The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters

The Wolf Man vs Dracula: An Alternate History For Classic Film Monsters, by Philip J. Riley

No month stated, 2010 BearManor Media

I’ve wanted to read this for a long time. The story on this slim trade paperback is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula is an unproduced script written in 1944 by Universal Studios screenwriter Bernard Schubert, who went on to write the Universal picture The Mummy’s Curse. The script then sat in a box in Schubert’s garage for “forty years” before he and book editor Philip J. Riley got it out. 

The curious thing of course is that Schubert’s name is not printed on the cover of this publication, only Riley’s. Also, Riley has copyrighted the book himself – even though he himself does not contribute anything to it (other than finding the script and talking to the people who worked on it, that is). What I mean to say is, there is no introduction from Riley, or summary of the project, or anything. Indeed this book would have greatly benefitted from a bit more background. As it is, we get a few short introductory pages comprised of the hazy, decades-later memories of two men involved with the aborted project: Schubert (who died in 1988), and special effects man David S Horsley (who died in 1976). 

So in this regard we are presented with the thoughts of men who are no longer around to support the claims. I only note this because apparently Philip J. Riley has come under heavy fire from the Monster Kid community for such stuff: see the Classic Horror Film Board thread on this publication for more on that. The majority of the thread is nothing more than character assassination of Riley, accusing him of everything from plagiarism to theft. To his credit, Riley briefly appears on the thread to defend himself, acknowledging his occasional gaffe (it would appear his greatest “sin” was mixing up the names of a few actresses) and stating that he is merely a fan, publishing material for other fans. 

One of the biggest accusations is that the script for The Wolf Man vs Dracula is shall we say fake, a product of Philip J. Riley’s mind and no one else’s. This is because none of the “major” Universal historians (ie David J. Skal, Gregory Mank, etc) had ever heard of it prior to the publication of this book, and apparently there are no mentions of Schubert’s script in the official Universal records – though some people on that thread I linked to did find a trade announcement from 1944 which confirmed that Bernard Schubert was working on a script of this title. Of course, the answer is that the script sat in Schubert’s garage, and Riley kept the discovery of it to himself. And also, all those accusing Riley of making it up could have saved themselves some trouble and just read the damn book: it is quite evident that this script was written by a Universal screenwriter in the mid 1940s. 

Anyone who has seen the “monster rally” films of the ‘40s, ie Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, House Of Frankenstein, and House Of Dracula, will know one thing: the monsters seldom actually appear in the movies, and when they do it’s brief. And the producers never take advantage of having all these monsters together in one picture; indeed, the monsters will usually have their own separate plots and never come together. Only in the final minutes of Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man or the finale of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein do the monsters really interract. Compare to a modern-day approach to the concept, a la Return Of The Wolf Man, in which the monsters share a lot more “screen time” with one another. 

But that ‘40s mindset is front and center in The Wolf Man vs Dracula. I mean first of all, and I apologize for any spoilers, but the title itself is misleading. The “Wolf Man” doesn’t fight Dracula at all in this script! Instead, it’s Larry Talbot, ie the man who is cursed with being a werewolf (Lon Chaney Jr), fighting a giant bat in the climax. There is no scene where the actual Wolf Man fights the actual Dracula. And, true to the underwhelming vibe of the monster rally films (at least insofar as actual monster stuff goes), Talbot is human for the majority of the script, only turning into the Wolf Man at the very beginning and the very end. As for Dracula, he turns into a “giant bat” a bunch of times, but spends the majority of the script trying to get his fangs into some random countryside girl, for reasons never properly explained. 

Here's where more of those accusations come in, because in that hazy-recollections prologue, special effects guy David S. Horsley claims that The Wolf Man vs Dracula was to be shot in technicolor, and that color test photos were taken of Lon Chaney Jr. These photos have never been seen, though Riley intimates in the intro that he has seen them – however they are not reproduced in the book. Also, the historians claim there’s no indication Universal had any plans for a technicolor film in this genre at this time. But Horsley’s claim is backed up by the hazy-recollections of screenwriter Schubert, also in the prologue, who states that he was hired for the job precisely due to his work on a technicolor picture, thus he knew how to cater his script to the increased cost involved with color. 

What this means is that The Wolf Man vs Dracula would look pretty cheap, only taking place in a few locations (re-used sets from previous pictures, as thriftily noted by Schubert in his script) and only featuring a few actors. Oh and I forgot – another claim is that none other than Bela Lugosi would once again play Dracula, playing him for the first time on screen since the 1931 film. Horsley in his recollections says he’s unsure if color photos were taken of Lugosi, but one thing insinuated is that Lugosi was too old at the time for the physical action of a monster fight, thus the necessity of replacing him with a giant bat in the action scenes. This is where Horsley came in, trying to work up a giant mechanical bat to look realistic in technicolor. 

So there’s your buzzkill early in the review: the cover (created by Philip Riley and taken from period illustrations – and in fact I seem to recall a thread once upon a time that he was even accused of ripping this illustration off!) is a total lie. The “Wolf Man” does not fight Dracula. I mean technically he does, but it’s Larry Talbot in his non-wolf form. And he’s fighting a giant bat, not Bela Lugosi in a cape. Interestingly, the actual Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man did indeed fight the actual Bela Lugosi Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, one of the saving graces of what I consider an altogether annoying movie. Also that film established Larry Talbot as a vampire hunter…and curiously the seeds of that idea are planted in this unproduced script. Oh and that’s another thing…throughout the book it is “The Wolfman vs Dracula.” Every Monster Kid worth his salt knows the Universal character is referred to as “The Wolf Man,” ie two words. 

Another thing to handle straightaway is that the intro features a more serious goof, and again it’s “voiced” through the recollections of Schubert, who died many years before this book was even published. Schubert – or Riley speaking for him – states that The Wolf Man vs Dracula “would have been a natural sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man.” Within the first few pages of the script we realize how innacurate this is: The Wolf Man vs Dracula is actually a “natural sequel” to 1944’s House Of Frankenstein. According to that Classic Horror forum I linked to above, Philip Riley apparently acknowledged his mistake in this regard on some social media forum. But goofs like this are no doubt why he is disparaged by the Monster Kid community. 

Anyone with even a passing interest in the Universal monster rally films will recall that Larry Talbot “died” in the finale of House Of Frankenstein after being shot by a silver bullet, fired by a gypsy girl who loved him. This is how Talbot is discovered in the opening of The Wolf Man vs Dracula, lying beside the skeleton of a girl in gypsy clothes. So in other words the script picks up right after the climax of that film…several years later, but still. It sure isn’t a sequel to Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which ended with Talbot as the Wolf Man being swept away in a flood beneath Frankenstein’s castle while fighting the Monster. 

So here is the plot of The Wolf Man vs Dracula in a nutshell: Larry Talbot is revived, briefly turns into the Wolf Man in the hospital and kills a guy, then escapes into the countryside. When next we encounter Talbot he is back in human form, still in Transylvania, and has, apropos of nothing, hunted down a local man named Anatole. This is because Anatole, we learn, is the town hangman, and somehow Talbot thinks the hangman will be able to kill him. For good. Meanwhile, none other than Count Dracula has designs on Anatole’s “dowdy” young daughter, Yvonne, if not for that pesky crucifix she wears. Talbot marries Yvonne to force her dad to kill him(!?), and Dracula claims he can “help” Talbot die…if only Talbot will get rid of Yvonne’s pesky crucifix! The action climaxes with Talbot fighting Dracula (in giant bat form) and saving Yvonne from the vampire’s clutches. After this Talbot turns into the Wolf Man and runs roughshod over the local gendarmes in Dracula’s castle, finally being gunned down by Anatole. 

In the opening, Schubert implies that his script went unfilmed because Universal had met their picture quota for that year or somesuch. I think another reason might be that his script is subpar. Sure, this is likely his first draft, but as it stands, Schubert’s The Wolf Man vs Dracula is pretty lame (and pretty tame), and it makes even the most maligned monster rally film, House Of Dracula, seem like Citizen Kane in comparison. Maybe an inventive director could have brought some life to the proceedings, or maybe just the novelty of seeing Chaney and Lugosi in color would have sufficed. But the story itself just sucks. (If that’s too lame of a monster rally pun for you, you could instead say it lacks any bite.) 

And I’m judging the script by the merits of its filmed contemporaries, not from a modern-day perspective. I mean the monster rally films weren’t exactly grounded in logic. Look at Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, which detours into nonsense in the middle half: Larry Talbot starts the picture wanting to die, but halfway through he’s suddenly maddened to revive Frankenstein’s Monster. Even considering that, The Wolf Man vs Dracula suffers from illogical plotting. Like most notably, Larry Talbot barges into Anatole the hangman’s home, announces that he is a “murderer” and wants to die…and Anatole is like, “You can stay here for the night! Oh, and this is my daughter, Yvonne!” It’s just ridiculous. 

Even more ridiculous is Dracula’s fixation on Yvonne, which makes no sense. Actually, Dracula’s presence itself makes no sense. He’s not introduced in any grand fashion; literally we are just informed he happens to be sitting in Anatole’s home when Anatole himself is introduced in the script. Dracula’s just dropped in to chat with the town hangman. That’s literally the guy’s big introduction. And also the dialog, later in the script, intimates that there’s some confusion at play…that this Dracula is only a “relative” of the Dracula who caused all that trouble in London some years ago, ie the events of the 1931 film. Of course it’s the same vampire, though none of the locals realize he’s a vampire. 

And why Dracula is obsessed with Yvonne is a mystery. The impression I got was that she must be the only attractive young woman in the area. But the script makes it clear that Yvonne is not attractive…at least in how she presents herself. Only Dracula can see how hotstuff she really is…something we viewers get to see when Talbot marries Yvonne and she suddenly transforms into a mega babe. But then in the actually produced monster rally films, Dracula (as played by John Carradine) was also a bit of a lothario, so I guess the whole Yvonne storyline makes sense in that regard. What I’m trying to say is it’s so unexplored and unexplained…and so humdrum. We’re talking about Count Dracula here. Literally all he does in The Wolf Man vs Dracula is try to get some young Transylvanian girl to remove her crucifix so he can bite her neck. 

Another thing is that Dracula doesn’t even have any good dialog. In fact, the dialog throughout is without note, though Schubert does successfully capture the whining of Larry Talbot. I could see Lon Chaney Jr. delivering all of Talbot’s lines, so Schubert succeeds in capturing his voice; in Schubert’s comments in the intro, he notes that the Wolf Man was screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s “baby,” but again Schubert got this particular writing gig due to his experience writing to technicolor. There are very few speaking roles in the script; it really is almost a situation horror-drama concerning the core characters of Larry Talbot, Count Dracula, Anatole, and Yvonne. A character who briefly appears is “The Commissioner,” and it seems evident that the role was written with Lionel Atwill in mind; by this point in his career a beleaguered Atwill mostly just had supporting roles in Universal horror pictures. The Commissioner only appears in two or three scenes, but his dialog has a very Atwillian bent. 

Monster action is almost nonexistent. Early in the film Talbot turns into the Wolf Man; given that he’s in the hospital when this happens, the scene comes off like a retread of a sequence in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man. After this Talbot doesn’t transform again until the finale, when he again becomes the Wolf Man after fighting Dracula(!!). Schubert does present a little more “Wolf Man carnage” than was seen in the other films of the day; the Wolf Man tears into several gendarmes in the finale before being brought down, yet again, by a silver bullet. Schubert not only recycles sets in his script but scenes as well. Throughout The Wolf Man vs Dracula Talbot pushes Anatole to make a silver bullet to kill him with…which again is more illogical stupidty because Talbot goes to Anatole because Anatole is a hangman! Why the hell would he suddenly expect him to craft a silver bullet? But anyway Talbot as the Wolf Man meets the exact same end as in House Of Frankenstein, gunned down by a silver bullet. 

Other monster action: Dracula transforms into a giant bat a few times, flying back to his castle. There’s also a part where he turns himself into a wolf and attacks some townspeople, trying to frame Talbot. Now a curious thing here is that Dracula, like everyone else in the script, tells Larry Talbot he’s crazy to think he’s a werewolf, because werewolves don’t exist. I thought this would go somewhere, like Dracula of course knowing there are werewolves and looking to turn the Wolf Man into his vassal. Like for example in the contemporary Bela Lugosi flick Return Of The Vampire. But Schubert does nothing with the setup. About the most we get is a part where Talbot ventures into Dracula’s castle and discovers some monster lore in Dracula’s library; in an uninentionally humorous scene, Talbot spends all night reading the books, suddenly becoming an expert on vampires! In fact it is Talbot who keeps insisting to Anatole and Yvonne that Count Dracula is a vampire. This means that Talbot spends the majority of the script trying to convince people that monsters exist: that he himself is a werewolf and Dracula is a vampire. 

But it’s the biggest miss that the Wolf Man and Dracula never actually meet, at least in their monster forms. Talbot heads into Dracula’s castle in the final scene, battling the giant bat and staking it – another special effects shot which would see Dracula dissolve into dust. But it is an ignoble end for Dracula for sure. Even Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein realized the value of having the actual monsters fight one another. My assumption is Schubert was writing under the notion that Lugosi would be physically unable to handle an action scene, but this too is odd because Lugosi, as the Frankenstein Monster, battled Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man in Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, released just the year before. Who knows. The long and short of it is that it’s underwhelming, not to mention a letdown given the title of the script. 

So in conclusion, it is not to the loss of the Universal horror franchise that The Wolf Man vs Dracula never came to be. The titular characters come off poorly and the story hinges on one illogical development after another. I wonder though if the script made the rounds in the Universal screenwriter department. Curiously, Larry Talbot is suddenly alive and well in 1945’s House Of Dracula, which turned out to be the actual film that followed House Of Frankenstein. As mentioned, that earlier film ended with Talbot “dead” from a silver bullet. He’s alive again with no explanation in House Of Dracula. Almost makes one wonder if someone goofed and thought Talbot had been reborn as in Schubert’s script. But that doesn’t pan out, for as mentioned Talbot meets the same end in The Wolf Man vs Dracula as he did in House Of Frankenstein.

The Storyteller

The Storyteller, by Harold Robbins
January, 1987  Pocket Books

A few years ago I reviewed an obscure paperback titled Rich Dreams, which was a roman a clef based on the sordid life of Harold Robbins. Robbins himself broke ties with the husband-and-wife authors of that novel, the Barzmans, and possibly planned legal action against them, given that they had apparently lifted their material from stories Robbins had told them about his past. Perhaps the main reason Robbins was pissed was because he was planning a “Harold Robbins-type” novel about himself. 

Unfortunately, The Storyteller was published long after Robbins’s star had faded. If it had been published even a decade before it might have been another massive bestseller. But Goodbye, Janette was the last Robbins novel to perform well, with Descent From Xanadu (still my favorite Robbins yet) not doing well and The Storyteller following suit. Robbins himself was having a rough time in his personal life as well, having suffered a stroke a few years before that left him incapacitated for a long stretch.

Even more unfortunately, The Storyteller doesn’t have much going for it, once again coming off as a tired and dispirited work from an author who doesn’t give a shit. The only thing salvaging it is the bizarre, raunchy sex that peppers the novel – actually, there aren’t so many “sex scenes” per se, but there’s a ton of off-the-wall dirty talk and general sordidness. The sex scenes themselves usually happen off-page, with Robbins leading up to them with lots of “let’s fuck” sort of dialog exchanges. But as for plot, characterization, theme, forget it. The novel is as shallow as a kiddie pool.

One thing that can be said for The Storyteller is it’s a damn quick read. I took this one with me on a cruise, and I managed to read about a hundred pages a day. And that’s with no skimming. The book runs 341 pages of large print, lots of dialog and white space, but as usual Robbins keeps the story moving. The guy, despite his faults, was a master of compelling narrative drive, which is a very odd thing because nothing really ever happens.

The novel features a prologue and epilogue narrated by Robbins’s stand-in for himself, Joe Crown, a mega-bestselling novelist. This opening and closing section is either set in 1985 (the year the novel was published in hardcover) or 1979, I’m not sure – there’s textual evidence it might be the latter, given that at the very end of the third-person portion of the novel the characters, in 1949, wonder where they will be in thirty years. Not that it much matters. The Joe Crown of these first-person sections doesn’t tell us much about himself and spends most of his time in a hospital bed, his leg broken in a car accident. From his bed he flashes back to his youth, and the novel begins.

It’s 1942 and Joe Kronowitz is 22 years old and makes his living writing luird puld fiction for Spicy Tales magazine as “Joe Crown.” To get this out of the way asap, do not go into this novel hoping for a peek into the pulp-writing biz of the 1940s. All we learn is that Joe has written a few stories about a nublile adventurer named Honey Darling who often gets her clothes lopped off by the swords of horny sheiks. But how the pulp business works and why got Joe into it is unexplored. Indeed, what exactly compels Joe to write is itself unexplored. If you are looking for a book that explores the mindset of a writer, forget that, too.

That is the biggest puzzler about The Storyteller. Joe Crown is such a cipher that you feel nothing for him, and he appears to care about writing about as much as Harold Robbins himself did. Like his creator, Joe is more of an accountant at heart, more concerned with investments and money. Why he writes, even what he writes, is glossed over. And for that, Joe is actually more of a screenwriter than a novelist. The novel occurs between 1942 and 1949, and during that time Joe writes several screenplays (we only get the plot for like one or two of them) and spends most of the time working on his first novel, which is apparently about his youth in Brooklyn.

Also adding to Joe’s cipher-like qualities is his dodging the WWII draft. His father, who co-owns a chicken shack in Brooklyn, uses his connections to get Joe out of service. Why doesn’t Joe want to serve his country and possibly kill Hitler? It’s not stated. In fact Joe is such a middling, disinterested character that you start to get annoyed with him. But as part of his draft-dodging Joe officially becomes “Joe Crown.” More focus is placed on his flirtatious relationship with first-cousin Motty, an (apparently?) cute young lady who has lived with Joe and his family since childhood.

Oh yeah, Joe Crown scores a helluva bunch in this novel, by the way. He sets the precedent for a Harold Robbins character in fact. The dude sleeps with so many women that you eventually lose track of them. Yet Joe never works for it, with women, even before he’s a famous screenwriter, basically offering themselves to him. One can clearly see The Storyteller almost being like some vicarious excercize for the old, stroke-ridden Harold Robbins of 1985, who fucks sundry women through his fictional stand-in.

Motty is engaged to Stevie, Joe’s older brother, a boring loser who is studying to become a doctor. Meanwhile Joe, as part of his deal with the mobsters who got him out of the war, runs drugs for a muscular black dude named Jamaica who lives with several black women, each of whom he calls “Lolita.” (One of ‘em treats Joe to a graphically-depicted blowjob, of course; in fact, “frenching,” ie oral sex, runs rampant in this particular novel.) Joe will become so used to dealing drugs that he’ll continue to do so even when he eventually moves to Hollywood, not that Robbins makes much of this subplot or even explains it. There’s an even-more-unexplored bit where Joe temporarily manages a whorehouse.

But then he lands a bigshot literary agent, the (apparently lovely) Laura Shelton, who sells a story Joe wrote (stealing the idea from a story Motty told him) about a store security guard who falls in love with a would-be shoplifter. Now Universal wants to make it into a film starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan. Joe’s been hired to come to Hollywood to help write the script. Oh, and he’s gotten Motty pregnant after their first and only screw – Motty being a virgin, it’s a ten-pointer – and she’s fallen in love with him, so she’s coming along to Hollywood. 

The next section is set in 1945-1946 and Joe’s a veteran Hollywood screenwriter. He’s been fucking his way through the studio system, not that any of it is described or that he had to work for it. In Robbins’s world, these nymph starlets will actually have sex with even the screenwriter to get a job, which goes against the grain of one of Hollywood’s more infamous jokes (ie, these gals will screw anyone but the writer, because everyone knows writers don’t mean shit in Hollywood). Motty’s getting sick of Joe’s womanizing, and she’s falling in love with her boss, the owner of a JC Penney-style department chain. Oh and Joe and Motty now have a daughter who is so inconsequential to the novel that I didn’t even bother jotting down her name for future reference.

Joe gets a gig to write a script for Judi Antoine, the top pin-up model for his studio, Triple S (a sort of Warner Brothers analogue). Judi is known on the lot as “the Screamer” due to how noisy she is while screwing. (Even Joe had her, of course.) She can’t act so Joe comes up with ripping off one of his old Honey Darling tales – an interesting, unexplored tidbit here is that Joe mentions he’d have to be an “idiot” to tell the Hollywood boys that he used to write for the pulps. The movie is Warrior Queen of the Amazons and features a half-nude Judi and a bevy of similarly-unclad Amazons in the jungle; it will become a major hit.

But when Motty, who is having her own affair (and indeed is planning to leave Joe), comes home early from a business trip and finds Joe with his cock up the ass of Rosa, their strumpet of a 16-year-old live-in maid, she files for divorce. (Rosa for her part is a virgin, given to walking around in a transparent blouse with no underwear, and claims she enjoyed giving her father and brothers handjobs; just “a way of life” in her native Mexico!) Joe agrees to the divorce, only to discover that Motty is in fact already pregnant with the other dude’s child. He signs the papers and neither Motty nor Joe’s daughter are ever mentioned again.

We go into the final section in a long sequence set in 1949. Joe’s now in Rome, working for a De Laurentis-style film producer named Santini. Joe’s got a sexy black-Italian secretary named Marissa whom he has bunches of casual sex with (plus she enjoys DRINKING HIS PISS; see below). He’s also secretly getting some from Mara, the busty Bardot-esque superstar actress girlfriend of a Mafia dude. This section loses the entire “storyteller” aspect of the title, instead more focused on Joe’s life among the jet-set, in particular a long, raunchy sequence on the party yacht of the depraved Contessa, who switch-hits and likes to invite young women into her opulent room.

Oh but meanwhile Joe’s been long-carrying a torch for his agent, Laura Shelton, practically begging her to come be with him in Italy. For her part, Laura is more concerned with getting Joe to finish his book (an unintentionally humorous angle of the novel is that Joe is always being forced by other characters to write; he clearly has no interest in it himself, same as his creator). Also, Laura doesn’t want to become “just another girl” in Joe’s ultra-hectic sex life. As if! But after many misadventures with Marissa and Maria (and those two similar names don’t get confusing at all) Joe finally retreats to Cannes and gets Laura to come over to Europe and be with him.

After more partying with the Contessa (including a sickly bizarre part where the insatiable Contessa has Joe dip his fingers in cocaine and then ram them up her friggin’ womanhood), Joe finally scores with Laura, and they’re in love. They take a cruise back to New York, where Robbins quickly and perfunctorily wraps up the book via the “thematic” angle of Joe’s dad retiring to Florida, closing down his chicken place. But man Robbins misses so many balls this time out, with all these half-assed subplots he doesn’t bother to pay off, or when he does pay them off they’re subplots he forgot or neglected to even set up!

The final pages take us back to the first-person narrative of Joe himself (though Robbins slips in and out of the tense, sometimes writing “Joe” instead of “I”), where Joe Crown, now old and walking with a cane, enjoys the fruit of his labors, being awarded some “bestselling author of all time” prize or some such nonsense. Most importantly we learn here that Joe has been married since 1949 to Laura, so that worked out, however it’s intimated that this hasn’t stopped him from, of course, screwing a helluva bunch of other women in the ensuing decades. But we are to understand that Laura is his one true love; Robbins attempts to end the novel with one of his customary sentimental touches, but it falls flat this time. Really flat.

Harold Robbins was never considered a literary heavyweight, but his writing is even more amateurish and juvenile than ever in The Storyteller, with such blunders as:

“It’s an honor and pleasure to meet you, Mr. Crown,” the Italian said, in Italian-accented English.

The novel hardly has any flash or spark, and it’s overwhelmed by mundanity. Robbins rarely if ever describes any settings, locations, or even characters. I don’t think Joe himself is even described once; about the most we learn is that he’s well-hung, and even that isn’t mentioned until toward the end. Female characters rarely get descriptions of their features, hair color, or anything – even their bodies are seldom exploited, which should be mandatory in the trash fiction ethos. Of course we’ll get occasional mentions of “upthrusting breasts” and whatnot, but good lord, would it have been so hard to even tell us what some of these women even look like??

But hell, we read Harold Robbins for the naughty stuff. And as if this review isn’t long enough already, I’d like to finish off with a few sleazy treats taken from the pages of The Storyteller that made me laugh out loud. Seriously, brace yourself for the last one, which features the aforementioned urine-focused scene with Marissa:

“Don’t talk!” she said. “Just tear me apart and fuck me!” -- pg. 89

“Fantastic!” Her anus was as soft as a velvet glove. -- pg. 219

Suddenly she held him still. “Don’t move!” she ordered. 

He glanced up at her. “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m starting to pee. Ooh,” she whispered ecstatically. “Now you do it inside me.” 

“I can’t pee through a hard on,” he said. 

“Yes, you can,” she said. “I’ll show you.” Quickly she placed a finger under his testicles and pressed a nerve. His urine came pouring forth like a spout. At the same moment, she took his phallus from her and lifted it still urinating onto her face and gulped as much of it as she could catch in her mouth. When the urine had stopped she replaced him instantly inside her. She moved her face close to him. “I love the taste of your pee,” she said. “It’s like sweet sugar.” -- pg. 258

Rich Dreams

Rich Dreams, by Ben and Norma Barzman
April, 1982  Warner Books

Harold Robbins was notorious for writing blockbuster novels about characters who were thinly-veiled analogues of real-life figures; I often wondered, then, why no one ever wrote a Harold Robbins-type novel about Harold Robbins himself. Well, someone did – Ben and Norma Barzman, friends of Robbins, who, after hearing Robbins's (fictional) life story, realized it had the makings for a perfect blockbuster novel. Rich Dreams was the ensuing book, a paperback original that apparently went unnoticed and was soon forgotten (I only discovered it via the biography Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex). However, it did succeed in pissing off Robbins, who quickly cut all ties with the Barzmans.

The Robbins analogue here is Arnold Elton, “sex-novel king” who, now in his forties, has reached the pinnacle of success. He’s relaxing in his villa on the French Riviera, enjoying the good life with his newly-pregnant third wife, and meanwhile brokering a deal to take over a failing movie studio. This is the “present” storyline of the novel, and the movie studio deal takes up a goodly portion of the narrative; like his real-life inspiration, Arnold Elton is more interested in business deals and making money than writing novels. Indeed, Elton’s novels are given short shrift.

Elton’s business acumen and wheeling and dealing are given most focus throughout these portions, and obviously this is a good indication of the real-life Robbins. But then, Elton is nowhere as colorful or memorable as Robbins. By all accounts, Harold Robbins was a drug-taking, booze-drinking lout who was more often seen with a hooker on his arm than one of his wives; a running joke in Rich Dreams, though, is that Elton is pretty much a square, looking for true love from his various wives, hardly partaking of anything stronger than a mixed drink.

In other words, our protagonist is boring. This is one of the biggest misses with the book, and the biggest puzzler. If the Barzmans had more fully captured Robbins the wild man, we would’ve had a hell of a book. As it is, Elton is more a businessman and less of a deviant, which makes for a mostly tepid read…not to mention an exhausting one, given the novel’s 526 pages.

The early portions are the best. We meet Elton en route to France, having bought out the entire first class compartment of a 747. Before the flight’s over he’s managed to talk a stewardess (still so-called here) into sleeping with a millionaire Texas oil man who happens to be back in coach – there because he couldn’t get a seat in first class. All so Elton can keep his precious deal from falling through. Long story short, Elton once worked for a movie studio, of the Universal/Paramount type, and the place is about to go under. With some trickery and chicanery, Elton can get it for a few million.

From there to Elton’s villa, where the reader finally gets a bit of some Harold Robbins-esque goodness; Elton is greeted by the sight of his nude Mexican assistant (nude save for a coke spoon which dangles from her neck, that is), who wants to have sex with him while Elton’s wife watches. And Elton’s wife approves; in fact it was her idea. Elton’s response is to throw the assistant out and rant and rave; he only wants to be with his wife. The reader sees that we have another 500-some pages to go, and the dread sets in.

We also must endure some scenes with Elton’s two children, both of them in their early 20s and both looking to their dad for some money to make a feature film with hardcore sex scenes in it. The kids are incredibly precocious and demanding and it’s a great commentary by the Barzmans on the type of children Harold Robbins might have had, or at the very least, a person who wrote his type of novels might have had – there’s a great scene, much later in the novel, where Elton has breakfast with the two kids while they are still pre-teens, and they start asking him about fellatio and the like, all of it stuff they learned about from his novels. (Elton’s uneasy response is to tell them his books are for adults.)

Midway through, the novel jumps back to Elton as a boy, and for a few hundred pages we read about how he came to be. Growing up in hardscrabble roots, he escapes into the navy, fights in World War II, and lucks into a job in Hollywood, at fictional Alliance Studios. The Barzmans don’t really bring Golden Age Hollywood to life, as Elton is too low on the totem pole to interact with stars or go to lavish parties. In fact, he finds most joy working in the accounting department – yet more tie-in to the real Robbins story.

After another break, though, Elton ends up writing scripts. When his first is rejected for featuring straight-up sex scenes, he’s fired and a writing friend advises he turn the tale into a novel. Elton does and the ensuing book is a huge success, playing up on the salient aspects and going over huge with the late ‘40s reading public. The most Robbins-esque scene occurs soon after, with Elton meets a fiesty agent who barges into his place, announces that she is going to make him huge, and later has him explore every aspect of her body before they have sex, announcing everything she feels during it – all “research” for Elton’s novel, for greater accuracy. Unsurprisingly, she becomes Elton’s first wife.

The majority of this portion of the book is about Elton’s married life. Again, his actual novels aren’t much covered; we’re just told they’re sexy and usually deal with characters who are successes in some arena. Now, this is obviously more commentary on the real Robbins, who likely just considered his own novels product for the masses. But still, Robbins was sure to pepper his novels with outrageous/sadistic/insane sex scenes, stuff completely off the map, stuff that no one else would ever think of let alone write. There’s none of that in Rich Dreams, and it’s all a matter of telling rather than showing.

Meanwhile, back in the “present,” which I assume must be 1982, Elton is told shortly before a grand party he’s hosting that someone has put out a contract on his life. You expect this would turn the narrative into more of a suspenseful or at least paranoid tone, but still the Barzmans give us endless scenes of people just talking about business deals and the like.

At this point the “naughty” stuff is totally gone, and the book is past the point of becoming a total bore. The worst part is that when the culprits behind Elton’s death contract are revealed, it’s not only stupid but anticlimatically resolved. (Spoiler warning: It turns out to be his damn kids. Why? Because Elton wouldn’t give them the money for that film. And what does Elton do when he finds out? He slaps them around.)

There are a few bright points here and there. The aforementioned uncomfortable breakfast scene is one, with Elton’s kids discussing the lurid details of his novels matter of factly. Also the Barzmans insert a few in-jokes; early in his career Elton is advised that, in order to keep from being sued when writing a roman a clef, just have a cameo from the real person he’s writing about in the book – ie, if you’re writing about a Hugh Hefner type, have a party scene later in the book and mention that Hugh Hefner’s there. The Barzmans then do just that, mentioning that Harold Robbins is vacationing nearby during Elton’s climatic party scene.

Still, it was a chore of a read, much too long for its own good and not nearly lurid enough. The potential was there, though, and it was fully squandered. Who knows, maybe Robbins was most offended by Rich Dreams because it made him seem so boring and domesticated?

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, by Gregory William Mank
May, 2009 McFarland Publishing

This is actually the third book by Gregory William Mank I've read in the past few months; first it was his 1999 Women in Horror Films, 1930s, which was composed of essay-length chapters on several of the leading horror ladies of that day, with lots of great photos, after which I read It's Alive!, which was Mank's first book. This edition of Bela and Boris (as I'll refer to it) is an expanded edition of a book Mank originally published back in 1991 or so; this edition comes in at a whopping 700 pages. What kind of world do we live in where a 700 page book can be published about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff??

However the most surprising thing is how enjoyable the book actually is. Mank has done his research and it shows; Bela and Boris documents basically every known instance in the lives of the two men, from their first forays into Hollywood on down to their deaths decades later, Lugosi basically destitute, Karloff enjoying the gratification of being considered a living legend. For that is the heart of the book, the supposed rivalry between the two; it's long been rumored that Lugosi hated Karloff, at least in his later years, ruined by poverty and stricken with jealousy at Karloff's fame and millions. But also the book operates on the principle of how one decision can make or wreck a life: Karloff came to fame because he was given the role of the Monster in Frankenstein, a role which Lugosi famously refused. Most believe (and apparently, Lugosi late in life believed as well) that his decision not to play the Monster was the first step in his downfall.

I have my own doubts about this. I think Karloff succeeded because he stepped into the shoes vacated by the recently-departed Lon Chaney: Karloff became a master of screen disguise, playing a variety of roles behind pounds of makeup. Lugosi was always Lugosi -- though, as Mank carefully explains, this assumption was not always correct, as there are movies where Karloff overracts (as in the awesomely over-the-top The Lost Patrol, from 1934, directed by John Ford), and movies where Lugosi underplays his role (ie 1934's The Black Cat, aka the best horror film of the Golden Age).

But regardless, having read the book and watched many of the films discussed, it seems clear to me that Karloff went on to fame due to the versatility of his acting, whereas Lugosi suffered due to his (perceived) lack of handling of the English language and his (supposed) overracting. Also, Lugosi would say "yes" to any role offered him; not even a year or two after Dracula and he was starring in a movie serial, basically the dregs of the movie world. He needed the money, but stooping to such a level could only harm him in Hollywood's eyes. Bela and Boris also shows the mercenary, backstabbing world of Studio Era Hollywood; the moguls knew that Lugosi needed money, and they'd sign him up for pitifully-small salaries, paid by the week -- even going so far as to demand that all of his scenes be shot in one week!

The book is filled to the brim with photos, stills, and poster reproductions, many of which I'd never seen before. Mank studiously footnotes the entirety of the text, going into the details of the making of each film, especially those Lugosi and Karloff made togther. One thing you won't get from Mank however is actual film criticism, something I first noticed in It's Alive! He'll tell you the production history, the on-set happenings, the changes made to the scripts and the films, and how the movies performed at the box office, but one thing he won't give you is an appreciation of the film's direction, photography, and etc. In other words, the sort of thing you would expect from a film scholar; but then, Mank is more of a film historian.

As for his writing, Mank has an annoying tendency to start off his chapters in present tense, which makes it all come off like a pretentious Entertainment Weekly sort of article, yet he's unable to hold onto the style for long, jumping back and forth from present to past tense in each chapter, which makes for a bumpy read. He also delivers quite a bit of purple prose, such as: "If Univeral was a fairy tale realm, Uncle Carl was its hobgoblin Mountain King." I mentioned in my It's Alive! review that Mank seemed uncertain of his tone, switching from a schorlarly air to a fan's praise. Though he's evened out his tone here, Bela and Boris still sometimes comes off like a Famous Monsters of Filmland article.

It's also amusing in that Mank is the reverse of the regular film scholar, the majority of whom focus on mainstream films and dismiss horror movies as junk; Mank instead praises the horror and seens unaware of mainstream films. I'm not an expert at all, but even I noticed he got some of his details wrong in his brief mentions of Lugosi and Karloff's non-horror films (for example, he states that Lugosi appeared in the climax of 1933's The Devil's In Love, which is not correct; indeed, Mank appears unware that Lugosi shared a scene in the film with David Manners, his co-star in both Dracula and The Black Cat).

But Mank's attention to detail and his love for these old films more than make up for any of this. He comes off especially well in how he, in the course of his research, made many of these forgotten stars feel important again, after decades of obscurity. The horror genre was never looked upon with much interest in the Golden Age; it was only in later decades, with Shock! Cinema and the Famous Monsters-type magazines that younger generations began to so adore these films that had gone forgotten. Many of the actors and actresses in them had themselves been forgotten in the intervening decades.

Mank, in the course of his research over the years, found many of the cast and crew and talked extensively with them about their lives and work. Mank's interviews spread from the late 1970s on up to the present, and many of the people he spoke to have died in the interim. Mank has in this way preserved the past; if it wasn't for him, many of these people would have gone to their graves without revealing insight into the films they worked on, or how they perceived Lugosi or Karloff.

But again, the rivalry plays a large part in how Mank lays out the book. For his part he doesn't reveal which of the two actors he prefers, though no one says you have to prefer one over the other. It seems to me that the "rivalry" is more of a perception of the fans; Mank mentions throughout how the Lugosi supporters and Karloff supporters often bicker and disagree. This brings to mind the humorous image of over-the-hill former "MonsterKids" duking it out: "Karloff's the best, dumbass!" "Lugosi is, you son of a bitch!"

Personally, I much prefer Lugosi. I've always found it strange his star didn't soar higher. As Mank details, Lugosi is often portrayed as only playing one character on screen -- Dracula. The common perception of the actor is that, unlike Karloff, he wasn't able to subdue his own personality for his roles. As Mank demonstrates again and again, this isn't true; anyone who has seen Lugosi as Ygor in the awesome Son of Frankenstein will know Lugosi could play any role. And yet, the conception persists, and it is true in many instances that Lugosi was usually playing a variation of himself.

But really, this isn't a problem, and that's what bugs me. Golden Age Hollywood was built around a star system in which the stars played variations of themselves (or, at least, variations of who the fans believed them to be). Clark Gable usually played a "Clark Gable" sort of role. Same for Bogart. Same for Cooper. This was how the Studio System ran; studio writers and producers would create a property with a particular star in mind, catering the script, story, and dialog to the actor. Given this, it makes no sense that Lugosi was "held back" for playing a variation of himself. In all honesty, he should've gone on to bigger things. It comes off more that Universal, Lugosi's ostensible "main" studio, just didn't know what to do with the guy. They wanted horror product and were only capable of thinking of Lugosi in a horror light. In other words, he was straightjacketed by the genre he helped make famous.

As mentioned, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff is 700 pages long, and a lot of it could've been pruned. The '30s portion is as expected fascinating, as that's when the two actors were at their height. The '40s stuff, slightly less so. But it all begins to taper off in the '50s, and by the time Bela's died in the late '50s and Karloff in the late '60s, you figure it's about time for the book to end, too.

But Mank keeps going, telling us about the sons and daughters of the actors, when particular DVD sets were released, how fans reacted, etc. He even spends a few pages griping about Tim Burton's awesome Ed Wood -- Mank appears to dislike it due to all of the "cursing," and also because it strays from the facts of Lugosi's later life. I find it odd that people expect 100% truth from biopics; films are fantasy and should be treated as such. So what that Lugosi wasn't a foul-mouthed Karloff-hater in his twilight years? It made for a fun movie all the same.

Another strange thing about Bela and Boris is that I have no idea who the book is intended for. As mentioned, Mank writes in a mostly accessible/mainstream style, with large portions of the book coming off like articles from an entertainment magazine. Yet the book is priced $70 and up, and it's published by McFarland, which specializes in academic film tones priced in the college-book range.

So in other words, we have a mainstream book about two horror stars that's priced beyond the means of the average horror film fan. I don't know too many people who would drop $70 or more on a book about Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. But you can always do what I did -- get the book from InterLibrary Loan.

It's Alive!

It's Alive!, by Gregory William Mank
No month stated, 1981 The Tantivy Press

This past summer I watched all of the old Universal horror Dracula-Frankenstein-Wolf Man flicks in "order," the first time I've ever done so. There really is a loose chronology between the films, even if certain characters/time periods are changed at whim. As expected, I found the '30s material vastly superior to the cut-rate '40s output, with more inventiveness, creativity, and superior production values. In fact I found the '40s movies (ie The Wolf Man, House of Dracula) pretty damn stupid, and it boggles my mind that these movies have such a devoted fan following.

You could rank Gregory Mank at the forefront of such following. This was his first book, published in 1981, and Mank continues to publish to this day books on the golden age of horror movies, particularly the Universal output. It's Alive! compiles all of Mank's considerable research on the Frankenstein films Universal released from 1931 through 1948, with an appendix on later film versions of the character. Mank does a thorough job of providing a synopsis of each film (a bit incidental in our DVD era, but the fact is this book was published even before the VHS versions were released), a rundown of the production history, comments from various actors and crew (compiled from contemporary sources or from people Mank himself intereviewed), a listing of deleted footage, and finally a recap on how the film performed.

The only problem with It's Alive! is that it's so damn hard to find these days. Long out of print, the book goes for excessive prices. I was lucky enough to get a copy for fairly cheap. I first heard about the book a few years ago; sources claimed that Mank provided a lot of detail, including production stills, of material that was cut from the various films. Like most I consider James Whale's 1935 offering The Bride of Frankenstein the best of the series (except for those days when I consider Rowland Lee's 1939 The Son of Frankenstein the best), and after hearing that a significant amount of material was cut from the film, I had to get Mank's book to find out more. (Long story short, a subplot involving Dwight Frye's lurchy character was cut from the film; in it he was killing villagers and blaming it on the Frankenstein Monster).

Again, this was Mank's first book, and he appears to struggle for balance. Parts of It's Alive! come off rather scholarly, with Mank laying down the details in factual manner. Other parts get a bit more colorful (he's fond of finishing sentences with exclamation points, never the mark of a scholar), making the book seem like a looong Famous Monsters of Filmland article. But again his depth of research is admirable, especially given that he took the trouble to hunt down the surviving cast and crew of the various films for first-hand recollections.

The book is filled with production stills, poster art, behind the scenes shots, and candid photos, all in black and white. For me though the highlight of the book was reading how different these films were in their original incarnations, particularly the long-lamented Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, in which Bela Lugosi played the Monster; in the original cut, the Monster was "half-blind" and could speak, but all of this was cut from the film right before release, making Lugosi's Monster seem like a half-wit.

Since reading It's Alive! I've read another Mank book, his Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, from 2009. Vast parts of that book are almost rewrites of the material in It's Alive!, with Mank providing even more background detail and cast/crew interviews. I'll be reviewing that one here soon; of the two, it's a much better read than It's Alive!

As a final stupid note...I watched those Universal films in the depth of the summer, drunk most of the time, and began to wish that some dopesmoking cinema scholar in the late '60s had published a study on the films, ie the "gnostic" bent of the movies (that the Monster didn't represent man, and Dr Frankenstein the gods, but that the Monster represented the gods and Dr. Frankenstein represented man -- ie, man creates his own gods, gods which eventually cause his own death). I further thought some sort of knee-jerk scholarly bent could be derived from the hopscotching of actors in different roles throughout the film -- how Lon "Mr. Potato Head" Chaney Jr. (thanks to Ethan Morrden) is the Monster in one movie, the Wolf Man the next...further proof of the gnostic diagram of life, or something.

Like I said, I was drunk at the time, but damn it would've been a cool book.

Always

Always, by Trevor Meldal-Johnsen
March, 1979 Avon Books

This obscure paperback original concerns a screenwriter in 1979 Hollywood who falls in love with an actress named Brooke Ashley -- an actress who died in a mysterious fire in 1949. The screenwriter, Gregory Thomas, soon becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of Brooke Ashley's lover, who died in that fire with her; further, he is convinced that Brooke Ashley is out there somewhere, reincarnated just as he is, and he determines to find her. So in other words it's like a trashy romance novel penned by Shirley MacLaine.

Gregory's fiance Sharon unwittingly gets it all started; she takes Gregory to see a showing of Brooke's final film, which for some unstated reason is playing again in 1979 theaters. Watching Brooke on the big screen, Gregory finds himself crying for some bizarre reason during the maudlin finale. Soon he can't get her out of his head. He feels that he somehow knows Brooke Ashley, despite the fact that previous to seeing the film with Sharon, he was only peripherally aware of the long-dead actress.

He comes up with the idea to do a script loosely based around Brooke's life; at first he thinks maybe he'll imply that she didn't die in a fire, but then he comes up with the reincarnation premise, that she is alive out there somewhere, reborn in new flesh, and her also-dead lover is also reborn and must find her. He pitches the idea to his agent who says it'll go over like gangbusters; the agent, obviously stoned, goes further to say that Gregory should first write the idea down as a novel. This strikes me as strange, as everyone knows that Hollywood agents don't read novels. Already the novel has gone into the realm of fantasy.

Past-life memories gradually come back to Gregory. He tells no one, especially his fiance Sharon, who has become increasingly distanced from him. Sharon is jealous of the decades-dead Brooke Ashley, of the attention Gregory is giving her, and wishes he would just drop his entire script/novel idea. But after researching Brooke's life, Gregory gets deeper into it, even meeting up with one of the actress's friends: a now-old mystic who goes by the handle Madame Olga Nabokov, who acts as the novel's version of Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost.

It gets goofy when Gregory finally remembers his past life -- it comes to him in a sudden rush, all of it. His name was Michael Richardson, and he was a screenwriter then as now; in fact he wrote Brooke's last film. Working with Olga to track down pieces of his past life, Gregory soon collects a ring he once gave Brooke (another goofy moment; when he touches the ring it burns him -- the ring survived the fire which killed Michael Richardson and Brooke Ashley, you see) and even visits his mother. Michael Richardson's mother, that is. It's to Meldal-Johnsen's credit that he doesn't sap up this scene.

A horror element sneaks in as Gregory soon finds himself under psychic attack in his dreams. For some strange reason, Olga proves unhelpful here; you'd figure she'd at least teach the guy some lucid dreaming techniques for self-defense. I mean, even the kids in Nightmare on Elm Street 3 learned how to become "dream warriors." Anyway the threats continue in the real world as well, with Gregory receiving threats in the mail, threats demanding that he "forget" about Brooke Ashley and etc.

More research and remembrance and Gregory discovers who the culprit is: Brooke Ashley's mother. What's creepy though is she too died in the fire that killed Michael and Brooke. So either Brooke's mom lives on in the astral realm or she too has been reincarnated, and has continued hating Michael Richardson for taking away her daughter, no matter what skin he's now wearing. These scenes, while at first grating, soon add a layer of tension and suspense to Always, as Gregory finds himself in several life-or-death situations. Hell, even his cat gets killed. However the horror element plays out in an unintentionally-hilarious scene as Gregory accidentally runs over his enemy.

Many sequences of the novel are given over to long chunks of Michael's life with Brooke, how he met her, their dates, how they promised to be together in this world and the next, no matter what happened. Meldal-Johnsen tries to make this a soul-match sort of love, but sadly I found Gregory's relationships with Sharon and Jenny (a bimbo young actress Gregory hooks up with during a spat with Sharon) more believable. Also, Meldal-Johnsen really missed the potential for some true drama. Gregory isn't even married; imagine how much more impact this novel would have had if Gregory was married with kids. Given that, would he still try to find the reincarnation of his past-life lover?

Thankfully, Always isn't all love-written-in-the-stars romantic glurge. As was the style of the time, Meldal-Johnsen finds opportunity to trash it up with some graphic sex scenes every once in a while. My favorite such moment is when Jenny, the aforementioned bimbo actress, takes hold of Gregory's "distended penis worshipfully," says to it "Oh, lovely, gorgeous thing," pops a few ice cubes in her mouth, and then sets to work. And mind you, this is only their first date! Now that's a woman you reincarnate for.

Shadow Play

Shadow Play, by Marvin Werlin
March, 1977 Pocket Books

This is the first Gothic I've ever read, though it's a late-era model for sure; it's my understanding the genre had died out by the mid-'70s. But regardless a Gothic is mostly what Shadow Play is; we have a willfull female narrator, an Old Dark House filled with degenerates, and even a dashing young man to save our distressed damsel. The draw for me though is the book's focus on classic film; the villain of the tale, Max Deveraux, is a wealthy film fanatic who has created his own Xanadu, where he likes to enact scenes from various '30s and '40s movies, often with bloody results.

Christine Glenville is our heroine, a film scholar who is trying to escape a messy past in San Francisco. Christine's boyfriend is a suddenly-hot director who knows of a millionaire film-fan who often funds movies. The man, Deveraux, is looking for an assistant to come out to his rolling mansion in Mendocino, and once he learns of Christine's knowledge of classic film, he offers her the position.

The mansion is massive, an exact replica of Manderley in Rebecca. In fact each room is modeled exactly after one classic film or another, all at incredible expense. (The veranda is even a replica of the one in Death Takes A Holiday; quite a feat, as anyone who has seen that '34 film would know.) And the place has been staffed with a cast of eccentrics: Deveraux's wife, who both looks and acts like Marlene Dietrich, a gaunt chaffeur who comes off like Boris Karloff in The Old Dark House, even a mentally-unstable English beauty who claims to be Deveraux's niece. And there's Deveraux himself, given to grandiose speeches about the superiority of golden age film while strolling about his acre-spanning domain.

Christine has a hard time absorbing it all. There seems to be a weird vibe to the place and lots of coy looks between Deveraux and his wife, and also the chaffeur, Corrin, seems pretty bitter about something. Adding to Christine's uncertainty about all this is the arrival of Toby, a dashing young drifter who in a bizarre scene is beaten up by a drunken older man and left for dead in the middle of the road, where Christine and Corrin later find him. (Toby's scenes incidentally are written in third-person, as are other bits in the novel, which leads to a bit of a jar as we're in Christine's first-person narration, then after a short-space drop we're suddenly in the third-person POV of another character.)

The novel takes its good old time getting to the lurid stuff, which in fact isn't even all that lurid. Deveraux enjoys recreating scenes from classic films on a stage for the benefit of his servants; the films of Josef von Sternberg are a particular favorite, with Deveraux's wife of course taking the Dietrich role. But the plays take on the air of Grand Guignol as graphic violence is added to the scenes, material that never would have gotten past censors in the '30s.

Gradually Christine discovers that she had a predecessor here, one who went missing. Of course the reader is well ahead of her and knows the truth long before Christine does: the former assistant was killed as a result of Deveraux's mad scene-playing, everyone in the mansion is friggin' nuts, and Christine and Toby need to get the hell out of there but quick.

There's a bit of sex and violence here and there but it's all skimmed over. The addition of sex -- even though only alluded to -- already places the novel outside of the Gothic, at least so far as Dean Koontz defined the genre in his Writing Popular Fiction. In fact all I know about Gothics is what I read about them in Koontz's how-to book.

I wish the classic film stuff was a bit more prevalent, but Shadow Play does at least show how the movies of the past can so affect one that it can lead them to acts of madness. As a funny sidenote, Deveraux reveals his plan at one point to one day write a book about the impact of film on culture -- Geoffrey O'Brien actually did this, with his ludicrously pretentious 1993 offering The Phantom Empire.

Flicker

Flicker, by Theodore Roszak
April, 1993 Bantam Books

This hefty book was first published in hardcover in 1991, then brought out in an "expanded" trade paperback edition in 2006, featuring a new appendix and fragments of material cut from the original version. But regardless this original print (shown here in its mass market paperback incarnation) is long enough, and will already be a mostly-trying read for the average reader, even if like me you're fascinated by Hollywood's golden era of the 1930s and '40s.

Film critic Jonathan Gates narrates the tale, which spans the late 1950s through the late 1970s. Gates is the foremost authority on once-forgotten filmmaker Max Castle, who left his native Germany in the age of the silents to make films in Hollywood. After a notorious, overbudgeted flop, Castle was from thence on relegated to quickies or horror films, in particular churning out stuff for Universal. He progressed through the talkie era on through the '30s, finding opportunity to instill his own art into the schlock he was forced to film. Finally in the pre-WWII years he was announced dead, his ship destroyed while he was on a European voyage to acquire funds to produce a film of his own.

Gates relates for us how he came to discover Castle's work, and this provides the meat of the tale. A college student in late '50s California, Gates begins going to The Classic, a dank little theater run by Clare Swan (ie Pauline Kael), an opinionated critic who provides copious notes for each film shown on the Classic's small screen. Here Gates encounters the nascent French film movement, all the cinema verite so popular at the time. By chance Clare gets hold of a beaten old vampire flick, an old Universal film none of them can place. This turns out to be one of Castle's many forgotten films, and is Gates's introduction to the man and his story. Clare reacts negatively and leaves all of the Castle research to Gates, who she nevertheless continues to tutor in her own private little way.

Clare has taken a shine to Gates and has made her his latest consort/pupil. After instilling her harsh opinions on practically every film ever made, Clare takes Gates to the next level and continues to teach him while they're having sex. Seriously, she will blab on and on about Sergei Eisenstein or whoever while they're making the beast with two backs. I would say this is the very definition of a bore, but regardless Gates (and therefore Roszak, his creator) wants us to believe this is a wonderful way to soak up all sorts of esoteric film lore. (But then if film classes were actually taught this way, I probably would've gone to UCLA.)

The reader must be prepared to wade through thick paragraphs of in-depth film chatter, as Gates meets one industry person after another. I have never had any love for the cinema verite of the '50s and '60s, so this stuff was hard going for me, as Gates will indulge in endless chatter with students and whatnot. Finally though he gets to the more interesting material of Castle; the best parts of the novel are when Gates details many of Castle's classic horror pictures, all of which sound pretty great. (One of them, Zombie Doctor, sounds supiciously like the real movie Island of Lost Souls -- out now on Blu Ray, by the way.)

In some ways these early parts of Flicker are fascinating because they show how simpler life is for the classic film fan, these days. Gates and his friends must search high and low for prints of the films they want to see, usually coming up with nothing but beaten 16mm chain prints that are barely watchable. Meanwhile today one can find pretty much anything on DVD -- and if it hasn't been officially released, there's always the gray market of DVDRs.

Gates finds that he and other viewers often react with horror to otherwise-innocuous scenes in Castle's work. For example Clare, who shows a particular revulsion, though she can never understand why. Gates discovers why with the appearance of the awesomely-named Zip Lipsky, a midget curmudgeon who worked as cameraman on most of Castle's films. Lipsky has managed to hang onto "uncut prints" of all of Castle's released films; Gates begins visiting the man regularly to watch them. During these showings Lipsky relates the story of Castle, how he had so much struggle in Hollywood and how he always inserted another level into his films. Producing a "Sallyrand," a "stripper" Castle named after the actual stripper Sally Rand, Lipsky shows Gates how if you look through the viewer you can see another film buried within the shadows of the main film. Gates sees grisly imagery of decaying flesh and even pornographic moments which never would've gotten past a censor, then or now.

The Sallyrand allows a viewer to plainly see this hidden footage, but to the naked eye it's invisible. However the viewer still unconsciously sees it, and this explains the feelings of revulsion and etc which set in upon viewers of Castle's work. Subconsciously they are seeing a spectrum of revulsion, only they don't realize so on the conscious level. The question remains, of course: why the hell was Castle going to such trouble?

Gates is determined to find out. After Lipsky's passing (which is unfortunate, as he's the only memorable character in the novel), Gates determines to meet up with others who worked with Castle. This leads him eventually to Orson Welles himself -- Gates learns that Welles, when he came to Hollywood with a full ticket in '39, personally sought out Castle, as he was such an admirer. The two men devised the idea to film Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (something Welles himself did in reality), and Castle and Lipsky filmed a lot of jungle footage before the project was dropped. Welles, regaling Gates and the reader for pages and pages in Clare's NYC apartment (she's since gotten famous as a newspaper film critic), goes further to mention that Castle also provided a bit of assistance on Citizen Kane, and that he even worked with John Ford on The Maltese Falcon.

On Gates goes, searching for the truth behind Castle's esoteric work. He goes to Holland, where he meets the still-ravishing Olga Tell, Castle's girlfriend in the '30s; it was her nude form cavorting in the "hidden layer" of many of Castle's films. Roszak continues the "teaching via sex" bit as Olga, despite her vast age difference with Gates, teaches him a bit of New Agery she learned from Castle while they engage in bouts of sexual congress. Here the novel begins its gradual freefall, as Gates eventually learns that Castle's religion, which he hid in his films but still promoted subconsciously, was that of the Cathars.

Early editions of Flicker compared the novel to The Name of the Rose; no surprise that the newer edition compares it to The Da Vinci Code. For that's exactly what it resembles, only of course it's a hell of a lot more literary. As the novel winds into its third half it becomes more focused on esoteric religions and less on film, which isn't a bad thing; it's just that it sways off into fantasy, as Gates finds himself a target of a shadowy religious sect which runs a global chain of orphanages. He visits one of them -- Castle, you see, was raised in such an orphanage -- to find that the children are being taught how to edit film. The entire aim of the orphanages is to teach children how to work in film and thereby promote their cause.

Castle disappears from the novel for large sections as Gates becomes fascinated with a teenaged albino who makes grindhouse gore films on dime budgets; the kid also was raised in one of these orphanages and is himself an admirer of Castle. Finally all of it spirals out of control as Gates discovers he is in more trouble than he could've imagined, eventually finding himself a prisoner on an island off Malta; a fully-staffed island, as it were, with Gates treated like a guest. It's all just, I don't know, goofy. And you'll never guess who Gates's fellow prisoner is on this island. (Actually, you will guess; you'll see it coming miles away.)

By turns enthralling and boring, Flicker is nevertheless an interesting "other side" of Hollywood history. It is a bit annoying that Max Castle is presented as such an influential film personality (who nonetheless went forgotten), with a hand in pretty much any classic film you could name, which seems to me to take a bit from the actual filmmakers themselves. (I'm sure Ford wouldn't have taken kindly to the novel, let alone Welles.) The Cathar stuff seems a lame and unnecessary draw; easy to say in this post-Da Vinci Code era, but there could've been a more compelling "truth" behind Castle's hidden layers of film than the usual "forbidden religions" angle of Foucault's Pendulum and others.

The Takers

The Takers, by Robert Ackworth
January, 1979 Ballantine Books

They Lived By Movieland's Golden Rule: Do Unto Others...Fast!

Sporting the dumbest cover blurb in history, Robert Ackworth's The Takers seemed to offer everything I'd been searching for in a trashy novel set during Hollywood's Golden Age of the 1930s and '40s. It was a doorstop of a book, coming in at nearly 600 pages of tiny, tiny print, about three movers and shakers at the fictional Regency Pictures studio, with a focus on their lurid sex lives. Ultimately though the novel fell flat due to lack of characterization, lack of plot, and lack of description.

The three protagonists are Howard Stanton, who comes to Hollywood in the final years of the silent era and becomes Regency's top star through the '30s and '40s; Michael Baines, several years younger than Howard, an actor who too follows his dream to Hollywood and becomes a Regency star in the post-WWII era; and finally Tracy Gordon, a brunette sort of Marilyn Monroe who becomes Regency's sex goddess of the '50s. Howard Stanton gets the majority of the novel, with the Tracy Gordon sections taking up the least. At any rate all three of them connect in one way or another, with Michael Baines a huge fan of Howard's (yet still hoping to trump him one day as Regency's top star), and Tracy Gordon falling in love with both of them.

Stanton's tale in the '30s was the highlight for me, due to my interest in that era. He hobknobs with Regency's top star (like Baines later in the book, Stanton hopes to trump the current star when he arrives in Hollywood, and of course succeeds), and also becomes a surrogate son for the acting president of Regency. As his star climbs Stanton becomes friendly with a variety of ladies. I should mention here that Ackworth takes special relish in tossing graphic sex scenes into the novel, which gives it a nicely lurid touch. Sometimes it's laughable because the scenes just come out of nowhere, with no connection to the preceeding or following sections, as if Ackworth went through his manuscript and said, "I'll put a sex scene here....and another here..."

Stanton eventually falls in love with Leni Leibhaber, a sort of anti-Marlene Dietrich in that she's 100% pro-Hitler and spends all of her sequences denouncing the US and saying how great Germany is, thanks to the Nazis. All this of course occurs in the pre-WWII years, and despite her Nazi tendencies Stanton's still in love with her. (Also despite the fact that Leni spends a suspicious amount of time with her female assistant.) So then, we have with Leni Leibhaber a sex-crazed character who happens to be a lesbian Nazi; as I say, The Takers had all the makings of becoming a trash classic.

The problem is, it's all so boringly presented. Ackworth doesn't bother with scene-setting or placing his characters in a colorful world. He barely describes anything, and also given that he also doesn't pay much attention to characterization, it leads to colorless characters in a colorless world. Leni should leap off the page but in Ackworth's hands she's kind of dull, which is insane when you think about it. Not to mention that Ackworth hardly ever describes the films his characters work on, even down to the plots. Given the super-production of studio pictures back then, you'd figure Ackworth would have a field day describing the sets and everything, but he only comes close to this once, when Michael Baines first arrives on the Regency lot and walks through it, looking at the sets. But even here Ackworth is conservative.

Shortly before WWII Leni returns to Germany and refuses to come back to the US, so Stanton has no choice but to divorce her. He then marries another actress whom he's fallen in love with in the meantime; another blank slate of a character, this one named Georgina. By this time Baines is more in the storyline, coming to Regency to start off in bit parts. Unfortunately his storyline is a carbon copy of Stanton's, which we just read a few hundred pages ago. It's pretty much identical, with Baines lusting for stardom, hooking up with random ladies for some explicit sex scenes, and hoping to become top dog at Regency. Only Baines is drafted into WWII, so his storyline gets a bit different when he becomes a soldier on the battlefront; sadly Ackworth's powers of description fail him in these scenes as well.

Tracy Gordon too shares the same storyline, with the only difference that she's a girl, so Ackworth can write her sex scenes from a woman's point of view. She loves Stanton (who is divorced again) but marries Baines; the two men have a long rivalry for her. Eventually Baines and Tracy also divorce, which sets the scene for the 1962 reunion for the trio -- the novel opens in that year, with Regency about to celebrate it's 4oth anniversary, but it's a melancholy, dispirited affair, as the days of the studios are over, besides which all of the bosses and moguls from that time are long gone anyway.

But there's no plot here, no forward momentum. It's sort of like the same story over and over again. Even down to the small details -- Stanton loses his virginity (as mentioned, Ackworth leaves no sex scene unexplored) as a teenager to a whore; a few hundred pages later, Baines loses his virginity to a whore. The scenes are identical. Stanton falls in love with an actress who turns out to be involved, yet he can't get her out of his mind. Baines a few hundred pages later falls in love with an actress who turns out to be married, yet he can't get her out of his mind.

Perhaps this is Ackworth's theme, the banality and repetition of the lives of Hollywood celebrities, but it makes for a dull affair. Even the lesbian Nazi is boring, and that is the most unkindest cut of all.

Taboo

Taboo, by Elizabeth Gage
December, 1993 Pocket Books

Once again I must give credit to trash guru Martin Boucher for bringing an author to my attention. Elizabeth Gage is the author in question; she rose to a brief fame in the late '80s and early '90s before disappearing from the scene. According to the bio on the back of this book, "Gage" was a psuedonym, and as you can see in the link to Martin's site above, there are rumors that a few different authors might have been behind the name.

At any rate, of the various Gage novels Taboo was the one that struck my fancy, as it takes place in the "golden age" of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood. This is a big tale (560 pages in this mass market paperback edition) about a trio of people in Tinseltown: Kate Hamilton, a pretty young thing who escapes a miserable background to become Hollywood's darling; Joseph Knight, a handsome entrepreneur who moves into the movie business with the aim of taking it over; and finally Eve Sinclair, a child star of the early '30s who, as Taboo opens, is on the verge of turning 18, and is looking to shall we say expand her horizons.

Unfortunately it takes nearly 200 pages to get to the Hollywood stuff; before that we must endure Kate Hamilton's woeful adolescent years, in which she is abused by her stepfather, gets thrown out by her mother, and ends up marrying a crook. All of it seems taken right out of an early '30s melodrama, one of the "women's pictures" that were so popular at the time. And indeed that may be Gage's intent. But regardless it's boring.

Also we have lots of material with Joseph Knight, how he uses his looks and his charm to build up his fortunes, running afoul of gangsters and causing beautiful women to fall into suicidal love with him. The only bearable character in this endless trawl is Eve Sinclair, the villain of the piece; a true scheming hellcat, she outs her secretly-gay costar (Eve's mid-30s popularity is due to a series of movies akin to the ones Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney made together), endures the sexual advances of a mogul, and upon turning 18 has her meddling mother forever cast out of her life.

Finally we get to the Hollywood section, where in an unintentionally hilarious sequence Joseph Knight pitches a lame movie idea to the production manager of Continental Studios (basically MGM). The guy loves the idea, which is about the Russian revolution (Gage seems unaware that several such movies were made in Hollywood in the early '30s), but sees in Knight the makings of a powerful enemy, and so has his lawyer concoct a scheme whereby they can steal his idea but not give him credit. However this was Knight's plan all along; meanwhile he goes to a smaller studio and pitches a more realistic idea, this one about the struggles people endured during the Depression (all of this occurs around 1940). This producer too loves the idea, and rushes the film into production.

As expected, Knight's small film trumps the big budget Russian revolution flick. Now he is a man on the go in Hollywood, producing and directing films. Eve Sinclair, her star ebbing, latches onto him and gets the lead in his next film. But given that she becomes infatuated with him (every single woman who even looks at Knight in this damn book falls in love with him), Eve throws tantrums and acts it up on the set, trying to draw attention to herself. Instead Knight fires her, and hires in her place Kate Hamilton, who up to now has been relegated to extra parts.

This of course invokes Eve's wrath. She plots her revenge, but meanwhile in a completely unrelated sequence Knight serves as a combat pilot in WWII. Honestly I had no idea why this section was even in the novel. Nothing comes to a head until, in 1946, Knight and Kate are about to make another picture together; finally Eve sows her vengeance.

According to that author bio, Gage "is the psuedonym of one of storytelling's brightest stars." This is hard to buy, as her storytelling skills are horrendous. I do not exaggerate when I say that 98% of this novel is written in summary. It's all "He had said," or "She had done," or "And so it had come to pass." Just on and on and on. It renders the novel a limpid bloat of a thing, with no forward momentum. Even when Joseph Knight finally arrives in Hollywood and makes his film, even that is written in summary, Gage telescoping the events of the next several months in huge blocks of paragraphs. There's hardly any action at all. Even of the sexual variety; these scenes too, which one might expect to be lurid or at the very least trashy, are overwritten to the point of banality.

As I read this novel I couldn't help but think that there was a better tale within. Eve Sinclair is the true star here: she's callous and manipulative and fun to read about. Unfortunately she disappears for long sections, and we must endure the boring lives of Kate Hamilton and Joseph Knight. These two are taken from the realm of Romance fiction; as mentioned, Joseph Knight is so perfect as to be laughable. There are innumerable scenes where women -- who have only gotten a glimpse of him -- will find themselves dreaming of him, fantasizing about him. And Kate Hamilton is super boring, incapable of endearing herself to the reader. Had Gage reversed this, made Eve the star of the show and Knight and Hamilton the supporting players (and if she hadn't written the entire thing in summary), she might've had one heck of a novel.

Gage's first novel (and biggest success) was A Glimpse of Stocking, a doorstop of a book which again dealt with Hollywood, only in the modern day. I've got that book too, and thumbing through it, it appears that it doesn't suffer from the summary syndrome as much as Taboo. I'll get to it one of these days.

Weekend '33

Weekend '33, by Bob Thomas
May, 1973 Dell Books
(Original hardcover publication, 1972)

I love Golden Age Hollywood movies, especially what's now known as Pre-Code cinema; ie films made between 1929 and 1934 which became progressively more "adult" in nature. I was certain some novel had to have been written about this era of Tinseltown; I knew of course about Harold Robbins's The Carpetbaggers, but I wanted to find something else, something more obscure. And the way these things happen, I eventually found what I sought -- Bob Thomas's novel Weekend '33, published in hardcover in 1972, then again in 1973 in the mass market edition shown here, and then promptly forgotten.

In the '60s and early '70s Thomas had scored a trio of best-sellers with his bios of three movie moguls: Thalberg, Selznick, and King Cohn. So it's safe to say he's in his element here, in a novel about Hollywood personalities converging on a palatial residence in Central California during Labor Day weekend, 1933. Other than a puzzling gaffe -- Thomas mentions Joseph Breen and his Nazi brethren in the Hays Office a few times, stating that they would not give approval to various "saucy" scenes, when the Production Code in fact wasn't enforced until June, 1934, nearly a year after the events of this novel -- Weekend '33 is a perfectly-rendered trip back into a long-lost era of Hollywood glamour.

This is a long-simmer novel very much in the vein of Burt Hirschfeld -- and in fact, Hirschfeld's novel Acapulco is given a full-page advertisement in the back of the book (another full-page ad is given to The Millionaires, by my man Herbert Kastle). Thomas employs the same method as used by Hirschfeld: he takes a large cast of fabulous people with fabulous wealth, places them in a fabulous setting, and lets them simmer for a few hundred pages. And just as in Hirschfeld there isn't much "trashy" material here; the novel is mostly dialog and thick blocks of narrative.

Weekend '33 in fact could've been published a decade or two earlier and wouldn't have caused a stir. It's almost chaste in a way, which is surprising given the era it was published -- what I wanted was a trashy novel of Hollywood personalities sitting around in their art deco apartments and sipping High Balls while scheming against one another, with the occasional coke-fueled orgy to spice things up. Instead this is a slow-brewing tale that's more focused on character; and one could argue that there are too many characters here. That's not to say however that it is an uninvolving tale. I was actually quite caught up in it, and it worked the same magic on me that Hirschfeld's own novels have.

Rather than use real figures from the era, Thomas instead delivers analogues of them. This is a bit underwhelming, as the novel therefore lacks the impact it otherwise might have: Thomas recreates '30s Hollywood, creating a variety of studios that didn't exist, stating that they are the top of the heap, and only gives real studios like MGM and Paramount minor mention. And the only real actor I recall being namedropped was Kay Francis. But I guess the idea then is a roman a clef sort of aproach, a la Robbins; only whereas Robbins would've created one or two "new" characters and placed them in the "real" world, Thomas instead recreates Hollywood itself.

As mentioned, there are a damn bunch of characters. Here they are, with who I think they're supposed to be in paranthesis: Harrison Stembridge (William Randolph Hearst) and his mistress Anita Farrell (Marion Davies) invite a host of Hollywood personalities to their castle-like domain Excalibur (basically Citizen Kane's Xanadu) in Central California. Stembridge has ulterior motives in who he has invited; the money-makers of the industry, basically, and he refuses to tell Anita his intentions. Anita however convinces the old man to allow her to invite some of her own Hollywood friends to spice things up -- her fear is all of these fuddy-duddy "business types" will spoil Labor Day weekend.

Among the guests are Arthur J. Bryant (Louis B. Mayer), head of the biggest studio in Hollywood; Sam Green (Harry Cohn, on the way up), straight-shooting owner of a struggling, nascent studio; Kay Caldwell (Gloria Swanson), silent era screen queen now determined to keep her (aging) star from fading; Roger Carlisle (Herman Mankiewicz), a screenwriter with flashes of genius who despite it all is too busy getting drunk and pissing people off; Melody Lee (Jean Harlow), a street-smart but innocent bombshell who's the next big thing; and Curt Zimmer (Erich von Stroheim), hulking German director who cares only for his art. In addition there is a husband-and-wife producing team; the wife, Laura Mason, is a former silent star and good friends with Kay Caldwell; the husband, Bobby Redmon, is a comedian in the vein of Buster Keaton. There's also Henry Stockton (Joseph Kennedy), another studio owner, but one who has just entered the business; an industry leader, Stockton figures that a film studio can be as easily run as say a steel factory -- and like Kennedy, who was in love with Gloria Swanson, Stockton is in love with Kay Caldwell. Finally there's Don Howell, another fading star who is looking to Sam Green for his next film; I'm not sure who he's supposed to be.

Thomas takes his time with the narrative. We meet each of our characters just before Labor Day weekend, as they go about their business in Hollywood. And by the way, for a novel about Hollywood there's very little movie-making action. Instead we see our characters in between projects, and so get little insight into the movie-making machine. Stembridge sends out his invitations and the panoply of characters descend en masse to Excalibur. This is another well-rendered scene as some of the guests converge in rented limosines, others in private planes, and others in trains, riding in Stembridge's own luxuriously-appointed private cars. Along the way various characters meet and talk and talk. No one understands why Stembridge has called them to Excalibur.

Another sequence which seems to acknowledge Citizen Kane is when the guests first arrive; part of the ritual of Excalibur is Stembridge escorts his guests on horseback down into the valley and there they have dinner. It's all just like the outdoor party sequence in the latter half of Citizen Kane, when Kane is entertaining guests in that awesome backlot of a forest (complete with what looks to be Prehistoric birds flashing by in the skyline -- keep your eyes open for them, next time you watch the film). After dinner Stembridge talks privately with the men he invited to Excalibur, and we finally learn his intentions: he wants to buy their studios.

Of them all, Sam Green emerges as the hero of the piece, as he's steadfastly against it, even though he's not a moneymaker and indeed is behind on a note he owes...to a bank owned by Stembridge. The old man claims he's merely buying the studios as a plaything for his mistress Anita Farrell, but Green puts the pieces together: Stembridge is an anti-Semite -- indeed he seems very interested in the doings of Adolf Hitler over in Europe -- and his goal is to take Hollywood away from the Jewish moguls and recreate it in his own Aryan image.

This has the makings of a helluva plot, but it all boils over in lots of dialog and argument. And what's worse is the anti-Semite insinuations are clouded over. Green works as a cog in Stembridge's plan, but not enough to foil him; after various melodramatic incidents (for example, Bobby has a quick fling with Melody Lee before being discovered by his wife Laura), several of the characters decide to sell their interests to Stembridge and therefore be done with the whole damned Hollywood business.

Bu then -- and this paragraph is a spoiler, so skip it if you want -- Thomas undercuts all of the drama. After learning that his plan is a success and that all of the owners (except for Green) will sell him their studios, Stembridge is informed that he doesn't even have the money to buy them! Due to the newly-inflated cost of paper (like Hearst, Stembridge's fortunes have been created by his many newspapers), Stembridge's resources are now too swamped to even go forward with his plan. To say it's an underwhelming finale would be, well, an understatement.

Just as frustratingly, Thomas then skips forward to a few months after Labor Day weekend, with the opening of Green's new film, which was written by Carlile. We get a glimmering of what's happened to each of the characters as they converge on their way into Mann's Chinese Theater, being interviewed on-air by a radio personality. And with that Weekend '33 comes to an end.

It appears that Thomas wrote only one other novel, the impressively-titled The Flesh Merchants, from 1959. Before that though I think I'll check out some of his mogul bios. And I should discover more Golden Age-era novels posthaste: I have the comprehensive sourcebook The Hollywood Novel by A. Slide on the way via Interlibrary Loan.