Yuletide Reveal!

[selenak]

This year, I wrote what turned out to be the longest stories in the realm of fanfiction that I ever did, and enjoyed every minute of it, though the fretting afterwards once they were beta'd and posted was, as always, abominable. They were my love declarations to early Hollywood and the Swinging Sixties respectively, and here they are, courtesy of the neat "share" button at the AO3:


Lebenswerk (9874 words) by Selena
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Sunset Boulevard (1950)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Norma Desmond/Max von Mayerling, Norma Desmond/Joe Gillis
Characters: Max von Mayerling, Norma Desmond, Cecil B. DeMille, Noah Cross (Chinatown), Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Joe Gillis, Mabel Normand
Summary:

Eight movies Max von Mayerling made with Norma Desmond. Max, Norma, and the camera: their story from the beginning to the end.

You may recall there was a bit confusion when I got my assignment, and I was thus worried whether or not the recipient would like the story at all. As it turns out, she was the ideal audience every writer dreams of, giving extensive feedback for every chapter and writing a lovely overall review here. This was a big relief, not least because Sunset Boulevard is one of my favourite movies of all time, and when you play in the universe of the late, great Billy Wilder, you really don't want to make a mess of things.



When I saw Sunset Boulevard among the nominated fandoms, I knew I'd include it in my offerings, but getting matched on it was still a (pleasant) surprise. Now I had written meta on it before, but never fanfiction. Which story should it be? What came to mind after rewatching, which I did practically as soon as I had gotten the assignment, was the backstory which the film gives us tidbits of: Norma Desmond's career, and that of the man who was her first husband and director and whom we meet as her butler in Sunset Boulevard, Max von Mayerling. How did their relationship develop? How did the young girl whom both Max and Cecil B.DeMille describe as having more courage than any of them become the woman so unable to face reality that in the end, she retreats completly into her madness? What made Max chose staying with Norma even as a servant over continuing as a director? To coin a phrase, a story was born. :) (I may also have been itching to work out my frustrations about The Artist.)

I'm reasonably well versed in the history of silent film and in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, but I had to brush up in order to avoid major gaffes nonetheless, and also in order to construct a plausible time line for Max and Norma. The actors who played them, Erich von Stroheim and Gloria Swanson, provided a useful template, but not an infallible one; the biggest difference is of course that Stroheim and Swanson were never married, or even lovers, and the second biggest that they never lost touch with reality the way Max and Norma did. Still, their stories provided handy guide lines, oh, and also movie stills. Once I had found out that it was very easy to find photos of a young Gloria Swanson and a young Erich von Stroheim on the internet, I couldn't resist the temptation of using them, something that I had never done in fanfiction before. But this particular universe, with Sunset Boulevard being the ultimate "Hollywood on Hollywood" film, seemed practically to demand it. The pictures got very small indeed, Norma. But you still look magnificent in them.

(Once I had posted the story, I started to worry that people would be put off by the stills, or would think a chapter had ended when a photo came in the middle of it, or what not, and was going to and throw about deleting them until practically the minute the archive opened. In the end, I'm glad I didn't, because the feedback for them was positive.)

One example of using real life incidents in a fictional way: Erich von Stroheim's career as a director (not as an actor: unlike Max von Mayerling, he never stopped working as one) was finished by two infamous film disasters. One was Greed. The original print ran to an amazing ten hours. (And you thought Peter Jackson had cutting problems.) Erich von Stroheim cut it down to six hours, but that was his final version. At which point MGM removed Greed from Stroheim's control and was cut down to two and a half hours. It flopped; the original full length is lost, though stills and scripts still exist. The other disaster was Queen Kelly, which Stroheim shot with Gloria Swanson; the film was produced by Joseph P. Kennedy (yes, father of JFK), with whom she back then had an affair. Before shooting was even finished, Stroheim had quarrelled with Kennedy and Swanson, and was fired from his own movie.

For my story, I decided to make the two historic disasters into one film and make it the breaking point of not just Max' career as a director but also his marriage with Norma. This meant I also needed someone to play the Kennedy role; not a real life millionaire, but a fictional one. For a moment or two, I thought of Charles Foster Kane, but a) Charlie Kane had his own tragedy going on, and b) Citizen Kane in order to make a difference between Susan and Marion Davies explicitly made opera instead of the movies the area into which Kane blunders. So I went for Noah Cross from Chinatown, possibly the most sinister millionaire ever to be the villain in a film noir, conveniently located in Los Angeles, and also making it out of his own movie untouched and on top. (Even better, he's played by John Huston, who in addition to being a world famous director also did the occasional bit of acting. Like, say, Erich von Stroheim and Max von Mayerling.) Even Cross as a symbol of dehumanizing corruption in Chinatown was great, because of what Max asks Norma to do in the relevant chapter. And lastly, I could inflict a fate on him that, err, let's just say my beta remarked that it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I asked her whether Cross worked without any knowledge of Chinatown, since presumably a good deal of the potential readers wouldn't have watched both films, and she assured me he did, so that was alright, too.

The eeriest thing that happens when writing backstory for an existing tale is that it shifts the original story in your head. Sunset Boulevard is Joe Gillis' story; but now he feels to me like someone blundering into the end game of someone else's tragedy. (Well, he did before, too, but not to that extent.) I'd loved Norma and Max before already, but having written a life of them, I became even more attached. I just hope I did them justice.


Such an easy game (11874 words) by Selena
Chapters: 9/9
Fandom: Swinging London RPF, The Beatles
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alma Cogan/Brian Epstein, Alma Cogan/John Lennon, Brian Epstein/John Lennon, Alma Cogan & Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Cynthia Lennon/John Lennon
Characters: Alma Cogan, Brian Epstein, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Sandra Caron, Fay Cohen, Cynthia Lennon, Jane Asher
Summary:

Friendship, misunderstandings, sex and song: or, what happened when the biggest British singer of the 50s met the biggest British band of the 60s and fell for their gay manager. Or did she? Alma Cogan, Brian Epstein and the Beatles.

naraht and I had dared each other to write this story for eons, so when I saw her prompt, I decided to take the plunge and do it as a treat. Her thoughtful review is here, and honestly, I like her summary ("it is about fame and love and family and art and being Jewish and being queer and so much else besides") much better than mine!



Writing undisguised RPF about people who aren't all safely dead was something I thought I'd never do and ended up finding myself doing quite a lot in the recent year, so there you go, fannish virtue. I will say it felt a bit liberating that many of the people in this particular story are dead and have been since a few decades. (Err, in a "that's really sad for them!" kind of way, but, you know. Walter Scott said "sixty years ago" works for historical fiction; in this case, we're clocking fifty...) Anyway, Alma Cogan, who really was the most popular female singer in Britain during the 50s, and who had what used to be called a salon in the early 60s with parties where some of the most interesting people of the era hung out together, was one of the most intriguing characters I'd come across in the various Beatles biographies and memoirs I'd read. When I got over my RPF squick, I had hoped to discover her in stories, but no such luck. There was just one drabble (by, inevitably, naraht). The fact that Alma's musical image was the strict opposite of what her 60s friends were going for was just one of the many interesting things about her; clash between eras via personal relationships going in unexpected ways always intrigues me, see above: Sunset Boulevard. Then there was also the fact that while she was great friends with both John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and rumored to have had an affair with John at some point; his wife certainly suspected as much, and said so), she and their manager, Brian Epstein, were so close that several of their friends expected them to marry, despite Brian's homosexuality. All of which made for potentially very interesting dynamics to write.

One of the key things for me to keep in mind about Alma was that she was a singer. All too often, fanfic (for fictional and historic characters alike) tends to ignore the profession of whoever the main characters are, though in many cases that is as much their passion as what they feel for whomever they get paired up with. And at the point of my story, Alma is a performer who had been a great star for a decade - but was on her way downwards in the public favour. Not immediately, not crashingly, but the process had started. And here was the new bunch about to replace her in the most beloved category. Instead of setting herself against them, though, she befriended them and basically helped shaping them ("that was where I learned to be a guest", said Paul McCartney about Alma and her parties in real life). You may see why I wanted to write her story.

While my Sunset Boulevard story is strictly one character's pov (that of Max), Such an easy game was a chance to write multiple povs, which also helped with the ensemble character of the story. Despite the various entanglements and psychological messes, it ended up being one of my more light-hearted, optimistic pieces. Which to me feels right for the woman at the heart of it - or at least my fictional recreation of her.

Comments

[fallingtowers]

Now that you've posted the stories, it does seem rather obvious for anyone who's read your journal for a while, given the subject matter!

*bookmarks Lebenswerk*

[selenak]

So I thought.:) But I'm also aware that given their length, both would be stories a lot of people wouldn't get around to until later, if they were interested in the fandoms in question at all.