|
|
Post by David A. Riley on Feb 10, 2011 11:06:02 GMT
I love the movie, The Skull, though I wish someone had digitally altered the ending for the DVD so the skull looked a tad more realistic. That aside, it's a marvellous movie, with some top rank performances from the likes of Cushing, Lee and Wymark (a much under-rated actor - he was brilliant in Blood on Satan's Claw - who was only 44 when he died). I think it's a great film, and it was only on the very latest viewing of it, thanks to Lady P, that I actually saw any wires!!!! Patrick Wymark was 44 - really? I thought he looked much older than that! I've seen his grave in Highgate Cemetary courtesy of Mr Mark Samuels - if you go on the tour of the old part it's the one just on the way out I only noticed the wires because I originally saw it at the cinema, where they were much more obvious. A shame, but they don't really spoil what is a brilliant film. The best Bloch after Psycho, I think. Yes, it's a bit of a shock to see just how young Wymark was when he died. The Blood on Satan's Claws wasn't released till a year after his death and was his last movie. When he made The Skull he must have only been 39. |
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on Feb 10, 2011 16:26:52 GMT
*ahem* it always helps to give the link. Peter Duffell Bloch comes across as very grouchy about roughly 90% of his brushes with the film industry - with some justification, it must be said, but he was pleased with the Amicus treatment of Frozen Fear for Asylum (because they shot it as scripted: no tinkering around) and he's very gracious about The Cloak which "improved" upon his script. He's absolutely scathing about certain people he worked with on The Cabinet Of Caligari for Twentieth Century Fox and something called ''Steve Trilling' who sabotaged his screenplay for The Couch in 1960. The weirdest instance is surely Subotsky's re-editing of the explanatory scene at the end of The Psychopath in order to change the identity of the killer. I remember feeling there was something very wrong when I saw the scene on its original release - at first I thought the dialogue had slipped out of sync. Even odder, Freddie Francis never knew about it. |
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Feb 10, 2011 20:40:25 GMT
I think the David Schow hardcover volumes were 'The Lost Bloch' and collected obscure and more minor Bloch pieces Oh, I thought it was more mainstream and biografical. I seem to remember reading that Schow became a good pal of Bloch in his last years and tried to feature his work whenever he could. |
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Feb 10, 2011 20:46:11 GMT
Graeme's Flanagan's bibliography lists over 300 stories. It's probably a bit out of date as it was published in 1979:  Graeme also made audio tapes of Bloch's visit to Australia in the early 1980s when he was on a few panels. I transcribed a few of them - on tape he's a really funny guy and obviously well loved by everyone, and that doesn't come across on paper. Here's a part where he's talking about Lovecraft: "Well, it’s pretty generally known in the States that I got into writing because of Lovecraft. He’s taken a lot of blame for a lot of things that he’s not really responsible for. But I did send my first fan letter to him because I read about his previous stories in the letter column of Weird Tales. There was no where to get them. They weren’t reprinted, they weren’t available. So I wrote to him and asked whether he knew were I could find some of this stuff and he offered to let me borrow all of his published work. And then at about the fourth letter on he suggested I try my own hand at writing – he’d be glad to read it and comment on it. And he also gave me a list of correspondents that formed what would later become known as the “Lovecraft Circle”. The result of that I got in touch with August Derleth, who lived out at Sauk City about 125 miles from where I was, and Clark Ashton Smith, Eddie Hoffman Price, and J. Vernon Shea, who was not a professional writer but certainly one of the most avid fans and one of the most knowledgeable. And this increased my area of operations considerably, and some of the people I remained in correspondence with for many, many years to come. It was a very rewarding experience. "Bear in mind I’m talking about times when I was 16, 17, 18 years old and it was quite a thrill to associate with such people even through correspondence, or know people like Weinbaum and Farley and work with them in the Fictioneers group, where we didn’t read stories or anything but helped each other with plot problems. That was very, very interesting. "But I had not met another fan, a pure and simple fan (in those days we had fans whose purity was not questioned, and whose simplicity was self evident). By about 1936 a very prominent fan – about as prominent in the mid-West as Ackerman was in the East – a fan named Jack Darrow came to Milwaukie and visited me. That was first time a saw one of these specimens face to face. In spite of this I carried on." |
|
|
|
Post by dem on Feb 10, 2011 23:11:36 GMT
lovely post that, James, thanks very much for sharing. well, if this Jack Darrow character freaked him, God knows what Robert Bloch would have made of the species of "pure and simple fan" to be found lurching zombie-like around the basement of the Victoria Plaza Hotel during the Zardoz Pulp fair. Yeah, Graeme Flanagan's list ends with Freak Show in MF&SF for May 1979 so Bloch still had a quarter of a century's life left in him. can't remember if i asked before but did Graeme compile any more of these Bio-Bibliographies, and has he considered updating the Bloch? it would be interesting to see if he eventually made it to 400 stories and i'd not bet against it. later collections like Fear And Trembling and Midnight Pleasures contain a fair amount of post-1979 work and there were several anthology and magazine appearances to come. no fooling, Graeme's booklet is perhaps my all time most thumbed small press booklets, absolutely indispensable for making sense of Bloch's collections which often seemed to change title depending on who was doing the publishing! He crams an enormous amount of info into 64 pages and not a word wasted. something else i like about it - the presentation. it has an almost scrapbook feel to it with photo's, interviews tributes and snippets offsetting the exhaustive bibliography. The weirdest instance is surely Subotsky's re-editing of the explanatory scene at the end of The Psychopath in order to change the identity of the killer. I remember feeling there was something very wrong when I saw the scene on its original release - at first I thought the dialogue had slipped out of sync. Even odder, Freddie Francis never knew about it. Hi Ramsey. The little Robert Bloch has to say about Milton in Graeme's booklet comes across as very diplomatic, that he liked him both as a person and a genuine fan of horror and fantasy, so he wasn't about to give him the Steve Trilling treatment. incidentally, i just reread your For A British Point Of View from the same booklet and, as with the tributes from Mary E. Counselman, Fritz Leiber, Bradbury & Co., it bears out James' observation, "a really funny guy and obviously well loved by everyone." |
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Feb 10, 2011 23:35:09 GMT
but did Graeme compile any more of these Bio-Bibliographies, and has he considered updating the Bloch? Dem, he did one with Mark Rathbun on Richard Matheson called He is Legend, which came out in the 1980s. No more that I know of. Evidently someone (possibly Rathbun?) did an updated bells-and-whistles bibliography of Bloch a few years later. Graeme stopped doing bibliographies quite a while back - that's a pity because his Australian Vintage Paperback Guide is a classic of it's kind and he's got the right temperament and attention to details for that sort of thing. These days his big thing is teaching Blues appreciation at, I think, the Canberra Institue of Technology. |
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Feb 11, 2011 11:27:35 GMT
Great post, James, thanks! That was fun.
Particulary interesting for me is how much Bloch changed as a writer. I read his Mythos tales in the Chaosium edition Mysteries of the Worm - imho one of the best of the Chaosium titles which got rather ponderous later - and they are so fundamentally different than his later stories. Sometimes it is hard to beliive that his is the same writer who later wrote things like Enoch or all this Hollywood behind the scenes stuff.
I really have to read his novel The Star Stalker which I discovered in its german incarnation in a second hand shop and gathers dust since then. It is a Hollywood novel from 1968 without genre elements. (As far as I know).
|
|
|
|
Post by ramseycampbell on Feb 11, 2011 13:48:09 GMT
Great post, James, thanks! That was fun. Particulary interesting for me is how much Bloch changed as a writer. I read his Mythos tales in the Chaosium edition Mysteries of the Worm - imho one of the best of the Chaosium titles which got rather ponderous later - and they are so fundamentally different than his later stories. Sometimes it is hard to beliive that his is the same writer who later wrote things like Enoch or all this Hollywood behind the scenes stuff. The same is true of Henry Kuttner's evolution from his early Lovecraft imitations - mine too, maybe! |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 11, 2011 19:02:06 GMT
Particulary interesting for me is how much Bloch changed as a writer. I read his Mythos tales in the Chaosium edition Mysteries of the Worm - imho one of the best of the Chaosium titles which got rather ponderous later I'd agree with that. I wonder if there might be need for a Chaosium thread at some point as I've read far more of them than I should and I've even kept hold of a shelf of the buggers! |
|
|
|
Post by jamesdoig on Feb 11, 2011 21:34:22 GMT
Thanks guys. By the way, it was Randall Larson who compiled the later Bloch bibliography: The Complete Robert Bloch an Illustrated International Bibliography .
|
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 12, 2011 7:39:33 GMT
The Skull of the Marquis De Sade - Quite possibly the very first of Amicus' associations with Mr Bloch, I was quite surprised at how faithful the movie is to the book, and not at all surprised that Subotsky's script apparently ran out at around the 40 minute mark leaving Freddie Francis to 'string everything out a bit'. This is a great opener to the volume. No, scratch that - it's fantastic. Pure Bloch, describing its atrocities in the kind of elegant, witty style that's just how I like 'em. Even of the rest of this collection's rubbish this one's staying on the shelf.
A Quiet Funeral - And quite a slight tale to follow. As far as I can remember this was adapted pretty faithfully for Darkroom. They even managed to squeeze the punchline in.
The Weird Taylor - Very similar indeed to the Amicus episode it eventually gave rise to, which is hardly surprising as Bloch wrote the script, intending it to be the first episode of Asylum until Max Rosenberg ordered the order of the stories to be changed once he'd shown the movie to a distributor who thought there wasn't enough grue in the first 20 minutes. That's why Frozen Fear ended up first & they did some clever dubbing in the framework to cover it up. The same happens in Vault of Horror (the Terry Thomas and Michael Craig stories have been switched, this time for no discernable reason as they're both a bit silly). Back to The Weird Tailor. The story does actually work better than the film, however, because in the story the tailor (called Erik Conrad) is an utter bastard who beats his much younger wife regularly and deserves his come-uppance. In the movie Barry Morse's character comes across as very meek and not at all violent until the end and I had assumed the girl was his daughter! Great to be back reading pulp, btw 
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Feb 12, 2011 15:21:42 GMT
Off topic, I know, but this could be the title of a memoir recounting the story of The Planet of the Apes from the simian point of view. |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 12, 2011 16:00:14 GMT
Off topic, I know, but this could be the title of a memoir recounting the story of The Planet of the Apes from the simian point of view. I think the most appropriate response to that one is probably  |
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Feb 12, 2011 16:10:14 GMT
Off topic, I know, but this could be the title of a memoir recounting the story of The Planet of the Apes from the simian point of view. I think the most appropriate response to that one is probably To tell you the truth, John, I think that's more than I deserved...  |
|
|
|
Post by Johnlprobert on Feb 12, 2011 16:14:49 GMT
I think the most appropriate response to that one is probably To tell you the truth, John, I think that's more than I deserved...  Btw, why is the tailor in Bloch's story weird anyway? It's the customer who's the devil-worshipping necromancer. |
|
