Captain Flashback
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CAPTAIN FLASHBACK A fanzine composed for the 406th distribution of the All the Pretty Brothers: Turbo-Charged Party-Animal Amateur Press Walter Hill’s The Long Riders turns 40 Association, from the joint membership of Andy Hooper and Carrie Root, residing at 11032 30th Ave. As the Corona virus quarantine stretches into its NE Seattle, WA 98125. E-mail Andy at second month, and most everyone is obliged to [email protected], and you may reach Carrie at remain at home, I find that one of the things I’m [email protected]. This is a Drag Bunt Press missing most is going out to the movies. This is Production, completed on 4/19/2020. not exactly a rational longing, since I have been to a genuine theater to see a movie only twice CAPTAIN FLASHBACK is devoted to old fanzines, since last September (Midway and The Rise of Horse and Space Opera, surf guitar and other Skywalker). But as the world has shrunk to what fascinating phenomena of the 20th Century. All we can see from behind a face mask, one of the written material is by Andy Hooper unless indicated. many things I really miss is sitting through Contents of Issue #17: trailers and munching on movie theater popcorn. Page 1: All the Pretty Brothers: Walter Hill’s The Long Riders turns 40 But I’ve always watched most of the movies I Page 2: A Key to Interlineations in Issue #16 see on television ever since I was a tiny child. Page 8: Comments on Turbo-Apa #405 One of my earliest memories is eating instant Page 12: Fanmail from some Flounder: Letters to CF chicken soup and watching the Ray Harry- Page 14: Northwest by Northwest hausen-animated giant cephalopod crawl up the Page 15: I Remember Entropy Department: side of the Golden Gate Bridge in It Came From “Whatever Happened to Faanfiction?” by Beneath the Sea. Throughout the virus crisis rich brown, from BSFAN #17, Fall 1988. we’ve remained loyal viewers of Svengoolie’s Saturday night monster movie on the MeTV network and have hardly noticed that the jokes are all recycled from pre-viral times. I’ve also been watching a lot of programming on the Turner Classic Movies network; they too had to sadly cancel their annual film festival in Los Angeles and must instead present a “virtual celebration.” This was supposed to include a 35th Anniversary party for Back to the Future, and a benefit for Parkinson’s Disease in honor of actor Michael J. Fox. And Jim & Stacy Keach as Jesse & Frank James, other pictures which were to have The Long Riders, 1980. been exhibited on a full-size screen, will be enjoyed on smaller screens at home. The fact that Back to the Future was made 35 years ago doesn’t hit me so hard; somehow the mid-eighties continue to seem like a very recent period to me. But as I tied a bandana around my face in order to go for [Continued Next Page] --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Issue #17, April 2020 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A Key to Linos published in March in CAPTAIN FLASHBACK #16: Page 2: “Son, let this be a lesson. Never work hard and don’t form emotional attachments.” & Page 3: “Also, don’t be a cow.” Fatherly advice from Homer Simpson; S19, Ep17, “Apocalypse Cow.” Page 4: “This is how you know it’s live – you can actually hear piano in the drums.” & Page 5: “Most of the times, you hear drums in the piano.” Todd Rungren describes the recording of “You Took the Words Right Out of my Mouth” by Meat Loaf. Page 7 “Man, there’s no dope in this town – just these vile foamy liquids.” Jeff the Bass Player (Martin Lickert) confronts life on tour in North America in Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971). Page 8: “Where’s dinner? I’m thirsty.” Line delivered by William Powell as Detective Nick Charles in After the Thin Man (1936). Page 8: “And the fenceposts in the moonlight look like bones.” Lyric from the 1992 song “Black Wings” by Tom Waits --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- All the Pretty Brothers audience, no amount of authentic horse tack and [continued from page 1] Canadian prairie scenery will keep them awake. a walk in the neighborhood, another great film I wrote about this a bit in “The Fan Who from the 1980s flashed across my memory, and I Watched Liberty Valance” in FLAG #22. John really did feel old. The Long Riders, Walter Ford’s delightfully cynical 1962 feature The Hill’s “Revisionist Western” about the James- Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ends with an Younger gang, was released 40 years ago! explicit instruction to the screen writer: “This is the west, sir. When the legend becomes fact, Films about the United States’ western print the legend.” But Ford’s film gives us both expansion and people that lived it provided an the legend and the true story behind it; he important percentage of Hollywood’s annual th doesn’t follow his own advice. Both fact and income for much of the 20 Century. But it is fantasy can provide the basis for a great safe to say that Sturgeon’s Law applied, and Western, and maybe the best use both freely. something north of 90% of all the Westerns ever Sergio Leone’s irresistible saga The Good, The made were formulaic crap, bearing very little Bad and The Ugly uses events in the real New resemblance to anything or anyone “real.” Mexico campaign from the American Civil War Although the events portrayed were just barely as its take-off point – but then it strides firmly fifty years in the past, the pictures showed into fantasy, with anachronistic weapons and ten cowboys and rustlers duded up as if they were or twenty times the number of troops involved in ready to perform in a Western Swing band. And the historical event. And it features the the morality plays they presented took place in a Brooklyn-born Eli Herschel Wallach as a rich fairyland of imagination, where no one was Mexican bandit named Tuco. As I said, ever confronted with the choice between murder irresistible. and starvation. (Except for native Americans, who gamely died by the thousands under Lives of the Cowboys cinematic cowboy bullets. In real life, of course, In the 1960s and early 1970s, there were yet we used smallpox to get the job done.) enough Westerns being made that some American actors were still known as “cowboy But that remaining 2% to 10%, depending on stars” – the enduring John Wayne of course, but which version of Sturgeon’s Law you embrace, also Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Paul included some pretty spectacular movies. And Newman, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson and even a bad Western can look Good – look at any Lee Marvin appeared in a lot of Westerns in the Western movie starring Kevin Costner, for first half of their careers. But gradually, example. But great Western pictures tell great Westerns began to stand out in the sea of movies stories. They do not have to be true stories, by about cops and spies and even a few people who any means, but if the story does not engage the didn’t carry guns. A Western that could be cut for TV broadcast was something of an event 2 (and you could hardly do that with Sam Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch or The Ballad of Cable Hogue or Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks) and I recall later works by the Duke including True Grit and The Cowboys with some affection. Clint Eastwood’s post-Leone Westerns were eccentric; Hang ‘em High, Joe Kidd (script by Elmore Leonard), High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales all appeared between 1968 and 1976 and are often referred to as “Revisionist Westerns.” He summarized his career as a Man with No Name in Pale Rider, which was the top grossing Western of the 1980s. Arthur Penn also made the movie I think of as the ultimate “Revisionist” Western saga, the 1970 adaptation of Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man. It was a film that completed a kind of Circle of Hokum personified by General George Armstrong Custer; from the charming paragon Go ahead – skin that smoke wagon and see what happens. portrayed by Errol Flynn in They Died With Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp in Tombstone (1993) Their Boots On to the curly-haired clown There are three figures from the American west presented by Richard Mulligan in Little Big that have been particularly fascinating to Man. Neither actor looked anything like Custer, Hollywood: Wyatt Earp, Billy the Kid and Jesse who had mad, clear eyes that told you he was James. There is a wide cast of historic characters trouble at first sight. But Mulligan’s satirical just behind them, from Wild Bill Hickock to Bat character represented the evolving image of Masterson to Calamity Jane Cannary and they Custer from martyred hero to justly thwarted continue to appear in films and TV series too. genocidal bungler. Custer’s actual character is But Hollywood really can’t quit any of the “big probably missing from either version, but both three.” Wyatt Earp (1857-1929) was most movies reflect the way that their audiences felt memorably played by Kurt Russell in about him. Tombstone in 1993, and Kevin Costner had his One might conclude that America was working turn a year later. Earp was largely known as the through something traumatic in the medium of possible aggressor of the gunfight at the OK these movies, and eventually, we came to terms Corral and as an incompetent boxing referee with the 19th Century and original Westerns until a glowing biography of him was published became quite rare.