The Drink Tank 218

garcia@computerhistory.org
 My WorldCon Schedule!
OK, I am completely aware that it’s incredibly difficult to programme a WorldCon. It’s
like herding cats into a third story window from what I’ve seen. Still, this year’s schedule
is pretty rough on me, and the biggest problem, it doesn’t have me attending the Hugos
Reception! These things happen, but I really hope they let me go to the reception because
that’s the most awesome part! Free food, getting to gush to fantastic artists and writers,
free booze, getting treated like a minimal Big Shot in a room full of truly BIG Big Shots. It’s
great!

Here’s my schedule, if you’re gonna be trying to find me.

Friday: 11am- Cons, Cokes and Couches

Christopher J. Garcia, J. Mitchell Dashoff, Warren Buff
This one’s all about Teens and Fandom. I’m the one who’s furthest out from his
teens, but I feel in touch with many of the members of teen fandom. I wish James Bacon
were on this panel, since he’s done a lot in this area. I’ll probably prepare for this the least,
but it should be pretty good. I did a similar panel at Denver. Warren’s the moderator. I like
that guy!
Friday- 10pm- Steampunk
Ann VanderMeer, Christopher J. Garcia, Gail
Carriger, Kristin Norwood, Nick Matthews
Ah, Steampunk. This one will be where I’ll debut
my new zine, Exhibition Hall, with a preview issue.
It’ll basically be a cover, an intro article, a few photos
and a couple of short articles. No fuss, no muss. Ann
VanderMeer is good people and I’m glad I get to be on a
panel with her. I know Gail a little from SteamPowered,
where she ran the programming, and I believe she has
a book coming out or already out. I saw her briefly at
BayCon. Kristin Norwood is someone I don’t know and
can’t seem to find on bios or anything, so I’m going to say
that she’s an artificial construct made of brass and glass.
Nick Matthews is another guy I wasn’t able to find out
much on, so I’ll just say that he’s a former Ivory dealer
who invented a new kind of Elephant gun that vaporizes
Elephant meat, leaving behind only the bones and the
great scent of Brut. This could be a fun one.

Saturday: 11am- Fanzine Cover in an Hour

Taral Wayne, Christopher J Garcia, Frank Wu, Steve
Stiles
This should be a fun one. I’m going to be coming
up with a small zine, maybe two articles, three pages, and
the three of the panelists will be creating a cover of it. I’ve
got a lot to prepare for this one, so it should be fun. I’ve got some funky left-hand turns to
throw at the folks!
Saturday: 12:30pm- Lost in a world of “Lost”
Ana Oancea, Christopher J. Garcia, Cynthia Huckle, kT FitzSimmons, Perrianne
Lurie, Kim Vandervort
I wrote the write-up for this panel! Small victories. It’s an interesting set of panelists
as well. I’ve only been a Lost fan for the last three seasons and I actively don’t like the
first season and a half. I can’t seem to find out much about the others on the panel. I
wanna make sure that I get my questions out there, because with Lost, it’s more about the
questions than the answers.

Saturday: 2pm- The Greatest Fan Writer Besides Me

Cheryl Morgan, Christopher J. Garcia, Evelyn Leeper, Steven Silver, John Hertz
Wow, that’s a panel. Cheryl Morgan is a friend and one of the best fanwriters of the
last decade. John Hertz is a mensch and also one of the best fan writers of the last couple
of decades. Evelyn Leeper is a great fan writer, though sadly I’ve not read as much of
her stuff as the others. Steven Silver is a great guy (and he’s got an article in this issue!)
and I’m just there. Evelyn’s the moderator and I’ll be talking about some of my faves who
folks don’t see a lot of (Leigh Ann, Ed Green, Fran k Wu) and, of course, the guys who are
everywhere that I love (Taral, James Bacon, Claire, Lloyd Penney, Niall). It’ll be interesting
to see how this one goes.

Saturday: 12:30pm- The Hugo Awards: Dramatic Presentation: Long Form

Christopher J. Garcia, Gayle Blake, Louis Savy, Steve Green, Traci N. Castleberry
That’s right; both the TAFF delegate and the NA TAFF administrator are on a panel
not about Fan Funds! This should be a good one, and sadly Daniel Kimmel isn’t on it. If
you read his take on the nominees, you’ll see why I want him on the panel. I’ve got a lot to
say on this one (Good: an audio nominee! Bad: is Dark Knight really science fiction?) and I
think it’ll be a good panel. I’m excited to hang with Steve on this one!
Sunday: 2pm- Fan Funds Explained
Alan Stewart, Christopher J. Garcia, Flick
Christian, Janice Gelb, Steve Green
Good people on this one. Janice is a friend, a
former Bay Area fan, and once a year or so I show
Janice and Stephen around the Museum. Alan is a
great guy who sent me a pair of Cherry Ripe variants
that were amazing. Flick is a bunch of fun. Steve’s
good people, and thus, we have a really solid crew.
I think we have reps from all three of the major fan
funds (TAFF, DUFF and GUFF).

Sunday: 3:30pm- Great Fanzine Other Than Mine

Christopher J. Garcia, Guy H. Lillian III, Steven
Silver, Christian Sauvé
This one is a fun one, and I’ve got a lot of
fanzines to recommend. Steven Silver has been in the
Drink Tank a bunch of times, and I’ve appeared in
Guy’s Challenger and Steven’s Argentus. I don’t know
about Christian Sauvé, but I’m sure he’s a good guy. I
might try to have a few issues of The Drink Tank or Journey Planet to hand out at this one.

Sunday: 10pm- Technobabble Quiz

Christopher J. Garcia, Kevin Roche, Kij Johnson, Steven Silver, Frank Wu, James
Bacon
This is one that I did at Con Jose and I get to do again. It’s a weird combo of Quiz
show and audience participation show. Really, it’s Says You and Wait, Wait all mashed up
with Techno stuff. They put it at a bad time and this one I’d expect they’ll change. If you see
only one panel that I’m on, this would be the one. Plus, it has Kij Johnson, who may have
just collected a Hugo if the time doesn’t change.

I was also scheduled for a 7pm Sunday panel on Antique technology, but alas, that’s
the Hugo Reception and I’m psyched for that! I felt bad dropping it because I’ve never
chatted with Martin Hoare and he’s going to be on the panel.

This issue’s cover was from Jason Bentley (jasonbentley on Twit-

ter), while the piece above is from T. Rog, aka Tom Rogers. Cousin
Claire’s at it again with her version of Black Canary or the girl from
Moulin Rouge. Sam Hannah is the Wind-Up Girl artist. The photos
with Steven’s article were given to me by Steven, but I don’t think
he took them. The poster is from Pathe pictures and it’s the cover
is from Lloyd’s book. The internet piracy images are from Dana Col-
lidge and KIm Mizel. Of course, the Dork Knight is from Dann Lopez.
Gotta love Dann.
Steven Silver sent me this, and it’s about the greatest of the Silent Film Comedians,
so how could I not run it?

I’ve been writing a series of essays about silent film comedians for E-APA and will be
publishing each of them in a variety of different generally available ‘zines. You can find other
articles in Chunga, Reluctant Famulus, and Askance. Once all are finished, I’ll be collecting
them together, adding some additional material, and publishing it in Argentus.

Harold Lloyd
by
Steven Silver
Harold Lloyd was born in Kansas on April 20, 1893 in
Burchard, Nebraska to J. Darcie “Foxy” Lloyd and Elizabeth
Fraser Lloyd. Years later, in his film 1932 Movie Crazy, his
character, Harold Hall, would leave Nebraska to become a big
movie star in Hollywood. Hall had a much less successful go
of it than Lloyd.
His mother had been interested in a career as a singer
and she supported Lloyd’s own interest in that general
direction. Lloyd first was grabbed by the acting bug in 1903,
when he was cast in a local performance of “Hamlet.” He
continued to appear on stage as his family moved around
Nebraska and Colorado as Foxy, tried to find steady work. After Foxy and Elizabeth got
divorced in 1910, Lloyd and his elder brother, Gaylord, shuttled back and forth between
their parents for several years. After Foxy was hit be a beer truck in 1913 and was awarded
a $3,000 judgment. Foxy and Harold flipped a coin to decide if they should move east or
west, with the result that they moved to San Diego, where Foxy attempted to open a pool
hall (and failed). Harold continued to take on roles on the stage with no desire to try out for
the films which were being created just up the coast. However, film was more lucrative than
stage work, and, given Foxy’s failure as an entrepreneur, Harold eventually began to appear
in films, usually as a background actor.
Lloyd had one feature, whether a shortcoming or an opportunity depends on the
viewer, that Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle, and Turpin all lacked. All the other film comedians
had come up through Vaudeville and had polished their acts and routines in front of live
audiences. Their issue was translating their routines to the new medium. Lloyd, however,
did not have that background upon which to draw. He had a few brief stints in the
legitimate theatre and had trained with stage actor John Lane Connor when he first arrived
in San Diego, but his acting was created and honed on the screen.
During this time, Lloyd became friends with another background actor, Hal Roach.
When Roach came into an inheritance, he decided to open his own studio, first known as
Phun Philms and later Rolin. Roach hired Lloyd who created a character, Will E. Work.
It became clear that the character did not work, so Lloyd created a Chaplin knock-off,
Lonesome Luke. The character of Lonesome Luke appeared in nearly sixty films and was
successful enough that it allowed Roach to get a distribution deal with Pathé.
As Lonesome Luke, Lloyd was cast in tragic-comic roles as someone who was down
and out. Roach felt that Lloyd could be a bigger actor playing a different type of character,
although he was concerned that without some sort of disguise (as Luke, Lloyd wore a fake
moustache), Lloyd was too good looking to be a comedian. They came up with a character
known as “Glasses,” although also referred to on occasion as Harold.
“Glasses” was an optimist. Whatever life threw at him, he also felt that success was
right around the corner, and, in so viewing the world, he made it happen. Unlike Charles
Chaplin’s “Little Tramp,” Lloyd’s “Glasses” was flexible enough to be placed into a variety
of social situations. This also meant that he was an easier character for the middle class
to identify with. Similarly, the various situations gave Lloyd and roach more latitude in
finding situations to place “Glasses” in, from the heroic character in Rainbow Island to his
adventures as a newlywed in I Do. Unlike Chaplin’s tramp or Arbuckle’s “Fatty,” Lloyd’s
“Glasses” was a regular person without any signs of grotesquerie or quirkiness.
His early films with this character were successful, and audiences could actually
picture “Glasses” getting the girl. From 1914 through 1919, Lloyd’s leading lady was Bebe
Daniels, with whom Lloyd had a romantic relationship off screen, despite her age (she was
born in 1901). When she left to pursue more dramatic roles, Roach pointed out another
actress to Lloyd, Mildred Davis, who took over the Daniels roles in 1919 beginning with the
film From Hand to Mouth. At this time, Lloyd was one of the most popular comedians.
On August 23, 1919, while filming Haunted Honeymoon, tragedy struck Lloyd. He
was posing for publicity stills holding a prop bomb. He had just used the prop to light a
cigarette when it exploded. Lloyd was temporarily blinded and lost the thumb and index
finger on his right hand. The injuries and convalescence took Lloyd out off the limelight for
five months as he regained his sight and had a prosthetic hand made for him. Although
Lloyd would refer to the accident in general terms, he never discussed the actual injuries.
Once Lloyd returned to
making films, Mildred continued to
work with him through 1923, when
she appeared with him in Safety
Last, perhaps his most well-known
film. By the time it was shot,
however, she had already informed
Lloyd and Roach of her intention to
retire. In response, Lloyd proposed
marriage to her and the two were
wed on February 10, 1923 and
remained married until her death
on August 18, 1969.
In the years immediately
after the accident, Lloyd also carved
out another niche for himself, one
which doesn’t exist in the modern
world of film comedies, especially
with the increased use of special
effects. Harold Lloyd became the
king of the thrill comedies.
In thrill comedies, Lloyd
would set himself up for a variety
of dangerous situations, which
he then worked his way through.
The most famous, of course, is his building climb in Safety Last, although Lloyd used the
building climb in several of his films. He got the idea from watching Bill Strother, a Los
Angeles daredevil who would climb buildings. Stroher appeared in the film as Lloyd’s best
friend, and the idea, in the film, was that Lloyd’s character would climb to the would climb
to the first or second floor and then Strother’s character would take his place and perform
the remainder of the climb. However, in both the film, and reality, Lloyd performed the
majority of the climb, including the various stunts that saw him dangling from the hands of
the clock, fighting off pigeons, and having things dropped on him. For the most part, Lloyd
was climbing as high as it appeared he was, although some trick photography extended the
height of the building. Even then, Lloyd was performing at a height several storeys above
ground level without a net.
Part of the entertainment from this comes from knowing that the actor is actually
performing in the dangerous areas and was placing his well-being in jeopardy.
Lloyd and Roach parted ways in the mid-twenties, with Lloyd creating his own
production company. Lloyd also slowed down his work, making fewer films, but still
managing to be the highest grossing of the silent comedians in the late twenties. He also
used the opportunity to experiment with the film-making process, becoming the first
filmmaker to preview his films for test audiences and then re-edit them to make them more
appealing.
During this period, he made some of his most successful and lasting films, including
Speedy (1928), in which he appeared as the savior of the old-style horse-drawn trolley,
and The Freshman (1925), a college comedy which ends with Lloyd’s character scoring the
winning touchdown, and also setting up Lloyd’s final film, which would be released 22
years later.
Unlike Chaplin, who refused to create talkies until 1940 when he made The Great
Dictator, Lloyd was an early adopter of the new technology, releasing his first talkie,
Welcome Danger on 12 October 1929. Twelve days later, the stock market crashed, taking
with it much of the attraction of Harold Lloyd.
In the 1920s, Lloyd was a bigger box office draw than Chaplin,
with his feature films making more than Chaplin’s. One reason
for this was that Lloyd’s films has an optimism about them, while
Chaplin’s more satirical films had a much more cynical edge. This
also explains why Chaplin’s star continues brighter than Lloyd’s.
Following the stock market crash of 1929, the public had a much
more cynical outlook on life. Lloyd’s optimism was viewed as more
naïve and belonging to a bygone era.
Although Welcome Danger was Lloyd’s highest grossing film,
the economic times and change in attitude spelled an end to Lloyd’s
career. Throughout the 1930s, he only made five films, all of them
talkies, but his years as the most popular film comedian were in the
past.
While most of Lloyd’s silent films were original, two of his
talkies from the 1930s were based on previously published material.
The first was The Cat’s-Paw, in 1934 and based on a novel published the previous
year by Clarence Budington Kelland. The character Lloyd plays is similar in many ways
to his typical character. Ezekiel Cobb is a naïve young man who wants to rise up in the
world. Caught up in the corrupt politics of Stockport, he uses his innate optimism and
sense of right, along, in this case, with the help of the local Chinese community
The Milky Way made in 1936, based on a 1934 play of the same name. Playing a
milk-man turned boxer, the film would be made into a more successful version in 1946
as The Kid From Brooklyn, starring Danny Kaye in the Lloyd role of Burleigh Sullivan. In a
vaguely interesting coincidence, Lionel Stander appeared in both films portraying “Spider”
Schultz. When Samuel Goldwyn purchased the rights to the remake, he ordered all prints
of Lloyd’s version destroyed. Lloyd, however, had managed to secure prints of nearly all of
his films and retained his copy, so despite Goldwyn’s efforts, the 1936 film still exists.
Following the release of Professor Beware in 1938, Lloyd essentially retired from film-
making to focus his attention on a variety of hobbies. Among these were breeding Great
Danes, collecting cars, and music. Perhaps his most enduring hobby was photography,
where Lloyd played with making stereoscopic images. His granddaughter, Suzanne Lloyd
Hayes, has released two volumes of Lloyd’s pictures: 3-D Hollywood: Photography by Harold
Lloyd (1992) and Harold Lloyd’s Hollywood Nudes in 3-D! (2004). These two books are
comprised of just some of the quarter million stereoscopic images Lloyd took.
The fact that Lloyd kept prints of nearly all of his films once he became popular
enough has meant that unlike many of the silent film stars, most of his body of work
survives in clean versions. Lloyd also had control over their distribution and, throughout
the years he would arrange screenings of his movies, ensuring that they would remain in
the public’s awareness. Most of his pre-1920s films, however, are considered lost, having
been destroyed in nitrate explosion in Lloyd’s film vault, including most of the Lonesome
Luke films..
Lloyd was coaxed out of retirement in the mid-1940s by Preston Sturgis. Sturgis
had written, directed, and produced several successful films and had won an Oscar for
his 1940 screenplay The Greta McGinty. He came up for an idea that would start with the
final football game from Lloyd’s The Freshman and pick up with the character two decades
later, after life had a chance to wear him down. Lloyd agreed, although after filming began,
the two men discovered that they had very different ideas of film-making, from the script,
to the characters, to the gags. When The Sin of Harold Diddlebock was released, it wasn’t
a success and Sturgis’s partner, Howard Hughes, pulled it from distribution with the
intention of recutting the film, something that rankled Lloyd who had managed to acquire
rights to practically all of his earlier films. In 1950, Hughes re-released the film as Mad
Wednesday, which achieved the same level of success as its earlier incarnation.
Lloyd was now retired from acting, focusing his attention on his hobbies and on the
re-editing and splicing of his old films into compilations which he could control.
Harold Lloyd even has a tenuous tie
to the world of science fiction. According
to Joe Shuster, Harold Lloyd’s everyman
character served as one of the inspirations
for Clark Kent, even down to the idea that
he was unrecognizable when wearing his
glasses. Ironic, then that Superman and
Clark Kent first appeared in the year Lloyd
retired from acting.
Over the course of his 34 year
career, Lloyd appeared in 206 films (205
in the first 25 years). He managed to keep
control over most of those films, which
allowed him to live out a comfortable life
with his wife, to whom he was married for
forty-six years, until her death. Diagnosed
with cancer in the 1960s, Lloyd died on 8
March 1971.
Piracy on the High CD‘s
Taral Wayne-
Earlier this year there was a small diplomatic incident between the two greatest
nations on Earth. I refer to Hollywood and Canada, of course, and the effort of the former
to pressure the later to employ police state tactics to protect the film industry from video
piracy. Their theory was that Canada’s laws weren’t tough enough. While it was illegal
in my country to sell or distribute pirated movies, there were no draconian measures that
allowed thugs from Paramount or Fox to break into people’s homes, or to confiscate digital
camera’s at the cinema entrance.
Was this a serious problem, you ask? Was Canada really the pirate movie capital of
the world? True, you could walk down University Avenue in the heart of Chinatown, and
buy almost any movie in the world from one of hundreds of venders. Some operated from
regular stores, with permanent racks mounted on the walls, others from some handmade
stand on the street corner. But a closer look showed that they almost all had Chinese
subtitles and were made in Hong Kong. Doesn’t this make Hong Kong the movie piracy
capital of the world, rather than Canada? You’d think so, but nobody has successfully
leaned on the Chinese government in modern times to do anything. On the other hand,
Canada has a long history of compliancy to American demands. If you can’t force Beijing to
crack down on a black-market that almost certainly the government takes a cut of, it’s easy
to get Canadians to give up the right of protection from unwarranted search and seizure
when they happen to
be in line to enter a
theatre.
Fortunately,
this was literally too
Mickey Mouse for
even Ottawa to take
seriously, and nothing
came of Hollywood’s
demand.
I had never
before been tempted
to buy a pirate
film. After all, they
were reputed to
be extremely poor
quality, and usually
spoiled with annoying
subtitles in Chinese,
sometimes in Korean
or Hindi or Japanese
as well. But now that
I was aware of being a
resident of the movie
piracy capital of the
world, according to Hollywood, I became curious. The other day I found a store on Queen
Street (around the corner from where I lived) that had an attractive display of new pirates.
Not just old Charles Bronson action films with fast cars and fantasies about gunplay, or
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, the usual fare in Chinatown. The table displayed copies of all
sorts of recent films like Cars, Flushed Away, The Queen, The Da Vinci Code, The Aviator,
The Corpse Bride, and so on. They were all films I had seen and in most cases bought legit
copies of. But a trio caught my eye.
I had never seen The Simpsons Movie. It wasn’t even out in the stores, yet here
was The Simpsons Movie in a nearly professional looking pirate edition! Five bucks! I
could wait, of course. It was likely the legitimate release would be sometime a little before
Christmas. I had character. I waited months and months without seeing The Simpsons
Movie already. I could wait another three months. I could, but I was already curious about
it just because it was a pirate copy.
So I paid the man the five bucks, expecting to be disappointed by a blurry, tinny
sounding copy that would be no pleasure at all to watch. To my surprise, it was a perfect
copy. I had been warned that these things are often filmed with digital cameras taken into
the theatre, and one sign of it was the sudden appearance
of silhouettes of people getting up from their seats and
leaving for popcorn or a leak. At one point in the movie,
indeed a couple of people did rise from the audience and
walk out of frame. It was part of the movie, though… An
impeccable copy, this was five bucks well spend indeed.
Was it pirated from a Canadian theatre? I doubt
it. The copy was so good I think it could only have been
smuggled out of the studio, a digital copy right from the
computers used to make The Simpsons Movie.
Ratatouille Emboldened, I bought two more pirate films next
Monday. I had noticed both Ratatouille and Meet The Robinsons earlier, but didn’t want
to risk a whole fifteen dollars on an unknown venture. As before, the presentation was
attractive, and the price was right. I had never seen Meet The Robinsons so it was an
obvious choice. I had seen Ratatouille though. Why buy it? Curiosity about the copy for
one thing, and I had plain liked it so much that I wanted to see it again, soon.
Nothing more needs to be said about the movie, really. Enough that you know
that Ratatouille earned the 6th. highest rating from Rotten Tomatoes in history, with 97%
approval. The image quality wasn’t quite as picture-perfect as it had been for The Simpsons
Movie, but it was about as good as a run-of-the-mill videotape. Sound quality was about
the same. I could almost have forgotten I wasn’t watching a licit copy until the signature
faux pas – a couple in the audience got up and walked in front of the screen. It was almost
like being there for a moment.
Pirated in Canada? Possibly. Who knows? It wasn’t as though it said “eh?” or
“aboot” in the credits…
I fed Meet the Robinsons into the machine the next day, and was immediately
disappointed. The picture was everything I expected of a pirate copy. Fuzzy, dark, and out
of focus around the edges. The sound quality was so bad it reminded me of those days long
past, when the family took me to the drive-in dressed in my jammies. You have to have
watched Vincent Price from the back seat of the car yourself to remember the tinny sound
from those hook-on speakers. That was how tinny the sound from this pirate copy was. If
that weren’t enough to persuade me that I’d bought a dud, there were subtitles with no way
to turn them off. Chinese, you say? French? (I live in Canada, after all.) Nope. Russian
of all things.
No need to guess where to find the theatre from which this movie was illegally filmed.
But I guess Moscow is no easier for Hollywood to push around these days than Beijing.
I’ve kept The Simpsons Movie as a curiosity, even though I plan to buy a used legal
copy when available. I planned from the beginning to pass Ratatouille on a friend who I
knew wouldn’t buy it, but ought to be made to see it. Legal copies are already available,
and it’s only a matter of weeks before I can buy one pre-viewed from the Blockbuster on the
corner. Meet the Robinsons, though, was a write-off. I’ll buy a used copy later, but what
did I want with this unwatchable shadow play? I took it back to the store on Queen where
I bought it, and having a good rapport with the proprietor had no problem exchanging it for
five dollars worth of soup in dented cans…
And from the Pirate Movie Capitol of the World, that’s a wrap!