Isegoria

Penny Marshall has died, at age 75, “due to complications from diabetes” — after having been diagnosed with lung and brain cancer in 2009 and then making a full recovery.

I didn’t know much about her early life and career:

Carole Penny Marshall was born in the Bronx. Her mother taught tap dancing, while her father directed industrial films. She attended the University of New Mexico for 2½ years. While there, Marshall got pregnant at 19, and soon thereafter married the father, a football player.

Marshall made her screen debut in 1968 with small roles in Richard Rush’s “The Savage Seven” and Jerry Paris’ “How Sweet It Is!,” on which her brother Garry was a writer. She also had small roles in Paris’ 1970 film “The Grasshopper,” but she found much more work on television, guesting on series including “That Girl,” “Love, American Style” and “The Bob Newhart Show.”

From 1972-74 she recurred on “The Odd Couple,” a show developed for TV by brother Garry, as Myrna, the schlumpy secretary employed by Jack Klugman’s Oscar Madison. (Marshall reprised the role for the 1993 reunion movie, “The Odd Couple: Together Again”).

She was a series regular on the critically acclaimed but short-lived CBS sitcom “Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers,” in which she played Janice, who frequently mocked her brother-in-law, played by Sand, for his romantic failures.

In 1975 she guested on “Mary Tyler Moore” but, more importantly, on “Happy Days,” where Marshall’s Laverne De Fazio and Cindy Williams’ Shirley Feeney first appeared on an episode where Fonzie chooses two girls from his little black book for a double date with Ron Howard’s Richie. (“Happy Days” was, like “The Odd Couple,” co-created by Penny’s brother Garry Marshall); letters to the show revealed that viewers liked the Laverne and Shirley characters, and when Garry Marshall was asked by then ABC programming exec Fred Silverman to come up with an idea for another sitcom with which to build a Tuesday night comedy block, he devised “Laverne & Shirley.”

While thinking about where hippies come from, I revisited Bohemianism, which seems like an odd name for a similar phenomenon:

Literary “Bohemians” were associated in the French imagination with roving Romani people (called Bohémiens because they were believed to have arrived from Bohemia), outsiders apart from conventional society and untroubled by its disapproval. The term carries a connotation of arcane enlightenment (the opposite of Philistines), and carries a less frequently intended, pejorative connotation of carelessness about personal hygiene and marital fidelity.

The title character in Carmen (1876), a French opera set in the Spanish city of Seville, is referred to as a “bohémienne” in Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto. Her signature aria declares love itself to be a “gypsy child” (enfant de Bohême), going where it pleases and obeying no laws.

Where did hippies come from?

Were they a totally novel development, as they were portrayed at the time?

In 1948, jazz crooner Nat King Cole was on Top of the Pops for eight straight weeks with the single “Nature Boy.” The song became a standard and was recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee. (Much later, director Baz Luhrmann had a haggard Ewan McGregor type out the chorus at the end of his 2001 film Moulin Rouge.)

The record set off a brief journalistic frenzy in 1948 over its hitherto unknown lyricist eden ahbez, who had long hair and a beard, dressed in a robe and sandals, ate only fruits and nuts, had given himself a Book of Genesis first name and cosmic A-to-Z last name, and lived in a tent under the first “L” in the “Hollywood” sign.

In other words, years before the word was coined in the 1960s, this guy was a hippie. He and the dozen or so other robe-wearing proto-hippies who hung around a German couple’s health-food store in Laurel Canyon called themselves “Nature Boys.” Hence the song’s odd title.

Trying to figure out the story behind this weird anomaly led me to a 2003 article entitled “Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture” by Gordon Kennedy and Kody Ryan. They make the case for the origins of the hippie phenomenon in late-19th-century Germany: nudism, hiking (Wandervogel), health food, and the whole back to nature “life reform” business. It’s all more or less German.

This helps explain an odd phenomenon I noticed while hiking with my father in the Hollywood Hills above Laurel Canyon in the 1960s-1980s: About one out of four people we’d pass on the trails would reply to “Good day” with “Guten tag” or a Nordic equivalent. (Then during the early 1990s recession, hiking became fashionable in LA and the Teutonic flavor was quickly swamped.)

I’m a bit surprised the Sailer’s surprised by this. German Romanticism led to both hippies and Nazis. Many New Age ideas go back to Rudolph Steiner and the Theosophists — including pursuit of the almighty Vril.

In high school, Steve Sailer and his classmates were assigned Alvin Toffler’s 1970 bestseller Future Shock, about how the ever-accelerating waves of change would soon overwhelm us — but it didn’t happen:

Instead, mass society fragmented and thereby stabilized. My cousin, for example, remains a hippie, and he’s recently talked his mother into wanting to go to Burning Man. Today, nobody much cares: Burning Man seems less shocking than funny.

Yet when I was a small boy, virtually every male in America, except perhaps violin soloists, had short hair.

It’s difficult to make clear just how big a deal hair length was in the 1960s. When I was six in 1965, my family went to England. We were sitting around at Heathrow waiting for our flight back to the US when a young man with collar-length hair walked into the waiting room. “It’s a Beatle!” screamed a girl. The excited crowd surged toward John, Paul, George, or, possibly, Ringo. I dispatched my mother to get the Beatle’s autograph. She returned bearing the signature “Peter Noone,” the lead singer of Herman’s Hermits.

The point of this anecdote is that in 1965 so few males had hair covering two-thirds of their ears that transatlantic travelers assumed that anybody who did must be a rock star. (And we were right.)

“Perhaps Ecclesiastes got it right.”

I can pin down when rock fans started to let their hair grow. Buffalo Springfield’s remarkable single “For What It’s Worth” (“Stop, children, what’s that sound?”) is usually thought of as an early Vietnam War protest song, but it was actually inspired by the Sunset Strip curfew riots over the planned demolition of the Pandora’s Box nightclub. Even in November 1966, however, a mob of protesting Los Angeles rock fans looked clean-cut.

That must have been the last time they got their hair cut. In the summer of 1967, some visitors wanted to “go see the hippies,” so my parents drove us over Laurel Canyon to Sunset. The Strip was jammed with us tourists agog over the longhairs.

After a while, though, you got used to odd new social phenomena like this sweeping the world. In fact, soon everybody expected it. A decade after 1967’s Summer of Love, for instance, the media were all primed for punks to take over. After all, an entire ten years had gone by! (That was 35 years ago.) In 1979, everybody was told to dress in 2 Tone black-and-white clothes and listen to ska, but diminishing returns were visibly encroaching.

The new Watership Down trailer doesn’t look good, I’m afraid:

The book — yes, the one about the rabbits — is one of the classics of fantasy.

Richard Adams passed away two years ago, but a couple years before that he did an ask-me-anything, where he explained that Hazel was based on someone he knew in real life:

Yes! I had the good luck to get accepted for service in airborne forces during world war 2. Not everybody who put their name forward was accepted for it. I felt tremendously proud. I went as an officer to 250 light company RASC airborne. The commanding officer was a Major called John Gifford. I admired him tremendously. He was very quiet — in fact one of the quietest I’ve ever known. Regardless all of his commanding officers respected him and obeyed him without question. All his officers were parachutists whether they were commanders or not. My point is that everyone in 250 light company respected and admired him, and he certainly influenced Hazel. He was so sensible. Not all commanders are sensible! I would even say his officers loved him.

In 1975, Christopher Tolkien left his fellowship at New College, Oxford, to edit his late father’s massive legendarium:

The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.

A large portion of the archive concerned the history of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, Middle-earth. The notes contained a broader picture of a universe only hinted at in Tolkien’s two bestselling novels, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Tolkien had intended to bring that picture to light in a lengthy, solemn history going back to creation itself, but he died before completing a final, coherent version.

Christopher took it upon himself to edit that book, which was published in 1977 as The Silmarillion. He then turned to another project drawn from his father’s papers, then another—ultimately publishing poetry, academic works, fiction, and a 12-volume history of the creation of Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin, published in August, is the 25th posthumous book Christopher Tolkien has produced from his father’s archives.

Now, after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings.

[...]

The Inklings (and such of their forebears as Chesterton) sought to explain that there was nothing absurd in the secular and the sacred living cheek by jowl. In fact, it’s quite likely that one may find oneself, in Woolf’s phrase, “sitting by the fire” alongside a wizard who witnessed the singing of creation into being — as indeed Bilbo Baggins does.

This is not to say that the Inklings simply fled into a nostalgic past. They rather sought to apply its lessons to a violent and difficult present. If the Bagginses resemble throwback Victorian gentlemen and the other hobbits suggest plain English country folk of ages past, much else in The Lord of the Rings, from Saruman’s terrible machines to the mangled bodies on the Pelennor Fields, resembles the 20th century. The story ends with the Shire, which Tolkien described as “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee,” ravaged by war. Frodo, experiencing a sort of spiritual shell shock, can find no peace even when the war is long over.

The Inklings weren’t escapists. They were, Flieger writes, “a response to a response, and thus a continuation of the dialogue…. If the period surrounding the Great War gave birth to modernism, it also engendered the reaction against it, the effort to ensure that ‘before’ was not wholly lost in ‘after.’”

Neovictorian reviews The Brave and the Bold, Volume 3 of The Hidden Truth, which I also enjoyed, but this quick aside is what most caught my eye:

Meanwhile, I understand that Dr. Schantz is working on a popular physics book with some ideas about how to resolve the so-called “paradoxes” of quantum mechanics.

Yes, please.

Yes, please, indeed.

Not every lesson can be taught explicitly:

Fairy Tales are written to speak to the emotional language of children — to present a problem that is both vague and foreign on the surface, but highly relatable to the child’s subconscious fears, and then to provide the child with practical, cautionary advice for problems yet to come or coping strategies for problems which have no solution.

[...]

Horror movies can give a child space to deal with their fears in the realm of fantasy while they subconsciously work on bringing the eventual reality of those fears to manageable terms.

[...]

Life without story could be broken down into a series of bullet point instructions, which may seem efficient but would prove ineffective. People need the space and distance that that fantasy can provide. That same space and distance can afford someone the time to mentally process the fears, anxieties, and grief which are overwhelming and incomprehensible. Stories for children need to be more than losers winning despite being losers. Stories for children need to begin helping them develop their emotional tool-kit, or else there will one day be a world of adults unable to cope with everything that is inevitable.

William Goldman has died at age 87:

He was born in Chicago, went to Oberlin College in Ohio, served briefly in the military and got a master’s in English from Columbia University in New York.

He launched a successful literary career immediately after graduating from Columbia with his first novel, The Temple of Gold. A series of well-received and sometimes bestselling novels followed.

Then, in 1965, Goldman started to shift into movie territory. He helped on the script for Masquerade (1965) and adapted Harper (1966). Then he wrote his first-ever original screenplay.

That beginner’s stab at screenwriting was none other than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It sold for the then-record sum of $400,000 (some $3 million in 2018 dollars) and won Goldman an Oscar in 1970 for best original screenplay.

That was just the start. Goldman went on to adapt The Stepford Wives, adapt All the President’s Men — another Oscar-winning screenplay — and turn his own novels Marathon Man and Magic into films.

Ten screenplays later, Goldman still didn’t see himself as a Hollywood man. “I’m not a screenwriter,” he told The New York Times in 1979. “I’m a novelist who writes screenplays.”

But he knew enough to write the definitive guide to screenwriting. Adventures in the Screen Trade was published in 1983 and became a bestseller. Screenwriting professor George Huang tells NPR’s Neda Ulaby the book “was like the Bible in the industry” — and that the advice in it still holds up today.

And then there was The Princess Bride.

The 1987 film, which Goldman adapted from his own novel, performed modestly at the box office upon its initial release. But as the years passed, it found a passionate following. Lines from the movie have woven their way into the fabric of pop culture — “Inconceivable!” “Aaaaas youuuuu wiiiiiish.” “Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”

Ralph Bakshi’s animated The Lord of the Rings hit theaters on Nov. 15, 1978, after taking a hard road, a road unforeseen:

“I’m sitting in my office and I read that United Artists was going to make Lord of the Rings as a live-action picture written and directed by John Boorman,” says the now-80-year-old animation director, whose success with adult-oriented cult favorites Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic paved the way for him to make Wizards at the time. “But they were going to condense three books into one picture and add extra characters to make it work. For a Tolkien fan, I thought that was the stupidest thing I’d heard in my fuckin’ life. … You can’t squeeze those three books into one picture unless you’re making a Roger Corman film.”

[...]

The $1.3 million budgeted, politically acute Wizards incorporated a number of Tolkienesque characters in its post-apocalyptic setting, from fairies and elves and dwarves to the title characters themselves. As Bakshi’s animation studio was finishing the film, he learned that Mike Medavoy, who was running United Artists at the time, had put Boorman’s adaptation into turnaround.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, why don’t I go make the film?’ recalls Bakshi. “So I call up Mike Medavoy and I go to United Artists, which in those days were on the same lot as MGM. In the main building on one side of the building was MGM — which Dan Melnick ran in those days — and on the other side was Mike Medavoy at UA. I went to see Mike in his office and he says, ‘Look, I’ve got this script and I don’t understand it. I never read the book. We don’t want to make the picture. What do you want to do?’ I said, ‘I want to animate it. Three pictures.’ He said, ‘We don’t want the picture. What we want is our three million dollars back for the screenplay that we paid Boorman. So I’ll give you the rights, and if you can get our money back you can make the picture any way you want.’ True story.”

So Bakshi went straight across the hall to MGM to try to persuade Melnick. Peter Bogdanavich happened to be pitching a project with the studio head behind closed doors, but Bakshi talked his way into the office and dangled the rights to Rings in front of them. Melnick immediately bit. “Bogdanavich had to leave the room, never to speak to me again for the rest of my life,” says Bakshi with a chuckle. “We crossed the hallway to Medavoy’s office and Danny says to Mike, ‘Okay, I want to make the film with Ralph. What do you want?’ And Mike says, ‘Three million dollars for my screenplay back. And Melnick says, ‘You got it.’ They shake hands. Medavoy, whose job was just saved, gets on his feet and shakes my hand, almost crying. I got back his money. He was off the hook.” Bakshi then immediately got on the phone with his lawyer, Bruce Ramer (also Steven Spielberg’s lawyer, who infamously named the shark from Jaws after him), who sealed the deal with MGM that afternoon.

“So I’ve got the rights, I’ve got the film financing from MGM, Medavoy’s off the hook, I’m going to make three pictures, and I’ve also got $200,000 to start the storyboards. It wasn’t a bad day’s work, right?”

As Bakshi’s animation company was winding up Wizards, a whole division was established to develop The Lord of the Rings. Then he read in the trades that Dan Melnick just got fired. “I thought, ‘Shhhhit,’” groans Bakshi. Richard Shepherd was now heading up production at MGM, so the director and his lawyer set up a meeting to confirm that the project was still on track. “He says, ‘I don’t understand the picture. I don’t want to make it,’” recalls Bakshi. “You had two people in Hollywood in those days; people who read books who got the picture, and people who didn’t read books and didn’t get the picture. ‘Is Lord of the Rings about a wedding?’ I said, ‘No, it’s not about a wedding.’ Now I’m angry.”

Bakshi wanted the rights back and Shepherd wanted his money back. But the animation director was headway into pre-production and did not have the funds to simply hand back the $200,000. So he called producer/record exec Saul Zaentz, who “made a fortune” on the Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic soundtracks: “Saul Zaentz had made One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest on the Fritz the Cat money he made. Fritz the Cat was done for under a million dollars and made at some point $60 or $70 million, so he was rolling in money. He gets on a plane that afternoon, he makes a deal with my lawyer to finance all three films and pay MGM back their money and have UA distribute the film — that’s Medavoy, who’s more than happy because now he gets his film back without him putting a penny in it. So I’m set.”

[...]

Armed with a script delivered after multiple revisions by Peter S. Beagle and Chris Conkling, Bakshi had his blessing and was ready to go with the first film in the series, budgeted at $8 million. “A fortune for me; I’m rolling in dough,” he says. Given carte blanche and the choice of making a live-action or an animated adaptation of the sprawling story, Bakshi sided with animation: “I owed it to my guys. All the animators were my friends and I didn’t want to let them go. It was a question of getting behind my guys who stood behind me on all my films.”

[...]

“We didn’t have motion control in those days; there were no computers,” he says. “[Rotoscoping] was a tremendous way to get realism in a picture. … When it came to Rings I was really trapped on the deadline. I came up with the technique of instead of tracing the photograph, I would put the actual photograph [in high-contrast] right on the animated cel and paint it. … The short time allowed me to take a chance on some stuff that worked out unbelievably.… If a director has no money, he’s got to find a way to find the style or shooting technique to make the lack of money disappear and at least be emotionally right, which is everything. Without emotion, you don’t have a scene.”

I could have sworn I’d mentioned this anecdote before:

While upwards of 3,000 animators worked diligently on the established footage, Bakshi hammered away at the Orc action scenes and the battle of Helm’s Deep in Spain, battling the elements — and some politics — in the process. The crew shot at The Castle of Belmonte, the same 15th-century stronghold in Castilla-La Mancha that hosted Charlton Heston’s production of El Cid.

“I’m on the wall of the castle, it’s windy, it’s cold, I’m freezing,” says Bakshi of one particular battle sequence that employed nine cameras to run at once. “Coming in from the various towns are hundreds and hundreds of townsfolk, they all line up, they get fed, they’re going to be Orcs with shields, spears, costumes. All morning and in the afternoon we’re dressing, and now we’re running around doing composition. … We’re finally ready to roll, so I said, ‘Roll camera one, roll camera two, roll camera three, roll camera four, roll camera five’ — we only have one take on this so I have all the cameras rolling. By the time I get to camera six, some guy stands up in the middle of the composition, takes off his head and helmet — he’s the communist leader — he said, ’It’s time for lunch!’ Everyone drops their spears and their costumes and they walk off to lunch. But not to miss a shot, I keep the cameras rolling. I knew at the end of Helm’s Deep I’d have to get some shot of Orcs walking away in disgust. So we used a couple shots of people walking away later in the film. And we had to reset and reshoot and we finally got the shot. I’ll never forget it.”

I can’t believe Bakshi made the film without taking advantage of any of this:

As the picture was taking shape, both Led Zeppelin and Mick Jagger circled the project with interest. Zeppelin is well known for their multiple Rings references (to Mordor, Gollum, Ringwraiths and more) in such songs as “Ramble On,” “Misty Mountain Hop” and “The Battle of Evermore.” Bakshi approached the band to use their music as the soundtrack to the film and he says they responded with an enthusiastic “absolutely!” But according to Bakshi, producer Zaentz, which owned Fantasy Records, couldn’t get the music rights, as the top-selling band’s contract prevented them from working for another label. “He passed and he got me Leonard Rosenman [to compose the orchestral soundtrack],” says Bakshi. “He was good. I didn’t mind him. He had a good reputation. But Led Zeppelin would have blown off the roof of the picture. So I lost that one.”

As for Jagger, the Rolling Stones frontman learned of the production and was keen on getting involved. “So I get a call from Mick Jagger — he wanted to come up and see what we were doing on Rings,” recalls Bakshi.“[My studio on Hollywood and Vine] is full of college kids all graduated from art school, a very young group. So I’m walking through the studio with Mick Jagger and the girls start to scream and faint. I had 2,200-3,000 people working on four floors, and the word spread to each floor that Jagger is walking around, and people got from one floor to the other through the staircase, and there was thunder like horsemen coming down, shaking the staircase. My son was there for the summer and he was terrified — he hid in the bathroom. So that was just hysterical. … [Jagger] wanted to do the voice of Frodo. I told him I would have used him easily but I was already recorded and everything. He’d be a pretty good Frodo, I guess. I don’t know.”

The film is flawed, but its fatal flaw isn’t really Bakshi’s fault:

“I wanted three or four more months for editing. I was exhausted. I was tired. I was burnt out from Spain and shooting, and I didn’t want to make the deadline, which was [right before] Christmas,” he remembers. “What you’re looking at is the first rough try on my part. So I had a big fight with [the studio to buy more time]. ‘We can’t. We’ve got the theaters booked, we’ve got the popcorn in the theaters — you know, that bullshit. So that was the first blow. The second blow was when I handed it in a week before release, what we used to call wet prints, to the theater. They showed me the advertising campaign and I said, ‘Where’s the Part One?’ And that’s when I found out.”

A key criticism of Bakshi’s Rings final cut was the fact that the story simply ends after the battle of Helm’s Deep, with a narrative voiceover explaining, “as their gallant battle ended, so too ends the first great tale of The Lord of the Rings.” Fans of the source material felt duped, and even the uninitiated were scratching their collective heads over the ending because they never got to see Frodo throw the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

“I had a huge fight with [Zaentz] and I didn’t want to do Part Two,” says Bakshi.“It may sound odd to you today. We came from a different breed in those days. … Life was too short to spend your time with a bunch of people that you didn’t want to be with. In other words, people that would screw you over that way after you made so much money for them. You don’t want to spend another eight years with those guys. … That wasn’t an easy decision to leave, because I loved Tolkien.”

Bakshi can get pretty defensive about The Lord of the Rings. His earlier Wizards isn’t good, but it is oddly compelling. His later Fire and Ice isn’t a good film, either, but it does feature some amazing rotoscoped action sequences atop beautifully lush background paintings.