stuff respond?
In that sense, the decision to have Prince record songs for the movie, and be so enamored with the Batman mythos the Purple One recorded a whole damn album of songs was a masterstroke. Prince’s Batman album is widely derided now and even was so on its release, but you cannot deny it helped usher people – particularly the teens who made MTV, Much Music, and CBC’s Video Hits a staple of afterschool viewing. The “Batdance” video in particular was a real banger in that regard, with Prince appearing as himself, as a character calling himself “Gemini”, with dancing Batmen and Jokers and Vicki Vale’s cavorting about an obvious soundstage while music punctuated by audio clips from the movie. It’s one of those “only in the 80s would this work” moments in pop culture that burned itself into the memories of every GenX kid who watched it. It also made every school-age kid who saw it want to see Batman.[7]
I was looking forward to Batman like most summer filmgoers, but more so because by 1989 I was a big comic book fan. I had been one since 1984 when I discovered the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series but my tastes had matured though by 1987 as I discovered books like Hellblazer, The Shadow, and Sandman. Brockville’s first comic book shop, The Comic Cave, opened in 1988 and I spent many hours there browsing the racks discovering a new favorite book almost every week. A friend finally convinced me Batman was cool when lending me his paperback editions of Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, and most particularly The Killing Joke. That book was what made me most interested to see Batman, especially when in an interview in Starlog Burton made mention of it being an influence. It’s no surprise the version of Batman occupying my brain was a much different beast from the one we got.
I actually didn’t see Batman opening day despite it actually arriving at the Parkedale Cinema in Brockville on day of release, because opening day and night were spent at my friend Casey’s lakeside cottage outside the city. Being teenage boys being boys the “sleep-over” became a “let’s stay up all night and play poker and burn shit in the camp-fire” so by the Saturday afternoon when I and my buddy Mark visiting from Toronto staggered back to my house to crash, we somehow decided seeing Batman that night was the much more prudent course of action than, you know, sleeping. But movies were important back then. They were cool back then. And back then you had to see it on opening weekend so you could say you had seen it. And so, after a hasty dinner of pizza the two very bleary-eyed of us staggered to the Parkedale to stand in line for tickets and crowd into the sold-out theater to take our seats and try to get through Batman without nodding off.
Doing anything while sleep-deprived is a challenge. Seeing a movie while sleep-deprived makes for a wholly different experience. And I noticed it from the beginning as the Warner Brothers logo transitioned to a gloomy landscape as the credits rolled and Danny Elfman’s now legendary score played over what would eventually be revealed to be the Bat-symbol. The movie was dark, and it was dim, and while I was attentive to it, in its most gothic moments – the opening in Crime Alley, the raid on Axis Chemicals and the (re)birth of the Joker, all the way to the operatic showdown atop Gotham City Cathedral, I couldn’t be sure I was in the theater watching Batman, or having a dream about being in a theater watching Batman. As I recall afterward Mark felt the same way, and on the way home we quizzed each other (“Did the Joker really pull a massive gun from his pants and shoot down the BatWing?”) to confirm that yes we had actually seen Batman and hadn’t been dreaming the entire thing.
So I’d seen Batman. But did I like it? To be honest I couldn’t be sure, so I saw it again a second time in a state of full waking to make sure what I’d seen the first time was what I’d seen. And at the time I was kind of mixed. It certainly had atmosphere to spare, but the story was thin, the action clunky (Burton is many things but a director of action is not one of them). That’s not to say it wasn’t good because deep down it did what every film should do which is to transport you to a time and a place where you do not exist. Where you are just some silent presence observing the trials and tribulations of these characters and their world.
In Batman’s case the world is Gotham City, and what a dingy, dreary world it is; possibly the best representation of the city outside of Matt Reeves’ The Batman in 2022. Bolstered by Anton Furst’s gothic production design, the Gotham of Batman is very much that “third main character” after Nicholson’s Joker and Keaton’s Dark Knight.
As for the plot, well, there really is none. It’s an origin story. For the Joker. For Batman. And for the dominant form of blockbuster moviemaking that would really kick into gear in the late 1990s with Blade, the X-Men series, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, all of which paved the way for 2008’s Iron Man; a modest hit that ended up kicking off a cinematic universe to spread across screens big and small over the following fifteen years.
It’s surprising looking back even now to consider just why Burton’s Batman hit so hard because it’s so damn weird. Not weird like Batman Returns would be in 1992, not weird as in the “what the hell were they thinking” weird of Batman and Robin of 1997. Batman is a loose, almost plot-less film carried along by its stunning production design, moody cinematography by Brazil‘s Roger Pratt, loopy score by Oingo Boingo’s Danny Elfman, snazzy costumes by Bob Ringwood, and diametrically opposed performances by Keaton’s brooding, slightly off-kilter Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson’s very off-kilter Jack Napier/Joker. The premise of Batman – Batman must stop the Joker from poisoning the citizens of Gotham City – is pretty much the plot. The vibes are funhouse mirror though, with Nicholson chewing scenery and camping it up to the hilt while the normally just as loopy Keaton in the straight role of “man who dresses as bat”
Batman is an exercise in style and in mood. It is a brooding, shadowy nightmare of dark alleys, Lovecraftian architecture, and gothic styling. More than any movie I’d seen up until that point, Batman made me truly understand and appreciate what a director brought to the table. A Batman film by Tim Burton is diametrically opposed to one from Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, Zach Snyder, or Matt Reeves. And while all of the latter films are very much their own things all of them owe some of their vision to Burton’s first film. We certainly see shades of it in Batman Begins’ expressionist jumble of tenement slums and in The Batman’s nightmare version of Gotham. We even see it in 2023’s box-office bomb The Flash, which resurrected Keaton’s Caped Crusader for an extended cameo and did absolutely nothing interesting with him.
Batman 1989 was also quite campy, becoming more so as the Joker begins his campaign of terror. Like he’s hijacking the narrative, tearing away the brooding noirish atmosphere of the film’s first act and giving it a dose of his Smylex gas. Street mimes become Tommy-gun-blasting maniacs. Trenchoat-and-fedora goons get makeovers with snazzy leather jackets bearing a Joker logo. Gotham’s mayor, police chief, and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Billy Dee Williams) break the fourth wall and look to the Joker on his TV screen as he interrupts their TV-screened press conference. The criticism of Batman from its fans; the heavy use of Bat-machine guns, Bat-bombs, Bat-missiles would seem to fly in the face of the legacy of a character who never used a gun, but this isn’t the comic book Batman; this is Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman is a Tim Burton movie.
In the wake of Batman’s extraordinary success, what was truly surprising though was the lack of any films Batman inspired. We really didn’t get any other “comic book movies”; no new Superman, Flash or Wonder Woman, no Spider-Man, Captain America, or X-Men either (Marvel’s finances were in a general shambles throughout much of the 1990s). Instead what we got were movies starring characters whose origins were pulled from the same Great Depression era as Batman and Superman. 1990 saw Dick Tracy, 1991 gave us the retro throwback The Rocketeer, 1994 gave us The Shadow, 1996 The Phantom. It was as though Batman’s enormous success somehow convinced studio execs that the movies the kids of the 1990s were desperate to see were the characters their grandparents grew up with back in the 1930s while listening to their exploits on the radio. None of these Batman-inspired follow-ups hit in the way Burton’s film did (and most of them bombed outright). What was even more surprising was that Batman didn’t inspire that wave of comic book movies; all the 90s brought us outside of modest hits like 1994’s The Mask and outright flops like Barb Wire were three more Batman movies.[8]
As to why it was such a hit though, I wouldn’t point to comic book fans, which even then were not a major force in a box office success. I would suggest instead that because so many of that summer’s movies were sequels audiences were just looking for something new even when “new” in this case meant a character first created in 1939 who’d been a recognizable piece of pop culture for the intervening fifty years. The Bat-Logo was hip. It was cool. Using it as the principal marketing hook was a master-stroke, and one that you can credit producer Jon Peters with; he alone may be the one most responsible for changing how movies were marketed and you can see the simplicity of Batman’s logo poster throughout the next thirty-five years of film. All throughout that summer and well into fall a Batman logo t-shirt was considered to be a “cool” fashion choice, even among the girls. Batman may not have been a great film, but it was a fun one, and one that just happened to be the right film at the right time for it to take flight.
I remain a Bat-Fan to this day. I have a massive Lego Bat-Wing mounted on my office wall. I have a collection of Lego Batmobiles spanning the Adam West-Burt Ward TV series through Robert Pattinson’s incarnation. I even grabbed a Michael Keaton as Batman circa 1989 from McFarlane toys just to have him on my shelf of 70s-80s movie-inspired action figures. To me Batman is the most malleable of the superhero figures comic books gave us. He can be dark and brooding, he can feature in a horror or action or romantic storyline, he can do “the Batusi” and appear in Lego form but always, always be that same character. His rogues gallery of villains are the best rotating cast of n’er do wells in fiction bar none, from The Joker and Penguin and Catwoman to The Riddler, Two-Face, Clayface, Mr. Freeze, R’as Al Guhl, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The Gotham of Batman, like the Metropolis of Superman, is a fictional city everybody knows about and has probably visited at one time or another. There is quite literally a Batman for every occasion and inclination.
My Lego Batwing, hanging on the Bat-wall
I also remain a Burton fan, though when looking at the overall scope of his work, his most essential years to me remain his early ones, from 1985 and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure through 1994 and his biopic Ed Wood. Many believe he lost his touch after Ed Wood’s box office failure but I feel Burton has always been Burton; it was just in that decade or so stretch comprising Pee-Wee, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Wood found his eccentricities in sync with the movie going public and the cultural shift as GenX took the wheel. It’s no big stretch to see a similarity between Beetlejuice and Scissorhands with David Lynch briefly entering the mainstream with Twin Peaks, and the Alternative Rock generation moving to the forefront. Strange and unusual was “in” for a time and then it wasn’t, and while there is a lot in Burton’s subsequent work to admire, notably Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, and Sweeney Todd which feel more fully realized than his Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and Dumbo. Tim Burton just became what all successful filmmakers do at some point; he became Tim Burton, Incorporated; a filmmaker with a certain style and language and outlook that becomes the selling point over what he’s actually selling.[9]
Lego Batmobile and minifig collection. Thank the pandemic for my Lego obsessions
1989 was the Summer of the Bat. It announced that the 1990s would be a much different decade than the 80s. A decade where the formerly weird suburban kids like Tim Burton would be handed the keys to the kingdom and both shape and be shaped by a cultural shift that would change everything that came before. As for me it was the summer my movie obsession and career path resultant really kicked itself into high gear. The next three years would be some of my most stressful but also my most happy even as my home life would take a turn for the worse. But, like Bruce Wayne, I would find reason to fly.
Just a portion of my 80s movie and TV figure shelf. You have to grow up but you don’t have to grow old.
[1] And occasionally the American one as well; the border was a lot more open back then compared to now.
[2] And if not? It was still two hours in an air-conditioned theater when the temperature outside hit 90 degrees.
[3] Contrast that with 2023, where we seem to ge a “summer” movie every month.
[4] 1981, with Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Road Warrior, and Escape From New York was no slouch either.
[5] None of these were as anticipated by me as Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing but owing to its R rating and not making it to theaters in Eastern Ontario I had to wait for it to hit video before watching it multiple times.
[6] Unfortunately, and your mileage with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Dial of Destiny may vary, it was not.
[7] And became a great punchline in Edgar Wright’s 2004 film Shaun of the Dead in the process. The “gag” which I won’t spoil wouldn’t work nearly as well if it had been any album but Prince’s Batman one.
[8] 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a hit but one still in production when Batman was released.
[9] He shares that similarity with Michael Bay of all people, whose more interesting films like Pain and Gain, 13 Hours, and the terrific Ambulance are lost in the shuffle of five (!) Transformers films.
Back in 2010 I was a still freshly-minted New Yorker, still adjusting to my new life in the Big Apple. While I’d visited the city extensively in the eight or so years previous, this was now my home. Because of that I enjoyed something of a personal renaissance.
I have to admit here friends, before settling in NYC I was on a sad trajectory. I was entering my mid-thirties. My adventurous wanderings through popular culture had stagnated into keeping up with some favorite bands from the 80s and 90s like U2, Green Day, R.E.M., P.J. Harvey, Garbage, and Green Day. When I wasn’t listening to classic rock and alternative radio I was I was mostly listening to news stations and – shudder – talk radio.
The latter was a thankfully brief flirtation with the dark side of angry white middle-aged men who blamed “teh liberals” and “the immigrants” for every ill, not the least of which being a loser spending his day listening to talk radio. Though to be fair this was Canadian Talk Radio; a much friendlier, less-angry version of the stateside brethren. But I was a long way from the college-rock Lollapalooza-alternative music era of my youth.
It was, ironically, creating Mixtape that snapped me out of my reverie. I’ve written elsewhere but the basic gist was the discovery of my old comic book collection, old music magazines, and old boom-box in my mother’s basement that led me back down the memory path, listening to old mixtapes and thumbing through old magazines. I rediscovered the simple joys of music, and once settled into NYC, began digging into more contemporary artists who stoked those same feelings: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, MGMT, Sleigh Bells, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine, and a little-known, little-remembered Fratellis side-project called Codeine Velvet Club.
Spearheaded by John Lawler with Scottish singer Lou Hickey, their first and only album was short, sweet, jazzy, poppy, melodic, and to the point (and featured a great cover of The Stone Roses’ “I Am the Resurrection”). I’d love for you to listen to it but that’s going to be difficult outside of YouTube, and is sadly the point to this whole exercise in memory.
You can listen to the album here … but for how long is the real question
To listen to Codeine Velvet Club takes some effort. The album is long out of print and while you can stream it on YouTube you won’t find it on Spotify or Apple Music. You can’t even buy it on iTunes and while used copies are available through Amazon a “new” unopened copy will run you close to 60 bucks. That’s just one example; one album released fourteen years ago this very year. There are many more. More movies, more TV series, more albums and books unavailable and in many cases largely forgotten, all thanks to this Streaming Apocalypse. Thankfully I own a physical copy of Codeine Velvet Club. I can listen to it whenever I want to because I own a physical copy of it.
Back in November came the news that for the first time since streaming movies and TV became popular you couldn’t find a single James Bond movie on any streaming service. Fifty years of 007 just vanished with nobody along to pick up the slack (Apple TV currently has the streaming rights so it was just temporary as long as you’re an Apple subscriber that is). I myself was unconcerned as I already owned the complete 25-film Blu-Ray box set so could actually watch any of the Bond films anytime I wanted. But their temporary disappearance was troubling on multiple levels because this wasn’t some obscure arthouse film; this was Bond. James Bond.
Pictured: Bond, James Bond.
And yet after years of loyalty to the various streaming services I believe consumers have begun to wise up to the fact that ownership of physical media – books, music, movies – means to curate, not just to consume and they have begun to answer this with a drive back to physical media. 4K and Blu-Ray copies of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer sold out everywhere on its release in December. People are anticipating the 4K Blu-Ray release of Dune Part Two to accompany their copy of Part One. It was almost as if we suddenly re-discovered the pleasures of unwrapping a DVD or Blu-Ray box set of a favorite television or film series.
I’m not the buyer of physical media or indeed any media that I once was but I am shifting more to curation. Over Christmas I acquired Blu-Ray sets of the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street film series, the complete 1978 Battlestar Galactica, the complete 1979-1980 Buck Rogers, the Criterion Collection’s remastered edition of Mean Streets, and the two Guillermo Del Toro films – Nightmare Alley and Pinocchio – I didn’t yet own but now do. They sit alongside my Blu-Rays of Star Trek (The Original TV and film Series), The Twilight Zone, and Planet of the Apes film series. I own the Despecialized Star Wars Trilogy, all the Bond and Mission Impossible films, and roughly five to six hundred other assorted DVDs and Blu-Rays spanning the early silent era to recent releases. Thanks to physical media I can watch both the theatrical and TV versions of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the Extended Editions of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, numerous behind the scenes documentaries, commentaries, and special features, any time I feel like it and even without an internet connection.
Of course there’s my still growing collection of Movie Novelizations as well which while tapering off in recent years still stands as a curation of yesterday’s trash paperbacks with a projected short shelf-live now containing books over fifty years ole.
With comic books my reading has mostly shifted to digital as time and money demands more of both from me in other areas. Yet over the last three months I decided to seek out and acquire a complete run of Marvel’s The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones comic book series which ran from 1982-1985 and continued the narrative begun in theaters with Raiders of the Lost Ark, running 34. Back issues remained easy and inexpensive to acquire, but furthermore outside of some astronomically priced trade paperback collections released by Dark Horse Comics in 2008, the only way to read this series was by acquiring the actual individual issues.
Which I did …
Between physical media resurgent and people stepping back from streaming it’s almost enough to give one hope for the the media we love. Even the studios seem to be coming around to admitting that for all their investments in services HBO Max and Paramount Plus, that Netflix is still top dog and that it’s a lot easier (not to mention profitable) to license their films back out rather than keep them under lock and key on their own services which cost a lot to maintain. Just a quick perusal of Netflix and Amazon offerings in January displayed a bounty of DC Warner Superhero titles and giant shark movies that while I had absolutely no interest in actually watching were at least an option whereas before I should have had to subscribe to Max to watch.
Thankfully I have a library; my home library and the public one in our town. That library has an extensive movie collection I can borrow from on a whim, and a library borrow is usually more than enough to scratch a particular itch rather than buy a movie, watch it once, and let it gather dust on my shelf ever after. We’ve come a long way from the days of Blockbuster Video and Tower Records, Borders, Virgin, and Barnes & Noble (the last of which being the only game less standing and even their DVD/Blu-Ray section is a shade of what it once was). I doubt those lost behemoths are coming back, and physical media’s position in our fat-paced world remains precarious, but as long as they’re still producing I’m still buying.
As was the case with the video rental and sales era, there was a golden age of streaming but that age ended with Disney Plus, followed by Peacock, Max, Apple, and all the services cropping up. What once was limited to Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix is now spread out over a dozen rival services. To have access to everything streaming would cost you hundreds a month and you’d never have time to watch all of it (I have films in my Netflix queue I added years ago I still haven’t gotten around to – probably time to admit as much and delete them). We’ve come full circle back around to the 500 channel universe cable TV once promised less than ten years after abandoning it for streaming.
Now, there are some great free ad supported services like Tubi and Plex. I binged in old episodes of CHiPs, Miami Vice, Knight Rider, The A-Team and The Greatest American Hero, and fun lesser-known movies like Raise the Titanic, Southern Comfort, Rolling Thunder, Hell Night, Dreamscape, Strange Invaders, and a lot more. Thanks to PBS and my wife and I being supporters of our local affiliate we have access to a near complete library of documentary series on a variety of subjects. Frontline, Nova, Secrets of the Dead, the American Experience, and scads more.
Books? Obviously I still buy them, having devoted a fair amount of shelf-space to the Movie Paperback collection that carried me through the COVID era, but that too is winding down partially because the easiest “gets” have already been “got” and because I’m legitimately out of room to store them. That said there is nothing, nothing quite like a big bulky expensive book, like this massive Omnibus Edition of The Art of G.I. Joe, all 20 lbs, $150.00 of it:
Collecting things is my hobby, and a good hobby to have. Hobbies are good to have in general and you can tell the difference between those with and those without. The busybody condo association president or HOA member butting into everyone else’s business? No hobbies. The person glued to the daily outrage of their phones? No hobbies. Collecting books, movies, comics, toys, games and the like are a two-fold experience in both the acquisition but also the enjoyment of. I don’t think I’m ever as relaxed, as chill, as I am when stretched out on the sofa reading an actual book printed on actual paper.
That’s the other great factor in favor of physical media: it’s yours, and nobody can take it from you. With the plethora of special-interest groups out in the world agitating for and launching book bans targeting school libraries and public ones, it’s no paranoia to suspect at some point these “goose-stepping morons” (as derisively and accurately named by Henry Jones Sr.) might start gunning for what we watch as well. Not only external forces but internal ones as well. Disney made headlines last year when they began removing low-rated, low-performing original content (like their Willow series spinoff I was never able to find time to watch) from the service, leaving the people who hadn’t yet caught up with them adrift with no other means to watch other than sailing the high seas of Pirate Bay.
All of the above is very much on my mind for another reason as I work my way through the first draft of a narrative non-fiction book based on my popular Celluloid Heroes webseries. Over the course of its 140,000 or so words I take a deep dive into those bellwether GenX films that inspired me to become a storyteller myself. Some of these films are well known like Star Wars, The Goonies, E.T., Back to the Future, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, and Avatar. Lesser known are films like Dragonslayer, Blue Thunder, La Bamba, Singles, Lone Star, The Limey, Bubba Ho-Tep, and Inside Llewyn Davis. To adequately research this book I couldn’t rely on the here today/gone tomorrow world of streaming; I had to draw from my collection of movies and, where lacking, purchase the physical copy of the movies I had yet to own (fortunately I’d say a good three-quarters of the films covered I already owned and the remainder were easy to pick up).
Frankly, the studios would love it if everyone ditched their physical media for streaming. They’d love for you to pay them ten to twenty dollars a month in perpetuity to have access to their respective libraries of films and exclusive streaming services as well. All the more reason to deny them that pound of flesh. Especially as we may be entering a golden age of physical media too, with the resurgence in remastered vinyl, 4K Hi-Def, an upswing in excellent behind the scenes features and more bells and whistles, like the near hour plus of deleted scenes that come with a very affordable version of Cameron Crowe’s grunge-era romantic comedy Singles. You won’t find that on streaming.
With a physical copy there are no ads. There are no disclaimers about content, no un-skippable notices informing you that Gone With The Wind, The Searchers, or even Blazing Saddles were the product of different times, and different mores. A physical movie will not be pulled from your library, and occasionally re-inserted minus offending scenes or minus politically “offensive” episodes, like Community’s infamous “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”.
Which was supposed to be offensive to point out why Dark Elf-face is wrong and … (sighs in irritation)
When art is owned by corporations that corporation decides how accessible it will be. Sometimes maliciously, often times pure indifference. There are many, MANY Canadian bands of my teenage-twenty something years whose music is nowhere to be found online outside of shoddy YouTube clips taped off Much Music thirty years before; National Velvet, Grasshopper, hHead, Glueleg, and many more I’ve forgotten about because they’re otherwise unavailable outside of used record and CD stores, themselves a dying breed.
For years I began to see my shelves laden with books and DVDs, my long-boxes of old comics stowed away in closets and storage spaces as something of a burden; the detritus of a life that’s seen many years, many cities, and many homes. There are e-books, e-comics, and streaming video; who needs physical media anyway? Well, as one who owns examples from all of the above that are out of print, out of circulation, not available to stream, and just plain rare, well, I like to think curating a collection of physical objects still has a place in this digital age. And because of that digital age where things can disappear at the click of a button, holding those objects closer feels more essential than ever.
I like owning things. I like my books, comics, vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, Lego sets, toys, and games. I enjoy having them around me, just like I enjoy being able to decide to pull Excalibur, Tombstone, No Time To Die, Ravenous, The Breakfast Club, The Irishman (thank-you Criterion), the “Space Vampire” episode of Buck Rogers, or binge watch Season One of The Twilight Zone by taking it down off the shelf. These things we own hold their own magic, their own alchemy. There’s still a little thrill I get when the DVD or Blu-Ray menu pops up on the screen and I select “Play” on the remote. In that moment I, not the studio, not the streamer am controlling the horizontal and the vertical. I am deciding what to watch, when to watch, and how to watch.
When was the last time any of us were able to say the same?
I’m up to my neck in revisions to two separate manuscripts, and a non-fiction book proposal at the moment so there won’t be any major updates this month or possibly next. But my new short story “THE SUMMER KIDS” will be available to read on this website on July 1st so mark the date.
In the meanwhile, here’s a quick breakdown of 3-Act structure using STAR WARS Lego sets for your reading and viewing pleasure:
“Writing is an occupation in which you must continuously prove your talent to people who have none.” – Jules Renard
I admit it’s strange to say you miss a person you never met, that you never knew, but if like me you were a fan of his work I think we all felt like we knew Harlan Ellison. Some people I know actually did know him so I suppose in the grand scheme of things I could say Harlan and I were two degrees removed (top THAT, Kevin Bacon, who I’m only four degrees from).
Here was a writer who put himself front and center, to the point that in some circles he was better known for his personality than his writing.
A writer who never hesitated to make noise for himself in an industry where writers are expected to shut up and type and let someone else get the glory.
While I loved his fiction – “A Boy And His Dog”, “The Deathbird”, “Shatterday”, “Paladin of the Lost Hour”, “Mephisto In Onyx” rank among my favorites – I was a greater fan of his non-fiction; his essays on film, on television, on the art of writing, of his own life experience. Harlan laid it all out there and became the first writer as rock star, a figure known in some circles more for being Harlan Ellison, period. Louder and larger than life. He wrote about his father (“My Father”), his mother (“My Mother”), he wrote about the loss of a beloved pet, (“Abhu”). He wrote one of the best unproduced screenplays I ever read (his adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot”). His book “Harlan Ellison’s Watching” collecting years of essays and reviews on film has been a constant companion for more than 25 years.
So if it wasn’t clear, I was and remain an Ellison fan.
He was haunted by the murder of Kitty Genovese (“The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”), he marched through the segregationist south with MLK (“From Alabamy, with Hate”), he was a fierce, fierce advocate for the rights of the working writer, and was unafraid to call out assholes where he saw them. In the movie business and the book biz, they’re plentiful, believe me.
He had a lot of experience in Hollywood, mostly in Television with episodes of shows like Burke’s Law, The Flying Nun (!) and Route 66. His most in famous work though would be the two episodes he wrote for The Outer Limits – “Demon With A Glass Hand” and “Soldier” (both of which became the un-sanctioned inspiration for James Cameron’s The Terminator. Ellison sued, and won both credit on the film and a cash payout).
And his most famous? That would be this one:
Widely regarded as the best episode of the original Star Trek, and source of an infamous rift between Ellison and Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, detailed in Ellison’s book:
Harlan kept all the receipts.
When Harlan passed in 2018, I didn’t mourn, but I did reacquaint myself, pulling my 1012-page softcover of The Essential Ellison off my shelf and spending the next six or so weeks re-reading it cover-to-cover. That was my eulogy, my memorial to a writer who definitely had an influence on me. occasionally his name would pop up on the radar post-mortem, but I figured that was it. He’d specified in his will that all unpublished work be destroyed, leaving his wife Susan to manage his copyright and his estate (sadly Susan followed Harlan two years later). More on that further down.
So it was, back in February, that I attended my first in-person Boskone since early 2020 because, well, reasons. A guest on several panels, I made my customary sweep through the dealer’s room, where to my surprise, I saw my old pal Harlan. He was at the NESFA table; sci-fi and fantasy hardcovers and softcovers on sale to raise money for the New England Science Fiction Association, the fine organization that helps run the Boskone event. Naturally, I couldn’t leave without grabbing the last of two remaining copies of A Lit Fuse. It took a few weeks to get to it – I was immersed in a biography of Buster Keaton at the time- but after cracking A Lit Fuse open I dove back into a world I’d largely forgotten.
On my first big trip to LA as a full-time working writer I made sure one of my stops was the late, sorely missed Dangerous Visons bookstore on Ventura Boulevard. I went because it was a bookstore, but also because it was Harlan’s bookstore. He lived a short drive away, and the name itself was taken from the legendary Dangerous Visions anthology he edited in the 1960s, that sparked a revolution in sci-fi-fantasy writing, breaking it free from the shadows of the pulp and the obscure and made it vital for a new generation of reader.
Naturally I bought a couple of Ellison books; the first two volumes of The Essential Ellison (as well as a now extremely rare signed, slipcase copy of the late Richard Matheson’s Twilight Zone scripts). Given the ridiculous Canada-US exchange rate at the time I estimate I dropped two hundred dollars on books that day, and spent the next month eating Ramen noodles and mac & cheese (ah, the life of a screenwriter just starting out).
Pictured: A screenwriter just starting out
Harlan making himself, warts and all, very public was a bold move, a brave one, and an oddly prescient one. Because today writers are expected to be public. We’re expected to be online, Tweeting and Facebooking and Instagramming our daily lives. We’re supposed to attend workshops and conferences and readings, we’re supposed to campaign for awards, to play the role our industry expects of us.
It’s almost enough to make you want to chuck in the towel.
Because if there is one thing I’ve come to discover about myself it’s that while I still enjoy the act of writing I don’t much enjoy being “a writer”. Certainly not as much as I used to. I enjoy the work, the rewards less so. A blank page does not terrify me the way it does others. I’ve heard writers say again and again that the writing is the least pleasant part of the process, preferring the adulation, the applause of the audience, the commendations that follow publication or production.
Dorothy Parker herself famously said “I don’t enjoy writing; I enjoy having written”. Well, that’s where Dorothy and I part ways. I enjoy writing, and when I’m done writing I write something else.
Clearly I’m the exception. And I’m not in any way blaming other writers for embracing what’s supposed to be fun. The victory lap is important especially for those very talented writers, the men and women for whom writing is therapy and exercising the demons that drive them. Writers and creators who come from traumatic backgrounds, hard upbringings, alcoholic and abusive families, ones who genuinely struggle from PTSD.
Reading Segaloff’s biography of Ellison I found myself remembering the writer I wanted to be. There’s very little of the mid to late-nineties I recall with much nostalgia. It was a depressing time in my life I wouldn’t ever want to repeat. And yet Harlan Ellison, the man, the writer, his stories and non-fiction I do recall in much fonder terms.
I’m definitely closer to the end of my life than I am to the beginning. Harlan once said life should end around age 70 (he lived to see 84). A debilitating stroke incapacitated Harlan some years before his passing; the worst torture for a writer now physically unable to write. Keeling over at my desk seems the best possible retirement for me. I’d hate to spend my remaining years sitting and doing nothing useful with them.
What is most surprising (and a little tragic) to me is that Harlan and his works are slowly being forgotten four years later. Without Susan to manage his estate his books are starting to go out of print. I don’t believe his writings will disappear entirely, but the day will come when some publisher that does retain rights will look at sales figures and decide it’s not worth the cost to a multi-million dollar corporation to keep a deceased author with a dwindling fan-base in print. Food for thought for all the writers out there concerned with their “legacy” and “creating works that outlast me”. I hate to break it to them/us but the likelihood anyone remembers us or our work after we’re gone is slim to none.
There’s a lyric from Canadian band Metric’s gorgeous song “Breathing Underwater” that sort of encapsulates where my head is at the present. It goes; “I can see the end but it hasn’t happened yet”. That’s where I am in my life. I can see the end. It’s (hopefully) a long way off, but it’s undeniably closer now than it used to be. I still have time and plan to make the most of it, but I know I’m nearer to the end of the road than the beginning. There’s still some great scenery, great moments to come, but that end is coming.
To be clear, I don’t see that as a bad thing. We all make the mistake of believing our lives are infinite. If there’s any regret I have it’s the years I wasted, and the time others wasted for me. Knowing what I do now I would have walked away from people and situations a lot sooner than I did. I won’t make that mistake with the time left to me.
Harlan was once asked what he wanted his epitaph to be, and he replied; “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time I mattered.” I think that sums up the human experience as succinctly as anything he wrote. Our lives are brief, and over far too soon, but to our loved ones and to the people we touched through what we created, they matter. Writers like Harlan, like myself, try and snatch a little bit of immortality by producing work we hope will outlive us.
But as the years go on, everything fades.
Even words on a page.
ADDENDUM: I will be back next month with part one of a 3-part series I’m calling “Celluloid Heroes”, in which I take a deep dive look at three movies that changed the course of my life, inspired me, or otherwise made their mark. Following that summer series will be a little treat marking the 5th anniversary of my book MAGICIANS IMPOSSIBLE, so make sure you’re here for that. October will feature a piece on another writer with a great influence on my life, the legendary Ray Bradbury, and I may have a few more surprises in store. Stay tuned. Same Brad-time, same Brad-channel.
