10/17/23
Newsletter #491
The Crack of Dawn
After we completed Lunatics: A Love Story (1992), in 1991, I moved back to Hollywood for the fourth or fifth time. I rented a bungalow on Hudson St., just off Sunset Blvd. Marvin Gaye used to have his own recording on studio on Hudson, across Sunset. At the end of the driveway, across Hudson, was the Hollywood Police motor yard, where 50 black and white police cruisers sat in need of repair. There were two other bungalows in an enclave, and I went through a variety of nutty neighbors. Unlike the previous bungalow on McCadden St. – the infamous bungalow, where the one, the only, Quentin Tarantino hung out (I still find it extremely difficult to fathom that that goofy knucklehead is the biggest filmmaker in the world. I was also thinking the other day, “Maybe folks aren’t getting the proper perspective when I mention that bungalow and QT hanging out there, like it happened a couple of times and I’m cherishing these few memories. No, I’m talking about a long, horrible stretch between 1986-1988, that was miserable and not worth remembering. Keep in mind old QT didn’t make his first movie until 1992. Back then he was just a loudmouthed, opinionated kid, with a lot of VHS tapes of shitty movies) – this other bungalow was kind of nice, with new carpet and appliances.
Somewhere along the way, my buddy Marvis had scored a six-foot-long, two-inch-thick piece of glass with beveled edges that was sitting on his deck collecting dirt. One day as we sat in that bungalow’s living room, Marvis pointed over my head at the wall and said, “That piece of beveled glass would fit perfectly right there as a bookshelf. I said, “OK. Do it. When I move, you’ll take the glass back.” Marvis is a carpenter and installed it securely. For whatever my reasons were, I filled it with science fiction books.
Rob Tapert, producer extraordinaire of Xena, Hercules and the truly unkillable Evil Dead series, sat below that glass shelf and spoke these words, “Every good book that’s ever been written has been filmed.” I should have done a spit take, but instead I said, “Only someone who doesn’t read books would say that. Most of the good sci-fi books have not been filmed.” Rob folded his arms and said, “Oh, yeah? Like what?” I reached directly over his head to the glass shelf and handed him the first of three volumes of Before the Golden Age, edited by Isaac Asimov. These were Asimov’s favorite stories from when he was a kid, from 1928-38. There was a story called Tumithak of the Corridors by Charles Tanner from 1932 that was kind of long, that I thought was terrifically cool, and had not yet been made into a movie, and honestly, still hasn’t. It’s in the future, Martians won the war and rule the surface of Earth. Human went underground. Our story is about a young, Conan-like warrior fighting his way to the surface of Earth, where Martians now rule. He goes up level by level, each a different society.
When I gave Rob the book – admittedly, a paperback – I said, “Don’t lose it, it’s part of a trilogy.” So he immediately lost it. I bought myself another copy. Anyway, Rob read the story and liked it. Great. At some point months later Rob went out of town and I ended up with his police car-like, black Taurus. I reached under the seat and found volume #1 of Before the Golden Age.
Years went by. Rob called me and asked, “Whatever happened to Thumbelina of the Hallways?” I said, “Tumithak of the Corridors. It’s not getting any newer and the author Charles Tanner is still dead. I’ll bet it’s in the public domain.” Rob asked if I would fax him a copy, which was a pain in the ass, but since I now had two copies of volume #1, I sent him the story. He called back at some point and said, “That’s a good story.” And I said, “And I thought they’d all been shot.”
More years went by. It was now the late 1990s and I lived in Santa Monica. My open door faced west and in blew a warm ocean breeze. Rob called. He said, “What do you want if I make Tumithak of the Corridors?” I thought, look at that, he finally got it right. I was truly befuddled. “What do I want? I didn’t write the story. I don’t want anything.” But wait, then it hit me. I loved that story, and had since I was a kid. So I added, “I’ll tell you what you can do for me. Don’t fuck it up.”
There was an abnormally long silence. A silence that spoke volumes. I finally said, “Wait, you already fucked it up?” Rob hastened to inform me that changes, that needed to be made, had been made. I said, “Well, it’s whatever you made it, leave me out.” It became a TV series called Cleopatra 2525, that was on for two seasons, 2000-2001. Here’s the sort of blurb from Rotten Tomatoes, “Hey, did you hear the one about the stripper who was cryogenically frozen after her breast augmentation surgery goes awry, only to be awakened by two warrior maidens 500 years later in a world ruled by machines?”
So, yes, I guess a few changes were made.
On some level, though, that series — whatever it is — exists because my buddy Marvis had a long piece of thick beveled glass.
Ever onward.
We're doing our best.
Where is volume 492?