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Horror Veterans of many kinds
Oct. 19th, 2012 09:30 amIn continuing news about awesome veteran actors giving interviews: Martin Landau, looking back at his long life from Hitchcock to Burton. (Tim, not Richard.) (Also apparantly the interviewer isn't a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, because daughter Juliet does not get mentioned.) Very enjoyable to read, especially things like Landau refuting the "doomed to die early and burn out" cliché about James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. Choice quote:
"No, no, no," he says with uncharacteristic emphasis. "Jimmy never talked about dying; Jimmy talked about living. Jimmy's only concern was that he would become an old boy, like Mickey Rooney. When Kazan tested actors for East of Eden, Paul Newman and Jimmy auditioned on the same day. Paul looked like a man when he was 20, whereas Jimmy was still playing high-school kids at 23. So that bothered him a bit. But Jimmy did not want to die.
Vaguely connected via Mr. Landau, who played the man himself in what is still my favourite Tim Burton film bar none, Ed Wood, and got an Oscar for it: a photo of Bela Lugosi at eighteen. Did I mention how thrilled I was to discover that bust of him at the mash up castle in Budapest?
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Being a child in the 70s, growing up in the 80s: as it happens, Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, actually was the first King novel I ever read (i.e. I didn't come to King via his later more famous efforts). It introduced me to the concept of high-school-as-hell two decades before Buffy, and I find a lot of a lot of the observations in this article about rereading the novel decades later (with the awareness of what King archetypes and tropes first show up here, how he would develop etc., hold true for me as well. I'd add that I didn't like the Brian de Palma film as much as the article writer did; in fact I felt let down by it when I saw it, not least because the shift to making Miss Desjardins (called Gardner in the film because apparantly de Palma hadn't twigged that having many Maine characters French surnames had a point for Stephen King) a more prominent character (almost a second and positive mother figure for Carrie) and making Sue Snell a less important one (in the film, you have no idea whether or not she actually wants to help Carrie or is part of the conspiracy against her, and are inclined to believe the later, whereas in the novel for a great part we're in her pov) seemed to me a betrayal of something that had been important to me in the novel. Sue is someone wo does something crappy at the start of the novel, realises she did, and tries to atone for it in a meaningful way, which even if it doesn't work it the way she wants changes her, and for the better. Given what happens to Carrie herself in the novel, this was an important second narrative. And Carrie not having an adult figure she could trust and who actively cared for her is important, too; Miss Desjardins in the book punishing the bullies but not actually doing something constructive to help Carrie in her home situation contributes, in its own way, to the unfolding disaster. (Also I think Miss Desjardins embodies a lot of a young King's own ambiguity about himself as a high school teacher, which he still was at that point, in her anger at her students yet awareness she doesn't make their lives better, either.)
Anyway, Carrie: raw, clumsy, gripping. I read it before actually getting my first period, so one enduring effect was "thank God it happened at home for me and not in school!" Also, young me thought King made Carrie's abusive mother (his first but by no means last take at The Scarily Insane Christian Fanatic) up from scratch and that she was the most unrealistic character of the novel. Which judgment I, err, later was forced to revise. Sadly. And now I'm ponding about favourite and least favourite King novels again, and Misery is probably my favourite still, because of all the writing meta and the perverse twist on the writer and muse concept, followed by Dolores Clairborne. But Carrie is its own category for me: neither a favourite nor a least favourite: a first. In so many ways.
"No, no, no," he says with uncharacteristic emphasis. "Jimmy never talked about dying; Jimmy talked about living. Jimmy's only concern was that he would become an old boy, like Mickey Rooney. When Kazan tested actors for East of Eden, Paul Newman and Jimmy auditioned on the same day. Paul looked like a man when he was 20, whereas Jimmy was still playing high-school kids at 23. So that bothered him a bit. But Jimmy did not want to die.
Vaguely connected via Mr. Landau, who played the man himself in what is still my favourite Tim Burton film bar none, Ed Wood, and got an Oscar for it: a photo of Bela Lugosi at eighteen. Did I mention how thrilled I was to discover that bust of him at the mash up castle in Budapest?
****
Being a child in the 70s, growing up in the 80s: as it happens, Stephen King's first novel, Carrie, actually was the first King novel I ever read (i.e. I didn't come to King via his later more famous efforts). It introduced me to the concept of high-school-as-hell two decades before Buffy, and I find a lot of a lot of the observations in this article about rereading the novel decades later (with the awareness of what King archetypes and tropes first show up here, how he would develop etc., hold true for me as well. I'd add that I didn't like the Brian de Palma film as much as the article writer did; in fact I felt let down by it when I saw it, not least because the shift to making Miss Desjardins (called Gardner in the film because apparantly de Palma hadn't twigged that having many Maine characters French surnames had a point for Stephen King) a more prominent character (almost a second and positive mother figure for Carrie) and making Sue Snell a less important one (in the film, you have no idea whether or not she actually wants to help Carrie or is part of the conspiracy against her, and are inclined to believe the later, whereas in the novel for a great part we're in her pov) seemed to me a betrayal of something that had been important to me in the novel. Sue is someone wo does something crappy at the start of the novel, realises she did, and tries to atone for it in a meaningful way, which even if it doesn't work it the way she wants changes her, and for the better. Given what happens to Carrie herself in the novel, this was an important second narrative. And Carrie not having an adult figure she could trust and who actively cared for her is important, too; Miss Desjardins in the book punishing the bullies but not actually doing something constructive to help Carrie in her home situation contributes, in its own way, to the unfolding disaster. (Also I think Miss Desjardins embodies a lot of a young King's own ambiguity about himself as a high school teacher, which he still was at that point, in her anger at her students yet awareness she doesn't make their lives better, either.)
Anyway, Carrie: raw, clumsy, gripping. I read it before actually getting my first period, so one enduring effect was "thank God it happened at home for me and not in school!" Also, young me thought King made Carrie's abusive mother (his first but by no means last take at The Scarily Insane Christian Fanatic) up from scratch and that she was the most unrealistic character of the novel. Which judgment I, err, later was forced to revise. Sadly. And now I'm ponding about favourite and least favourite King novels again, and Misery is probably my favourite still, because of all the writing meta and the perverse twist on the writer and muse concept, followed by Dolores Clairborne. But Carrie is its own category for me: neither a favourite nor a least favourite: a first. In so many ways.
