A web log, an æthereal scrap-book if you will, with a somewhat vintage flavour. News items, occurrences, experiences, thoughts and opinions related to Victoriana through to Fifties Americana can all be found here.
Over the course of the last week various news sources have reported on two films in the early stages of development that I know will be of interest to this blog's readers.
First to be on the receiving end of the Hollywood treatment is a man widely regarded as one of the triumvirate of 1930s pulp fiction characters (and proto-superheroes) along with The Shadow and The Phantom - Clark Savage Jr, otherwise known as Doc Savage. First appearing in pulp magazines from 1933 onwards, Doc Savage was perhaps one of the first typical "human" superheroes having been "trained from birth to the peak of physical ability". Adept at martial arts, knowledgeable about earth sciences and a master of disguise with a strong desire to do good and help others, you can see why this would appeal to one of the major film studios - particularly with superhero movies like The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel doing such brisk business at the box office. Why not get in on the action (literally!) with the granddaddy of them all?
Attached to the project as director is Shane Black, who has recently had incredible success with Iron Man 3 (which I have to sadly admit I've yet to see) and whose screenwriting credits include Lethal Weapon, Predator and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He certainly sounds like the kind of chap who could take Doc Savage places!
This won't be the first time Doc Savage has made it to the big screen, however. Those of you with long (and some might say masochistic!) memories may recall the 1975 film Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely in the title role. Foreshadowing somewhat the similar reception of pulp hero films The Shadow and The Phantom twenty years later, Doc Savage: Man of Bronze is generally regarded as excruciatingly awful. I won't even bother to dignify it with a link - I'll leave it to you to decide if you want to find out about/be reminded of it (although here's a picture)! However with Mr Black at the helm I feel sure the new Doc Savage film will be a far, far better affair. Already I'm liking the sound of the 1930s period setting and the "Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart action hero" slant.
Although rumours of this new film have been circulating since 2010 it is only recently that Shane Black has begun talking about it to the entertainment press, so I would not expect to see it in cinemas until well into 2014 at the earliest. Still, something to look forward to! Who do we think should take the role (I've already seen Daniel Craig's name mentioned)?
The other film to look forward to is an adaptation of a recently-written novel entitled The Other Typist, the debut book of author Suzanne Rindell. The story is set in 1920s New York, with two contrasting young women on a police precinct's typing pool befriending each other and by the sound of things getting up to all sorts of mischief in the Prohibition-era Big Apple.
Confirmed to play one of the two lead roles is Keira Knightley, but no other cast or crew details have been confirmed at this time so once again we're probably looking at a 2014 release date. I get the impression that Miss Knightley has a polarising effect on people (particularly women - "flat/square/horse face" and "too thin" being among the comments I have heard some ladies mutter!) but I've always found her to be a decent enough actress. I'll be interested to see who will be joining her on this project.
Quite apart from the fashion aspect of the film, for me and my fellow Typosphereans it will hopefully be an excellent chance to sate our passion for vintage typewriters with several 1920s types surely to be in evidence! What do we think, chaps & ladies - Remingtons, Underwoods, Royals? What would the NYPD be using in the Twenties?
The book on which this film will be based was published in Britain last month and should be, as the saying goes, available in all good bookshops. Reviews have been positive, so we can only hope that the film will achieve as much. Furthermore, for those of you living in the British Isles B.B.C. Radio 4 Extra has just this week started broadcastingThe Other Typistas an audiobook and the first part can be heard here. Hopefully it will give us a small idea of what to expect from the film.
What films are you looking forward to in the next 12 months - anything else interesting I've missed?
Some welcome recognition now for one of the earliest comic-book superheroes, as discussed in this short B.B.C. interview from a few weeks ago.
As explained Lee Falk's The Phantom, along with Walter B. Gibson's The Shadow, was among the first of the masked crime fighters to appear in comics and newspaper strips of the 1930s. Predating Batman and Superman by several years, The Phantom in particular set the superhero standard in a number of areas. He was the first to wear a coloured, skin-tight costume and the first to be illustrated with a mask showing only white eyes, for example. Similar to the Batman character, introduced 3 years later, The Phantom also had no special powers and relied purely on fear and physical strength. Their back stories also shared some similarities, with the loss of parents being the common motivating factor.
The 1930s was in fact the decade to which the concept of the superhero as we know him today owes its genesis. In the dark days of the Great Depression - and particularly in America where gang crime was prevalent - the idea of empowered, costumed champions of honesty and bravery easily captured the public's imagination, aided in no small part by the incredible popularity of newspapers, radio and the cinema. On the outbreak of the Second World War these characters' stories were frequently and unsurprisingly written with an obvious propagandist bent as the likes of Batman, Superman and The Phantom fought Nazis and Japanese villains rather than criminal gangs, if anything further cementing their place in popular culture.
While Batman and Superman have endured in the public consciousness for the last 70 years, the fortunes of trailblazers like The Phantom and The Shadow have waxed and waned in that time. Although The Phantom comic strip has the remarkable distinction of having been in print continuously since 1936 (with Lee Falk himself still wielding the pencil right up until his death in 1999), the character's transition to other media has been less successful (for a start - and I can scarcely believe this myself - it was never serialised on the radio as The Shadow was!). Here we take a look at some of the better-known screen adaptations of The Phantom:
The Phantom first appeared on the big screen a mere seven years after his creation in one of Columbia Pictures' popular 15-part serials. It proved quite a success and very nearly spawned a sequel in 1955 before copyright issues scuppered any further possibility of another serial.
Perhaps the best-known recent adaptation of The Phantom is the 1996 feature film starring Billy Zane in the lead role. One of a triumvirate of pulp hero-based films released in the early- to mid-Nineties, along with Rocketeer (1991) and Alec Baldwin's turn as The Shadow in 1994 (all of which grace my DVD collection!), The Phantom - like the others before it - did not perform satisfactorily at the box office and for a while marked the end of major studios' interest in these early pulp characters. It did, however, help Billy Zane land his role in the following year's blockbuster, Titanic. And if you liked him in that, ladies, let me remind you than he worked out especially for his role as The Phantom (one that he went on record later as ranking among his favourites) and for much of the film wears the aforementioned skin-tight suit(!). Even disregarding that fact I highly recommend it as a bit of fun, period escapism.
Like me some of you may also remember from the early 1990s the popular cartoon Phantom 2040, which successfully updated The Phantom character to the 21st century. In 2008 a 3-hour, two-part live action television series called The Phantom was shown on the Syfy Channel, again bringing the character into the modern era. Around the same time a new film was announced and is rumoured to still be on track. The Phantom: Legacy will once again feature a present-day iteration of the character with various updates, so it will not hold as much interest for the likes of you and me as the period-set 1996 version, but it promises to follow the same template as the recent Batman films which will probably translate into critical and commercial success.
So although The Phantom may not be quite as well-known as Batman or Superman the fact that the comic strip featuring his adventures continues to be published after nearly 80 years, with a number of adaptations to show for it as well, proves that this enduring character still has plenty of pull. What with that and the news last year that new stories featuring the Rocketeerand The Shadow have been penned, perhaps a renaissance for these other early pulp heroes is simply a matter of time.
Last year I blogged about one of my favourite pulp-fiction heroes, the Rocketeer, and the news that a new series of comics featuring the character had been commissioned. At the time I was delighted to hear of the new Rocketeer adventures and now it looks as though some more pulp heroes from the golden age of radio and comic-strips are about to get a new lease of life.
An unsuccessful attempt to reintroduce a few of the more famous pulp crimefighters resulted in a series of live-action films being made in the early 1990s, beginning with the Rocketeer in 1991 through The Shadow (starring Alec Baldwin) in 1994 and ending with The Phantom (Billy Zane) in 1996. All part of my DVD collection, of course! Alas cinema audiences at the time were just not in the mood for these classic characters, the films performed poorly at the box office and pulp's breakthrough into the mainstream proved abortive. I've always said they were simply made 20 years too soon(!).
Now, as the accompanying article touches upon, the early radio and comic-strip characters are proving to be more popular again as the fashion for all things vintage continues and public affinity with the tough times of the 1930s grows. The new Shadow strips aim to take advantage of this renewed interest and hopefully introduce a new generation to the thrills of these early superheroes.
There are some interesting thoughts and ideas put forward by the interviewees in the piece and those held by the writers and artists involved in reviving these well-known characters, as well as the new strip itself, shows that there is a very good chance of fresh success for The Shadow at least, and maybe others too. Director of the first three Spider-Man films, Sam Raimi, has long been a fan of The Shadow and is rumoured to be working on a new Shadow film having been trying to obtain the rights to the character since the late Eighties (which resulted in him making the 1990 film Darkman, starring Liam Neeson). The Shadow given the Spider-Man treatment? Sounds good to me!
Last year's The Green Hornet film, while not a period film and critically unsuccessful, at least shows that Hollywood hasn't lost its appetite for classic pulp fiction. Next year's The Lone Ranger starring Johnny Depp has, going by available details, received mixed reactions so far but may be one to watch (although I've never really considered The Lone Ranger as a pulp character). The Phantom continues to appear as a comic strip, was recently adapted for television and is also mooted for a film "reboot". Likewise a new Doc Savage picture is said to be in the pipeline too. While only some of these have or will remain rooted in their original time periods they should all remain true to their roots and will hopefully continue the revitalisation of these classic characters.
In the meantime, this all-new Shadow comic-strip looks like a promising start. Fans of "old-time" radio serials like those of The Shadow, Flash Gordon and the like can also listen and download a wide selection of original broadcasts from this splendid website.
For fans of pulp comics The Rocketeer is a familiar and worthy addition to the genre and its illustrator, the late Dave Stevens, a highly regarded artist and writer who is much missed.
Unlike The Shadow, The Phantom, Doc Savage, Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon The Rocketeer came in late to the pulp fiction party, having been created by Stevens in 1982. However with its great 1930s setting and proper pulp feel to the stories (heavily influenced by the Rocketmen serials of the 1950s, which I've mentioned previously, as well as pin-up models of the time such as Bettie Page, the likes of whom Stevens enjoyed drawing too) it quickly earned its place in the pantheon of comic book superheroes.
I love the 1930s Art Deco vibe that Stevens was able to capture so well; the stories are classic examples of good old-fashioned derring-do, there's a pretty girl, dastardly villains and plenty of flying both with and without aeroplanes. For me, the Rocketeer has everything!
Rocketeer stories continued to appear throughout the remainder of the 1980s and 1990s and even led to a live-action Disney feature film in 1991 (which I have also mentioned previously is one of my all-time favourite films). Sadly the film was not a great success and no further Rocketeeer stories were produced after 1995. Even more tragically Dave Stevens died from leukemia in 2008, seemingly putting paid to any new Rocketeer adventures.
It was with great delight, therefore, when I heard recently that the copyright holder IDW Publishing had approached several of Dave Stevens' peers with the view of having them pen some new stories, illustrated in a style sympathetic to Stevens' original artwork.
A new series of 1930s-style comic book adventures seems almost too good to be true, but this article confirms it - soon there will be more exciting adventures of the Rocketeer to thrill and amaze us. I can hardly wait!
