Hello!

We very much enjoyed Dread Central’s April 3 article discussing the flurry of werewolf movies that hit in 1980 and 1981. Writer Matt Konopka skips the blather and goes directly into descriptions of storylines, distinguishing one from another. We of course have our favorites too. Like Matt, I really admire Michael Wadleigh’s  Wolfen even if it always ends as a big disappointment.

The article ends up a spirited defense of Joe Dante’s  The Howling, which gets my vote as well as the best of the bunch. Seen theatrically, it worked its magic 100%. Director Dante and screenwriter John Sayles found a good balance between humor and horror, with 2 or three really smart, exciting jump scares.

 

A New Kind of Werewolf:  Why  The Howling  has the Scariest Transformation Scene 

 

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And we’ve got inks to a full-length Sci-fi landmark that I’ve usually only seen excerpted — the KTLA TV show from 1950, which took a TV camera to the soundstage of George Pal’s  Destination Moon. That landmark film has since suffered from comparisons to more exciting space adventures that (slowly) followed, so it’s difficult to communicate what an impact it had. The average American still thought of space travel as Buck Rogers fantasy, and to have it discussed as a factual possibility stirred everyone’s imagination. Few could have believed that the first moon landing would occur just 19 years later.

The kinescope of KTLA’s visit to George Pal’s moon was an episode of a live TV show called ‘City at Night.’  They’re certainly trying to be creative. It’s great fun to see the TV crew struggling to cover everything with two cameras … the on-camera hosts Keith Hetherington and Dorothy Gardiner are frequently forced to vamp, while we are left staring at piece of camera equipment. But they do their best not to come off as awkward.

When not panning across the impressive moonscape backdrop, we’re introduced to a number of the film’s creators. Part one starts with a nice pullback from a painted moon; over the course of the hourlong show, we wander all over the moon set, and then to the rocket interior sets.

We first meet the director Irving Pichel, who woould make a much better host than the TV people — Pichel did a lot of voiceover work in addition to acting and directing. The space crew comes next, in costume: John Archer, Warner Anderson, Tom Powers and Dick Wesson. The experienced actors can’t have been familiar with live TV. Nobody speaks unless spoken to, and Dick Wesson doesn’t use his comic character.

George Pal arrives, with his quiet voice and foreign accent — he’s immediately deflecting praise to his collaborators: author Robert Heinlein, artist Chesley Bonestell and art director Ernst Fegté. Bonestell shows a copy of his book Conquest of Space, which Pal later transformed into a movie.

I may have skipped somebody, but I caught intros for editor Duke Goldstone, director of photography Lionel Lindon with the Technicolor camera, and Technicolor color consultant Robert Brower. A couple of extraneous guests are there as well — a naval officer and the noted supersonic test pilot Eugene May. Everyone calls him Mr. May — does that mean that he was a civilian test pilot?

We noted last week that Destination Moon is on its away in a new Blu-ray encoding, perhaps sometime this summer.

 

DESTINATION MOON  On The Set With George Pal
Part One
Part Two
Part Three 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson