Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
John Carpenter's The Thing with Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey
273 Plays1 year ago
We see in 2023 with Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey, the hosts of the Strange Studies of Strange Stories podcast covering genre fiction. As well podcasting, they are quite the polymath duo; Chad is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and musician, and Chris is a writer of books for tabletop RPGs and co-host of other podcasts such as Rachel Watches Star Trek.
Chad and Chris's bread and butter is H.P Lovecraft - they cut their teeth on HP Podcraft, a podcast dedicated to the master of cosmic horror - and they join us today to talk about a movie that has Lovecraftian DNA running through it - John Carpenter's The Thing, the 1982 science-fiction horror masterpiece. We'll talk about the evolution of the film, from At the Mountains Of Madness to Who Goes There?; we'll cover fears of the unknown, a post-Covid reading of the film, and ponder upon alternative versions of the film starring Ernie Hudson and Christopher Walken (which almost happened!).
We also chat about the various projects Chad and Chris have on the go, including Chad's 2022 movie The Time Capsule, his music with Pitch Black Manor, and Chris's unexpected podcasting adventures with his wife Rachel.
Elsewhere The Judge concludes her series of talks on plagiarism, we hear Mosaix's winning entry from December's 75-word writing challenge, and Elon Musk tells Mars Radio FM how his acquisition of Twitter is paving the way for his journey to the Red Planet.
Links
The Strange Studies Of Strange Stories Podcast
Chad's band Pitch Black Manor
Chad's movie The Colossus, adapted from Clark Ashton Smith's short story, can be viewed for free (!!) on Youtube.
For more info on Chad's 2022 sci-fi romance movie The Time Capsule visit https://thetimecapsulemovie.com/
Chris's other podcast, Rachel Watches Star Trek, is available on all good podcast platforms, and there are more details here.
Index
[0:00:00 - 0:41:07] - Interview Part 1
[0:41:08 - 0:43:26] - Skit 1
[0:43:27 - 0:59:25] - The Judge's Corner
[0:59:26 - 1:00:41] - 75-word challenge
[1:00:42 - 1:03:37] - Skit 2
[1:03:38 - 1:31:24] - Interview Part 2
[1:32:25 - Close] - Credits
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Crohn's Cast
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Crohn's Cast. I'm your co-host Christopher Bean. And I'm Dan Jones. It's January and we're in the middle of a long bleak mid-winter where sometimes you look out the window and you see those icy stretches of wasteland and you think that only a bottle of scotch, a game of computer chess and a flamethrower could get you through the night.
00:00:35
Speaker
But we should count our blessings. We don't have to worry about our families or our housemates or our neighbors turning into gruesome shape-shifting aliens, unthinkingly seeking to assimilate every living organism it can get its half husky hands on. No, we can in peace consider today the 1982 science fiction horror movie masterpiece that is John Carpenter's
Winter Survival and 'The Thing' Discussion
00:00:55
Speaker
The Thing, which celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2022. Based on the 1938 John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There? It tells the story of a group of American researchers in Antarctica who encounter the eponymous thing, a parasitic extraterrestrial lifeform that assimilates
00:01:13
Speaker
and imitates other organisms. The group is overcome by paranoia and conflict as they learn they can no longer trust each other and that any one of them could be
Introduction to Guests: Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lackey
00:01:22
Speaker
the thing. It stars long time carpenter muse Kurt Russell as helicopter pilot and all round badass R.J. McCready and a slew of hard bitten American character actors. It combines Rob Bottin's visceral creature effects with genuine psychological horror and has Lovecraftian terror running through every one of its assimilated cells.
00:01:43
Speaker
I'm going to have to try not to gush your fanboy too much because this month's guests are the inimitable hosts of the Outstanding HP Podcast and the recent Strange Studies of Strange Stories, Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lackey. Their podcast is dedicated to the strange fiction of HP Lovecraft and laterally work from other luminaries such as Michael Shea, Aldrin and Blackwood and that Bronte woman who wrote a song for Kate Bush.
00:02:03
Speaker
An American living in Yorkshire, Chris Lackey is the co-host of Strange Studies of Strange Stories. Chris also writes for tabletop RPGs. And you can find his newest book, Cots of Clulu from Chaosium, at all your favourite game retailers. Chad Pfeiffer co-hosts and scores Strange Studies of Strange Stories. He's also the screenwriter of recent film The Time Capsule, as well as audio creature feature The Colossus. Pfeiffer's band Pitch Black Manor is really scary.
00:02:27
Speaker
They're also responsible for introducing the developed world to delights such as Lying Vincent Price, Posh Pete Burns, and of course, the correct way to say
00:02:38
Speaker
Behold, Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lackey.
Podcasting Journey and Rebranding
00:02:41
Speaker
Welcome. Hey, thanks for having us. When we started the podcast, we were drawing up a long list of people who we wanted to have on as guests. And we thought that was going to be our USP, have guests on. And we got a network of authors and publishers and agents. And Chris is always saying, oh, HP Podcraft, I love the latest episode. Go and check this out. So he got me hooked on it as well.
00:02:56
Speaker
it.
00:03:03
Speaker
I said, why don't we go and invite Chris and Chad on from HP Podcast? He said, no, you can't do that. We can't have them on, we're not ready. Chris's enthusiasm and it took my boneheadedness to basically reach out and I have no shame about these things. Here we are. Thanks, guys. Yeah, this is really cool. We're talking to the pro-level podcasters now. Maybe you could teach us a thing or two. But before we go on to that,
00:03:32
Speaker
Let's talk about the thing. Cause I think we're all on the level there. Yeah. Well, like we had suggested, you guys had initially said, let's talk about some Lovecraft. Our show, we did about 120 episodes on the entire works of HP Lovecraft. That was as the HP Lovecraft literary podcast. And then as you said, we continued on to other writers for the next 10 years. And only in, um, only just this year did we rebrand as strange studies, a strange story. So we could broaden the scope of what we're doing a little bit. And the topic that you guys had suggested initially was at the mountains of madness, which so we would have covered that on our show.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think you covered, you took like five or six episodes to cover. We did. It's a really long story. And honestly, getting either of us to reread it would have been the most herculean task. Not that I don't love it. However, the thing, and I'm here in Wisconsin now, I just moved to California, it's snowy here. So it's when the first snow comes down, it's like time to pop that baby in because it's just a good wintery, scary
00:04:25
Speaker
flick. And although, as you said, it's the 40th anniversary, a lot of people have been getting out to theater to see it. Uh, I still think it's always good to talk about it. So I just had, I gave it another watch. When did you
Casting and Themes in 'The Thing'
00:04:34
Speaker
watch it, Chris? Did you watch it recently? Yeah, just yesterday. Again. Yeah. Yeah. It's fresh in the mind. Oh yeah. I'm ready to talk. Well, I've been reading about it too. There's some crazy things, you know, that, um, Richard Matheson was one of the guys that were trying to get to do the screenplay for it, which I didn't know about. Really? Uh, yeah. And they ended up going with the guy that wrote a bad news bears, which Carpenter was really a big fan of.
00:04:54
Speaker
As he should be. That's a great flick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So he came in and then they, he wrote it and he was having trouble with the second act. So Carpenter came in and, and they kind of worked together on it and, and sorted it out and they were both happy with it because they wanted, Carpenter loved the old movie a lot. And, and he, he was kind of didn't want to do it, but they said, no, read the original story. And they read the original story and he's like, Oh my God, it's so different. I love this. And then, then that was a matter of them trying to adapt that script to get it to work. So.
00:05:21
Speaker
Yeah, the who's the monster and who's not element wasn't really present in the 1951. Well, the 1950s, it's still a great film. It stands up the 1951. It's still just the monster is still a bloke in a suit. Carpenter was very explicit about saying, I want to do this, this movie. I want to pay homage to the 1951 Howard Hawks film. I also want to adapt the John W Campbell novella, but I don't want the monster to be a bloke in a rubber suit.
00:05:49
Speaker
And so you get the Rob Botten creature effects. It's a funny film. Like you said, like Rob Matheson was almost involved. There were a number of different actors who didn't almost make the film or who almost made the film, but they didn't make the final casting. Ernie Hudson was supposed to play to play Childs up until the last minute. And I think they got the Keith David was his first big role.
00:06:14
Speaker
It's his first big role and he was the last one to be auditioned and Ernie Hudson was being lined up for the role and then he came in and he was a theatre actor and they gave him the role, they thought he had brought that intensity to it but they kept telling him that you've got to tone it down, it's not the theatre, you've got to tone it down. Which is kind of weird because Childs is the hot headed one of the group. Also the Batman that survives a horror to the end which is pretty rare for 1980.
00:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, it is. And also that's interesting because there is a moment where when they're trying to decide on who's the leader and child says, I'll take it. And they go, no, Kurt Russell says, how about someone with a cooler head? And I was like, what's Charles been doing? He's not that excitable. And he calls when they need a flamethrower. Yeah, they should have brought Winston Zeta more in there. He would have done a better job. He's great.
00:07:04
Speaker
I love that I want to see the alternate version of the thing where any Hudson is playing childs and Christopher Walken is playing because he was going to be brought in as McCready Russell. Yeah, it was Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken were all guys that they were tossing around to be McCready.
00:07:22
Speaker
So I would endeavor to say that probably wouldn't have changed the movie much unless they're the kind of actors that bring rewrites down. One thing that I noticed that's particularly on this viewing, and I've seen it so many times, but in the context of how is this a Lovecraftian movie? Because we, you know, at the mountains of madness, I know that Del Toro is always kicking around releasing an adaptation of that.
00:07:42
Speaker
it's legendarily difficult to adapt Lovecraft work because it is really geared towards the written word. It's something that's supposed to be received that way. And I think that the thing tells a very similar story to Add the Mountains of Madness, but in a very cinematic way. And one thing about it that's very Lovecraftian is that to an extent, the characters don't matter that way. They're all out here at this Arctic research station, but you don't really get any context as to why what's going on in their personal lives that would cause them to want to go out to this job of solitude out in the freezing cold.
00:08:11
Speaker
And I feel like if this were a story with telling a more traditional story where the main characters were in the lead, they'd be resolving some kind of past trauma by beating this creature. Think about, like, Sandra Bullock in Gravity. There's a backstory they introduced about a dead child so that when she conquers the big monster, she's also conquering the small story.
00:08:29
Speaker
That is not the case with it. They receive this problem from somebody else. It's almost an inherited problem, which is very Lovecraft. They're not at the beginning of it. They're not at the end of it. And to bring it back around to the 1951 movie, I thought it was very clever of them to remake it, but also this is sort of a sequel because they're the ones in the 1950s movie who blow the thing out of the ice and then put an electric blanket over the block of ice of the alien that defrosts them and allows them to escape.
00:08:53
Speaker
And so they went that extra step of saying, how about it's the Norwegian group that they did. These characters aren't the ones who caused it. And they're not the ones that are going to end. And that is incredibly cosmic horror here, you know, in terms of their actions really don't matter very much. Yeah. Well, that's, that does echo at the mountains of madness quite clearly. Doesn't know where the narrator and his team go down to the alien city. And, um, yeah, it's the same thing. He starts to see, he started, the narrator understands where it becomes clear to him as he, uh, uncovers the, um, the, the shock, the shoggoths.
00:09:23
Speaker
and their relationship to the humans, it's a bit like the thing where it's there, it's always been there, and there is a relationship between the shoggoth and the old ones, and the way that the humans have a relationship with the thing, and it sort of becomes apparent. It's a bit like Alien as well.
00:09:41
Speaker
where the characters are a bit more delineated, I suppose, in Alien, but the fact that their personal relationships don't kind of matter and the characters are all written to be asexual, you could have picked up any group of people and popped them into that situation and the situation doesn't change. So it's really about the thing and any group of human beings.
00:10:05
Speaker
And you could lay Alien over this movie pretty easily. I think they have a very similar structure. They tell a very similar story. Yeah, it's the group of blue collar guys who just got trapped, kind of horrific circumstance. The thing is really interesting in that it has another Lovecraftian element. There's a great story called Things, I believe. It's by Peter Watts. I'll double check that when I'm not blabbing, but it's the Alien's perspective on the movie.
00:10:28
Speaker
You can read this online and it won a lot of awards. It's a really fantastic thing because it gives you a truly alien perspective where this thing is just trying to commune with the people there. It doesn't understand individuals. It thinks that all of us species are one mind. So it's trying to get into them and rap, you know, like I want to be your buddy and stuff and that's the way it's doing it.
00:10:47
Speaker
And as you watch the movie, it is true. You don't really know what the aliens' objectives are. They say what they are. They say, we think it's trying to get to, you know, the rest of the planet. It's trying to do this, trying to do that. But every time you see this poor monster, it's going, I mean, it's kind of communicates something because it allows itself to be caught out of you. Yeah. Like Lenny from of Martian men. It's Lenny. That's all it is.
00:11:14
Speaker
There also seems to be a little ambiguity too. I was reading about this where Carpenter was talking about whether the thing, if somebody was the thing, did they know that they were the thing? Did it so possess them and take on their personality that walking around having conversations, it didn't realize it was the thing until- In the novella, that's heavily implied.
00:11:35
Speaker
There's a lot more hand-wavium and weird extrapolatory science going on in the novella. There's a lot of unnecessary engineering exposition that goes on at the beginning of the novella.
00:11:50
Speaker
I think it's copper copper has a long monologue at one point where he's explaining that if you were assimilated you wouldn't know it and you'd still have your own memories and you'd still have your own experiences and so you wouldn't know it until it was too late so it is kind of implied and I think it's less so in the film I
00:12:10
Speaker
I think it's weird. The film doesn't really decide on whether... What did you say that novel was or that story was, Chad? Things. The one from the... It's called Things. That's interesting because it kind of answers a question that I posed when I was watching it for the most recent time for this. The film doesn't really decide whether the thing is this mindless automaton.
00:12:35
Speaker
Which is implied when Blair's doing the computer simulation of the cells being
Effects and Filming Challenges of 'The Thing'
00:12:40
Speaker
assimilated, or whether it's a highly intelligent, highly sentient being, because the Blair thing builds a flying saucer. Yeah, it must be.
00:12:50
Speaker
Yeah, he is responsible for some subterfuge when, you know, Kurt Russell talks about when he's talking to the tape recorder, it seems like this thing bursts out of your clothes. And then a scene later, they find his clothes all ripped up. So is the thing trying to plant one on him? Or when I watched it this time, I thought, maybe couldn't the thing double you? I mean, does it have to most of the time it takes people over in the process killing them? But if it had some of your genetic material, couldn't it just imitate you and then take off?
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah, because there seems to be so much more matter when it's exploding flower heads and tendrils and stuff than there would be in an average human being. And when I watched it this time, I thought I had a moment because it's a long time since I've seen it where I thought, oh, are these clones or body snap? What is it? Is it replicating or is it replacing? And I think
00:13:39
Speaker
you could probably argue that both ways. That's in the novella as well. They kind of answer that point in the novella. It talks about biomass in the novella where the thing takes over the dog and then the dog takes over another dog and some of the matter goes into the other dog and then there's leftover matter in the original dog which replicates because it's replicating and so it doesn't need all of its matter to be transposed into the new host.
00:14:05
Speaker
And I always imagine that maybe seed-like, it has the ability to expand very tightly dense pack matter so that, you know, that's why suddenly all of it makes no sense, right? That it's creating all of these tendrils and all of this stuff, given the finite amount of matter that it has. But I thought maybe a little duplicate Kurt Russell's there that gets away or something.
00:14:23
Speaker
because they never solved the mystery of the ripped clothes. And there's a really weird scene after that discovery where the guy says, hey, I don't think that we should be sharing food. We should be eating out of cans. And Kurt Russell's just standing in the doorway and he goes, okay. And then he walks off very stiffly. I think that was duplicate Kurt Russell, who's just waiting around for everybody to eat each other a lot. And then it's gonna scam her up into the night. So the Kurt Russell at the end, is that duplicate Kurt Russell? I don't think so. I think that's the real one. Duplicate Kurt Russell's just watching the show.
00:14:52
Speaker
Well, I don't think I, again, this is speculation on my part. I think that the thing needs to get your, not just your genetic material, but get into your brain and your mind because just looking like you, it's not going to know how you move, how you talk, how, you know, like it couldn't, you know, do, do the Kurt Russell bit. It would be like Kurt Russell.
00:15:20
Speaker
You're Captain Ron. You're Captain Ron. The only database of information the thing has is all of Kurt Russell films. I'm Elvis, still wrong. I'm Santa Claus. Well, I assume it didn't do bird on a wire because then everybody would have got on with it.
00:15:42
Speaker
Maybe from the things perspective it is a rom-com.
00:15:47
Speaker
It's a non-consensual rom-com. Yeah, new genre there. We talked about watching the thing most recently for this, and we always brush up. When was the first time you watched it? Because I watched it when I was, I think, 11. My dad had it on VHS. He'd taped it off the telly of Channel 4 or something. And I said, dad, can I watch this? And he said, well, I'm not sure you'll like it. It's a bit grown up. So I said, what is this? It's an alien film.
00:16:16
Speaker
He didn't go into any more detail. I thought, okay, I'll give it a go. I made it up to the bit where the thing goes into the dog cage and then it metastasizes. As soon as you know the flower thing, when the flower thing comes out of its chest cavity and then opens and then starts rotating, I switched it off. No, not for me. I'm out. What the hell is this? Did you watch it that young and have that experience?
00:16:42
Speaker
I was in high school for sure when I saw it. Yeah, I think I was in high school as well. It's funny you ask because I was trying to think of when I might have seen it. A lot of hay is made about this movie bombing in 1980, ET also coming out that year. And I hear people saying, you know, folks were much more interested in seeing a fun happy alien story than they were something so bleak and desolate.
00:17:04
Speaker
Like this, and oftentimes they're talking about the ending because the ending didn't test well and they said maybe there's a happy end. I don't think if you change the ending it would have worked out anyway in terms of getting the public's sentiment behind it. But I think that maybe that bombing had more to do with how movies were released at times. You look at what was out in the cinemas, it's a lot to eat, and things didn't come to video for eight, nine months. This just needed that kind of at-home treatment where you watch it. You know, the interested parties could go out and get it, you know? It's so good.
00:17:30
Speaker
It's so gruesome that it could easily have come a few years later and be labeled a video nasty straight to VHS. It's obviously much, much better than that, but it could easily have fallen into that category. Maybe it was just too gruesome as well. Like you said before, the characters, it's not a character-driven story at all.
00:17:50
Speaker
It's almost like a vignette of psychological horror. This is a completely isolated psychological incident, and that's it. There's no extra-textual context. There's no after. There's no before. It's just what happens, and maybe it was a bit too bleak. Well, it did come out the same day as Blade Runner.
00:18:13
Speaker
Like they were released on the same day and it wasn't a bomb because it did make money. It's North American Revit. It was a 15 mil budget and it made 19.6. So it wasn't much. It wasn't much, you know, when people are doing movies, but it, you know, it did make a slight profit and they were hoping for much more, obviously.
00:18:33
Speaker
Well, I guess when carpenter was coming off the back of Halloween and lost in New York, that was a year before. Is that my, am I right from New York? Yeah. And the fog as well. Cause he worked on the effects guy. Rob routine worked on the fog as well with him.
00:18:50
Speaker
And he'd made, obviously, he'd made buku money off of Halloween, off of a tiny budget. So he had a lot of capital, but then the budget was swollen quite significantly for the thing. So the margins he was operating with were much tighter. But yeah, he still made money, as you say. Should have used Tom Atkins instead of Kurt Russell, in my opinion. Tom Atkins? He was one of them. That was up for it.
00:19:13
Speaker
No, no, but I just prefer him. This is just your wish list. Yeah. Well, my recollection is just watching it later at night at home. And it's very effective that way. And my takeaway when it, you know, because it's a monster movie, but it transcends that a little bit. And I think it was the scene where they're testing the blood in the Petri dishes. Yeah. That later I went, that was possibly one of the most suspenseful
00:19:39
Speaker
well-executed scene I've ever seen. And that was my first memory of it going, this is better than your average predator or whatever.
00:19:47
Speaker
Hang on, let's rewind the tape. Nothing's better than Predator. No, no, I know. That was a bad example. But when I watched it again, and I've seen it a million times, still watching that scene, Petri dishes, see how does he manage to build? Where are the cutaways to the people? How long does he take? When the thing jumps out of the Petri dish, it's still a complete surprise. I was in the middle of one of these guys talking, it's just going to happen. So he times it really well so that you don't expect it.
00:20:13
Speaker
And then you have the two that are dead, so you don't know, you know, there's that side of it as well. It's like, has he, before he's accused of killing an innocent man, you know, you don't know what that's going to happen. Can it even respond if it's from dead person's blood? And it's just, you're completely in the dark as to what's going to happen. And everybody's tied up and then it starts, it builds this crazy suspense. And then when it blows up, it turns onto full on reanimator crazy eighties gore horror. Yeah.
00:20:38
Speaker
Insanity, you know, one guy eating another guy with his weird head clasp. I mean, it's just like amazing. We're making a habit when we mostly do novels and books on this podcast. The only other film that we've done was an American werewolf in London, which also happened to have these, you know, these incredible early eighties analog transformative special effects. And now we're doing the thing. This is exactly the same thing. And I, when I was watching the film back,
00:21:05
Speaker
I had a bit of a real sense of nostalgia for the special effects. They're so, so evocative because the thing is right there in the room and it's a very, very complicated puppetry and sculptures and things like that. And I mean, I don't, I'm assuming you've seen the sequel, no, the prequel that was released in 2011 where it was done with CGI. And I don't think it was a particularly bad film, but there was something that it wasn't so visceral.
00:21:35
Speaker
about the special effects. I just think the early 80s with these horror films and some of the action films, it was so tangible and dirty and icky and gruesome because it was right there in the room with the actors. Yeah, and there's magic involved as well because even if you know it's not really, how did they do that? It's just you're looking at him, him going, oh, there's no arms and that thing just ate when he tries to...
00:22:00
Speaker
Well, you know, that scene, they actually got a stand in an amputee dude and they made fake arms and then ripped off the whole thing with that. And that I was just reading about it because Rob Botin is was one of those guys and he was 21 years old when they made that movie and he got super sick. He got pneumonia. He had an ulcer because he was working all the time. He was sleeping in the shop that he worked in.
00:22:25
Speaker
He was a bit of a, from what I can read, what I've read, he was a bit of a control freak, whereas he wanted to do everything. And him getting able to let people help him on stuff was really hard for him. I mean, he was 21. He was so, yeah. And so when he, when, uh, cause the fog was just two years earlier than that and he worked on that. So he, he was a teenager when they, when they made that movie. And I can't imagine like,
00:22:49
Speaker
Yeah, making a movie and go on. Hey kid, I want you to take care of all this stuff. You know, have this responsibility, given that to like some 19 year old guy. And it's just, it's mind blowing. And the fact that he's 21 and like what I was doing when I was 21, Jesus, real old stuff.
00:23:04
Speaker
I mean, I love the idea of even the studios and John Carpenter having or fostering that sort of that creative environment to that extent that you're willing to take a punt on this 19 year old who probably hasn't done anything before the fall and just given this huge responsibility for a major motion picture.
00:23:25
Speaker
and he comes out with this incredible work. I mean, it's creating the right conditions for the work. I mean, yeah, he did burn himself out and I think they had to get Stan Winston in, didn't they? He did, yeah. He came in and finished off the stuff. He is uncredited. I think he has a special thanks at the end of it because he was like, no, Rob did all this stuff. This is his work and I'm just finishing up. I'm just helping out with some of the stuff.
00:23:51
Speaker
I feel like maybe he's the dog thing. He did some puppeteering and some stuff with the dog. I know when they shot it, they, to save money, you know, the burnt up Norwegian camp is the camp that they blow up of their camp. It's their camp. And, you know, they blow up at the end of the movie. So they shot all the Norwegian stuff where they go to the Norwegian camp.
00:24:08
Speaker
after they blew up that set so they can use it instead of having to build. And it saved them something like 200,000 out of the budget because they were going to build another set for the Alden Norwegian camp. And they're just like, no, no, no, we'll just use this one after we blow it up. And because they literally blew up the whole place. Oh, wow. It's crazy. Really cool. That's highly reasonable. That's like it's a little like Roger Corman shooting a second movie on an existing set, you know, like to fit another one in.
00:24:34
Speaker
And Mexican Dracula, you know. Mexican Dracula absolutely shot on the same set as Universal's Dracula. And also Lars and Baruch's homestead from Star Wars was where the thing was filmed. Which was filmed there? Uncle Owen and Aunt Baruch from Star Wars. Their burnt bodies can be clearly seen in the thing. They're in the thing. I know Rob Botin worked on the cantina. You're being too coy about this. You must elucidate.
00:25:04
Speaker
Basically, when Luke Skywalker looks at those burning corpses in my head cannon, that's in the thing as well. Oh wait, so they didn't actually use the bodies. This is just in your heart, in your soul. I can't find a citation for it, but I believe it to be true. I know you're going to say, you know, in Star Wars, they just burnt those actors up, saved a little money. Well, they would these days, wouldn't they? God.
00:25:27
Speaker
Those are the actors, they just burned them up. They didn't want to cost them $200,000 to get fake burn actors. They have a stockpile of burning corpses that are just on some lot in the universal somewhere. Yeah. What is this burned up bodies in there? So I thought maybe, yeah, they reused those corpse. They certainly worked on Star Wars. He did some of the cantina monsters. He was in that crew and he was definitely a teenager then.
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah. There you go. You heard it here first. Well, I certainly did. Yeah, so did I actually. Talking before about what Chad was saying about the, you know, don't share the food, that scene, at the beginning, one thing, and I sent you a message about this, Dan, earlier in the week that really stood out for me is watching this film. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:26:07
Speaker
I know what you mean. Watching this film post COVID, you know, you're indoctrinated into what to touch, how to wear your mask, how to wash, and you know, like, how many how long you should wash through COVID and stuff. And I found myself watching the thing going at the very beginning, just after the dog has licked the guy. McCready passes his whiskey bottle, and he just swig and I'm like,
00:26:26
Speaker
But what about he's just had a dog licking, you know, that would never have occurred to me before. But now we have a vigilant and hyper aware. It was really interesting having a post COVID reading of the thing. Yeah. Interesting. And we were talking about the similarity to alien in both of these movies, the great, you know, breaking quarantine is the great evil, the sin that causes them to have so much, you know,
00:26:48
Speaker
Ripley tries to tell them, don't let him in. They break in. That's what causes all the misery in Alien. And similarly here, I was watching it the same way. I'm, well, why are you guys, you're putting one guy over here and quarantining them, then you guys are all hanging out and sharing things. And, you know, so yeah, it would be made so differently today. It would be so, they would have to play with so much. They'd really have to have some wrangling of that plot to allow some of those things to happen, knowing if the characters knew what we know now.
00:27:13
Speaker
Possibly, although I think the pandemic taught me that, yeah, people are sloppy with stuff. You can't yell at the fictional characters when you see it happen all the time. You see people walking around with a mask underneath their nose. Right away during the pandemic, I remember going to the beach and there was a whole family that were coming out of the carport and the dad was wearing the mask and nobody else. I'm like, it doesn't work that way. You can't wear the mask for everybody.
00:27:36
Speaker
So I don't know it's more plausible to me that these people are making these dumb mistakes than it ever was. I think in a pandemic you would never pour a drink into your chest. You want that for the long haul. Certainly. Yeah, he gives up on the chess computer quite quickly, doesn't he? Oh, cut. Yeah. You know, also the voice of the chess computer is Adrian Barbeau. Yes. Who was married to John Carpenter at the time. Was she? Yeah. I think that was prior from the fog.
00:28:01
Speaker
Well, the thing is, if you guys are covering books in that type of thing, I mean, I feel like it's a very literary movie as well, at least in that it's in a very literary tradition of the survival story, specifically the Arctic survival story. And I know the things that were inspiring Lovecraft right at the mountains of madness. Poe wrote one of these. There's
00:28:19
Speaker
John Campbell, who is the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who started so many writers' careers, who wrote the source material, who goes there. There's also a great story called In Admanson's Tent that we covered, which is another monster out there. And then I think that the Algernon Blackwood story, The Willows, although it's not an Arctic story, is very similar. I feel like they're building on the backs of a lot of this stuff, and even like the Shackleton Expedition.
00:28:40
Speaker
Or there's a whole genre of literature that is just these crazy people who went out to see the world and the things that they encountered and the diseases they got, and the company of men getting reduced to ruin where they're eating dog pebikin and not, they have to survive and do whatever they have and they turn on each other and all this stuff. So I feel like the thing is just a quick action, borderline pulpy movie, but that it really is on the shoulders of some really excellent, what it means to be human and Lord of the Flies kind of literature.
00:29:07
Speaker
As the 20th century, as the space programs of the 20th century started to increase our understanding of the solar system, in the 1960s, it was eventually revealed that Mars was nothing more than a ball of red rock and sand and not much else. So, bang goes the theory of little green men on Mars. No, it's not happening.
00:29:28
Speaker
and the same with the moon but where at the mountains of madness in particular was great is that it set it in Antarctica, it didn't set it somewhere nearby, it set it in Antarctica and our understanding of some of the places on earth such as Antarctica are so narrow that they're actually less than some parts of space and so it's entirely plausible that man's deepest fears and the fears of the unknown would be transplanted onto
00:29:54
Speaker
Someone is actually already right here under our noses and I love that about the thing that it builds on that DNA has a strand of DNA that the terrible thing, although it has come from another world and like you said before, Chad, we're inherited or the cast, the characters are inheriting
Ecological Themes in 'The Thing'
00:30:13
Speaker
it. It's already there and it's actually on our doorstep. The weirdness and the terror and the cosmic horror is actually right here already.
00:30:20
Speaker
And accidentally finding its way into some sort of global warming theme as well, which is kind of odd. We just covered I Am Legend not that long ago, which is another 1950s sort of apocalyptic survival book by Richard Math. But in that, you know, there's some wind, some ancient stuff got kicked up somewhere and it's carrying like a, you know, a molecule that's the vampire molecule, but it's really done because of climate change is what causes the whole vampire apocalypse.
00:30:43
Speaker
And similarly here, I think there's just a throwaway line where he says, well, these things have been getting thrown up. So yes, it was the Norwegian crew that blew it up out of the ice, but there was some sort of change out there that caused things that are very, very ancient, pushed up into the higher levels of the ice. And I think that there's some anxiety over that in the world now that as things melt, more and more things are, you know,
00:31:02
Speaker
there is a possibility that say like an ancient virus that we are evolved past being able to handle could just come out and be like, Hey, what's up? Remember me from 40,000 years ago? No, you don't take it over. You know, so those things are possible and pretty frightening. So I think this still plays, you know, I think when people talk about the old movie or the eighties movie, these are both taking place in kind of cold war worlds where the threat of communism, the threat of invasion from within are things that are on people's minds. But now I'm looking at and saying these still work in a time where perhaps the insecurity is ecological.
00:31:30
Speaker
This is a film that works in most eras. It works in both ways, which means that it's probably neither explicitly. It's not an analogy of any one thing. It's not an analogy of the ancient virus or an analogy of communism or whatever it is, but it just plays on a psychological horror that there is something, there's a horrible snake type thing, or dog snake eagle thing out there. You don't know what it is.
00:31:57
Speaker
And it could come and get you at any point and it could just drag you down into the ice or into the mud and you're done. That's what the fear is. It's that something's there. You're, you don't know what the hell it is and it's going to get you, which is, you know, that happens. It happens anyway.
00:32:13
Speaker
Is there anything you want to talk about on the thing before we take a break? Anything else that we've missed? I wanted to talk about the scene with the dog. Parma leads the thing dog into the cage and there's some good dog wrangling going on behind the scenes there because the way that you, I think Chris you mentioned this.
00:32:32
Speaker
on a VN last week, the dog walks in and it looks different somehow to the other dogs. The way it walks in, it pads in, it gets down on all fours and it just stares straight ahead at the wall. You can see all the other dogs thinking, what's going on here? What is with this dog? I love that scene. That's the first time you think, yes, something's not right about this film. It's cranking up the tension. I love that scene. That's a brilliant dog actor. It really is. The greatest dog acting ever caught on film.
00:33:01
Speaker
I know a story about that dog as well if you want to hear it. Jed's the dog, I believe. Jed's the name of the dog. Jet. Yeah, he's listed in the credits, right? Jed. Jed. Jed. Jed. Jed. Yeah. You know the guy that looks after the dogs, why is he given such shady treatment from the... I don't get the impression... I don't understand why I didn't see it, why he's so surly and why they all look at him as sconce.
00:33:31
Speaker
When I was watching it back, it was Palmer, isn't it, the dog wrangler? And I got the sense that he was... Sorry? Clark! Clark! Clark, of course. Yeah, Palmer's the stoner, isn't he? Clark, he's the dog wrangler. And I got a really strong sense, again, I'd not really noticed it before, that he was a real animal lover.
00:33:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think he was probably more forgiving of the animals very strange behavior than the others who were rightly quite suspicious about it. And so he was close to the animals. I think at one point, one of the animals gets shot when the thing does its thing in the cage. One of the other dogs gets shot. I can't remember who has the pistol, whether it's child or somebody else.
00:34:15
Speaker
And he goes crazy and starts to wrestle the pistol away from the other man because he doesn't want the dogs being shot. So I got the sense that he was, you know, he had a more emotional connection with the dogs than any of the other men. And maybe a more, a more emotional connection than the dog to the dogs than he had with the other men. Oh, for sure.
00:34:34
Speaker
And I think, too, because he was so close to the dogs and the dog was the first thing that came in, everybody, you know, instantly was like, well, if anybody's going to be infected, it would be him because he was so close to the dogs. He was the press. That's Richard Mazur. He was president of the Screen Actors Guild for a long time. So I used to get mail from him all the time. And I don't even get it. But on this initiative and I'd be like, it's the dude from the thing, man. He's what's he? I don't trust him. Don't trust Clark. Quarantine the letter. Watch Clark. Yeah. Open the letter with rubber gloves.
00:35:05
Speaker
Okay. So, um, if you have, he's the one, he's the only one that's legit murdered. I mean, he's not. Yeah. He's trying to help too. He's like, these dudes are nuts. I'm going to take control. You can see he's seething to take control for a good part of that before he dies. Well, I guess the other, whoever shot, who shot him? Was it McCready? Oh yeah. McCready. And then later when they're testing the blood, they're like, so I guess that makes you a murderer and he just kind of moves on to the next thing. It doesn't address it. I guess he's not in the union then. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
00:35:35
Speaker
Ben, you said you had something on the dog. Well, it's kind of what you've said. It's not the narrative of that scene for me, much as the composition of it, the screenshots, the way the dog comes in, the lighting. There's so many different cuts, not fast jump cuts, but so many different angles of the dog coming in, and it's just phenomenal. It's just filmed so well.
00:35:59
Speaker
Um, there's also some pretty significant time jumping that happened second half. Uh, you know, I think there's a part right in the second half. He goes, the storm's coming in six hours. And then in the next scene, he's like, the store has been raging for 18 hours. So, you know, they jumped like a day and a half ahead. And if this were a mystery film where it was important for you as the viewer to sort out who's the thing, who's not the thing, how are they going to beat this? And those times jumps would be really important, but because it really doesn't matter.
00:36:23
Speaker
You yourself as a viewer are never gonna be able to sort this out. I think Carpenter's able to do it just willy-nilly so he can introduce mystery. I don't know what happened in that time. It's ultimately something you're not gonna have to calculate. So it creates this feeling in the second half of we're just racing against death. There's nothing that really can be done.
00:36:38
Speaker
There are characters that just disappear and you don't know what happens to them. Nols does, yeah. You just don't know what happened to them. They had it in the script that they have death scenes of them, but I think that they were, again, budgetary concerns, but they're also like, you don't need to, you know, it's- Did they film? Do you know if that was, if Nols' death was filmed? I don't remember if it was actually filmed, but it was definitely in the script at some point of him dying. So I don't know if I actually made it, if that was something- So there's no deleted scenes somewhere. I don't think so.
00:37:07
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure I read somewhere that a lot of money was or it was supposed to be a quite an elaborate death scene for novels. Maybe that's why they cut it. Yes, I think that's I think you're right. I think it was they had a scene playing for a minute was going to be expensive and they just cut it and they didn't even bother like just addressing that he was dead just because.
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah, everything's falling apart. You can't keep track of everybody and who knows what happened to them. It must have been quite a cool film to direct because it's so chaotic. All these things you can throw at the film, the time cuts, it's disappearing characters. You don't have to worry about continuity. You can just throw whatever you want at the edit and it still all comes out in the wash.
00:37:46
Speaker
Well, it does have that advantage, and it's of having an ensemble cast that's all together a lot of the time. And I think that that's the real thing that makes The Thing from Outer Space, the 1950s movie jump out, is Howard Hawks, who I don't think is credited as the director, but who did probably direct that movie. He was always really good with blocking. So if you watch The Thing from Outer Space, somehow he's managing to get 8-10 people in every shot all the time.
00:38:08
Speaker
And they're moving around without running into each other and staying in frame. And it's really just from a shot composition standpoint, a really amazing movie. And then similarly, carpenters got a complex and these guys, I mean, I saw the making of them. They all shuttled off to some wintry place. Where was the I don't remember where this was shot in Alaska.
00:38:24
Speaker
in Alaska, right? So they're all together. And you don't have those complications of, you know, today, we're just shooting somebody pouring the milk down the sink, and then we're all going over to another location to get the backyard of something that's going to double for this and all the things you would normally have film, you've got a, it's almost a little more like theater where you've got a good ensemble of actors together, they're in most of the scenes together, you know, you can make a more linear movie that probably is more emotionally connected behind the scenes. Well, I think that that really shows reads
00:38:49
Speaker
You can sense relationships between these men, even though there's no real exposition about, you know, how they feel about each other when he decides to not turn down the Stevie Wonder superstition. That guy's obviously been bitching at him for a long time and he doesn't want to do it. You kind of feel that around the edges. I've looked up Nall's scene. It says here, this is Wikipedia. I found this on eventually totaling 1.5 million. The effects budget went overboard. So they had to eliminate some scenes, including Nall's confrontation of a creature dubbed the box thing. Oh man.
00:39:18
Speaker
What was the box thing? I don't know. It sounds rad. And that was from, let's see, we're trying to cite it. Cohen? Cohen Stewart, producer. Oh yeah, Cohen Stewart wrote a book about- When Nils and McCready are trying to blow up the site toward the end of the film. Am I right in thinking they have a load of crates together in the caverns underneath the complex?
00:39:40
Speaker
Yeah, a load of wooden crates. I think they do have a load of wooden crates or they have a few where they have the detonator on. So maybe something to do with the wooden crates, something. There's the box thing. Who knows? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Entirely speculative. Could be. Sounds cool. Could have been just like a Rubik's Cube with feet.
00:39:56
Speaker
No, it was the cook. So maybe maybe it was like a box of food or something like that that it was. I don't know. We it seems like this thing pushed itself into a dog or the dog was managed to escape from the Norwegian camp. And perhaps this was all by accident. You do have to admit that as a strategy replicating house pets, real good one, because even a strange dog you don't know can jump up on you, put its tongue in your ear and you'll be like, oh, that's OK. He's just being silly. Whatever. You know, if a human does that, you're on you're in court for the next 20 years.
00:40:26
Speaker
In some marriages, you just have your genetic material around. I mean, you can full on as a dog. You can be humping on people. You can lick them. They just let them wander around the camp. Let the dog in here. We'll sort it out later. That dog gets into everybody's business. Well, yeah, pissing off the coroner. Blair gets onto the table. And I think that's the first part of foreshadowing, isn't it? When he's on the table.
00:40:51
Speaker
So there you go. We can end this half of the show with some good advice if you're a shapeshifting alien. Be a dog. Be a dog. Be a dog. Don't be a dog fish. Thanks guys. Don't be a dog fish. We'll see you guys a little bit later on in the show. Hello and welcome to Mars Radio 14. The best radio station on Mars Space Force. And today we're going to be discussing one of those rare creatures that have evolved to assimilate
00:41:21
Speaker
and imitate other organisms. Lucky for us, Captain Half Milk Carton is a bit of an expert on them, and we've dispatched him to planet Earth to interview a Spondangular Glank that moved it. What did you call it? Earth. No, no, the parasite. A Spondangular Glank. Couldn't you introduce him by his name? He's my cousin. Introducing him as a Spondangular Glank makes it sound weird.
00:41:47
Speaker
And he's not! His name is Bartel and Newton-Buckert! Well, he used to be Bartel and Newton-Buckert. He goes by the name Elon Musk now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Okay, half-milk carton. I mean, is he there? He sure? He is, bungalow, but he's very busy, so I'm gonna have to enter him on the moon. One second. Hello, Elon! It's your cousin, Captain Ignatius Milk Carton of the Martian Space Force! We're doing a show on repulsive alien parasites! Do you have a minute to answer a few questions?
00:42:15
Speaker
Of course, I have time for everything, but you'll have to jog along beside me while I do important things. Okay, what part of important things?
00:42:27
Speaker
things like thinking of a way back to Mars. It's my everyday inspiring task. Life needs to be more than solving simple problems. Ha, ha, ha. And colonizing Mars would be more inspiring than any human can possibly imagine. I don't sleep. Ha, ha. I keep toiling around the clock while you non-parasitical martians spend your days digging in bismuthical sulfide or playing an angle ball. I'm down here on Earth putting the hours in on Twitter. Ha, ha. I was commenting, having opinions, and telling people. The way I see it,
00:42:56
Speaker
If other people are putting in 40 hours a week having opinions and advertising, then I'm going to do three times as much opinionating. Haha. 168 hours of memes speeds 40 hours every time. And it means I'm going to be on Mars 4.2 times faster than any even. But you're not human. And I can give you a spin back in the wrong chip right now if you want. That half milk carton would be the easy way. Haha. I'm turnbucket. Doesn't do easy. You made Elon Musk? Indeed. Him too.
00:43:26
Speaker
Hello, this is The Judge's Corner with me, Damaris Brown, where I talk about legal matters of interest or importance to authors. In December, I returned to the issue of copyright and the complications which arise when plagiarism isn't simply word for word verbatim copying. That talk looked at cases where it was claimed novelists had copied non-fiction work
00:43:47
Speaker
historical research, facts and theories. This month, I'll consider how courts deal with the trickier issues of alleged copying from other novels, with their characters, settings and scenes.
00:44:00
Speaker
To begin with the obvious, published fanfiction is almost invariably an infringement of copyright, since its whole rationale is to use characters created by somebody else. The original author might not take any action, as long as there's no commercial element involved, but that doesn't alter its legal aspect. However, not every character in a book is legally off-limits, since not all characters are created equal.
00:44:29
Speaker
To quote two judgments from the United States, which apply with much the same force in the UK, a stock character or basic character type is not entitled to copyright protection. And no character infringement claim can succeed unless the plaintiff's original conception sufficiently developed the character. And the defendants have copied this development, and not merely the broader outlines.
00:45:01
Speaker
What exactly does that mean? Well, you can write about vampires, if you really must. And they can be immortal and devilishly handsome, as that is very much stock material or this broader outline for vampires.
00:45:17
Speaker
However, if they're immune to garlic and crosses, they can be killed only if they're chopped up and burned, and sunlight makes them sparkle like diamonds, you've almost certainly crossed the line into copyright infringement.
00:45:33
Speaker
But even similarities between developed characters don't necessarily equate to breach of copyright. This can be seen in a 1999 case brought against DC Comics, in which the plaintiff claimed the main character in the graphic novel, Dampa Stillborn, was copied from his own book, Matchsticks.
00:45:54
Speaker
Both characters were half-human, half-ampa, they were both called Nicholas Gaunt, and they were of similar appearance. White males in their early twenties, with pale skin, thin to medium builds, dark, unkempt hair, and a slovenly appearance. Though, as the judge noted, such characteristics are common to a great many Generation X post-adolescence.
00:46:21
Speaker
Because these books were graphic novels, though, the court could look at more than simply a short, written description. And despite the apparent similarities, the two characters were drawn very differently. One had an oval face with a long nose, his hair usually pictured as a bushy clump on the side of his head, while the other had
00:46:43
Speaker
A heart-shaped, angular face with pronounced cheekbones, and his hair came to a widow's peak on his forehead and hung in long strands down the sides of his face. The clothes they wore were also significantly different.
00:47:00
Speaker
The plaintiff didn't simply rely on description as a basis for his claim though, arguing that the character's life stories were similar. Both had a sinister genealogy. Both were seeking to uncover the truth about their origins, which they learned through flashbacks or memories. And both had to choose between good and evil, finally turning to evil by deciding to kill people.
00:47:24
Speaker
But these the judge held, did not amount to elements which were original and distinctive to the plaintiff's work.
00:47:32
Speaker
The basic underlying idea was the same, a half-vampire on a quest to discover its origins, but that alone was not protected by copyright, and the other similarities largely arose from that premise. A half-human half-vampire is practically guaranteed to have a sinister genealogy, while such a character would necessarily have a dual nature involving a struggle between good and evil.
00:47:57
Speaker
and indoctrination into the forces of evil by killing was not uncommon to horror or science fiction literature. Nonetheless, the judge made it clear that even though these components were not original, the plaintiff could still have succeeded in his claim if they had been combined in an original way, or if the way they were expressed in the two works were themselves similar.
00:48:24
Speaker
But having reviewed the works as a whole, the judge concluded that the differences in the treatment of these ideas, including the differences in their total look and feel, the interactions of the characters and the plot, were so pronounced that no reasonable jury would find the works similar.
00:48:42
Speaker
A later case, heard in 2009, where the similarities between two characters were very much more obvious, resulted in what I understand was the first time a US court had given copyright protection to a single character from a standalone work. But that character was Holden Corfield and the work, The Catcher in the Rye.
00:49:05
Speaker
A novel called 60 Years Later, Coming Through the Rye, had as one of its characters a thinly disguised JD Salinger as a novelist, whose main character, Mr C, takes on a life of his own. But as the court noted of the extensive similarities between the two novels,
00:49:26
Speaker
Mr. C narrates like Holden, references events that happen to Holden and shares many of Holden's notable eccentricities. Mr. C's adventures parallel those of Holden. Both characters leave an institution, wander around New York City for several days, reconnect with old friends, find happiness with Phoebe and ultimately return to a different institution.
00:49:50
Speaker
Finally, within these broader structural similarities, the novels contain similar scenes. Quite apart from these parallels, it was hard for the defendant to deny he'd copied Catcher when his novel had been marketed as a marvellous sequel to one of our most beloved classics, and in an interview he'd described his book as, just like the first novel, he's still Holden Corfield.
00:50:17
Speaker
Instead, his main defence was fair use. That is, his work was transformative of the original, a defence that can be effective for works of parody, for instance. However, the judge held that Salinger's copyright, both in Catcher as a novel and in the Holden Corfield character, had been infringed. The defendant had borrowed far too much from the original and the defence was likely to fail.
00:50:45
Speaker
The judge granted an injunction stopping the publication of the defendant's novel in the US, and though this was overturned on appeal, the parties subsequently reached an out-of-court agreement achieving exactly the same end, extending the ban to Canada, and even preventing the defendant and his publishers from using Coming Through the Rye as part of the title of his novel, or alluding to the original, to Salinger, or to the legal proceedings themselves when promoting it.
00:51:14
Speaker
Oddly, the defendant's book had actually already been published in the UK before the US proceedings started, and he remains free to sell it here and in other countries. As the decision in that case shows, copyright extends beyond the characters alone, covering also such things as plot elements and settings. But just as a stock character doesn't merit protection, nor does a stock scene. A Seine Affair, as it's called in the US.
00:51:45
Speaker
Such scenes are sequences of events that necessarily result from the choice of a setting or situation, basically tropes that seem all but obligatory for a particular genre. So such elements as drunks, prostitutes, vermin and derelict cars, in a depiction of policemen in the South Bronx, and
00:52:06
Speaker
Electrified fences, automated tours, dinosaur nurseries and uniformed workers in a story about a dinosaur zoo have been judged not protectable. Though it's important to bear in mind that it's one thing to use a generic scene in your work, another thing to reproduce such a scene exactly as someone else created it.
00:52:32
Speaker
One case in which it was alleged that aspects of plot, subplots, themes and incidents were copied came to the High Court in England in 2010 and involved a little known book called Willy the Wizard and the rather better known Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
00:52:50
Speaker
Not a lot of similarity between a 16-page illustrated novella for young children on the one hand and a fourth in a series six or seven hundred page behemoth for adolescents on the other, one might think, even if the main character of each is a male wizard. But the claimant managed to produce what the judge described as five main elements of plot architecture, which it was alleged JK Rowling had copied.
00:53:17
Speaker
The main characters have to compete in a wizard contest in which they're required to deduce the exact nature of the main task, which they uncover covertly in a bathroom. That main task involves the rescue of human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal creatures, and the wizards complete the task, winning the contest, by using information gained from helpers. Pretty thin fare by way of alleged copying, one might think.
00:53:46
Speaker
Certainly that was the judge's view. The similarities upon which the claimant relies seem to me to constitute ideas which are relatively simple and abstract, and I strongly incline to the view that they are at such a high level of generality that they aren't protected by copyright.
00:54:08
Speaker
Indeed, he subsequently called some of the claims unsustainable. However, the claimant had evidence from two experts who supported his case, one asserting that there were original and unusual plot ideas and devices in Willy the Wizard not found in earlier children's books, but which appeared in some number in Goblet of Fire.
00:54:32
Speaker
The other expert dealing with forensic linguistics who noted similarity and overlap of vocabulary and the common use of rare word clusters. Moreover, this was only an interim hearing as the defendants had applied for summary judgment against the claimant on the basis he had no real prospect of success at a full hearing.
00:54:53
Speaker
Notwithstanding his conclusion that it was improbable the claimant's case would succeed at trial, the judge didn't feel able to dismiss it at that point. But in view of concerns over the claimant's financial status and general conduct of the case,
00:55:08
Speaker
He was already contemplating making an order for security for costs, and this was done a few months later. The claimant was required to pay £1.5 million into court to guarantee that part at least of the defendant's costs would be met. When he failed to make the first transfer of the payment, the case was struck out. The claimant was even less successful in a case he brought at the same time in New York against the Goblet of Fire's US publishers.
00:55:38
Speaker
While the judge in the English case said, I do not feel able at this stage to say that the claimant's case is so bad that I can properly describe it as fanciful. The American judge, using somewhat more robust guidelines of an ordinary observer test, and with a scathing commentary on the literary merit of Willy the Wizard, entirely devoid of a moral message or intellectual depth, the text enlivened only by the illustrations that accompany it,
00:56:06
Speaker
She had no such qualms. Her verdict was, the contrast between the total concept and feel of the works is so stark that any serious comparison of the two strains credulity and the claim was summarily dismissed.
00:56:23
Speaker
All the cases I've discussed here relate to works which were still under copyright. But as I confirmed back in my first talk last January, if a novel is in the public domain, then its characters and settings are fair game. Hence, there's no copyright infringement created by the publication of
00:56:41
Speaker
pride and prejudice and zombies, or PMP and vampires, or whatever other Frankenstein abomination might be dreamt up. However, even here there are potential problems with works from the 20th century, since under US copyright law, some stories by a particular author may be in the public domain, while others by the same author are not.
00:57:05
Speaker
And if those stories form part of a long-running series using the same characters and setting, questions can arise as to exactly what is and is not protected. This is the issue that arose in a legal action brought in 2020 by the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the Netflix film Enola Holmes.
00:57:26
Speaker
which, as you might guess from the name, piggybacked off the Sherlock Holmes stories. An unrelated legal action had previously decided that the essential characteristics of Holmes and Watson, arising from some 50 works then in the public domain in the US, were available to writers to use, even though some later Holmes stories were still under copyright there.
00:57:49
Speaker
However, the judge in that case expressly confirmed that additional features regarding the characters, which were depicted only in the later still protected stories, remained off limits. The change in attitude of homes towards dogs was one example used.
00:58:07
Speaker
In the Enola Holmes case, the plaintiffs claimed that in these later stories, Conan Doyle made the surprising artistic decision to have his most famous character, known around the world as a brain without a heart, develop into a character with a heart.
00:58:25
Speaker
Holmes became warmer. He became capable of friendship. He could express emotion. He began to respect women. Whether all of these were indeed significant new character traits for Holmes is arguable.
00:58:39
Speaker
And even more open to debate is whether warmth, friendship and respect for women are actually aspects which can be protected by copyright. In the event, these questions are still up in the air. For shortly after the defence was filed, the case was dismissed with prejudice by stipulation of the parties. What in England would be called an agreed consent order between the two sides, which ended the claim without a hearing. Presumably there was some kind of settlement.
00:59:05
Speaker
The one-what terms isn't known, but as the order required the parties to pay their own costs, it's likely that here, as so very often in copyright cases, the lawyers were the only ones to profit.
00:59:24
Speaker
The 75-word writing challenge for December was on the theme of drifting, and the genre was science fiction. It was won by Stuart Widows, aka mosaics, with his entry, Finally a Purpose in Life, for which I'll be doing the reading. Finally, A Purpose in Life, by Stuart Widows. Outside, methane snow piled up against the door of the abandoned research station.
00:59:54
Speaker
Lost. Freezing. Trapped. Thought Padre Antonio to himself. Fighting the cold and the fatal desire for sleep. Titan. Titan of all places. Why was I called here? For what reason? Then a faint crackling voice in his headset. Explosion. Lost power. Orbit decaying. Not long now.
01:00:24
Speaker
Very frightened. Can anyone hear me? Yes, son. Padre Antonio here. I'm listening. Welcome back to Mars Radio 14, which, by the way,
01:00:46
Speaker
It's the third best radio station of the Martian Space Force. My name is Lieutenant Bungalow, and I'm standing in for Captain Half Milk Cart, who is on a fact-finding mission to Earth. Are you there?
01:01:02
Speaker
Yes I am, and I talk into the shapeshifting parasite known as Bartolomeu turnbucket. Uh, Elon Musk. Oh, sorry, Elon Musk. Now, you have said that you're going to travel to Mars using traditional human physics. Is that right? Yes, it is. And not only that, I'm going to tweet every step of the journey.
01:01:25
Speaker
Because when something is important enough, you do it even when the odds are not in your favor. And believe me, half Mill Carton, the odds are not in favor of traditional physics. Right, so then what will the journey involve? It will involve audacity, inventatiousness, genuicity, foresight, tenacity,
01:01:54
Speaker
And the creation of a revolutionary new belief system called sexosity Yes, the act of never getting up so long as I'm not dead or incapacitated I'm going to uphold the two pillars which will be the most important part of my journey number one Nothing is impossible number two
01:02:20
Speaker
No smoking. But would the team not be a bit wobbly with only two feathers? Only if you believed in gravity. I thought yours believed in gravity. Nots. Haha. Anymore. I don't know about that part. Sorry, I mean, alien. Hang on, I lost someone here. Hey, excuse me!
01:02:37
Speaker
Do you believe in gravity? Or, of course, of course he doesn't. Everyone believes my theories. I have mass appeal, of course. I'm asking him! Do you believe in gravity, sir? I do not. I believe in the two laws of sucosity. Gravity is just something governments invented to keep people down. Alright, so you want to go to Mars, too? All my followers are going to walk there. But that's impossible! Nothing is impossible.
01:03:03
Speaker
An impossible is nothing. We just need to keep trying. Take the first step, ha ha. If you don't succeed the first time, try again. Yes. If you don't succeed the second time, try again. That's right. If you don't succeed the third time, try again. Hi, are you still there, Bongoro? We might leave it at that. I think this is going to go on for some time. Yeah, okay. Thank you. Have no card. Safe travels.
01:03:37
Speaker
And welcome back. Today's guests are Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lackey. We're going to be talking about their process for their podcast and their other creative pursuits and other all things genre in the second half. So welcome back. Let's hear about this change. So you're not doing the HP podcast anymore. It's changed into, has it been rebranded or is it something completely different, your new podcast? It's rebranding. We started off doing Lovecraft stories. That was the whole point of the podcast was to kind of make Lovecraft a bit more accessible.
01:04:07
Speaker
because his prose is a bit purple. And for somebody that's not into Lovecraft, it might be hard to get into him because his antiquated style of writing. So we thought it would be a good thing to cover stories and talk about them, discuss them. Some of them we didn't even get through. I remember Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath was just a mess. And it was a struggle to try and get through that particular story. And once we put in the time and the work to do it, it made it enjoyable. And I had a good time with that story. And hopefully other people could get that.
01:04:36
Speaker
So we focused on Lovecraft, and after we were done with that, we were enjoying doing the podcast so much that we didn't want to stop. Lovecraft wrote this essay called Supernatural Horror and Literature, where he cites all of the things that inspired him to write. And from that, we started to go into the things that he read that inspired him, and he would comment on those. So it was almost like he was a third member of our podcast when we did these stories, because we had his insights and his feelings about these particular stories.
01:05:03
Speaker
But once we kind of got through those stories, we went into other authors that Lovecraft wrote with, like Clark Ashton Smith or Robert E. Howard, contemporaries that contributed to what people refer to as the Cthulhu mythos now. And then after those, we kind of just people that were in weird fiction or at the period that kind of late 19th century, early 20th century genre fiction, weird specific stuff, but then
01:05:31
Speaker
kind of just realized we weren't being really honest about it's no longer the HP Lovecraft literary podcast. We're just doing this type of fantasy, science fiction, horror from this era. And let's just be honest about it. Yeah, we had three years or so covering Lovecraft's actual work and then about 10 of all kinds of ancillary things. Thanks.
01:05:51
Speaker
We wanted to expand into more science fiction, and that's when we switched over to Strange Studies of Strange Stories, and that was just this summer. So we started renumbering one, but if you subscribe to our show on Patreon, the whole 600 plus episodes of the HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast are there. So it's one continuous show. We just decided to make it a little more accurate in the naming, and then we also wanted to, you know, extend the scope a little bit, cover more of the types of things we're interested in.
01:06:16
Speaker
In terms of restriction, we still only do authors, for the most part, who have passed away. So we're not covering current fiction. I suppose when you started, you must have looked at Lovecraft's output because he was prolific, if nothing else. You must have looked at that and thought, this is almost inexhaustible. Here, we could start a podcast and we could never get to the end of it. And then you do get to the end of it. I mean, what was it like when you thought, okay, well, we've completed Lovecraft. Where do we go next?
01:06:44
Speaker
I mean, we did we always knew as it was really interesting. This was 2009 when we started the show and we had done some other Lovecraft related stuff in our careers. We both worked on the HP Lovecraft historical societies call of Cthulhu film, which is a silent film adaptation of that celebrated story. And we knew there was some audience there, but we were just trying out the podcasting thing because Chris was listening to them a lot. He's an artist, but we could do this and I hadn't had a background in audio.
01:07:09
Speaker
engineering. So we gave it a shot and didn't have to do a lot of advertising because it's a relatively, maybe not anymore. But at the time, it just wasn't a ton of content for people who are Lovecraft fans. So we got listeners. And as we were going along, I think started conspiring to keep things going.
01:07:25
Speaker
Yeah we just enjoyed it was something i have done lots of other projects together writing you know almost had two or three movies totally made we made a animated animated feature film that we did together and just nothing really stuck and this is the first thing in our careers that we just.
01:07:41
Speaker
was working and we didn't want to stop the train because it was, it just kept building and building. And it wasn't until we went to Patreon is that when it kind of just became a serious career for us, like a real, a real job. That's what's strange is because you speak with such Elan and knowledge in your podcast. Well, you know, I'm talking about the one I was, you know, that introduced me to you, the HP podcast.
01:08:05
Speaker
that it's hard to imagine you're not making a great success instantly of anything you've done because it's so polished and professional apart from the easy-going, the charismatic hosts and all that kind of stuff. I told you I was going to fanboy gush.
01:08:21
Speaker
But I think it's just as surprising to hear that you've not been, I don't know. I don't want to say a household name, but a lot more names than perhaps you are. Building up the brand of the HP Podcraft to then let it go seems a bit of a shame. You're going very silent like I've said something really wrong. We're just being ashamed right now. We're just feeling ashamed.
01:08:46
Speaker
No, I mean, hey, we're still working at it and we love what we've got and we're still working on expanding our little media empire of the one show. Yeah. But there's lots of stuff that we're pointed towards doing. We're thinking about a game right now and expanding our production of audio plays and associated things. Last year, we did a feature audio version of The Colossus by Clark Ashton Smith, which is really an audio feature film.
01:09:15
Speaker
And it, you know, it's funny at the time, I didn't know how that would work. And now I'm seeing that Audible is doing these and that big movie stars are in them and that kind of stuff. So I'm like, wait a minute, is this going to be another thing we get scooped on? But we're going to continue to expand and try and do those sorts of things. But in terms of the entertainment industry as a whole, yeah, we've had lots of almost wins and failures and things like that, because, you know, I guess it's all about finding, figuring out what's unique about what you've got to offer. And I guess the podcast for Chris and I is that.
01:09:41
Speaker
you know, it sets us apart. We had a unique set of skills that we were able to apply to. Whereas, you know, like I said, like you were saying, I released a movie in the summer and it just kind of went nowhere. Hopefully it picks up an audience later, but these things are really difficult. And so you got to build on what's working. And for us, it's true.
01:09:57
Speaker
We have to put all the links to everything that's relevant. We'll put all the links out to all of our listeners and we'll push it. You're right, it's hard. When we set this up, it was really as
01:10:13
Speaker
Yes, a supplementary to our activity. I mean, I guess we started this in the same sort of spirit as you approached HP Podcraft in the beginning. We're both writers. We've had a modicum of success, I suppose, up to this point. And we're still trying to build on that. And we've got other projects and irons in the fire and things that we want to do. And I saw this as a way of exploring that.
01:10:38
Speaker
And exploring that as a supplementary piece of work where we could learn a little bit more about the craft that we were trying to embark on. We have sections on where we have legal advice for writers, where the judge is talking about her experiences as a barrister.
01:10:59
Speaker
which is usually it's really important and it's really illuminating because most writers don't think about the practical the industrial the legal side of the industry and getting on guest such as publishers and agents to shine a light on the stuff that the nuts and bolts of the industry is hugely useful so it really and it opens up new avenues of ideas and opportunities you don't really think of so it's been really useful as well as well as a lot of fun.
01:11:28
Speaker
And I don't know about, I mean, you guys must be, you know, absolute bulls and buddies. I know you're living in different parts of the world, but I always wanted to do it with a co-host. And I asked, we've got a writing group, Chris and I, Bean and I, we got a writing group. And I said, I really want to do this podcast.
01:11:44
Speaker
Who's with me? And I knew that of everybody. I was hoping that whoever I'd get, it would be great. But I knew that Bean would put his hand up and say, yes, and say, yes, let's do this. Let's do this. And it's been great. Yeah, but it hasn't been that nice, actually. Oh.
01:12:00
Speaker
it has but i was i was saying at the beginning dan when you were getting yourself sorted out um that chris and chad like chris is the bad cop chad is the good cop or the chris chris is the horrible one and chad's a nice one and i think i'm clearly the nice one out of us too the the analytics does not bear that out
01:12:20
Speaker
I never get any feedback. I wanted to also say, you mentioned them both being boot and buzzies. Did you grow up together or was there some kind of, when you were kids, you lived near each other, I think? Yeah, we went to junior high together and then high school as well. We became friends in high school when we, I knew who he was, so we were in band together, but we weren't really friends until we did a play together. We were in little shop of whores. Oh, wow.
Chad and Chris's Creative Collaborations
01:12:49
Speaker
I love that.
01:12:49
Speaker
and Chad was Seymour and I was the dentist. And that's when we actually became friends. Like that's when we started hanging out and doing stuff together. And we started like a kind of literary club at high school together. And yeah, you know, and just Chad had his band and I kind of helped out occasionally with his band stuff that he did, you know, his rock band, Pitch Black Banner, which they've reunited after high
01:13:13
Speaker
It's not 30 years, is it? Yeah, it is, man. Oh, God. Jeez, that's hard to say. It's kind of odd because in terms of career, I really don't. Back in high school, I was doing plays with Chris, playing with my band, and then went on this whole tour of doing other careers and stuff, and then here I am now. Chris and I are doing these audio things, and then I'm still playing with them. I'm basically doing for a living what I was doing in high school.
01:13:39
Speaker
Good times. I'm happy about that. Definitely. Good times. A good place to be. Phil, if you're doing a 30-year reunion of your band, then that really should be headline news. Yeah. That was a pandemic project. We'd all gone our separate ways and then we had some time freed up and so we were able to play together again. Did you do an online reunion? It was an online reunion. Yeah. Well, I lived in California, our guitarist is in Iowa, and then our lead singers in our hometown of East Moline, Illinois, where Chris and I grew up.
01:14:08
Speaker
closing music over, emailing each other drafts of songs and then recording in our home studios and then, you know, Mix and Master did two albums that way. But I've since moved. I after 25 years moved out of California and I'm in Wisconsin right now. So we actually were able to get together. We played a reunion show around Halloween. But that that's what got me through the pandemic. And I know I'm not the only musician who did that, where it was just a good time to sit down with your mates, make some music. Did you see that on Netflix? He's a American comic and he's
01:14:37
Speaker
Oh, right. He did like a whole musical from his apartment. Yeah, what was his name? That was born through COVID. Yeah, and did pretty well. People really enjoyed that. Yeah, I mean, I was really laughing. And but but but it was also you know, when some humor is so intelligent or so bang, bang, bang, bang, you're marveling at it rather than laughing at it. And that's how I that's how I felt. And I think we had so much so much time on our hands in COVID.
01:15:00
Speaker
I think that COVID, ironically, it was a great time for artists because we could sit down and actually think of stuff and have the time to actually do it. Usually, it's just thinking and endless ideation. I procrastinate and things get in the way and life didn't happen. There was a load of great stuff that was produced. I wrote a whole novel in lockdown. This came out of lockdown.
01:15:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's that chase, you know, it's like we I needed to pause in my personal life at that time to kind of figure some things out. But when you're weak and wake up, we got trying to pursue some goal, you know, you don't really think about it. And so I think there were terrible things that happened. And then for a lot of folks, they just needed to put the brakes on life for a minute, kind of
John Carpenter's Influence and Tarantino's Interest
01:15:45
Speaker
sorted all out.
01:15:45
Speaker
I can't believe we're talking about music and we haven't mentioned John Carpenter and Ennio Morricone's score. Especially John Carpenter. Can we just skip back to that a sec? Can I just ask you something? Because I don't know this when I looked checked when I was watching it. The credits go to Ennio Morricone, but there are so many cues, sound cues on that film that just sound like something from The Fog or Christine.
01:16:10
Speaker
I was wondering, do you know if there was a cross-pollination of styles? From what I read about it, he liked Carpenter's stuff and wanted to... He wasn't emulating it, but he was going with a synth sound. He was doing those type of things. That was his one. Yeah, it was him. I don't think Carpenter actually worked on it as far as I remember reading.
01:16:34
Speaker
It's got a little more, you know, it sounds like a carpenter soundtrack with a wee bit more finesse because that carpenter stuff is great, but it can be repetitive and Morricone does that, but then he also knows when to pull it back and it's such a good thing. Yeah, there is more finesse. There are scenes, I think it's...
01:16:49
Speaker
where i think it's where they first encounter the the site of the spacecraft land at the landing site the spacecraft and the excavation site there the soaring any more coney strings really this sort of chromatic dissension layers of strings all descending upon one another layering and getting lower and lower and lower that's that's more sophisticated than your average john carpenter score so that i think that's that's obviously more economy but
01:17:17
Speaker
The other you know that the bass guitar the bomb bomb bomb but that feels very john carpenter really. There is some there was for sure some bits that were carpenter in there like some what do they call it.
01:17:34
Speaker
Looking up the thing some pieces you know some fill fill the sound what do they call that to the highlights i'm not an audio sound tracks me like that they use it like it's a dental or not it's a dental because that's when that's played in the thing no it's just for like you want to use cues yeah there you go some of the cues carpenter had thrown in there.
01:17:52
Speaker
Well, oddly, this music shows up in a Quentin Tarantino movie. I think it's The Hateful Eight, where he was sampling a lot of Morricone soundtracks. So I was watching that movie and go, what? This sounds really familiar to me. Might have even been in the trailer. And then I realized, oh, this is music from the thing that he's using, like using in the final film.
01:18:09
Speaker
That's so cool. I think it was Tarantino again watching the thing that made him want to cast Kurt Russell in Deathproof because he was watching the thing one day and he realized Kurt Russell hadn't been a badass in a film for about 15 years. He'd gone off and done all his rom-coms and he was watching the thing one day and now I thought, and he thought, no, I need to, I need Kurt Russell. I want my Kurt Russell to be a badass. So he cast him in Deathproof as the stunt driver.
01:18:36
Speaker
Yes, that was that. So Pitch Black Manor, let's talk about Pitch Black Manor.
Podcast Music and Personal Projects
01:18:40
Speaker
Okay. You've used a bit of, I believe I've heard some Pitch Black Manor stuff on the podcast, have I? Yeah, sure. We'll play as Outro Track sometimes. Yeah, I think because I got into, I mean, I'm really into atmospheric sort of, or ambient sort of sounds like, you know, John Carpenter stuff, I think I picked up on the repair of reputations from your, your podcast, huge, huge. Is it, is it used one as some of the incidental music or something?
01:19:06
Speaker
Okay, so the band, probably not. The band is more of a rock and roll outfit. I mean, it's more of a traditional industrial goth band, whereas I do the music for the show, which is its own thing. And it's just me. And yeah, a lot of that's ambient and close to the John Carpenter stuff. Or, you know, when we first started the show, I had lots of bits and pieces of music that I'd use for other projects that were kind of going nowhere. And so when we picked up the podcast, it's like,
01:19:29
Speaker
Oh, great. I got a 30 second half finished thing that we can use under a reading here. And so we started building soundtracks for it that we still use. So we've got a couple of soundtracks on offer for the show and a couple of coming out of things that we never. Chris, you were going to say something a second ago. Oh, no, I just I found a quote from Carpenter here where he said that he
01:19:46
Speaker
Uh, it's, this is, this is him saying, he says, I cut the music into the film talking about Marconi stuff here and realized there were places, mostly scenes of tension in which his music would not work. I secretly ran off and recorded a couple for a couple of days, a few pieces to use. My pieces were very simple electronic pieces. It was almost tones. It was not really music at all. Just background sounds something today you might even consider a sound effects. So there you go.
01:20:10
Speaker
So I think that the actual doo-doo and all the stuff that we had with, I think that is Marconi. Marconi. Marconi did a soundtrack for the Jack Nicholson movie Wolf, which people did not like that movie very well. I love the soundtrack for that. Marconi is one of those composers. He's really well known for his spaghetti western stuff, but he'll slip into any mode.
01:20:28
Speaker
Yeah, the mission. He did the mission as well. That was brilliant. He did like 500 films. I mean, he was seriously prolific. And he had like, what, a 60, 70 year career or something like that. He did everything. He's one of the greats. So what about your own personal projects, you know, your passion projects and stuff? What have you got that the listeners need to hear about that you want to
01:20:50
Speaker
Chris has a second podcast about Star Trek. I'm a big Star Trek nerd on top of everything else, but my wife is not into nerd things at all. This was her idea because I do this show. She's like, how would you feel if we want Star Trek together and then we did a podcast about it? I said I would feel spectacular about doing that. Are you sure that's something you want to do? She's like, yeah, let's give it a try.
01:21:14
Speaker
So we started with the original series of Star Trek, then we did the animated series, then the movies with the original series cast. Now we're into next generation, fifth season, and my wife still doesn't really like Star Trek.
01:21:30
Speaker
It's called Rachel Watches Star Trek. That's the same as the show. Has she accepted though that she's in it for the long haul? Yeah, yeah. She loves doing it. Even if she doesn't like it. So you get through to Discovery, like season three of Discovery and still don't like it. No, but she's going to stick with it.
01:21:46
Speaker
Well, it's yeah, she is. I think she doesn't hate it. And there are episodes that she has really loved and the characters are totally growing on her, especially the next gen characters. Like she's, I can, you know, when people are mean to data, she gets really upset about it and stuff. And like, she wouldn't watch it if we weren't, uh, if we weren't doing the show, she wouldn't just on her own decide to watch it. But when we do watch it, she does seem to get into it.
01:22:09
Speaker
And she enjoys like the community that we have. Like we on Patreon, we've got, you know, uh, tiered listeners that we meet up every month and we talk and they're just like lovely people. And she loves this community that is built up around the show. And so for that, she's in the long haul, but it's, it's a funny, she's really funny cause she's from Yorkshire. So she's got, she talks funny, you know, she's got a crazy accent that I didn't even understand where she was from when I met her. I thought she was maybe Scottish or something or really, you know, she sounds nuts. Just making it up.
01:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, what is this crazy talk that she's doing? And yeah, so it's a Yorkshire accent, I guess. And she's very funny. So I interrupted before when you were telling us the name of the podcast. What's it called? Rachel watches Star Trek. Rachel watches Star Trek. It'd be interesting to hear what she thinks, what your wife thinks when you get to Voyager and Deep Space Nine. Yeah. Especially the later episodes of Deep Space Nine.
01:23:01
Speaker
Because Deep Space Nine starts off pretty rough. I did a rewatch of Deep Space Nine about five years ago and I forgot how bad the first seasons are. She might like Flodo. Was it Flodo? The blue thing? Flodo the blue thing, which was like a sort of amphibian kid that would run around in the trees and was called Flodo. That's a terrible orientalist, Lord of the Rings joke in there somewhere, but I don't think we should probably go there.
01:23:27
Speaker
well there's blue oh no maybe it's yeah i'm sure it's deep space nine it might be voyager actually because i think anyway sorry blue kid running around yeah it looks like a star wars cantina thing you know it's a bit shit and it's blue skinned and it's uh-huh is it maybe in the holodeck but it's this ds9 definitely chad do you look utterly baffled i just think you're hallucinating man i don't think yeah
01:23:52
Speaker
I don't remember. I want to know. I haven't seen this. I did watch Voyager because it's hilarious. Yeah. Voyager is a great B movie. Yeah. Voyager is the only one I watched really religiously. I was more into Farscape than Star Trek. See, that sounds like a Farscape character. Yeah. There's lots of blue people on Farscape. No, it wasn't Farscape. It certainly was.
01:24:14
Speaker
Because I'm not wrong, right, I'm looking at Flodo deep. Flodo? Anyway, let's move on while Bean scurries off to Google to see if he can piece together his childhood. But yes, Chad, what have you got going on at the moment?
01:24:29
Speaker
Oh, my goodness. Well, this year, as I alluded to, I relocated, so it's eaten up a lot of time. Released a movie in the summer, which I didn't mean to disparage. It's called The Time Capsule. It's a romantic film. It's great. I love it. I can see The Time Capsule. I love it. I can see it in Twilight Zone episode. Why can we see this, Chad? You can see it anywhere you rent your movies. You know what? It has American distribution. We do have an international distributor, but I don't know how easy it is to watch it overseas yet. Can you rent it in England?
01:24:55
Speaker
Well, we will find out and we'll let you know. Well, it should be available via Amazon or wherever you can rent films. It's in early stages. Oh, right. If it's on Prime, I think because my friend is a director of photography and he's done a couple of small movies and they've sold to Prime. I think when you sell to Amazon, I think you'd get worldwide distribution through the Prime. Yeah. Well, we have a distribution company called FilmRise. They have their own app here.
01:25:25
Speaker
But we have international distribution, so I don't know exactly. You can find it. It's called the Time Capsule. It's got Brianna Hildebrand in it who was in the Deadpool movies and Todd Grinnell, who was in One Day at a Time remake. It's good, but I was out in Hollywood, Hocken scripts for a long time, and most of them were horror, probably closer to the stuff that we're talking about today. This one, which was a sci-fi romance, that's the one that made it through, so it was a little unexpected.
01:25:51
Speaker
It's a good flick, and I hope folks can enjoy that. I'm just getting resettled here in Wisconsin, and we're just talking about ways to expand the show. I did make a movie called The Colossus that I also alluded to earlier as part of our show, but it's an audio feature film, and you can check that out on YouTube. If you are linking out to things, please link out to The Colossus. I'd like more people to listen to it.
01:26:10
Speaker
We're definitely going to watch and listen to all of these things. And yeah, once we find them, we'll put them on the links. Absolutely. I think it's also, you know, important for people to realize that now I think we've got a lot more, not patients, but people are seeking out more independent stuff rather than the usual Hollywood or big stuff, because it's just, well, maybe we're just getting older, but it's just the same old, same
Challenges in Film and Literature Industries
01:26:34
Speaker
old people. I think you're right. People have known for a while. Science fiction like, um,
01:26:39
Speaker
Upstream color or primer those kind of ones which are by you know, by no means large budget but some of the best science fiction has been produced in the in the last few decades. Yeah, it's out there. It's been well known for a while now that well.
01:26:55
Speaker
Hollywood has always been very conservative, but it's more conservative than ever at the moment in terms of taking risks on new projects. It's just the same IP being reheated over and over again. It's very rare that you get an original screenplay for a big movie, for a blockbuster.
01:27:13
Speaker
really rare, you know, it just doesn't happen so much anymore. I think Knives Out probably would be the last successful movie where it was just actors doing things and not which was great. You know, it's hard for younger or rather more unknown folks break in and the Disney, Disney fight Holly. So I think then
01:27:31
Speaker
That, in some respects, is good because there's more consumer level stuff. You can get a movie made for cheaper and it takes some of the centralization away because you just don't have it. When it's a big monolith like Disney, you have no choice to make it. But in terms of people who are seeking out careers in the film industry, it's very difficult because those independent films, they don't pay the people that work on them. There's a very big division of who's making money in Hollywood and who's not, and most people are not.
01:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's the same in the publishing industry. For small-time writers like Bean and herself, there's no living to be had. I know of one of our guests, Stephen Cox, he's got a friend, I think he's a mutual friend, but we won't mention him, but it took him something like eight or nine books into his career and he's got a successful career before he could give up one day of work a week. It took a long time.
01:28:24
Speaker
Anyway, we're almost out of time ourselves. So we're going to finish on the usual questions that we have for our guests, which are what are you reading at the moment? And what book would you recommend for our listeners? So, Chris, do you want to go first? What book are you reading at the moment? And what would you recommend for our listeners? I'm reading a role playing game right now, which is the role playing game, which is the adaptation of
01:28:50
Speaker
the Blade Runner movies and books and television series that there was the animated one that came out a few years ago. So yeah, I'm reading a role playing game book. That's the one thing that I have right sitting at the edge of my eye. I mean, I have a stack of books, but that's specifically now.
01:29:05
Speaker
Chad, why don't you answer what you're reading right now so that I can think about what I would recommend. I know. Well, it's funny because it's so on brand. You know, because we cover the weird fiction and the horror and I actually usually am reading something different from that. Like we had a break a month ago and I reread The Adventures of Huck Finn, Big Mark Twain.
01:29:22
Speaker
Right now, I'm reading Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, which was adapted into a really good movie. The book's a little different. It's part of a trilogy. So it has aliens who are invading people, and it's very Lovecraftian, so it's about as on-brand as I can get. It's a really good book, Annihilation. Fabulous. And Chris, have you got a recommendation for us?
01:29:40
Speaker
I think the kind of the newest, and it's not that new because we covered it last year, is still Robert Aikman, which is like the coolest horror author that I've never heard of until like a year ago. That his body of work he wrote in the 60s and 70s. He's an English guy and everybody that writes horror, is into horror, knew about him. I didn't. And his stuff is just, it's something else. It's totally rad.
01:30:05
Speaker
So if you can find, they're collections. He only does short stories. I don't think he did any novels. If you find any of his collections, anything you pick up, it's great. I'm going to double down on it. I've been recommending Robert Aikman to people a lot recently. Brilliant. Robert Aikman. There we go. Guys, I think we're just about out of time tonight. Let me thank you both for agreeing to come on to our little podcast, our little parochial podcast down here in Crohn'sville and bestowing your A-list Stardust onto us for a couple of hours.
01:30:35
Speaker
Well, I think we're C plus tops. See, it's all it's relative though, isn't it? Everything is relative. It is relative. Yeah. Thank you so much for having us. It's been a blast. And then you used to rewatch the thing as a Oh, yeah. Yeah. And thank you. We're talking about books just then our reading list because we were always doing books for this show.
01:30:54
Speaker
Our reading list is monumental. It's just this huge stack of to-be-read stuff to get through for the show. So you choosing a 100-minute movie was just music to our ears. I know how that is, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Listen, it's been an absolute blast. We've really enjoyed it. It's been informative. It's been fun. We'll hope to speak to you again in the future. Sounds good. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot, guys. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you.
01:31:39
Speaker
This month's episode of Crohn's Cast was brought to you by Dan Jones and Christopher Bean and our special guests Chad Pfeiffer and Chris Lackey. Additional content was provided by Damaris Brown, Brian Sexton, Jay Stalaper and Stuart Widows. Special thanks to Brian Turner and the staff at Crohn's and thanks for listening. Don't forget to join the world's largest science fiction and fantasy community for free at sffchronicles.com.
01:32:04
Speaker
and join us next month when we'll be speaking with one of SFF Chronicle's most famous sons, the author Brian Wigmore. We'll be talking about the Arthurian mythos in John Borland's 1981 film Excalibur.