The ending of Budd Schulberg’s extraordinary life at age 95 tonight is just a little strange for me personally. By a very odd coincidence, just last night I finished watching the 1959 TV production of “What Makes Sammy Run?,” Schulberg’s great and possibly never-to-be-filmed 1941 novel about Hollywood dehumanization (yes, it goes back that far, at least). The DVD included an interview he gave just last year and, given his age and fairly obvious frailty, I wondered how long it would be before I’d be writing one of these posts on him. He was not a young man, but this is still too soon.

Anyhow, what can you say about the writer of “On the Waterfront” and “A Face in the Crowd” — two of the most acclaimed screenplays ever written — and the nastily on-point movie business novel which was so effective it drove John Wayne to physical violence? Of course, Schulberg got it from all sides, though for differing reasons.

Like most liberals, I have serious complaints with how Schulberg comported himself during the McCarthy era, and certain lines in both of his great scripts slightly stick in my craw. While, unlike many, he never abandoned his liberalism, it’s clear to me that his entirely justified anticommunism took a form that helped that American extreme-right,  harmed the first amendment, and bolstered the most vicious aspects of U.S. foreign policy. Still, there’s no denying the power and clarity of his writing or the moral values they expressed at their best.

As it happens, I posted one great scene from “A Face in the Crowd” last week. Here’s another clip from that should knock your socks off.

From the only surviving dramatization of the ultimate Hollywood novel.

“On the Waterfront” has never been a huge personal favorite of mine, but it’s easy to see why this became one of the most famous scenes ever in movie history. And it’s more than five minutes of two guys talking in the back of a cab with no action or movement other than the tremendous emotions between two brothers. Hard to imagine anyone in mainstream movies having the guts to pull this one off now.

H/t The Auteurs Daily Feed

The talk might be all peace — well, the prospect for it — love, and closing down Gitmo in Washington. And in Hollywood, post Oscar annoucement, the main matter of concern for those not attending Sundance might be that now we all really do have to see Benjamin Button even if — like me — you’re kind of dreading it.

But via cinephile newsmeister David Hudson, we learn that, as per Anne Thompson, fists are flying in Park City, Utah. Well, one fist flew, anyway. And not just any fist but one belonging to well known critic John Anderson and his target was Jeff “the Dude” Dowd — and if there’s any film fans reading who aren’t at least dimly aware that producer’s rep Dowd, a sort of super-agent/salesperson for independent films, was the model for Jeff Bridges’ “Dude” in The Big Lebowski, I’d be surprised.

Beyond noting that Park City during Sundance really is a stressful environment and, given the constant lay-offs in the print media and open season on movie critics, this might not be a good time to antagonize them. I will also say that I and my laptop practically lived in the place where the not-quite brawl apparently took place: the friendly and fairly intimate restaurant/bar of the Yarrow Hotel, where most of the press screenings are held and which became a beloved refuge for me during my single ten-day Sundance stretch back in 2005.

Technically a private club because of Utah’s unsurprising blue laws, it’s not a very big place, so the altercation must have been a sight to see. Also, given the genuine niceness of the staff — who  collectively allowed me to click away for hours with fairly minimal purchases of coffee, burgers, and the very occasional post-writing beer — I’m glad there wasn’t too big a mess and they now have another good story to tell about those crazy people from Hollywood.

A bit of Christmas bummer via Greencine.

I’m still making up my mind about whether or not the Nobel Prize winning Mr. Pinter was a great writer for me, personally, (and I need to revisit even the relatively small part of his work I already know and important works I’ve missed, particularly the film of Betrayal, or any version of “The Dumbwaiter” and, I guess, The Homecoming…which I think I’ve seen in some in some form…maybe). However, there’s certainly no denying his influence both on the stage and screen worlds.

For me, watching his work (either on film or as radio plays, so far) was either complete fascination or kind of completely the opposite, sometimes in the same piece. If anything, it’s the radio plays that I’ve heard, mostly in pieces, which I’ve found more consistently hypnotic, but that’s just me.

In any case, I’m sure he would want us to be terse at this point.

Me: So, I put on a YouTube video…..Is that  alright?

You: Yes, yes it is.

Me: Alright, then.

Sad news via Greencine, the world’s best known and most beloved genre fan has passed on at age 92.

If you grew up a geek in Los Angeles — and, as the four semester president of the Venice High Science Club and, before that, the one term prexy of the Junior Count Dracula Society (an even odder story than it sounds), boy, did I ever — you could not avoid the man everyone knew as “Forry.” For those of you unfamiliar with Mr. Ackerman’s work, he was basically the ultimate fan — “Mr. Sci-Fi” he was dubbed, for he apparently coined the name that many an SF geek with literary pretentions refused to use but that everyone else has taken up ever since. (Even though I haven’t been anything resembling a rabid science fiction purist for decades, I still can’t bring myself to call it that.)

He started his career as a literary agent, whose clients included, among many others, Isaac Asimov, his longtime friend Ray Bradbury, and (I’m pretty sure) the great pulp writer and screenplay collaborator Leigh Brackett (Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye, The Empire Strikes Back). At the other end of the scale, his Wikipedia entry reminds me that he was also the “illiterary” agent to, you read it here, Ed Wood.

Despite what appears to have been some definite financial success on that account, however, his greatest professional achievement was probably as the editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, the backbone of Jim Warren’s crude publishing empire that later branched off into semi-adult black and white comic books — also led by another creation of Forry’s, Vampirella. He was also one of the primary founders of the LASFS – the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (as per its website “this world’s oldest continuously-meeting science-fiction and fantasy club”) which just had a convention over Thanksgiving weekend and which I hope he was able to attend.

Still, at least in these parts, he was best known and loved as the owner of the Ackermansion, his own home and the setting for easily the most impressive collection of horror and…okay…sci-fi related memorabilia and antiquities known to man. When, he moved to smaller quarters in 2002, a collective sigh was heard throughout L.A.’s Geek-American community.

I have two strong personal memories of Mr. Ackerman — who showed up at practically any sf/horror/genre film/comics event you could name for decades. One was when, prior to the first Westal Administration, he escorted my aforementioned high school science fiction club through the Ackermansion, showing off the original robot Maria from Metropolis and some of animator Willis O’Brien’s original models from the 1933 King Kong as well as the 1926 copy of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories that had started him on his life’s journey at the age of ten. I also remember seeing him when I was probably seventeen or so at Westercon, the largest West Coast science fiction convention that wasn’t focused on Star Trek and that upstart newbie, Star Wars. It was a late night, 16mm screening of a movie that remains a big favorite of mine, the 1973 The Wicker Man.

Just before it started, I turned around and saw the then-sixty-something Forry sprawling across several chairs for an 11:00 screening of a movie he’d probably already seen a few times. (True, it was before even VHS was all that common and it wasn’t exactly easy to see.) He smiled and gave me a wave though he could not possibly know who I was other than just another fellow enthusiast. He was just happy to be watching an obscure movie on a bad projector in a hotel ballroom. A fan through and through.

UPDATE: It’s absolutely no surprise that there’s been a great deal posted about this notable passing since I first wrote this yesterday morning. You can find most of it via good ol’ Dennis Cozzalio’s predictably remarkable post. Of course, Dennis is a true blue horror fan of the first order, and like Guillermo del Toro, accepted monsters into his heart at an early age, so he very much knows whereof…. Anyhow, along with his personal reminiscences on the importance of Famous Monsters to him and to the horror world in general, he’s also posted a three-part video epic documenting his own 1998 visit to the Ackermansion. I call that appointment online viewing if ever there was.

Dennis also links to some worthwhile posts, including one from Tim Lucas, which alludes to some controversies I was totally unaware of. The only criticisms I ever heard of Forry or his magazines had to do with his coinage of “sci-fi,” and the crude writing and bad puns in his magazines. (As a blogger with a love of borsht belt humor, I’m hardly in a position to criticize on either score). Otherwise, everyone seemed to love him personally and respect his work as the ultimate fan and his friendliness to true geeks of all levels was legendary. At least on the most public level, what was there not to like?

Admittedly, the current version of the Famous Monsters wikipedia entry (which I’m not linking to because I’m somewhat suspicious of some of what’s in it right now) seems if not perhaps one-sided, more than a little strange, in its discussion of a lawsuit that, along with our barbaric health care system, reportedly had a lot to do with so tragically draining Ackerman’s resources and forcing him to sell off large chunks of his collection. But, hey, it’s Mr. Sci-Fi/Monsters, we’re talking about, so a little strangeness seems apt.

On a much more positive note, Dennis also links to Glenn Kenny and some extremely worthwhile comments. And it was via Kenny, I stumbled upon this really poignant 2003 Los Angeles Times article by Hillary MacGregor, who apparently tolerated a bit of flirtation from the late octogenarian with very good humor, reposted on their Daily Mirror blog. I was especially taken by a section discussing one of Forry’s lesser known passions…. the long-ago attempt at a one-world language designed to bring on world peace.

….In a mishmash of what sounds like French, Spanish and Italian that is somehow comprehensible to any liberal arts graduate, he tells a visitor her eyes are beautiful, her height striking. He is speaking Esperanto. “In the 20s and 30s, some science fiction stories of the future mentioned that everyone would one day speak Esperanto,” he says. “For me it was like time travel. It was like going 100 years into the future. And if I could bring back a bottle of something, I would be thrilled. At least I could bring back the language everyone would be speaking.”

Something about Ackerman’s snippet of Esperanto seems to capture the soul of science fiction, and of Ackerman himself. It speaks to a utopian vision cherished by people who fantasize about a world where Martians and Klingons and humans can all speak the same language and get along. It is the view of an optimist, the view of a man whose slogan is “Save humanity with science and sanity.”"

Again, what’s not to like?

As per Greencine, probably one of the two or three best known authors under fifty has died. According to the Los Angeles Times, his wife reporteds he hanged himself at his home in Claremont, a smoggy college town about an hour east of Los Angeles.

Honestly, I’ve only read maybe a few articles and one or at most two or three short stories by David Foster Wallace and never even made up my mind whether or not I cared for his style of writing. (Interesting as both Wallace and I are fond of digressions — though rather than fighting the impulse, as I try and usually fail to do, Wallace made digressions and extensive footnotes his style. For what it’s worth, I’m undecided or negative, at least right now, on the writers he is often compared to.) Even so, I’m sure I may wind up picking up Infinite Jest at a garage sale or used book store and maybe give it a go at some point — like the book of short stories and articles by him I have packed away in a box somewhere. Nevertheless, considering his popularity and what will no doubt be a lasting influence in today’s literary and film world, this is simply too big to ignore here.

It’s probably inappropriate, but I’ve got to admit that my primary feeling about this is anger. I’ve never suffered from extreme, full-scale depression, so I can’t (or shouldn’t) judge. One thing I know, in one case from personal experience, is that suicide is very much a meme, a sort of contagion. The people who do it tend to have known others who’ve done it. So, every time a depressed famous writer commits suicide, he’s putting that idea out there not only for everyone who knows him, but for other depressed famous writers.

It would be absurd to blame Wallace’s death on, say, Ernest Hemingway or Hunter Thompson (who was ill and had never planned to have an ordinary old age), but the disease of suicide has a way of spreading and the only way to stop the spread is to do what you have to do to figure out a way to make life livable. Also, the only Wallace fiction I’m sure I’ve read was a biting short story called “The Depressed Person“* — a sort of attack on a woman who tries to make her anguish the primary occupation of all her know her. If he could see the selfishness of this character and her needy behavior, why couldn’t he see that suicide was the ultimate cry for attention — and, in a writer’s case, a way to increase your level of fame without having to write anything? Now, the chances of suicide have gone up in Wallace’s circle and, perhaps, slightly, for his fans, especially the writers among them.

I have no idea what Wallace was going through, but I wish he’d tried a little harder to break the chain. It’s still a beautiful world and part of what makes it that way are incredibly smart, incredibly troubled and neurotic people like Wallace.

(*Note: The link above won’t allow you to read the actual story unless you subscribe to Harper’s, but that’s never a bad thing to do.)

UPDATED: In comments, Stacia brings up some legitimate points, and I respond.