Articles by michael-h-price-1
Sun Jun 1, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
An Unprecedented Perspective on Edgar G. Ulmer, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors
I had mentioned Edgar G. Ulmer, the Grey Eminence of Old Hollywood’s Poverty Row sector, in last week’s column, attempting to draw a thematic similarity between Ulmer’s most vivid example of low-budget film noir, 1945’s Detour, and a newly opening picture called Stuck, from the dramatist-turned-filmmaker Stuart Gordon. The cause-and-effect response here was an urge to take a fresh look at Detour. Right about that time, the mail brought a copy of Gary D. Rhodes’ new book, Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (Lexington Books; $85).
Gary Rhodes is a colleague of long standing, a filmmaker, educator and journalist whose work has intersected with mine on several fronts. Such Rhodes volumes as White Zombie: Anatomy of a Horror Film and Horror at the Drive-In relate strategically to the Forgotten Horrors books that George E. Turner and I originated during the 1970s, and Gary and I have long acknowledged a shared interest in Ulmer (1904-1972) as a talent essential to any understanding of maverick moviemaking.
With Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row, Rhodes takes that interest to an unprecedented extent. Editor Rhodes and a well-chosen crew of contributing writers consider Ulmer in light of not only his breakthrough film, 1934’s The Black Cat at big-time Universal Pictures, or such finery-on-a-budget exercises as Bluebeard (1944) and Detour (1945), but also Ulmer’s tangled path through such arenas as sex-hygiene exploitation films (1933’s Damaged Lives), Yiddish-language pieces (1937’s Green Fields), well-financed symphonic soap opera (1947’s Carnegie Hall), and ostensible schlock for the drive-in theatres (1957’s Daughter of Dr. Jekyll).
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Sun May 11, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Child Brides of the Ozarks and Beyond, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #56
Sixty-five years after a double-edged sword of a movie called Child Bride of the Ozarks professed to indict the custom of underage marriage – while courting a leering, voyeuristic audience, naturally – the issue remains urgent. Last month’s raids upon a polygamist sect in Texas demonstrate that such persistence, involving girls scarcely into their teens, belongs as much to the presumably Civilized World as to the more thoroughly well-hidden corners of the planet: The Yearning for Zion Ranch had hidden in plain sight, a Third World concentration camp, bunkered in alongside Mainstream Amerika.
Meanwhile in the Dominant Culture, a Florida-based plastic surgeon named Michael Salzhauer has published a cartoon-storybook testament to female objectification called My Beautiful Mommy (Big Tent Books) that purports to “[guide] children through Mommy’s [cosmetic] surgery and healing process in a friendly, nonthreatening way” – nonthreatening, that is, until one grasps the deeper message: Looks are everything, and you get what you can pay for. The greater objective would appear the preconditioning of a next generation of face-lift addicts: Better start saving up now, girlie, and maybe develop an eating disorder as a prelude.
So which sector, or sect, is the less civilized? The backwater zealots who propose to wait out the Apocalypse in round-robin conjugal confinement with “brides” young enough to be their granddaughters? Or the proponents of glamour-at-a-price?
Dr. Salzhauer’s idealized Beautiful Mommy, as pictured on the cover of that scrofulous little book, calls to mind nothing so much as an over-glamorized Britney Spears or Miley Cyrus, perhaps a Bratz-meets-Barbie: Never too young to aspire to such artificiality, never too old to lay claim to it, given a loaded checkbook. Photographs from the Yearning for Zion round-up suggest nothing so much as some 19th-century agrarian-society re-enactment, but the forcibly modest attire of the young women involved conveys an aspect more ominous than bucolic.
About that movie…
My lingering impression of Harry Revier’s Child Bride of the Ozarks has hinged more upon featured player Angelo Rossitto (1908–1991) than with any social-agenda implications. Rossitto, a pioneering dwarf player of Old Hollywood, had reminisced fondly about Child Bride during a series of late-in-life interviews for the Forgotten Horrors film-history books. George Turner’s and my chapter on Child Bride in Forgotten Horrors 2, in turn, deals as much with Rossitto as with the picture itself.
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Sun Apr 6, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and Drew Friedman, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #51
I met Drew Friedman in 1990 through a long-standing friendship with his brother and then-frequent collaborator, the songwriter and social critic Josh Alan Friedman, while we were attending a cartoonists’ convention in Dallas as working artists and comic-book developers. Drew had built a reputation within the industry as a meticulously lifelike portraitist, capable of arraying tiny dots of ink into images of dreamlike accuracy that captured the soul – unflatteringly so, as a rule – as unerringly as it suggested a physical reality.
Poised for a leap into mass-market commercial illustration, Drew had brought to the Dallas Fantasy Fair a work-in-progress assignment for a video-box edition of a pioneering television series, The Honeymooners. The portrait of star player Jackie Gleason shone forth from the over-sized Strathmore page – Drew was working on a scale larger by far than the size of an actual videocassette sleeve – like some impossible photograph. The piece was too richly caricatured to be a photo, but it captured an essence of Gleason in a way one seldom sees in ink-on-paper.
“Needs some cleaning up,” Drew said, surveying the results. He set aside his Rapidograph, a fountain-pen drawing tool capable of dispensing near-microscopic quantities of ink, and went to work with an X-Acto knife, chiseling at one ink-speck after another with unerring near-photographic accuracy. Gleason’s face, already as convincing as if reproduced by a half-tone engraving camera, seemed to engage the observer in direct eye-contact animation under Friedman’s masterful touch.
The intervening years have found Drew Friedman moving ever deeper into pop-mainstream acclaim via such publications as MAD and Los Angeles Magazine and Entertainment Weekly – a far cry from the compassionately acerbic show-business satires that he and Josh Alan once produced for various under-the-counterculture and arts-revue publications.
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Sun Mar 30, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
"Prowling" - Juggling the Blues with the Comics, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #50
“Ya gotta be a juggler to woik in dis racket,” a senior-staff powerhouse named Frosty Sloane informed me after I had landed my first job in a competitive marketplace, back around 1965.
“I thought we were selling shoes,” I answered him. Which of course we were. I had a fleeting mental picture of some Ed Sullivan Show juggling act involving wingtip clodhoppers and stiletto heels. Took a while for Frosty’s metaphor to sink in – but once I had experienced my first stampede of customers and watched Sloane accommodate ten or fifteen prospective buyers while I attempted to deal with one or two of ’em, I caught his drift, all right.
Frosty Sloane was so effective at the craft, with consistently high sales tallies to show for it, that he could afford to be overconfident. He would juggle products while juggling customers: If a shopper should ask to see one style of shoe, Sloane would bring out half-a-dozen selections and wind up selling two or three of those. And he was such a wisenheimer that I wondered how he could get away with some of his sales-floor stunts.
“Y’see, half o’ th’ customers who come in here durin’ a slower stretch – they don’t even know they’re customers, yet,” Frosty counseled me, as if dispensing the Wisdom of the Ages. “They’re jus’ sleepwalkin’, browsin’ away like as if they knew what they were doin’. An’ ya gotta figger out how t’ get their attention.” No sooner had he spoken, than a woman wandered into the department, browsin’ away – just like the man said.
“Watch dis,” Frosty said, “an’ I’ll show ya what I mean by ‘sleepwalkin.’” He strolled toward the browser, nodded in her direction, and then spoke: “Tickle your ass with a feather, ma’am?” He paced the question just rapidly enough to blur its words.
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Sun Mar 9, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Allan Turner’s Folklife Treasures, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #47
The measurable results of bare-knuckled research, like gold and luck, will turn up where you find ’em. Folks often think of cultural research in academic terms – the ivory-tower stereotype, alone in the realm of uninterrupted thought and empirical fact-sifting, or the aloof egghead at large amongst the tribes – but a truer basis must rest with the very folks whose thoughts and dreams and deeds form the foundations of any popular culture.
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
On the Wavelength of 'The Signal’, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #44
The dramatis personae roster for a soon-to-open, three-author film called The Signal lists a multitude of roles identified only as “random bodies,” “struggling people,” “deranged people” and so forth. If the casting, as such, suggests chaos, then such must be precisely the intent. From a premise of frenzied malevolence, writer-directors David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush have crafted a smart and orderly, if cryptic, chiller that owes many debts of influence but also brings some welcome new twists to an old and over-familiar formula.
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Sun Jan 20, 2008 — by Michael H. Price
Joe Palooka as a Weird-Menace Vehicle, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #40
One connection leads to another and then another, whether via the proverbial Six Degrees of Separation or by means of random-chance Free Association. Which explains how the moviemaking Coen Bros., Joel and Ethan, and Ham Fisher’s strange trailblazer of a comic strip, Joe Palooka, come to be mentioned in a single sentence.Continue reading Joe Palooka as a Weird-Menace Vehicle, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Dec 30, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Bamboozled by Bat Masterson, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #37
Every time I backtrack to some last-century comic book or movie or teevee show that purports to portray Bat Masterson, I come away with a greater appreciation of the historical model as a bigger-than-real figure. Granted that some of Masterson’s real-life exploits and con-games aren’t quite the stuff of sensationalized melodrama, I’ll take the genuine article every time for Puckish wit and adaptability to wildly differing environments.Continue reading Bamboozled by Bat Masterson, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Dec 23, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
Conversations with Roy Rogers, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #36
The opening Jan. 8 of Texas’ Fort Worth Stock Show & Rodeo, a hardy and adaptive survivor of the 19th century, marks not only a continuation of the region’s most emphatic reminder of its economic basis in agriculture. The occasion also nails the 50th anniversary of a major-league show-business breakthrough for the Stock Show. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans arrived in Fort Worth in 1958 to serve as hosts for the first comprehensive network-television coverage of an authentically Western rodeo.Continue reading Conversations with Roy Rogers, by Michael H. Price ›
Sun Dec 2, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
My Cousin Vinnie vs. the Vampires, by Michael H. Price
Forgotten Horrors #34
Right about now, my cousin Vincent Price would be grumbling about a new film called I Am Legend (opening Dec. 14) – reminding anyone within earshot that he had been the first to star in a movie based upon that apocalyptic story and muttering, “You’d think we hadn’t done it right, the first time.”
Price (1911-1993) had said as much about another movie during our last get-together, in 1986 during a college-campus lecture-tour visit to Fort Worth, Texas. David Cronenberg’s Oscar-bait remake of The Fly was about to open, and Price – who had starred in the original Fly of 1958 – was exercising his prerogative, as a grey eminence of Hollywood’s horror-film scene, to cop an indignant stance: “Hmph! You’d think we hadn’t done it right, the first time.” Like I said…
Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend, starring Will Smith in a role corresponding to that which Price had handled, is the third filming of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel about the collapse of civilization under an epidemic of vampirism. Price’s version, issued in 1964 with little fanfare, bears the title The Last Man on Earth. Price might have grumped about a 1971 remake called The Omega Man – if not for the starring presence of his friend Charlton Heston in that one.
In a benevolent side-effect, the heavy promotion of I Am Legend has prompted a classy widescreen-DVD release of The Last Man on Earth – issued last week via a video-label holding-company ghost traveling under the worthy old corporate name of MGM.
Vincent Price: The name conjures images as varied as the roles he tackled (romantic, comical, heroic, tragic) before typecasting kicked in to distinguish him as the baddest of bogeymen. Price was as prominent a champion of gracious living – gourmet chef, cultural scholar, published author, and discerning collector of art – as he was a reliable movie menace..
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Sun Oct 7, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Shock! Theatre, 50 years later
Forgotten Horrors #25
The 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival in North America occurred in 2004. So what else is new? That occasion could hardly be treated as commonplace nostalgia, so urgent has the influence remained. Witness Julie Taymor’s newly opened film, Across the Universe. Nor can mere nostalgia account for the significance of the 50th anniversary of a similarly intense cultural phenomenon known as Shock! Theater.
The likening of Shock! to the Beatles’ impact, and to rock music as a class, will become more evident, so bear with me.
Depending upon one’s hometown locale, some folks might remember Shock! Theater under some other proxy local-teevee title. My immediate North Texas readership recollects the syndicated-television breakthrough of Shock! Theater under the localized name of Nightmare. That Fort Worth version premiered in September of 1957 over a scrappy and innovative independent channel – a distinctive presentation of a nationwide syndie-teevee blitz.
In reviving a wealth of Depression-into-WWII movie chillers from Universal Pictures Corp., Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems syndicate left the style of presentation up to the individual stations. A channel typically would assign a local-market announcer to pose as a creepy personality (such as John “the Cool Ghoul” Zacherle, in Philadelphia and New York) who would introduce the various Frankensteins, Draculas and so forth and then intrude at intervals to present blackout gags.
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Sun Sep 30, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction cycle persists
Forgotten Horrors #24
Continued from last week…
An Arlington, Texas-based songwriting and guitar-building partner of mine named Greg Jackson tells of the time when, as a schoolboy intent upon advancing his family’s music-making traditions, he brought home a just-learned story-song called “Five Nights Drunk” and demonstrated it to his folk-singing father as a fresh revelation. Manny Jackson listened long enough for the verses to open the floodgates of memory, then burst out laughing: “Why, I learned that song back when I was just a boy, and it was old even then! Here: Let me show you how it really goes!”
I suspect that that communal dream-stream, rippling with the waves and the undertow of ancient Ideas That Wouldn’t, and Will Not, Stay Dead (like the Man Who Wouldn’t Stay Dead of my Grandmother Lillian’s cycle of folk-tales) is the truer basis of the fabled Unbroken Circle of Southern non-sectarian gospel-singing tradition. Our shared notions and perceptions bind our generations, one to another – more so, even, than blood kinship – if only we will bother to heed the interests in common and build upon them. The past is ever-present.
Greg Jackson and I, both natives of the Texas Panhandle with immigrant and native-tribal ancestral ties to Kansas and Oklahoma and points eastward, have enjoyed the good fortune to be involved since around 1980 with a music-making and storytelling ensemble called the Salt Lick Foundation. East Texan by origin but long based in Dallas and Fort Worth, Salt Lick is ostensibly a bluegrass band that nonetheless reserves the right to indulge in blues and honky-tonk forms, with the occasional forays into rock ’n’ roll, Latinate and Cajun idioms, and free-form jazz.
An immersion in folklore is a foregone conclusion with Salt Lick – from fiddler Earnie Taft’s (above) devotion to Irish traditionalism, to bassist Ron Green’s eerie ability to channel the presence of some 19th-century circuit-riding revivalist preacher. We deepened the connections in a stroke when we teamed in 1984 with the Wimberley-based novelist and playwright Elithe Hamilton Kirkland (1907–1992) to develop a musical stage revue called Precious Memories.
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Sun Sep 23, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: What's A Fishhead?
Forgotten Horrors #23
Continued from last week …
We had left Robert Bloch hanging in mid-conversation last week, speaking of Irvin S. Cobb as a forerunner of the “bizarre pulp” movement in popular fiction.
Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (1876–1944) was a crony and occasional collaborator of Will Rogers, and a key influence upon Rogers’ droll sense of humor. He can be seen as an actor in such Rogers-starring films as Judge Priest (1934; deriving from Cobb’s folksier tales) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), both directed by John Ford. It was for other works entirely that Robert Bloch remembered Cobb.
“Have you ever read Irvin Cobb’s ‘Fishhead’?” Bloch asked me around 1979-1980. “Well, if it was good enough for Howard Lovecraft to single out as a nightmare-on-paper [in the 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Fiction], then I was ready and willing to tear into it. Which I did. Changed my entire direction, that one story did.”
I can relate, all right. In 1995, independent publisher Lawrence Adam Shell and I set about to adapt as a graphic novel Cobb’s 1911 tale of righteous vengeance, “Fishhead,” in which a swamp-dwelling hermit of grotesque aspect runs afoul of malicious neighbors. If Irvin Cobb had drawn upon regional folklore to lend his title character a gift of supernatural communion with the wildlife, then our crew reckoned we must treat Cobb’s story itself as folklore – subject to sympathetic re-interpretation and elaboration as a condition of respect.
And otherwise, why adapt at all? Cobb would have done a greater service to scholarship than to popular literature if he had contented himself merely with compiling the various old-time rumors about reclusive souls presumed to possess spiritual bonds with the wastelands. The audacious job that Cobb called “Fishhead” backfired at first, accumulating rejections from one magazine after another on account of its unabashed gruesomeness and its sharp contrast with his gathering reputation as a sure-fire humorist. One editor, Bob Davis, of an adventurous magazine called The Cavalier, wrote to Cobb in 1911: “It is inconceivable how one so saturated with the humors of life can present so appalling a picture.”
But after Davis had relented and published the yarn in 1913, “Fishhead” proved a watershed, helping to trigger the so-called “bizarre pulp” explosion that would gerrymander the boundaries of mass-market fiction during the two-and-a-half decades to follow. By mid-century, when Cobb’s lighthearted and bucolic tales had become by-and-large forgotten, “Fishhead” was still reappearing as a magazine-and-anthology favorite.
Sun Sep 16, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: The folklore-into-fiction connection
Forgotten Horrors #22
Recycling-in-action: Herewith, an encore of a presentation I delivered earlier this month at Tarleton State University’s Langdon Weekend arts-and-farces festival at Granbury, Texas.
If it was good enough for Aesop and Shakespeare and Mark Twain, then it should suit the rest of us – as tradition-bound storytellers with roots in the Old World and in early-day Americana, that is – just fine and dandy.
I am speaking of folklore – the oral-tradition narrative medium that encloses and defines any and all cultures and stands poised as a chronic muse (often ill-heeded or, if heeded, ill-acknowledged) for anyone who attempts to relate a tale for popular consumption. This is a self-evident truth so obvious as to go overlooked.
Yes, and the barrier between folklore and commercial fiction is as slender as the upper E-string on a guitar, and just as sensitive. Pluck that string and watch it vibrate, and the blurred image suggests a vivid metaphor. The inspiration, at any rate, is as close within reach as air and water, and often less subject to pollution.
“So! Where do you-all get your ideas, anyhow?” The question, vaguely indignant, crops up every time a published author goes out communing with the readership. Stephen King has long since perfected a suitably snarky reply: “I get mine from an idea-subscription service in Utica.”
King is joking, of course, and even the most cursory reading of the humongous body of work that he represents will find King tapped into a deep lode of rustic folklore. Witness, for example, The Shining, a 1977 novel-become-movie in which a key supporting character takes prompt notice of a precocious child’s thought-projecting abilities: “My grandmother and I could hold conversations … without ever opening our mouths. She called it ‘shining.’”
I grew up in close quarters with two grandmothers like that – not in Stephen King’s sense of “shining,” as such, although with each I felt a communicative bond that ran deeper than articulated speech. Each, that is, seemed to sense what might be burdening my thoughts at any given moment, whether or not I might care to put any such thoughts into words. And each grandmother, too, was a prolific and spontaneous storyteller, dispensing colorful family-history tales, fables in the Aesopic tradition, and hair-raising horrors divided more-or-less equally between waking-life ordeals and dreamlike supernatural hauntings. With such living-history resources at hand, who needed Little Golden Books?
My maternal-side grandmother, Lillian Beatrice Ralston Wilson Lomen (1895–1982), characterized her ghostlier yarns as “haint stories” – haint being a back-country variant of haunt. She knew by heart James Whitcomb Riley’s famous moral-lesson poem of 1885, “Little Orphant Annie, (sic)” with its recurring admonition that “the Gobble: ’Uns’ll git you ef [if] you don’t watch out!” And she could concoct – or recollect, or fabricate from combined experience and imagination – stories and verses every bit as horrific, and as absurd and uproarious.
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Sun Sep 9, 2007 — by Michael H. Price
MICHAEL H. PRICE: Roy Crane: A life in comics
Forgotten Horrors #21
Continued from last week…
The following text contains the remarks of comic-strip master Roy Crane (1901 – 1977) from a visit with George E. Turner and Yrs. Trly. on May 13, 1969, in the Editorial Art Department of the Daily News & Globe-Times at Amarillo, Texas. George and I had become acquainted with the Texas-bred artist a few years earlier when he had visited various client-newspapers on behalf of his Reuben Award-winning feature Buz Sawyer. – M.H.P.
Back about 1912, when I was a boy, our next-door neighbor in Sweetwater [Texas] was a traveling salesman for a wholesale grocery firm. Mother and I went with him and his wife, once, when he made his rounds, and we went up to Amarillo. I had an impression of endless grass, and the car seemed always to be going uphill. The grass was very thick and grew right up to the ruts – there wasn’t a graded road. There was a world of prairie dogs. They’d dive into the runs, and we’d run over hundreds of them a day. Now they [residents of the Texas Plains] have discovered trees, and there are beautiful lawns and flowers.
Les Turner, who later was my assistant on the Wash Tubbs daily strips, is from Wichita Falls [Texas]. We were going on a sort of bumming trip together after we finished art school. There were no jobs for us, and we went riding freight trains and hitching rides. I missed him by one day when he got a ride to California. I went to Galveston and got a job as ordinary seaman on a tramp steamer to Europe. When we returned and landed at New York, I got my first art job on the New York World.
I started Wash Tubbs in 1924. Later that year, [Harold Gray’s] Little Orphan Annie came out, and it was quite a departure. Here was a strip that tried to make you cry instead of laugh! I wanted to make Wash Tubbs an adventure strip, and the office wanted to make it a movie [humor, i.e.] strip. When I broke in, there had been a few continuities. I think Andy Gump [of Sidney Smith’s The Gumps] ran for President, and they had running gags about the election. He lost, of course.
But 1924 was in the day of joke comics, and the guy who took [subscribed to, i.e.] the most joke magazines was the biggest-rated cartoonist. Some [cartoonists] collected foreign joke books and had them translated. I was living in Cleveland, then. Once, two different strips in the Cleveland paper had the same joke on the same day – and there it was, the next day, in still another one! No one paid much attention to adventure strips until the Depression. They were called comics, and they ran on the comics page, and they were supposed to be funny.
A number of us were trying to tell stories. We called them continuities, not stories. They were more or less like the situation comedies on teevee today. I was trying for adventure, connected with romance. In 1929, I picked up [Captain] Easy. He was someone I could put some force behind. [The title character] Wash had been with a pal about like himself, and they couldn’t fight or anything. I even had to have some eunuchs in a harem help them out a bit, and that was going too far! Easy was what I needed, a two-fisted type.
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