Yes, I am saying the world I live in is a low-budget commercial movie made without literary or artistic pretensions. You know, the kind where movie makers learn their craft, taking big risks with smaller consequences, and making the world of their picture reflect their heart rather than the producer’s lust for money.
Mostly what I am talking about are the movies I remember from late-night Saturday TV in black and white (regardless of whether or not the movie was made in Technicolor) and the less-risky as well as more-likely-good Saturday matinees on Channel 3. Movies made in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. They were perfect, of course, for the forbidden Midnight Movie on the show called Gravesend Manor. I had to sneak downstairs to watch it on Saturday nights with the volume turned way down low. (Not that Mom and Dad didn’t know. Well, maybe they didn’t know how many of those I watched completely naked… maybe.)
I watched this one when I was twelve, late night on an October Saturday. I had a bed-sheet with me to pull over my head at the scariest parts. Frankenstein was a crashed astronaut brought back to life by the magic of space radiation. He was uglier than sin, but still the hero of the movie, saving the Earth from invading guys in gorilla suits and scary masks (none of which looked like the movie poster.)
This one, starring James Whitmore, a really good B-Movie actor, was about giant ants coming up from the sewers and the underground to eat the city.
I would end up watching it again twenty years later when I was wearing clothes and not alone in the dark house lit only by a black-and-white TV screen.
I realized on the second viewing that it was actually a pretty good movie in spite of cheesy special effects. And I realized too that I had learned from James Whitmore’s hero character that, in times of crisis, you have to run towards the trouble rather than away from it, a thing that I used several times in my teaching career with fights and tornadoes and even rattlesnakes visiting the school campus looking to eat a seventh-grader or something (though it was a bad idea for the snake even if it had been successful.)
This one, of course, taught me that monsters liked to carry off pretty girls in bikinis. And not just on the poster, either. But it was the hero that got the girl, not the monster. This movie taught me that it sucks to be the monster. Though it also taught me that it was a good movie to take your pajamas off for and watch naked when you are thirteen.
But not all B-movies had to be watched late night on Saturdays. This movie was one of the first ones that I got to go to the movie theater to see by myself. (My sisters and little brother were still too young and got nightmares too easily to see such a movie.) It came out when I was in my teens and Mom and Dad began thinking of me as an adult once… or even possibly twice in a month.
And not all B-movies were monster movies, gangster movies, and westerns. Some, like a lot of Danny Kaye’s movies, were movies my Dad and my grandparents were more than happy to watch with me. I saw this one in both black-and-white and color. And I learned from this that it was okay to take advantage of happy accidents, like a case of mistaken identity, and using your wits, your creative singing ability, and your inexplicable good luck to win the day for everybody but the bad guys armed only with your good sense of humor.
And some of the best movies I have ever seen, judging by what I learned about movies as literature from Professor Loring Silet in his Modern Film Class at Iowa State University, are by their nature B-movies.
I am using movie posters in this blog post only from movies I have personally seen. (And I admit that not all of them are strictly “good” movies according to Professor Silet, but I like them all.)
Feel free to tell me in the comments if you have seen any of these movies yourself. I am open to all opinions, comments, and confessions.
I live in a B-movie world. The production values around me are not the top-dollar ones. But the stories are entertaining. The real-life heroes still run towards the problem. And it still sucks to be the monster. But it has always been worth the price of the ticket. And during my time on Earth here, even in 2020, I plan on staying till the end of the picture. I go nowhere until I see the Best Boy’s name in the end credits. And maybe not even then.
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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