Grade Z Movies at the End of Movie Stars' Careers

It is interesting to me to see the end of great actors’ careers:


Two of Joan Crawford’s latter screen appearances were in “Straitjacket” (s. Robert Bloch) and lastly in “Trog” which some people think of (not me) as a big step down from her days in James M. Cain’s “Mildred Pierce.”


Sherlock Holmes actor Basil Rathbone’s last two appearances were “The Autopsy of a Ghost” (Mexican) and then “Hillbillies in the Haunted House” (billed under hayseed Ferlin Husky, country western singer).


John Carradine made it a point to take any role for a paycheck, no matter how bad. He was nominated for “The Grapes of Wrath” as a befuddled preacher and ended up doing movies like “The Astro-Zombies”, "Corpse Grinders", and “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.” A film professor friend of mine told me once, “It is a good idea to make a movie about Billy the Kid. It is a good idea to make a film about Dracula. But it is not a good idea to make a movie about both of them in the same movie.”


John Carradine made all these grade-z movies with no artistic quality but was a champion of aesthetics apparently because he did artistic things--his last--he died because he never recovered from climbing the entire stairs of the Milan Cathedral to see the architecture of the massive structure..


The last movie for both J. Carrol Naish and Lon Chaney, Jr. was a Grade Z movie called ”Dracula vs. Frankenstein” in 1971 directed by cult cheese/sleaze director Al Adamson (who himself was later murdered and buried in wet cement in the den of his house).


For the last several years, directors knew that they had to get their scenes with Chaney done before 11 am because he would be drunk by then. I read somewhere that he had a phobia, a fear of running out of stored food (seriously).


Agnes Morehead, a member of the Mercury Theatre with Orson Welles, did a horror movie that was almost unmentionable it was so bad, and she ends up losing her head at the close of the movie.


Joseph Cotton ended up in forgettable films like “Baron of Blood” and “Lady Frankenstein" (two decades earlier in Cotton’s acting life, Ed Wood, Jr. forced him to attend his terrible play, “The Casual Company” and he told Ed, when pressured to say something nice about it, said, “I think it will go okay...” just to get Wood off his back).


Glenn Strange who often played the Frankenstein monster ended up being the bartender of the Long Branch saloon on “Gunsmoke.” To a lesser extent, George Tobias starred in a lot of films with stars like Gary Cooper and ended up being Agnes Cravitz’s henpecked husband..


As a horror writer I love these Grade-Z movies, no matter how bad, but there must be some built-in rule for actors that it is inevitable that towards the end of their career that they will end up doing movies that cult Horror/SF fans like a lot (people like me who like MST3000 perhaps) but standard movie fans don’t like very much.

SF Movies and Gravity, or the Lack Thereof

In “It, the Terror from Beyond Space” (s. Jerome Bixby), early on in the movie a crewmember is cheerfully pouring steaming hot coffee into the coffee cups of the crew on a sleek cylindrical spaceship which has several ‘decks’ and there is no explanation of how gravity is explained in any way.

 But maybe that is good because in a lot of these old movies they make it a science lesson with every move they make (in ”Destination Moon” there is a Woody Woodpecker cartoon shown to prospective big wheeler-dealers to explain how rocket propulsion works), explaining why they do this or do that, usually to some guy from Brooklyn in the crew that keeps mentioning the Brooklyn Dodgers..

Many SF movies do the same thing: “Forbidden Planet,” the redoubtable “Angry Red Planet,” “Rocketship X-M,” the Flash Gordon serials, Star Trek, Lost in Space, almost any SF movie or TV show, and Star Wars. 

In Heinlein’s “Destination Moon” and others, like “Flight to Mars they explain about why one has to be strapped in so as ‘not to float’ on the nuclear-powered ship run on steam thrust.  

Also done in the Willy Ley inspired ”Conquest of Space” (p. George Pal) but the movie goes as step further as the Earth-orbiting space station revolves and spins to create artificial gravity. 

It was not until “2001: A Space Odyssey” that there was an actual rotating living quarters on a ship that generated some centrifugal force to create artificial gravity, and again in the sequel, “2010.” 

Even in “Alien” there is no explanation for the induced gravity in the ship. In the Star Trek movies they finally explained it all with convenient Anti-Gravity devices.In H.G. Wells “The First Men in the Moon” there is a “Cavorite” substance which works the same way. .

In many spaceships in older movies there is no space below to account for the mechanics that make the ship run. If you ever look at a V-2 rocket diagram you’ll see Werner Von Braun’s genius apparatus that made it go. Look what it took for the Apollo missions. 

In very ‘cheap’ movies you’ll see the gangplank to get into the ship is at the very bottom of the ship. In Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” the ship is just a large bullet but we realize that shooting a large manned projectile is essentially “Spam in a Can” to anyone within the projectile..

In James Blish’s novels he came up with this: SpinDizzy: A device that made use of a relationship between electron spin, electromagnetism and gravity allowed any object to leave the Earth’s surface. ;.Famed Astounding Editor John W. Campbell, Jr was big on the Dean Drive, which did not work. He was obviously a legend as an SF editor. He often talked about Scientology and Psionics as well.  The Dean Drive: 

The Dean drive was a device created and promoted by inventor Norman Lomer Dean (1902–1972) that he claimed to be a reactionless drive.^[1] Dean claimed that his device was able to generate a uni-directional force in free space, in violation of Newton's third law of motionfrom classical physics. His claims generated notoriety because, if true, such a device would have had enormous applications, completely changing human transport, engineering, space travel and more.^[2] Dean made several controlled private demonstrations of a number of different devices, however no working models were ever demonstrated publicly or subjected to independent analysis and Dean never presented any rigorous theoretical basis for their operation. Analysts conclude that the motion seen in Dean's device demonstrations was likely reliant on unsymmetrical frictional resistance between the device and the surface on which the device was set, resulting in the device moving in one direction when in operation, driven by the vibrations of the apparatus

Woodward effect. A reactionless thruster would have many practical applications, including the propulsion of spacecraft. According to Dean, his drive is a reactionless thruster, and his models were able to demonstrate this effect. He received two patents for related devices that are known to be unable to generate a uni-directional force, but he occasionally demonstrated devices that were different. Dean’s claims of reactionless thrust generation have subsequently been shown to be in error; the thrust generated is understood to be reliant on friction with the surface on which the device is resting. .

Sidenote: I read that Phil Dick sent him a lot of stories but that Campbell thought that PKD was ‘insane,’ just plain crazy. That is, his stories were so far-fetched that he did not understand them. So he never bought anything by PKD. .

I wrote a short story about twenty years ago called ”Jimbob Goes to Mars” which essentially took from Steinbeck’s ”The Grapes of Wrath” about how one of the Joad boys had ‘a certain way of knowin’ about engines and trucks and could just fix ‘em’.  I just applied that to rockets and had pimple-faced Jim-bob Johnson offworld on Io applying the courses of a Dr. Biddle, etc.  .

I’ve also left out here 99 percent of what is left to talk about propulsion in literature or reality, star drives or ion drives or fusion drives. When I was a kid in all our Encyclopedias they had diagrams of potential moon shots and potential Mars shots and how we would get there.  I never did outgrow the sense of wonder about the way we could get to a destination in space.  I remember reading books on how to build a Moonbase, whether to dig out a vast pit on the surface and cover it, hence the base is completed.  

When I was a kid I realized while watching enough space launches that certain things in science fiction movies were taken for granted and there is not much verisimitude.  I just know that Nasa astronauts don’t talk much about the Brooklyn Dodgers while inflight.

The Merits of Cheeseball Movies

I heard that H.G. Wells had given Eisenstein the rights to his book, War of the Worlds, and then Paramount got them, and to this day, George Pal’s version is still the best in my opinion. Sir Cedric Hardwicke’s narration of the famous first few sentences from the book is chilling.

H.G. Wells wrote the script for “Things to Come” loosely based on his 1933 book, and it was directed by William Cameron Menzies with Hardwicke, Ralph Richardson and Raymond Massey. Menzies’ production set design for the silent “Thief of Baghdad” was incredible.

But what about the cheesier movies? There are zillions of them. Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” or “Zontar, the Thing from Venus,” the Commander Cody movie “Zombies of the Stratosphere” (Republic, 1952) with an unknown star named Leonard Nimoy, and numerous others. If you get a copy of The Psychotronic Dictionary you’ll get an insulin rush of descriptions of incredibly bizarre or bad movies. In the movie “Zontar” (d. Larry Buchanan), the control room system for the launching of the large rocket almost appears to be behind the lounge bar in the den of someone’s house. Zontar, the monster appears to be a cross between a Wookie and a Hi/Lo Shag Carpet. In “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” (1978) there is an actual helicopter used in the film that crashes and was left in as part of the movie. A friend of mine was an extra in the final scene in a football stadium in San Diego when a huge crowd runs across the field all the while stomping on an extraordinary amount of tomatoes. In “The Giant Spider Invasion” it appears a Volkswagen Beetle is dressed up as a huge fuzzy spider. It stars Alan Hale, Jr. (“Gilligan’s Island”) and Barbara Hale (“Perry Mason”), whose dad Alan Hale, Sr. was Porthos in the silent “Three Musketeers.

To read about Edward D. Wood you can read “Nightmare of Ecstasy” by Rudolph Grey. His life has been documented more than most legit filmmakers, egregiously so. When he and his wife were evicted for the last time in a slum apartment in North Hollywood, the landlords threw all his scripts, book mss and mementos in the dumpster. He died a bit later in late 1978.

I don’t know when I realized the soothing quality of watching cheesy movies. There is something fun about watching old SF movies where the ships are shaped like pointed, sleek cylinders with no regard for trying to explain the semblance of gravity within the ship. It is pure bliss. Especially if you put the TV on as background ‘noise’ while you are trying to write your latest manuscript.

Sergei Rachmaninoff, a 6'5" Tall Scowl, said Stravinsky

 On a wholly obtuse subject, I basically obtained a piano degree (the full credits worth) in piano performance years ago and have always heard that for every small instructor position at a small college there are hundreds if not thousands of applicants of brilliant pianists with masters degrees and PhD’s vying for that one position. I mean people who could play concertos, you name it. And there are some pop artists today that could not even pick out Middle C on a piano if their life depended on it. 

I remember when I was 16 and had just memorized Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. I was pretty happy. I discovered much more difficult stuff in college, like Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto and Gershwin's concerto in F. 

Then I wrote my first novel, Rachmaninoff’s Ghost. It did not get published until twenty years later, after several other books had been published..Rachmaninoff was this extremely melancholic composer with a Russian short hairstyle, (they called it a ‘convict’ style back then) who composed the absolutely saddest  ‘heart on your sleeve’, lachrymose compositions. 

He wrote a symphonic poem called ”Isle of the Dead” based on the City of Dis or Hades, from a painting by a famous German expressionist artist named Arnold Bocklin. This painting literally shows a portrait of hell itself. 

He later composed a ”Vespers” or solemn choral piece based on Edgar Allan Poe’s ”The Bell’s”. 

I mean, Rachmaninoff was doing some interesting things. He was also considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He was born in 1873, died 1943..

One of my music professors had met him (considered the greatest orchestral trumpet player in the entire world a few years later) in 1939 at a famous concert, and shook his hand. I later put that and my music school and some semi-versions of my friends and professors loosely into the plot.

Life Spans that Bridge Time

I saw a photo of the SF editor Hugo Gernsback wearing sixties Bell Bottom pants (b. Luxembourg 1884- d. New York 1967). when he was at a science fiction convention con in or around 1967.  A man wearing mod clothes in 1967 that was two years old when composer/pianist Franz Liszt died in 1886. He is known famously or infamously for starting the first Science Fiction (Scientification) magazine AMAZING STORIES back in 1926, which led to other magazines and science fiction writers published within those magazines.

I read in an book by Damon Knight that Hugo Gernsback paid his writers “promptly upon lawsuit.” That is he paid authors for their stories only when he was sued by them.

I have always been interested in timelines of authors and/or composers. Richard Strauss, the famed German composer was born in 1864 and lived all the way to 1949. The great conductor, Arturo Toscanini was born in 1867, circa post Civil War, and lived to 1957 when he used to watch wrestling matches on television in his spare time when he wasn’t conducting the Symphony of the Air. It is hard to imagine he was born one year after the Italian Opera composer Rossini died (b. 1792- d. 1868, composer of “The William Tell Overture” or the Theme from “The Lone Ranger”, if you will) and Toscanini died the year they lauched Sputnik (Oct 4, 1957). 

Toscanini was born 40 years after Beethoven died (b. 1770 - d. 1827), and was 19 years old when Franz Liszt died (b. 1811- d. 1886), who was the first Rock Star of the classical world.

HG Wells was born in 1866 and lived to see the Atomic Bombs used on Japan and he died the next year in 1946.This is obviously a blog listing about not much at all, but I think about things like this once in a while.  

I always wonder what would have happened if HPL had lived past the late 30’s all the way to say, 1970 or even 1980 so. I guess he would have been seen at conventions wearing bell bottoms as well.

Great Derelicts in Literature

My pseudo-blog revisited: Here are some interesting tidbits.

Malcolm Lowry had to drink out of a urinal pot while housed in a Mexican jail. Kerouac was considered Dementia Praecox (schizophrenic). In his later years he was a shut in that watched Beverly Hillbillies episodes with a bottle of whiskey next to his lazyboy chair.  Truman Capote would check himself into a sanitarium after he would finish a novel or screenplay. Philosopher/Math genius John Stuart Mill kept his waste in little jars, sealed. Why am I writing this?I guess I am fighting at not being “writer besotted”. That is, namedropping authors, being too fascinated with author’s eccentricities than one should. How they dealt with life as it came at them.

The anomaly has always fascinated me: Nobel laureates for Literature (Hemingway, Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, a non-Laureate named Scott Fitzgerald for starters -- all extreme alcoholics) who got the dry heaves when they went without alcohol for more than 48 hours. Faulkner desperately lining his coatpockets with bottles during Prohibition when he lived in a little apartment in the French Quarter in New Orleans and wondering how he could last without always have a bottle of whiskey lying around. Jim Thompson used to go to a flophouse in New York City across from his publisher’s building and for a few months fuel himself on alcohol and cigarettes and then when he finished the novel in question, fall into a great delirium of depression. 

It smacks of romanticism in literature, almost as if Thompson was in a paradise of depression, the way I’ve heard it. Mostly when writers who drank a good bit before there was Prozac and when the first crude tranquilizers weren’t even around until the 1920’s from what I’ve heard, their form of medication was liquor.Why is any of this interesting to me, personally? Because there is this relationship between some writers who were almost literally bums, that is, living a squalid lifestyle, some of them constantly roaring drunk, and their output, which some of it was and is considered great. 

Louisiana, especially around New Orleans, is a fat, drunken state. It is know for the expression "Laissez le Bon Temps Roule'" Let the Good Times Roll.  The Mardi Gras is here.  We've had more crooked politicians than a banana republic. Our state law is still based on the Napoleonic Code.  And I've met some strange people in this place.  I’ve been to a bar in Sun, Louisiana where a lot of the biker patrons were packing heat. Most amusing gentlemen. I’ve been to a place in Mississippi where if you found a dead raccoon in the road you could trade it in for a pint of whiskey in the Bottoms of Franklin County.I’ve worked as a laborer during college summers at refineries like the massive Exxon refinery where literally half the plant was drunk or stoned. So I wrote about it in my novel SKIMMING THE GUMBO NUCLEAR and tried to insert every apocryphal myth and legend about Louisiana culture within it. I've had a guy come after me with a knife once. I've met maniacal offshore roustabouts in Lafayette who spent their entire month's pay in one night, buying drinks for crowds of people. 

I guess all I really care about is, how could some of these authors, considered social misfits, derelicts, ended up turning out very interesting books. Why were the good citizens and bigshot businessmen of Cross Plains, Texas ragging Two-Gun Bob Howard about getting a real job instead of writing when he was making more money then most of them, bankers and businessmen alike. Maybe it does not matter. I’m sure there were just as many authors who turned out great fiction and did not get into wild insane adventures. Maybe it really doesn’t matter, just the actual prose itself on its own.But if the prose was already considered good writing on its own then why not find out about the author as well.

To Blog or Not to Blog

I don’t have a blog yet because I just refer people to far more interesting pre-internet blogs which were books back then, such as Jean Cocteau’s Diaries or the famous 20th century song-cyclist Ned Rorem’s Paris Diaries. Andy Warhol’s diaries published after his death were simply transcribed from tape recordings because he was too lazy to write down his musings (gossip) apparently.

I may consider a blog or simply send out scintillating remnants of bon mots via bulletins, far less worthy than the likes of those chronicled by Auden and Cronenberger, such as Dorothy Parker. 

I feel I have nothing much to say on a daily basis worthy of being entrapped in an internet audit stamp on the electronic sprawl.Here is just a trial balloon bulletin.

In 1988, I wrote a science fiction novel called MOVIETONE MARS, which was pre-internet, and I predicted that in the future everyone would be his/her own semi-celebrity and have his/her own 15 minute television show. With the advent of reality television shows, blogs, Twitter, Skype, Myspace, Facebook, internet webcams and Youtube, there may be something to it..

I have a nondescript life with as much excitement as the the Elephant Man subsisting on potatoes in the carnival, living here in the wondrous peasant state of Louisiana, so I do not have much to describe daily living on a blog diary. I’ve written voluminous correspondence pre-internet, about 11 thickly bound volumes of single space epistolary discourse that would make a pulp writer nod slightly with agreement as he reaches for his canned A & P Spagetti. 

So I’m sending this much the way candidates now set up exploratory committees to see if they will run for office or whether they have stomach gas.