(1) SAFETY LAST. I didn’t know it was this dangerous to work for J.J. Abrams. Or to be J.J. Abrams.
In his interview on the Howard Stern show, Abrams tells stories about (1) how a hydraulic door on the “Force Awakens” set slammed down on Harrison Ford’s ankle, (2) how Abrams broke his back trying to lift the door, and on an earlier occasion, (3) Leonard Nimoy broke his nose while working on the Star Trek reboot.
“He fell, he hit his nose… he had a gash on his nose,” J.J. revealed. “I thought, ‘holy crap, this is a disaster.’ I felt horrible. I wanted to kill myself at this point.
(2) GENERAL LEIA. Louis Virtel of Hitflix decrees: “Carrie Fisher just scorched ‘Good Morning America’ and you’re not worthy” .
The most intense and thrilling part of this universe is the real-life Carrie Fisher, whose self-possessed wooziness makes her one of pop culture’s most sublime entities. She was just on “Good Morning America” chatting about losing weight to play the part of General Leia. She brought her dog. She was electric. She was rad, weird as hell, and right. She awakened America.
I love everything about this interview, namely Carrie’s one-liner about resuming her role in the “Star Wars” universe. “I got in character and I’ve never gotten out again – and really, I’ve tried everything.”
(3) FORBIDDEN BOOM. That highly scientific party-pooper Adam Korenman (When the Stars Fade) pulls back the curtain on “Dramatizing Space Battles in Film and Fiction” at SF Signal.
[First of three points.]
…Star Wars, like pretty much every space drama of the past 40 years, is more in the realm of fantasy than science-fiction. Though our understanding of arriving and surviving outside the atmosphere has grown tremendously, our representations of such acts in film and literature remains steadfastly in the realm of fiction. In my series The Gray Wars Saga, I am equally guilty of playing space battles more for the drama than the science. Why is it that every auteur from Heinlein to Abrams showcases a false image of the dark void above? Let’s take a look at the realities of space combat and see if we can find out.
1) Explosions are Pretty, Space-splosions are not.
In any space opera worth its salt, a massive ship is bound to explode. As an audience, we anticipate it the same way we expect anyone in a dark hat to be a bad guy. To paraphrase Anton Chekhov, if you show a spaceship in Act 1, you’d better be blowing it up by Act 3. But explosions, and fire in general require three elements to exist: Heat, Fuel, and Oxygen. You’ll notice I bolded the last word, as it is fairly important. Space is famously lacking in O2—to the point where people think you explode if you’re ever exposed to the vacuum (also not true, but Cracked already covered that, so let’s move on). Space explosions look more like the time you dropped your LEGOs on the kitchen floor than when you dumped a pack of Mentos into a 3 liter of Diet Coke. The rapid expansion of heat (literally the definition of an explosion) will rend your big ol’ ship into pieces, and those shards will head in every direction until acted upon by another force (thanks, Newton). No fireball, no awesome ring-shaped shockwave. Just scrap….
Real space may not be able to carry sound (no oxygen, so nothing to carry the vibrations) but a movie theater with a THX monster system can. If we’re going to allow musical cues in our cinematic experiences to pull our emotional strings, we can surely forgive a few foley artists getting creative with the sound design. It allows the truth of the drama to reach the audience on more levels. And if playing to one of our senses for the sake of drama makes the cut, then allow us science-fiction writers the joy of delivering fiery ends to our marvelous creations.
(4) BOSKONE GUESTS. At the Boskone Blog, “Mini-Interview: Robert J Sawyer and Cerece Rennie Murphy.
How would you describe your work to people who might be unfamiliar with you? [Robert J Sawyer:] I’m a hard-SF writer, heavily influenced by the best of Frederik Pohl (I consider his Gateway to be the finest novel our field has ever produced). I’m also liberal, even by Canadian standards, and a rationalist, a secularist, and a humanist (Humanism Canada gave me their first ever “Humanism in the Arts” award) — and my work embraces all those things. I mostly do near-future or present day stories, usually set on Earth, with a strong philosophical bent. My prose is pellucid (much more Arthur C. Clarke than Gene Wolfe) and my tone usually upbeat….
What is your favorite Star Wars memory, scene, or line? What is it that that memory, scene or line that continues to stick with you today? [Cerece Rennie Murphy:] (It could be a moment from within any of the films, a moment associated with the films, or something inspired by the films. – My favorite scenes from Star Wars are all the scenes between Luke Skywalker and Yoda from Empire Strikes Back. I remember watching theses scenes in the theatre when I was 7 years old. They literally changed my perception of God, my place in the world and my potential. I realized then, as I still believe now, that we’re all Jedi, we just don’t know it. Watching Luke’s fear and doubt keep him from fully accessing his own potential was powerful for me, even then. I don’t think you can sum up the human condition any better than that. “Luminous beings are we….not this crude matter,” I really believe that the healing of our entire world could begin with this statement.
(5) HELP ANN TOTUSEK. “I’ve started a GoFundMe to help with my family’s housing situation,” Ann Totusek told me. Her complete narrative about her situation is here.
As a short overview, Ann recommended Steven H Silver’s comment at Whatever.
Through a change in circumstances, Minneapolis fan Ann Totusek has found herself in a situation where she either needs to buy her house or find herself homeless. Ann is currently the caregiver for her mother, suffering dementia, and her teenage son, who suffers SPD. Ann, who helps run conventions throughout the upper Midwest in Iowa, Minneapolis, and Chicago, is running a GoFundMe to raise money for the down payment on their home.
Ann has run Green Room and Program Ops for me at several Windycons as well as the hospitality suite at the Nebula Award Weekend in Chicago in 2015 (and plans to again in 2016). Her hospitality has always been wonderful and now we have the opportunity to repay some of that hospitality by ensuring that Ann and her family can live and thrive.
In the first 11 hours, the appeal brought in $8,463 of its $150,000 goal, including a $2,000 boost from Ctein and another $5,000 anonymous donation.
(6) MARKETING TIP. Fynbospress makes a compelling argument for placing more of the “front matter” in the back of your self-published ebook, in “What’s the matter with front matter?” at Mad Genius Club.
Why? Well, a sample is 10% of your entire file, not 10 percent of your story. When you get a reader interested enough that they downloaded a sample, or are clicking “look inside” on a web page, you really don’t want them to scroll past all of that stuff only to find three paragraphs of story! You want a couple pages to hook them in, draw them deep, and make them immediately click “buy the book” so they can keep reading.
Some very savvy authors actually set up the amount of front matter and their story so the 10% cutoff falls directly after a cliffhanger. This is sneaky and wonderful, because you can immediately deliver the payoff with the rest of the book.
(7) Today In History
- December 4, 1985: Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes makes its theatrical debut.
- December 4, 2008: Forrest J Ackerman passes away.
(8) DOES SIZE MATTER?
Two Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers stand with three vehicles, providing a size comparison of three generations of Mars rovers. Front and center is the flight spare for the first Mars rover, Sojourner, which landed on Mars in 1997 as part of the Mars Pathfinder Project. On the left is a Mars Exploration Rover test vehicle, a working sibling to Spirit and Opportunity, which landed on Mars in 2004. On the right is a test rover for the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed Curiosity on Mars in 2012.
(9) THEATER HISTORY. Alex Ross’ profile “The Magnificent Memory of Norman Lloyd” at The New Yorker shows the 101-year-old actor still has the power to bring history to life.
Through the Group Theatre, Lloyd came in contact with the Stanislavsky method, and he applied it to his character in “Caesar.” In Act III of Shakespeare’s play, Cinna the Poet ventures out to attend Caesar’s funeral; a mob mistakes him for another Cinna, a member of the conspiracy, and drags him off. Welles had realized that the scene could stand in for contemporary Germany, where even non-Jews were persecuted for having Jewish-sounding names. Initially, Welles thought of the character as a Byronic figure, wearing a beret. But Lloyd wanted to pattern Cinna on someone he knew: the Greenwich Village poet Maxwell Bodenheim, who used to sit on the stoops around Washington Square, offering to write poems for twenty-five cents. Lloyd pictured Cinna as a bum in a suit, foolscap spilling out of his pockets. Welles said, “O.K., do it your way.”
(10) LOGGIA OBIT. The actor who played the President’s military advisor in Independence Day, and the toy company mogul who danced on the piano with Tom Hanks in Big, Robert Loggia, died December 4at the age of 85. He had been battling Alzheimer’s Disease for the past five years.
He was best known for his roles in the movie Scarface and in the TV series Mancuso FBI
During a long career he worked a lot, in the beginning often playing ethnic characters, usually Hispanic or Middle Eastern, and at the end frequently cast as a mobster.
His genre appearances in television included episodes of One Step Beyond (“The Hand,” 1959), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (“Graveyard of Fear,” 1966), The Wild Wild West (“Suspicion,” 1967), Wonder Woman (“Wonder Woman vs Gargantua,” 1976), The Bionic Woman (“Jaime and the King,” 1977), The Six Million Dollar Man (1976), Tales of the Unexpected (1984), and The Outer Limits (2000).
(10) REDISCOVERED TALKIE. High Treason (1929), not only one of the earliest sound movies but an sf movie to boot, will be shown December 6 at the Anchorage International Film Festival. The sound version of the film was long thought lost until it was rediscovered in 2005 in a group of old films in Washington State. Kevin Tripp, a moving image archivist in Alaska, arranged transfer of the nitrate films to Library of Congress for salvage – having first completed a hazardous materials training program.
The film was taken from a play by Noel Pemberton-Billing. He was an aviator, politician and inventor who founded the Supermarine aviation company, which would produce the Spitfire fighter plane in World War II.A declared pacifist, the playwright nonetheless advocated aerial bombing of civilian targets in wartime, two topics that weight heavily in the script.
Read an in-depth study of High Treason illustrated with many stills at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!
File 770 reader Steve Johnson says, “I will be in the Bear Tooth Theatre for the show on Sunday–my wife snapped up two reserved seats.”
(11) DESTROYED AGAIN. Funded as a stretch goal of Lightspeed’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction!” Kickstarter campaign, a companion publication “Queers Destroy Fantasy!” is now available from Amazon.
…This month we’re presenting a special one-off issue of our otherwise discontinued sister-magazine, FANTASY, called Queers Destroy Fantasy!: an all-fantasy extravaganza entirely written—and edited!—by queer creators. Here’s what we’ve got lined up for you in this special issue: Original fantasy—edited by Christopher Barzak—by Catherynne M. Valente, Kai Ashante Wilson, Carlea Holl-Jensen, and Richard Bowes. Reprints—selected by Liz Gorinsky—by Caitlin R. Kiernan, Austin Bunn, Shweta Narayan, and Nicola Griffith. Nonfiction articles—edited by Matthew Cheney—by merritt kopas, Matthew Cheney, Keguro Macharia, Ekaterina Sedia, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Ellen Kushner. Plus an original cover illustration by Priscilla Kim and original interior illustrations by Goñi Montes, Odera Igbokwe, Sam Schechter, Elizabeth Leggett, and Vlada Monakhova.
(12) LOAFING AROUND. Will R. sent along the link to “Make This Awesome Dune-Inspired Sandworm Bread” with a skeptical comment: “I have to agree with the person I saw this via, who said ‘delicious-looking is not the description I would have used.’” Will had a valid point, and that is why I didn’t gank the picture to go with the excerpt.
Fans of the novel and movie Dune will appreciate this spice-filled sandworm bread recipe from geek baker extraordinaire Chris-Rachael Oseland….
The sandworm bread consists of a basic sweet bread with a spice filling and a sugar glaze. Yum. Blanched almonds are added to create the sandworm’s intimidating, toothsome maw. I can smell its melange breath from here!
(13) S.H.I.E.L.D. S.P.O.I.L.E.D. Those who know say that spoilers abound in this trailer for Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD 3×10 “Maveth” (Winter Finale).
S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra go head-to-head in a battle that will change Coulson’s world forever.
[Thanks to Steve Johnson, John King Tarpinian, and Will R. for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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First among many.
Second among few!
No kidding — hope the European readers wake up soon!
“The Fourth is strong in this one…”
The fifth awakens?
Ooooh, beautiful sandworm bread! I made worms like this for a Halloween party once.
http://imakeprojects.com/Projects/fleshworms/
(2) GENERAL LEIA. I like how both Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, (among others), are at the whole No Fucks Given stage when doing the promo run for Star Wars. Also, is there a more pointless thing for actors to do than the promo circuit for Star Wars?
(12) LOAFING AROUND. I was a bit scared to click the link, but yeah, that bread doesn’t look too bad.
AND IT’S A LOVELY BALMY MORNING HERE IN DOWNTOWN EUROPE WITH GENTLE WINDS REACHING AS LITTLE AS 100MPH AND SHEETS OF VERTICAL RAIN CARS ARE DRIVING ON THE SHEETS OF VERTICAL RAIN AND MILE-LONG FREIGHTERS ARE SAILING ON THE ROADS ‘TIS BRILLIG AS WE SAY AROUND HERE AND BY BRILLIG WE MEAN WET AND THE SLITHY TOVES ARE WET I’M TRYING TO HAVE A CUP OF TEA BUT IT’S RAINING IN MY TEA AND I’M LOOKING FROM TEA TO RAIN AND FROM RAIN TO TEA AND FROM TEA TO RAIN AGAIN AND ALREADY IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WHICH IS WHICH THIS IS ME SWIMMING OUT FROM WIND TURBINE EUROPE.
i apologise for lowercase but nigel used all the caps, at least he left spare punctation.,; its a spot windy here too. i dropped and smashed my monitor panel earlier so i guess i know how jj abrams must have felt at seeing a valuable item getting broken. luckily i didn’t break my back picking it up, i just swore like a sailor from one of nigel’s roads.
FOUL WORDS FOR FOUL WEATHER MARK.
Sorry about your monitor, though.
Oh, and I particularly remember Robert Loggia from that not-quite-great lost cyberpunk mini-series Wild Palms. ‘Everything must go.’ RIP.
Nowt but a breeze and a little light drizzle, you soft southerners.
100mph winds and vertical rain – pshaw!
Luxury!
@Nigel
I’m treating it as an excuse for an upgrade 🙂 Luckily I hadn’t thrown out the last one so everything is the same as before, except a bit smaller.
(3) My favourite explanation for why we get sounds in space battles is that the pilots are receiving simulated soundscapes to aid their perception. (Not sure where I saw that originally, might have been B5-related.)
Bask in your mild temperate climate there Hugh while we brace ourselves against the might of the wild raging North Atlantic and hold it back from your tender regional extremities.
I think that while there is no boom in space people will still want/need sound cues(like have digital cameras make clicking noises).
Gunners areas will have surround sound speakers so to hear the firing of lasers(you need surround so you can hear people firing behind you) and the boom of a hit.
Edit: Looks like I got ninjaed by Mark. Oh well, great minds and all that.
(13) S.H.I.E.L.D. S.P.O.I.L.E.D.
Spoilers? DO NOT WANT.
Never did a sandworm, but for various young persons in the family I’ve decorated birthday cakes with Precambrian life, dragons, Daleks and the T.A.R.D.I.S., space marines, Minas Tirith, and a few other things …
@tintinaus: (digital camera noise)
In some places, the audible shutter noise is required by law – as a way to limit covert photography.
(3) Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth – shattering kaboom.
I’ve always been less surprised by the explosions than by the full orchestra they manage to fit into even small craft.
::godstick::
Re #2
And there is the power of the original trilogy’s archetypes, as compared to the remakes. I’m pretty sure Neeson doesn’t think he’s Qui-Jon, Christensen think he’s Anakin, et cetera.
I am kind of reminded of Heroquesting in Glorantha, where people take on the aspects of the myth they are enacting in the Gods’ world. In a way, Fisher took on the myth of Leia, and never let go.
Alec Guiness had a varied and significant career long before “Star Wars” and even his image was rather sucked into it.
Mark Hamill has made a separate from “Star Wars” career of cartoon voice animation and the occasional live action villain guest spot, which he seems to enjoy.
I imagine it must be very difficult to have played such central parts in such a huge phenomenon at such young ages.
@peace. Fair point about Hamill, and yeah, Guinness. Hamill’s Joker is very good, but I admit that I had to shift my brain a bit to accept him as such. Not seeing his real face helped with that.
FORBIDDEN BOOM — the emphasis on oxygen is a bit simplified. There are oxygen-free explosives that would explode in, for example, an all-nitrogen atmosphere. This doesn’t nullify the main point, that an explosion in a vacuum would behave differently than an explosion in an atmosphere.
@Paul: “I’m pretty sure Neeson doesn’t think he’s Qui-Jon, Christensen think he’s Anakin, et cetera.”
And Fisher doesn’t think she’s Leia.
There’s a huge difference between thinking you’re the character you portray and not being able to escape other people thinking you are. Carrie’s tried and tried to get out from under Leia’s shadow, but it never worked. Soap opera stars – remember soap operas? – ran into the same thing, to the point that the actors would get sacks of hate mail about nasty things their characters had done in the last week’s shows.
The archetypes do indeed have power, but you have it backwards. Fisher and Ford don’t think they’re Leia and Han, but an uncomfortable number of fans can’t see them any other way. To them, Nimoy was Spock, no matter what else he did or how many books he wrote protesting it. Fisher has it at least that bad, and probably worse, with Leia.
I still remember how one actor’s face lit up when I complimented him on his portrayal of a difficult character arc. His expression looked like nothing less than, “Finally, somebody GETS it!” I knew the difference between writer, director, role, and actor, and I’d shown him that I recognized how much work he’d put into the part.
What makes complete sense on screen in the finished product is shot in assorted fragments, and it’s easy for us to forget that aspect of moviemaking. It’s one thing for a writer to craft an arc and an editor to splice the right takes together to make everything click, but in between you’ve got actors memorizing lines and shooting their scenes out of order. That we get any sense of character development at all is a testament to that incredibly hard work.
ETA: Speaking of Hamill’s other work, he had a nice role in Kingsman. He’s also reprising his role as The Trickster again on The Flash soon…
Blimey, my book just got a brief mention on Irish national radio! Wheeee! ‘Quite magical!’
@Nigel:
Congratulations. That’s very exciting!
Headache, feet hurt, but hey, I have the magic of aspirin awaiting me!
Fisher and Ford make Leia and Han exist. They’ve also done other excellent acting.
Guinness aside, the others mostly just did a good job acting the roles.
Robert Loggia first came to my attention in his 1966-67 tv series T.H.E.Cat. He was one of the first actors who I remembered as an actor, rather than as the character he played (though Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat was an intriguing character; I was sorry the show only lasted one season), and I kept an eye out for later roles he played.
The rerelease of the Star Wars radio play had an interview with a young Hamill in which he waxed enthusiastic about doing radio, because he always wanted to but thought he had been born too late for those sorts of roless.
Thanks Peace! I think a Dublin bookseller gave it to the reviewer, and that particular chain of bookshops have been incredibly supportive, so I’m all full of warm fuzzies.
One of the ways to escape the problem of a single iconic role seems to be to play a second one – they seem to cancel each other out and allow people to see them as an actor who plays multiple parts, rather than just That One Part. Good examples might be Harrison Ford playing both Han and Indiana Jones, Nathan Fillion in Firefly and Castle.
Possibly this means that Daniel Radcliffe should try to be the next Doctor?
There will never be a better Christoper Blair.
Thirty-fifth!
Maybe.
Congratulations, Nigel, on the radio spot!
Yesterday’s read was London Falling by Paul Cornell (my second Magical London Mystery book in a row, but since I classed the first one in a different category it must stand alone.)
Liked it. It’s grittier than, say, Aaronovitch’s works (which I will commit file770 heresy by saying I didn’t really love — I found Peter Grant’s narrative voice irritating.) And I appreciated the emphasis on London Falling taking the form of a police procedural, which was well done. I’m likely to pick up the next book in the series at some point, although I don’t feel an urge to rush out and do so immediately.
(Currently about halfway through Django Wexler’s The Thousand Names, and based on what I’ve read so far if it sticks the landing that WILL be one I rush out and get the sequel to …)
Thanks junego!
re: (2)
It seems to be so very dangerous to play an iconic role before you are an established star. There are plenty of good actors who probably wished they could have switched the order, between the bulk of their acting career and The Big Moment. How it is that Harrison Ford escaped from that trap when the other two didn’t is kind of a question too.
(5) HELP ANN TOTUSEK.
Ann is a good person; I’ve worked with her to a greater or lesser degree on a few conventions and I hope the gofundme works out.
Harrison Ford had a career before “Star Wars.” He had been in movies since 1966. And he had the great good fortune to be in the iconic Indiana Jones and Blade Runner movies not too long after.
For Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, “Star Wars” was the second movie either of them had been in (and their earlier roles were minor). Nothing they did after ever measured up to it.
There is no File770 heresy. There is only reading books. After all, “It is by books alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the paper of books that thoughts acquire speed, the fingers acquire cuts, the cuts become a warning. It is by books alone I set my mind in motion.“
@kyra
Interesting. I like Aaronovitch’s narrative tone, but bounced hard off the sample of London Falling because I found the viewpoint and voice so annoying.
Honestly, I think Ford is just a better actor than Hamill. Fisher is a different story; her well-known substance abuse problems certainly didn’t help her career, and after a certain point Hollywood’s well-known ageism and sexism against older women didn’t either.
Spaceships explode in space for the same reason automobiles explode after car crashes.
It’s not just the spaceships exploding in space, or fighting at impossibly close ranges — their relative speeds are probably closer to automobile than to even WWII fighter planes, much less modern aircraft.
But I’m willing to accept it as a form of visual shorthand.
Older Alec Guinness also got to be the definitive George Smiley in the BBC adaptations of the Le Carre novels. I tend to think of him as Smiley rather than Obi Wan or any of his Ealing Comedy rolls (and of course, actively try to wipe from my mind his Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia)
“The definitive George Smiley” — amen. I keep waiting for the BBC to restore and remaster “Tinker, Tailer” and “Smiley’s People” as they did with the Ehle/Firth “Pride and Prejudice”…
Speaking of actors and iconic roles, one gentleman told me about getting a call from his agent about a bit part on “Tinker.” Agent: “The bad news: it’s just one scene. The good news: it’s a really, really LONG scene and it’s just you and Alec Guinness. The bad news… you don’t say one word.”
The actor took the part. They brought him back for the same role on “Smiley’s People” and gave him TWO scenes, one which was again silent and one in which the character actually spoke. And… the latter scene hit the cutting room floor, so the character never did speak at all.
Fortunately, Sir Patrick Stewart got one or two speaking roles after that…
@froomium. I suspect Stewart was decently well known in the UK by that point for his Sejanus in I, CLAUDIUS, though.
Camestros Felapton: Alec Guinness had a way of disappearing into his roles that may help explain why my instant response to hearing his name is to think of The Man In The White Suit rather than his other iconic characters like Smiley, Obi-Wan and Colonel Nicholson.
Funny how he played everything and everybody — Hitler, Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Charles I, a Pope, Freud, even Marley’s Ghost.