|
Post by dem bones on Jul 18, 2012 15:39:25 GMT
Theodore Roszac - Flicker (No Exit, 2005; originally Simon & Schuster, 1991) Blurb: A macabre detective story, an occult tale of medieval heresy, an apocalyptic thriller and a secret history of film.
Jonathan Gates loves going to the Classic, a legendary little art house cinema in West L.A. There he succumbs to what will be a lifelong obsession with the mysterious Max Castle, a nearly forgotten genius of the silent screen and legendary film noir director who vanished in the 1940s, at the height of his power.
Twenty years later Gates seeks the truth behind Castle's disappearance —and finds himself on a journey deep into Hollywood's own heart of darkness, where nothing on the silver screen is quite what it appears.
A macabre detective story, an occult tale of medieval heresy, an apocalyptic thriller and a secret history of film, Flicker is a richly evocative study of the dark side of human genius. Read Flicker and you will never be able to watch a movie in the same way again.Seriously, seriously, under-rated novel. Noticed it was back in print in Waterstones the other day, cashing in no doubt on the Da Vinci Code conspiracy-thriller thing that it had done so well back in 1987... An absolute treasure-trove of non-existent movies...some of which do exist...sort of... If you get a chance, try and see a print of The Lonesome Lovesong of the Sad Sewer Babies. ;D I would kill to see that movie... Failing that, just read Flicker for a detailed description. Flicker is awesome!! Indeed very underrated. The described movies seem absolutly real. A masterwork, this book. What a terrific novel! i'm approaching page 400, still have the best part of 300 hundred to go, and finding it so intriguing that the compulsive note-taking stopped somewhere around chapter three. Jonathan's passion for Max Castle movies has seen him caught up in a conspiracy that involves the Cathars, the Knights Templar, the birth of motion pictures, subliminal imagery, the Third Reich, The Maltese Falcon, Orson Welles, a studio-suppressed adaptation of Heart Of Darkness, McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist, plus some of the greatest imaginary films of all time. Review to - i doubt i'm capable! Thank you so much for putting me onto it, gents!
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Jul 20, 2012 10:06:07 GMT
This is the best I can manage. looks like this will be a long synopsis as the following doesn't take us much further than p. 100 ....
At the close of the 'fifties, university student Jonathan Gates is taken on by Clarissa Swann, co-owner of the decrepit Classic cinema, as her lover and unpaid gopher. Clara is a film historian of some genius, and Jonny is not at all displeased with the arrangement as he is as in love with the cinema as he is with Clara. His main concern is how Don Sharkey, Clara's degenerate long-time partner and projectionist, will take to the situation but Sharkey doesn't mind in the least. The unlikely trio share a passion for silent movies and classic film noir. Clara's tastes run to the European avante garde while maintaining a healthy contempt for pseudo-intellectual pretentious bollocks. Jon doesn't think it would be wise to confess his lust for the heroine of Nylana The Jungle Girl, a z-list Perils of Pauline rip-off.
One day Jon finds Clara studying a mouldering reel from vampire b-movie, Feast Of The Undead, the work of forgotten German director Max Castle, who fled to Hollywood when Hitler came to power and died when his passenger ship was torpedoed en route to Zurich in 1941. Jonny is astonished that Clara would waste her time on a trashy horror movie, but for all Feast ....'s cheesy nonsense, they find themselves strangely impressed. The clip exudes evil. The reel is so fragile it burns during the climactic impalement. Usually Clara would hand the film to Sharkey and have him salvage what he can, but on this occasion she destroys it.
Sharkey takes Jon under his wing and teaches him how to get the best from the Classics's antediluvian equipment. Don is a great one for wild conspiracy theories, some of which he may even believe.
"Zoetrope goes back to the Infidel people ... the ancient wheel of life. There was this zonked out Arab - Al-Hazan .... something or other, H. P. Lovecraft has the low down on him. He worked out all the principles way back, just before the Crusades, I think. And he wasn't the first. He was just picking it up from the heretics.'
"Heretics?"
"Zoetrope worshippers. The first movie fans. They were all over the Biblical lands."
Sharkey explains that, in Paris, he and Clara had fallen foul of a Father Rosenweig, a Jesuit later committed to a lunatic asylum for an assassination attempt on a film critic. Rosenweig was a member of Occulis Dei who believe the Knights Templar "were making movies out of pure astral projection." It's Dan Sharkey's opinion that Max Castle adopted a similar technique on Feast Of The Undead, but now Clara has destroyed the master, they'll not be able to pursue the matter.
The Classic struggles to stay afloat.
Much against her principles, Clara agrees to allow her despised patron, Chipsey Goldstein, to screen a festival of his work at the Classic. Goldstein has a vast entourage of fawning acolytes and the Classic needs the money. Venetia Magenta, his latest masterpiece of psuedo-art, is vaguely pornographic and attracts media attention. Clara's defence of this piece of tripe is so well-argued as to finally land her a job writing film criticism for the nationals.
On the death of his father, an obscenely wealthy, notoriously ruthless movie mogul, Chipsey inherits a vast collection of rare film and sets about auctioning it off at a wild, thoroughly debauched love-in. Clara - mortified that an original of her favourite movie, Les Enfants Du Paradis, has been snapped up at a pittance by the son of a Nazi war criminal, bullies Sharkey and Jonny into stealing it from his van. In the ensuing chaos they swipe the wrong cannisters. Clara's murderous rage is slightly pacified when Jonny shows her their haul includes a previously unlisted pre-Hollywood Max Castle original, Judas Jedermann.
The Classic's overnight notoriety attracts the attention of Zip Linsky, a chain-smoking, emphasemic dwarf, clearly on his last legs, who arrives at the Classic during their Max Castle mini-fest. Zip is not amused, but then he rarely is. He was Castle's cameraman and trusted friend during Max's Hollywood years before finding himself black-listed as a Communist sympathiser during the McCarthy witch-trials. Watching the Classic's butchered prints of Max's originals does Zip no good at all and he threatens to sue. Only Clara's revelation that she's unearthed Judas Jedermann placates him. He's so desperate to see it that, with a little persuasion from his huge- bosomed wife Franny - who has taken a shine to Jonny - he invites Clara and her protégé to his mausoleum of a mansion.
Zip has kept the masters of sixteen Castle originals ....
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jul 20, 2012 18:13:18 GMT
Judas Jedermann, now that is a movie I would have loved to see Great synopsis. Roszak really nailed the atmosphere of the pre-hippy-students and the begining of pop culture research. (At least it presented a convincing version of it) Of course this all pales when Zip Linsky talks Hollywood.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Jul 20, 2012 19:16:44 GMT
Judas Jedermann, now that is a movie I would have loved to see Me too, but Castle's suppressed (and possibly) unfinished adaptation of Conrad's Heart Of Darkness is the one i'd have screened at my funeral. Agreed, Roszac is brilliant on the hippy era, and he also had a gift for characterisation. The perma-stoned Sharkey, Chipsey Goldstein, Zip (for all that he's a dwarf) and Father Rosenweig are each of them larger-than-life yet still convince. Even relatively minor characters like Jurgen Von Schaucher and Yoshi, Zip's Japanese chauffeur are lovingly drawn. And the dinner with Orson Welles is a peach of a chapter. Where has this book been all my life?
|
|
|
Post by mattofthespurs on Aug 13, 2012 9:32:43 GMT
I have just finished reading "Flicker". It has sat on my shelves for sometime now as I bought it when I began collecting all the novels in the volume "Horror: 100 Best Books" by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman, and it's companion volume (where "Flicker" is listed). I feel like I have been hit with a brick. I literally finished the book not ten minutes ago. I'm not going to go into great detail about the plot. Others have done a much better job of that than I could provide. Suffice to say it's one hell of a powerful book. My mood now is of a distinctly dark one. I do wonder if Roszac has played a wonderful game by somehow putting 'the flicker' from Castle's movies into the book. There for all too see if one would have a sallyrand to hand or took the time to pick through the book a line (or maybe a word) at a time. It's the only explanation I can think of, for the book has left me with a distinct feeling of uneasiness and, maybe, loathing, that can not be explained fully by the written words of the book. A real powerhouse of a book. I may just burn it later...Just to be on the safe side. I'm sure you understand.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Aug 14, 2012 8:04:58 GMT
A real powerhouse of a book. I may just burn it later...Just to be on the safe side. I'm sure you understand. Yes, I do You know, if I see those masses addicted to reality-tv and videogames I sometimes wonder if the content is important at all as long as there is the Flicker. ;D
|
|
|
Post by Craig Herbertson on Aug 14, 2012 9:21:09 GMT
I'm constantly reminded of these ecstatic religious groups gathering en masse before they do something horrible.
|
|
|
Post by humgoo on Jun 10, 2020 18:00:47 GMT
I'm not even halfway through the book (I got the 1991 Simon & Schuster edition, 592 pages) but I've already found so many favourite passages! The book is just hilarious. Take the following:
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jun 10, 2020 19:05:12 GMT
Wow. This book sounds a lot more sophisticated than most of these fat horror/crime paperbacks of the era. I am intrigued.
H.
|
|
|
Post by dem bones on Jun 10, 2020 19:06:48 GMT
Theodore Roszak - Flicker (Bantam, May 1993) Blurb: A novel of superlative suspense in which innocence and evil flicker across the page like the play of light and dark on the silver screen Can honestly say Flicker is among the most rewarding reading experiences of my life.
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jun 10, 2020 19:22:27 GMT
Wow. This book sounds a lot more sophisticated than most of these fat horror/crime paperbacks of the era. I am intrigued. H. Steve, you don't know Flicker? Go buy it tomorrow, it's a must have.
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jun 10, 2020 19:44:27 GMT
Thanks, Andreas. I've been re-reading some Simon Raven novels because they help me cope with various forms of stress. And I was just ordering some more paperbacks of this series, The First Born of Egypt (I do not think it would be at all of interest to you) on AbeBooks. I couldn't get over the prices. Raven is such an obscure novelist. The shipping fees charged from the UK now are quite high. I think I saw a figure of around $23 to ship one clothbound book across the ocean. And that's with oil prices at what I have been told are at an historic low. We (Americans) are probably being punished for the colossal stupidity we are exhibiting on the world stage with our indescribable, indigestible prat of a leader.
I will look for the Roszac novel but if it's priced around 39.99 with shipping at another 15 bucks, will have to wait.
cheers, Steve
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jun 10, 2020 19:52:43 GMT
I did see a copy priced at 5 bucks, including shipping, so I grabbed it. No idea when I'll get around to reading it. Was the author a best seller during the period? I have never heard of him.
cheers, Steve
|
|
|
Post by andydecker on Jun 10, 2020 20:19:22 GMT
I did see a copy priced at 5 bucks, including shipping, so I grabbed it. No idea when I'll get around to reading it. Was the author a best seller during the period? I have never heard of him. cheers, Steve No best seller. A former friend recommended the novel sometimes in the 90s to me. According to the back text Roszak was a academic who was famous in the first place for a non-fiction called The Making of a Counter Culture in 69. I was tempted to read it, but back then it was pretty expensive and I was not that tempted. I gathered that his half a dozen novels were not that sucessful.
|
|
|
Post by helrunar on Jun 10, 2020 20:45:30 GMT
Even more intriguing, Andreas! I may have to shove this book firmly to the front of my queue. As a big fan of obscure film culture (a highlight of a couple of years ago was getting a private screening of the only known print of a 1957 movie that was the debut of cult actress Grayson Hall and late comedian Jerry Stiller, at a local film archive), it sounds as if it really has my name all over it. Not to mention the whole counter culture thing.
All the best, Steve
|
|