(1) LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION AWARD. The idea of the Location Managers Guild Award is truly Hollywood insider stuff. It’s “meant to spotlight outstanding filming locations that sent the tone and enhance the narrative for international features, television and commercials.” There are genre winners, of course. “Location Managers Guild Awards 2024” at Deadline.
OUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD TELEVISION SERIES
Fallout
Paul Kramer, Chris Arena, Mandi Dillin / LMGI, David Park / LMGI, Paul van der PloegOUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY TELEVISION SERIES
Fargo Season 5
Mohammad Qazzaz / LMGI, Luke Antosz / LMGIOUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A TV SERIAL PROGRAM, ANTHOLOGY, MOW OR LIMITED SERIES
Ripley
Robin Melville / LMGI, Giuseppe Nardi / LMGI, Fabio Ferrante, Shane HadenOUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A PERIOD FEATURE FILM
Oppenheimer
Justin Duncan /LMGI, Dennis Muscari, Patty Carey-Perazzo, T.C. TownsenOUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A CONTEMPORARY FEATURE FILM
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning – Part 1
David Campbell-Bell, Enrico Latella / LMGI, Jonas Fylling Christiansen, Niall O’Shea, Ben FirmingerOUTSTANDING FILM COMMISSION
Film in Iceland
True Detective: Night CountryOUTSTANDING LOCATIONS IN A COMMERCIAL
Toyota: Present from the Past
Mark Freid / LMGI, Paul Riordan / LMGI
(2) LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS BOOKS. Charlie Jane Anders names “10 Literary Books That Made Me a Better Science Fiction Writer” at Happy Dancing.
… As I wrote a while back, the appearance of literary merit means people will give your work more of a chance in spite of weird experiments, but it also means the reader might pay a bit more attention to the nuts and bolts of the story (at least sometimes.) In a good literary story, this relationship with the ideal reader leads to more attention to detail: the sentence-level prose, but also the small details of people’s lives and inner states….
6) Possession by A.S. Byatt
I re-read this book just a few months ago, because my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster has a similar literary detective story at its heart. And when I think about the current vogue for Dark Academia stories, Possession feels like a foundational text to me. The story of two young scholars who stumble upon a long lost letter that hints at a secret affair between two Victorian poets, Possession fairly burns with the joy of discovery and textual analysis. That’s the thing that I really discovered when I re-read this book: the poetry of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte is vitally important to the story and to their love affair, and the “clues” in the story are as much about the beauty of their writing and metaphors as any love letters. I’ll probably be writing more about Possession as the release date of Lessons in Magic and Disaster grows closer, so stay tuned….
(3) CAN THE PRICE BE RIGHT? “AMC to release new Batman popcorn bucket” – Batman News has details.
…AMC Theaters will have a Bat-Signal popcorn bucket available on Aug. 28 that will sell for $34.99. A new collectible cup of the Batmobile will also be available for $11.99, but a combo can be purchased for $44.99….
(4) ARMED LIBRARIAN. “Hell hath no fury like a librarian scorned in the book banning wars” – behind a paywall at the LA Times.
A MANDA JONES is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads.
Threats against her began two years ago after she spoke out against censorship and was drawn into the culture wars over book banning. She was condemned as a pedophile and a groomer and accused of “advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” The Christian right targeted her, and she found herself in the news warning that conservatives in her state and across much of the country were endangering libraries and intellectual freedom.
“I never expected any of this,” said Jones, who lives in Livingston Parish. “It’s a huge weight to feel all that attention. I’m just a school librarian from a two red-light town.”
Jones’ cautionary and disquieting testament to the nation’s divisiveness is told in her new memoir, “That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America,” a blunt, angry, searching and redeeming story about a woman engulfed by forces and designs she never imagined. It is a glimpse into a family and a small town that reads like a chapter out of “The Scarlet Letter” or “The Crucible,” narratives whose themes of fear, superstition, rage and religion are again permeating the nation’s political moment, including Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s recent comments that “Democrats want to put sexually explicit books in toddlers’ libraries.”…
(5) ANALYSIS OF A CONVOLUTED PUBLISHING HISTORY. Rich Horton decides it’s time for another look at a classic: “Review: Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith” at Strange at Ecbatan.
… I don’t really want to say more about the plot. There is at the same time a lot going on, but in an odd way not. Some of it seems a bit arbitrary, some doesn’t quite convince, and some is fascinating. But still at all pretty much works. The novel isn’t at a level with Smith’s greatest works, but parts of it are. At time it reaches the incantatory heights Smith could achieve, and it hints throughout at a really important story — the story of the Underpeople (which is also central to “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell”, and which perhaps is ultimately key to the entire Instrumentality future history.)….
(6) HOWARD WALDROP REMEMBRANCE EVENT. George R.R. Martin tells readers about the video portion of a memorial for Howard Waldrop, held June 29, at Not a Blog.
…I was not able to be there in person (we were in London at the time) but there was no way I could not be a part of a remembrance for H’ard, so I taped some remarks and sent them to Robert Taylor, who was organizing the event. I went on rather a long time, as it happens, but Howard and I had a long history and I am a wordy bastard in any case, as many of you know. My tape ended up coming in around 45 minutes long, and could easily have gone three hours if I’d just kept talking. There are so many stories to tell.
That was too long for the Austin memorial, so Robert and his team kindly cut and trimmed it for the event. I do have the longer version and will likely post it here… probably later rather than sooner. For now, we have this; not only my video, but all the other speeches and stories as well, from some of Howard’s pals. (Some, not all. Howard had friends all over the world.
Parts of this may bring a tear to your eye. Other bits will make you laugh. Laughter was one of Howard’s gifts….
(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Cat Eldridge.]
August 25, 1955 – Simon R. Green, 69. I’ve had email conversations with our Birthday honoree, Simon R. Green. He’s a fascinating, friendly person.
I first read the Deathstalker series which, like everything he writes, is part of the same multiverse. Owen Deathstalker, reluctant heir to the ancient Deathstalker name and a very minor historian, will come to lead a rebellion against the powerful and corrupt empire ruled by The Iron Bitch. Every SF trope is here — crashed alien starships, rogue computer hackers, clones and espers to name but a few. Yes, it’s space opera but not to be taken too seriously.
Moving sideways for a movement, he did a stellar job with his Forest Kingdom fantasy series which plays it more straight I think save SLIGHT SPOILER such touches as a butterfly collecting dragon END SLIGHT SPOILER. The connected Hawk and Fisher series of two Guardsman in Haven, a corrupt seaport, solving magical mysteries is wonderful.
Remember how I said everything was in the same multiverse? Hawk and Fisher show up in Strangefellows, just having a drink. Strangefellows being the bar in Nightside, the pocket universe beneath London where John Taylor is the only detective, as told in the Nightside series. Great setting, fascinating characters, weird stories.
The Secret History series involved the Droods, an ancient family that watches over the world and protects it from mostly supernatural and magical threats. They have a magical armor they, well, protects them from everything. Great series. This and the Nightside series were wrapped in one novel, Night Fall.
I should note that all of the must be read from the beginning. There is significant plot development as each series moved along. Characters change, situations develop.
The Ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute, an ancient and very secretive government department , exist to deal with ghosts, and live by the motto “We don’t take any shit from the Hereafter”. The plots here are thinner than in his other series but I find the character interesting enough to like the series.
Ishmael Jones is someone who cannot afford to be noticed, someone who lives under the radar. Why so? Because it’s been sixty years since the alien starship made him human and he hasn’t aged at all. These are really fun because Ishmael Jones simultaneously believes he’s human and alien, and views everything that way. Stories are quite good.
A freestanding novel of note is Drinking Midnight Wine about a small English town (actually where he was born) where good in all sorts of magical forms pushed back against evil in yet more magical forms. There’s an Angel, but trust me when I say that you wouldn’t want to meet her.
He’s too prolific to cover everything here and I noticed I skipped the excellent Giden Sable series. Oh well.
(8) COMICS SECTION.
- Arlo and Janis found something escaped from a little shop.
- Eek! documents a performance complaint.
- Wannabe gives writing tips, but are they any good?
- Pardon My Planet finds something is super hard to hide.
- The Far Side solves a super problem of its own.
(9) NOW WITH EXTRA ADDED EVIL. “’Rings of Power’ Returns, With More Creatures and More Evil”. Link bypasses New York Times paywall.
… In April last year, the production for Season 2 sprawled across several sites around Windsor, England. Shuttle cars sped hundreds of crew members and craft makers between vast studios and forests. For about eight months, nearly 90 cast members spent hours in hair and makeup to be transformed into elves, dwarves, orcs and other Middle-earth dwellers.
A building housed racks of costumes and specially molded or 3-D-printed trinkets and armor. Outdoor sets the size of playgrounds plunged the actors into a court in Númenor or the trenches of an orc camp. And nearby, machinery waited in a muddy field to film a gritty battle scene inspired by films like “Saving Private Ryan.”
“I kept saying constantly on set: more blood, more dust, more mud, more everything,” Charlotte Brandstrom, who directed four of the upcoming season’s episodes, said in an interview. (Some scenes set in Rhûn were also filmed in the Canary Islands.)
This, after all, might be the most expensive series in TV history, a blockbuster prequel that reportedly cost Amazon $715 million for its first season, and premieres the first three episodes of its second season on Thursday…
(10) BITE ON. [Item by Steven French.] Do we need another zombie series? If it has Sue Johnston biting someone’s nose off, then yes please! “‘Sue Johnston’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off’: Ben Wheatley on his zombie drama Generation Z” in the Guardian.
… The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.”
The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.”…
(11) BE ON THE LOOKOUT. Dan Monroe investigates “Whatever Happened to The LAST STARFIGHTER?” at Movies, Music & Monsters.
(12) ZERO FAMILY VALUES. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] From Netflix Anime. Very violent. Very bloody. Very NSFW. Gizmodo warns: “Terminator Zero’s New Trailer Shows the Bloody War to Come”.
…While writing Zero, Mattson keyed in on three core Terminator pillars: killer robots, “fear and dread around nuclear holocaust,” and family-centric stories. If the first two films are respectively about “a man and woman making a baby” and “a mother’s love for her son,” this series is about a fractured family coming together again. In his eyes, you don’t get Terminator without those three tenets, they’ve all led to an enduring franchise aiming to make a comeback and take some new swings.
[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Jon Meltzer.]
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“Saving Farmer Giles”
This guy know as Chris M Barkley also has a birthday today. He turned 68. Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday, Chris!!
Happy birthday to Chris!
Cooked Cider’s food for the coming week. Portioned, bagged, and in fridge or freezer.
This week’s Great Leap Forward in getting everything right was the acquisition of a new scale which measures weights down to .01 grams. Excellent for measuring supplements and other things being added in tiny amounts. Absolutely not intended by its makers for any nefarious purposes, despite being made small enough to fit in a man’s back pocket.
Currently reading The Deep Sunset: A Ghost of a Chance Novel, by Dean Wesley Smith. Pleasant and lightweight, which is exactly what I was looking for right now.
(10) I will skip this one. I will skip it entirely.
“condemned as a pedophile and a groomer”
Sloppy writing: condemnation implies evidence. “Called”, “accused of being” or even “slandered as” would be more accurate.
A very happy birthday to Chris M Barley!
Happy birthday to Chris and also to Simon R. Green, whose novels I enjoy very much.
Happy birthday Chris!
“More blood, more dust, more mud, more everything.” And less Tolkien. Oh, well, I don’t have to watch it. I have Prime at the moment, only because Amazon begged me to get a free trial so I could get free shipping on an order. I’ll cancel as soon as the order arrives. This is the third time I’ve done that.
(2) I continue to argue that without plot, storyline, the character(s) have no reason to change or do much of anything other than roll the same stuff around in their heads,
(4) She needs to call the FBI. Or maybe walk into whatever church is leading this attack on a Sunday with her shotgun, and tell them they’re going to stop,
(9) Most people, and certainly the ones I know/knew personally who have been in real wars, in actual combat, do not want to talk about it. None of these Hollywood honchos have been invovled, and so want more exciting killing. Tolkien was in combat in WWII, and did NOT emphasize the killing.
(11) Last Starfighter was great fun, This guy’s coverage was tedious.
Mark says Most people, and certainly the ones I know/knew personally who have been in real wars, in actual combat, do not want to talk about it. None of these Hollywood honchos have been invovled, and so want more exciting killing. Tolkien was in combat in WWII, and did NOT emphasize the killing.
Please get your dates correct. Tolkien was in the First World War, not the Second World War.
I’ve not read any Simon R. Green, and it sounds like I’d enjoy his work.
Where should I start?
@Cassy B — If you want over-the-top urban fantasy, I’d say the Nightside books beginning with Something From the Nightside. If you want more conventional secondary world fantasy, the Forest Kingdom books beginning with Blue Moon Rising. Or if you’d rather start with a standalone contemporary fantasy, Drinking Midnight Wine.
Oh, or for ridiculous, gonzo space opera, the Deathstalker series.
I haven’t read everything of his, but what I’ve read I’ve almost entirely enjoyed.
Cassy, his recommends are more or less what I would suggest. The Nightside novels are short enough in length to be ideal for an evening’s entertainment; and the Forest Kingdom series is top-rate fantasy. I would just add the Hawk & Fisher series as the couple there are great characters.
Yeah, Hawk & Fisher are fun. They’re technically part of the Forest Kingdom series, in the sense that Hawk & Fisher were (under different names) the main characters in the first three Forest Kingdom books, but they’re effectively standalone if you want to jump to more of a city guards in a grotty fantasy city story rather than the more high fantasy Forest Kingdom proper.
CatE – right, I meant WWI. Don’t comment about WWI that much.
@mark: I continue to argue that without plot, storyline, the character(s) have no reason to change or do much of anything other than roll the same stuff around in their heads
Okay, but what does that have to do with Anders’ piece?
Also, putting on my pedant’s hat, calling Middlemarch “literary fiction” is anachronistic: at the time Eliot’s novel was published (1871-72), the marketing categories now known as genres didn’t even exist. There was no such thing as genre fiction, just fiction.
Also also, I just want to say I agree with Anders that Philip Noyce’s 2001 film version of The Quiet American with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser is brilliant; it’s quite possibly the best film adaptation of a great novel that I’ve seen.
PhilRM – “the small details of peoples inner states”. To me, ok, there’s a clip of someone preaching, saying “You cannot acheive salvation by works”, to which my response is if you don’t do something, no, you do not get saved ™ by a deathbed repentance, if you never did anything to try to fix what you broke.
@mark: The actual quote is “but also the small details of people’s lives and inner states….“, but what is your point, exactly? Are you saying that characters in SF novels shouldn’t have lives or inner states, that they should only exist to enact the machinery of plot?
Does anyone recall a way of reading X.com posts without using an X.com account to do it? I don’t, but a friend says one was reported here. We appeal to the memory of the massed minds.
Annoyingly I remember seeing an alternative front end to Twitter mentioned in the comments recently, but don’t remember what it was called. Sorry
If I remember correctly, it was replacing the “X.com” in the link with “xcancel.com”.
Thanks John! That works.
Great!
I guess “twitter.com” is probably still taken…
Thanks, Joe H. and Cat Eldridge, for the Simon R Green recommendations!
@mark
“you do not get saved by a deathbed repentance,”
Jesus told the thief on the cross next to Him who had just made a deathbed repentance “today you will be with me in paradise.”
So, yes, you can.
“She needs to . . . walk into whatever church is leading this attack on a Sunday with her shotgun.”
Why would you even suggest this? Walking in to a church with a gun like that would be a good way to get shot.
My local library has That Librarian on order. (of course) I could have read Gender Queer at the appropriate age (probably middle school or a tad younger) and my sexual orientation etc. would not have changed. No kid is going to be seduced by a book. They are going to have revelations instead.
@Linda Robinett
Do you believe that there are any books whose sexual content is so strong that they are inappropriate for school-age children?
PhilRM: is my writing that obtuse that you don’t get what I’m saying? DidnLt I say, earlier, that a story should be balanced, neither all plot nor all character-driven?
Bill: I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian. Therefore, I have every right to say that’s utterly false – that does NOTHING to begin to repair your misdeeds. With what you say,, Hitler, before he shot himself in the bunker, could have repented, and we’re all good, right?
@mark: is my writing that obtuse that you don’t get what I’m saying?
Yes. Especially since the word you want is “obscure”, not “obtuse”.
If you don’t think that Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or Luis Alberto Urrea’s Into the Beautiful North (to cite the two novels on Anders’ list that I’ve read) have plots, then you’re going to have to explain what you think “plot” means.
@bill–
No one is putting pornography in school libraries. No one is putting pornography in the children’s rooms of public libraries.
Occasionally, in special circumstances, a book of what might be called erotica or might be called pornography (generally distinguished based on judgments about literary or artistic value) will get into some libraries, but only the adult section, and sometimes in restricted collections.
A notable case is Madonna’s book, Sex, in 1992. That was a, let’s say, lively, controversy, among both librarians and the general public.
It was expensive–$50 in 1992–and it was in high demand. It’s out of print, but still remains the bestselling coffee table book everywhere.
And no one, absolutely no one, thought it belonged in public school libraries or in the children’s rooms of public libraries.
There’s nothing on the various lists of Awful Books Which Must Be Removed From Our School Libraries that competes with Sex for erotic/pornographic content. It’s factual books designed to educate young people about their own bodies, books that include diverse characters, or address the dark side of US history honestly, or, sometimes, fart joke books for kindergarteners for whom that’s the highest form of humor.
No one wants to hand children adult pornography.
PhilRM: nope. Obtuse is the word I meant. And I’ve not read either of those, so I can’t respond to that. You also seem to have missed mcts re “lit-fic”.
@mark: Well, we can certainly agree you’re being obtuse.
I don’t know what a “mcts” is, so I can’t respond to that. However, you evidently hold the unshakeable belief that all non-genre fiction consists of nothing but quotidian navel-gazing, and that paying attention to prose and “the small details of people’s lives and inner states” in fiction is somehow antithetical to having a plot. This isn’t remotely true, but hey, you do you, as the kids say these days.
@PhilRM: One of the stories I’m reminded of (by this discussion) is “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets” which I read once back in 1980 or so and never forgotten. Some things happen in the story, but the plot is really simple. The climax of the story is trivial from the plot point of view (a piece of paper blows out the windows, but the character ignores it), but what that event tells us about the internal change the character has gone through makes the story unforgettable. I looked up the story today and realized that the author was Jack Finney
@mark
” I am not now, nor have I ever been a Christian. Therefore, I have every right to say that’s utterly false – that does NOTHING to begin to repair your misdeeds. ”
“Repairing misdeeds” and salvation are two different things. The thief didn’t give back what he stole, yet he was saved anyway. Salvation is a gift that none of us deserve, no matter what we do on Earth. And yes, even Hitler could have asked for it.
@Lis
“No one wants to hand children adult pornography.”
I quote from the Austin American-Statesman of 13 Nov 1992, in reference to Madonna’s Sex:
“Austin Library Director Brenda Branch has rejected a request from Mayor Bruce Todd to consider disallowing children under a certain age to see the book, saying “We do not discriminate based on age.” “
@bill-Now show us the bit that says Ms. Branch was planning to shelve it in the children’s section. Oops, you can’t do that, because she wasn’t.
Parents, on the other hand, can tell their kids they can’t borrow something.
And if you want the book banned from the library because some kid may find it in the adult section, check it out, and the parent doesn’t either prevent that or take it from the kid and discuss why they think it’s unsuitable when the kid gets home, y’know, if we’re not talking about at least an older teen, I’d consider that poor judgment, but it’s also the parent’s decision to make. Isn’t that what you want, Bill? Parental control, not those government librarians presuming to read their minds and make decisions for them?
@Andrew (not Werdna): There’s a short story that I think is by Jane Yolen – I read it in some SF anthology back in the 80s, but a quick perusal of her entry on ISFDB didn’t bring up any obvious candidates – that I likewise have never forgotten. (Although clearly I have forgotten the title and possibly the author.) The climax of the story, and practically the only thing that happens, plot-wise, is a guy comes home from work and tells his wife to turn off the tv, which is when you realize what’s going on, and it’s utterly devastating.
@Lis — in a library where the administration doesn’t care which shelf a book comes off of when dealing with kids, whether or not a book is shelved in the children’s section or not doesn’t make any difference.