Right as rain

I stopped to visit my pal Don after a long internet session next door. His front door was open and I tapped loudly enough to be heard over the movie, a daily afternoon event. They had a really wonderful film playing in TechniScope 2:66, letterboxed with black over and under. It was ultra sharp on a small 16x9 flatscreen, maybe a 42" LCD. Two-perf TechniScope was truly breathtaking -- loaded with visual energy and emotional power. The movie 'African Express' playing in 2:66 was a gem from the 1970s with first time ingenue Ursula Andress opposite a handsome Italian juvenile the same age, early-20s and sexy as heck. Jack Palance was the heavy, with Ozzie henchmen, stars from Down Under, convincingly tough bad guys. Shot on location in Africa, Italian color processed in Rome, a gifted Italian director and a meticulous German producer who gave his director plenty of shooting days and set-ups, nicely done.

I was fully justified when Bruno knocked aside his friend's objections, a cinematographer of considerable standing, and pushed TechniScope in my fictional tale Chiseltown. It was NOT a trivial or simple decision, and it had absolutely nothing to do with saving money. Film stock and processing are small budget items, hundreds of thousands, not millions. Chiseltown was greenlit at $12 million, typical Poverty Row starvation. By the time that Bruno was done, the negative cost of Chiseltown was $18 million, worth every penny, ultrawide comedy schtick and thrilling drama, with spectacular stunts that they had enough time to rehearse and cover from all the right angles. Skillfulness and creativity matter in low budget films.

Back to the TechniScope question. After his pal's initial objections and fussy cynicism about shooting 2-perf 35mm instead of standard 4-perf (twice as detailed), there was a passage of technical importance that did not appear in the novel Chiseltown. Tech stuff would be boring to most readers. Bruno and Ruud screened a dozen test reels, shot by a dozen TechniScope lenses. Bruno picked the three sharpest among them, limiting himself to focal lengths that determined where the camera was placed throughout the movie. The choice of a film editor was not a trivial decision, either. The producer was present in all those discussions because every aspect of a movie is always a producer's final decision. I liked my fictional producer Joe Klopp. Solid, bright, capable of managing staff, as supportive as possible to the director (with increasing frustration and worry) -- two men bonded by long experience of working together. You can't buy those kind of relationships. That's why it matters Who Knows Who, always in casting and "packaging" the money, always among the above-the-line creatives. Producers are creatives with heavy responsibilities, to actualize everything the production requires and to ultimately complete the picture. Not as easy as it sounds.

A happy day. I was right as rain about TechniScope. Looked great on a home entertainment screen. Might not be so swell in a conventional 500-seat 1970s cinema or modern multiplex, but 'African Express' was brilliant and beautiful and sharp on Don's flatscreen. Ultrawide 2:66 is a fabulous format with the right lenses, a gifted cinematographer, a talented director, and well known stars, their voices and sound effects recorded, re-recorded, and mixed nicely.

Story matters (a little). How it plays is everything.

Too bad I'm too old to direct. Oh, well. Life on life's terms. Writing was equally enjoyable and easier to complete. Cut to the starlet in his arms, successful R-rated lovers at home in robes at the kitchen counter, a happy ending. They sold popcorn at a preview in Fresno.

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Years in the making

"A master of sly observations, of the truths hidden in words, echoes to the time when men were men, and writers weren't afraid to tell stories." (L.B. Johnson)  "The combination of courage, tenderness, integrity, brains and raw sensuality is way out of the ordinary." (Erik Svehaug)  "Uncanny ability to portray exclusively female experiences accurately." (Sunni Maravillosa)  "One part grit, a dash of over the top machismo, a pinch of womanly intuition, add heartfelt devotion, murder, and heat over a flame of erotic pleasure." (Goodreads)

I re-read Portrait of Valor this morning, cried at the ending. I can accept that literary agents and publishers dislike my stories. I do things that other authors don't. Fundamentally, I'm a patriot of a peculiar sort. My heroes and heroines blaze an independent path, no different than Crockett or Pankhurst, with a modern twist. They don't fight for glory or social justice. Given a choice, they'd rather go dancing and drinking in luxurious nightclubs, tempt others into a hot wet romance. Cable and Blount are rich, resourceful, armed and dangerous, and bonded to each other by the only thing that matters in life -- personal autonomy in action, unafraid of life on life's terms.

If I had a magic wand, I would rewrite and polish The Tar Pit, but it would be wrong to dilute its terse tension. The final chapters are a miracle of heroism and its moral price.

I'm very proud of Charity, a shorter work that spans important truths and manages to be an exhilerating tale with a comic epilogue. I don't know what to say about Finding Flopsie, the same story told twice, with Chris and Peachy separated by baffling circumstances, a global chase that seems unfair and destined to end badly. A final adventure, Who Killed John Galt, passed the torch to a new generation of lovers, spared from peril, as most people are. Chris and Peachy were uniquely bold and irreplaceable, the best of an elite ruling class, fiercely independent and whole, free to thrive as wanton wildcats who faced danger as a welcome natural challenge.

Our social media distanced nation is worse without them. As proof, I offer Finding Flopsie, which I finally re-read tonight, a day after composing the rest of this post. It was wonderful. Nothing like it in literary history. Full of warmth, determination, deceit, despair, a love so deep that it hurts, and a blockbuster finish.

An easy death, achieved so much.

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Chicks Pick Pix in Nabes and Sticks

Parody of an old Variety headline* which I'll translate for you. Girls choose which movie to see on a date night in neighborhood theaters and small towns. Past tense, of course. All 8,000 screens in America are dark. Film production has ceased, no new product. The world's longest running animation series, in Japan, has gone off the air. Australia's "Neighbours" soap opera, in production 40 years until the corona virus shutdown, might restart with social distancing (no hugging and kissing? everybody in masks?)

Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.

Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.

(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)

Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.

Very peculiar

I've been looking back at 30 something years of literary work, more than half of it nonfiction, which troubles me. I don't like it, that I had the burden of exploring the obvious. Among my too few novels, five of them were set in the future, projecting ideas into fictional lives and loves and clashes with jealous, hamhanded evil.

Five more were the sequential saga of Chris and Peachy, from first kiss to crippled elderhood. I didn't want to show them at the end of life, but it happened in Who Killed John Galt. I find it hard to re-read The Case Files of Cable & Blount, not dissatified with what was achieved, but detached and sad because I know every word.

Partners was a masterpiece, far too tragic to re-read beyond page four or five. It beckons as flawless storytelling, magnetic and terrifying and tender, the unrelenting first person song of a young man's destiny that might easily have been mine. It surprised me to write this novel. In a just world, it would be celebrated as uniquely hard-boiled hippie fiction.

That leaves two minor works written after I had resigned as a serious author. It gives me easy pleasure to savor the goofball comedy of Chiseltown and the impossible farce of Heaven, a parting salute to those I loved. On some stormy night, I'll revisit the dry romance of Cocktail and steel myself to the unlikely emptiness of living too long.

It's impossible to write more, a mixed blessing. There are no more ideas to pioneer, no more stories to conceive in a world that no longer exists. Lovers cannot wear masks and gloves.

News flash: shuttered restaurants broken into, liquor looted. No sci-fi novelist could have projected how cloddish and hostile to liberty our government has become. Private property is a thing of the past. November elections will be an exercise in lies and ballot stuffing. Oh. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like Mars Shall Thunder. It didn't end well for most people. The hero and two women escaped in the nick of time, before Mars was destroyed.

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Two faces have I

This is a frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two, a spontaneous video close-up. Note that the ears are about the same size, not drastically out of scale or tilted. Perhaps I was leading with my right eye, characteristic of thoughtful discourse.

On a previous occasion in correspondence with a profoundly wonderful female FBI agent, I created a pair of psychographic photos, two lefts mirrored and two rights mirrored, to show her that she was two people cohabiting one skull. Her femininity and innocence was obvious in one picture, and her dark ruthlessness equally obvious in the other.

Well, having little to do, except to noodle on curiosities, I repeated the experiment utilizing the frame grab from Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon Part Two. Splitting the image and mirroring two left sides and two right sides of my face produced an amazing revelation. Intellectually, Wolf DeVoon is a square shouldered champion prize fighter. Emotionally, I'm a nerdy 90 lb weakling. Very strange that my two noses are completely different.

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How humiliating. Puts me in mind of something Rex said in conversation, that his security chief thought I was a weakling. I replied: "I might be a weakling, but I'm not a chicken."

Good thing that creative writing is a highly focused intellectual literary challenge. A dollop of sensitivity helps from time to time, but it's totally debilitating when, months later, I re-read something I wrote and burst into tears. The Executive Branch is all knuckles and know how, except the family scenes, little Millie in her highchair, 9 year old Peter scolded for talking with his mouth full at dinner, and Cathy worried about her husband dressing late at night in his uniform, summoned to the base unexpectedly. Women and children choke me up. I write love stories and pay for it in spades. Much easier to fictionally kill people and break things, keep emotion at arm's length, something I can't seem to do.

Huge laugh. "I'm half a man," I said in Tin Barn Philosopher, p. 78

I think what happened is that my emotional life was battered and disowned many decades, starved and crippled. I need to be embraced and loved and honored, need to laugh and play, which seems distant and vague. Courage isn't enough. I've been sufficiently courageous to risk life and limb and humiliation repeatedly. I'm not unhappy about that, but the loneliness hurts. "You're on your way into hell, Howard," Rand warned. Were there two Ayn Rands?



A brainy anorexic wrapped in a sturdy Russian thrill seeker in 1948, after she snaggered a handsome actor (stuck her foot out and tripped him on a movie set) to become a U.S. citizen by marriage, launched The Fountainhead, buttered up C.B. DeMille, monkeywrenched two publishers, finished the novel and sold the screenplay for six fat figures in today's money.

Girls have an unfair advantage, damn it.

I have a lot of respect for Ayn Rand, did my level best to honor her repeatedly (and skewer her legendary emotional trainwrecks in Heaven). Rand's debut novel We The Living was a truth soaked truckload of dynamite, so graphic and tragic that I didn't want to read it twice. Atlas Shrugged changed my life, recounted in First Feature. The Fountainhead sent me to prison, and in the years that followed I read nearly every word she wrote. I met four of her least respectable looters -- Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Alan Greenspan, and Tibor Machan -- and at a NATO summit I witnessed the unshakeable power of courage that Rand bequeathed to Margaret Thatcher. "There is no such thing as society," Mrs. Thatcher said in recognition of reality, which instantly ended her political career.

That puts me in mind of today's brainless chatter, everyone talking about reviving the U.S. economy, as if "the Economy" was an anonymous animal that has to be fed and spanked by political whim. There is no economy in a totalitarian state, which is precisely what the United States has become, fulfilling the dystopia of Atlas Shrugged, a moratorium on brains, power centralized in bureaucrats and media morale conditioners, farmers dumping milk and killing livestock, unable to sell or store them. The people transported by aircraft are government officials and tame "essential" journalists forbidden to criticize psychotic Democrats.

Fortunately, I didn't have the tragic karma of Ayn Rand. I was drawn to the hard boiled tales of Raymond Chandler, a private eye investigating buried secrets. Pretty funny that Miss Rand read Mickey Spillane for relaxation, praised his literary style, and she liked James Bond. My kind of stories, with a red hot, unapologetic sexuality that Ayn Rand lived in reality, as I did likewise. A photo of Rand at age 70 would reveal the emotional price she paid, like me.

No comparison of stature intended. All I did was defend liberty and plumb the philosophy of law, a minor technical matter that the Russian and her phony acolytes never explored.

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The virtue of auctions

NPR is relentlessly stupid. They tussled mightily and very politely for three scripted minutes on the hypothetical question of who should get the nonexistent corona virus vaccine first? There's a strong likelihood that there will never be such a thing. After 40 years of Hollywood heartache and lavish government spending, there's no HIV vaccine. Why can't anyone tell the truth on NPR?  "Corona" is a genus; this one is the Wuhan, named for place of origin. Because the Wuhan virus is similar in shell structure to HIV, it may be equally impossible to develop an effective vaccine, assuming that the virus doesn't mutate. Annual flu vaccine doesn't work very well, ineffective in many cases, because the damn flu bugs mutate frequently. Wuhan might modulate or mutate by the time there's a vaccine in a year or three.

Okay, let's play the NPR game. Who should get the vaccine first? Health care workers? Nope. Grocery store clerks? Uh-uh. Government officials, military, and cops? Wrong. Elderly and people with pre-existing morbidity? Bzzzt. NPR fails 4 for 4. Then it emerges that what they really care about is the world's poor, without mentioning how many people in the world are poor. It's 6 out of 7 billion. Where do you get 7 billion doses? NPR doesn't know and feels very distressed, according to the script they were reading. I hope you grasp that there's zero spontaneity in an NPR news broadcast. NPR talent specialize in faking improv while reading, asking each other scripted questions and expressing scripted concern for the poor. Even the "thank you" handoff is scripted. The only unscripted voices on NPR are Democrat politicians and former Obama officials who know in advance what the questions will be. NPR producers, writers, and directors run the whole news operation end to end, no different than CNN.

Be that as it may, the matter of creating 7 billion vaccine doses is simple. We auction them. The ultra rich will pay $20,000 a dose to be first in line, which capitalizes a bigger batch that sells for $1,000 to the much wider group of the world's millionaires, approximately 300,000 people worldwide, which capitalizes serious mass production that sells to ordinary middle class people in America and Western Europe, about 1 billion doses at $50, after which it goes off patent and the generic versions are so cheap that all the poor on earth get vaccinated for pennies. That's the virtue (and capitalist power) of auctions. A designer bathrobe costs $900, 30% less at Macy's, only $49 for a mass produced WalMart knock-off, and $5 in a thift shop.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way with water or toilet paper, which are ubiquitous and cheap and have to be produced locally because they're low value goods -- ludicrous luxury items if you have to transport them halfway around the world. I worked in North Africa. The tap water was filthy, and we bought drinking water bottled in Europe, an absurd economic penalty. That's Africa in a nutshell, absurdly misgoverned by tribal dictators and bureaucrats. Same problem in Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, Atlanta, Savannah, Washington DC. It's insane that industrial powerhouses like Houston, Cleveland, and Minneapolis are governed by grasping thieves, a perpetual "one man one vote" swindle of free shit welfare payola, price no object because race pimps are hostile to preserving anything we need, like low taxes, liberty, and stern interdiction of narcotics, gang bangers, and voter fraud.

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Fatherhood

My daughter drew these cartoons in 2012 when I was an active member of Zoetrope. The animal characters are Pokemon "Nine Tails." Contrary to the imputation presented above, I actually am her father. I held her and fed her and read stories to her at bedtime and walked her to school hand in hand, until she became a teenager and concluded that she knew more than I did, which might be true. My Latin is sketchy, and I can't do algebra or calculus.