Hello!   LATE NEWS FLASH — SAVANT DEAD IN PLANE!

 

It’s not true, I’m happy to say. Watching the new Blu of  I Died a Thousand Times, we were at first a little dismayed to discover a news item announcing my dee-mise. That’ll come soon enough, but please not back in 1955 when I was still a tot.

This ‘Savant Dead in Plane’ blurb has the added worry factor of Jack Palance staring at me. He looks angry, as if demanding to know why I’m not dead like I’m supposed to be.

The  Classic Horror Film Board used to have some great postings, where contributors would send in ‘newspaper shots’ from movies. In Sci-fi and fantasy films, the insert shots would announce amazing discoveries or dire threats, and nobody would look closely at the minor columns. With good quality home video, pausing on those dummy newspapers reveals a lot. Sometimes the headlines were bad paste-up jobs. The same dummy articles would be repeated. The text in them would often be nonsense.

We of course jump when our name shows up in print … I still get a kick from a The Far Side cartoon that takes place ‘in the Erickson burrow.’  Here are two more frame grabs that I’ve posted before. Anybody who has loitered too long around CineSavant will know what movies they came from.

 

---

 

And here’s a happy Review for another Book — no, a Magazine — well, how about an issue of a magazine that swelled to the size of a book?

Little Shoppe of Horrors, the brainchild of Richard Klemensen, has been publishing for decades and until the last few years has mostly focused on the output of Hammer Films. As his last issue approaches, it looks as if his magazine has been hijacked by something ‘like nothing we’ve seen before’ — the U.K. Kaiju Gorgo, a beloved Technicolor epic from childhood, when moviegoing was grand and glorious. Being able to review discs of the show was great fun, as good old Gorgo was my hands-down favorite monster as a kid. As an impressionable 9 year-old, everything in that movie looked absolutely real.

MGM generated some handsome still photos and a nifty poster for Gorgo, but zero production stills, and no behind-the-scenes shots of the vast miniatures or the workings of the monster and his towering mother-beast. Associate Lee Kaplan uncovered a couple of shots ten years ago, and that was about it. As it turns out, Lee contributes substantially to the 270-page ‘magazine.’ I see that Ernie Farino is still associated with LSoH, but the prime author and project editor for this issue was Anthony McKay. His massive Gorgo article subtitled ‘Monster of the Kings’ grabbed me from the start — it’s a history of the producers the King Brothers that begins with two decades of films that came before Gorgo. This history lays out the facts about numerous producing partnerships that imported foreign fantasy films for U.S. exploitation, as the Kings did with Toho’s  Rodan. The historical essay also sketches the ambitions of designer-director Eugene Lourie, who wasn’t deterred by the fact that he had to remake his first monster movie twice over.

One surprise in this department was reading about Lourie’s continuing attempts to work again with Ray Harryhausen, after their fruitful  first collaboration.

The core of the book/magazine is a 160 page, day-by-day chronicle of the filming of Gorgo, accompanied by actor and filmmaker bios and an astounding number of stills of the production in progress, coverage we never dreamed existed. We admire the design and craftsmanship in everything we see. We’re surprised by the many big sets constructed and just how much work was poured into everything. Lourie and cameraman Freddie Young coordinated the complex effects shots, composites so clever that some shots completely fooled us. In the course of documenting the shoot, Anthony McKay answers a number of story continuity and logic questions we always had about Gorgo — editing that sometimes jumbles the sequence of events on screen.

MacKay’s well written chronicle had access to all of the King Bros. production files. It details several risky business negotiations — the show was almost finished before the King Bros. lined up their distributors. Only gamblers like the Kings would play these crazy financial games. A series of addendums covers the film’s release rollout, the advertising and even an illustrated gallery of Gorgo toys. Although most of the book is B&W, there are quite a few color plates, especially when the advertising art clicks in. The famous Basil Gogos magazine cover painting for Gorgo is present in full color as well. Something else we didn’t know is that a BBFC fumble resulted in the show being given an ‘X’ rating in the UK … putting it out of reach of the very kid audience that would comprise its core audience.

 

Little Shoppe of Horrors #52 can be found at  the LSoH U.S.website and  the LSoH UK website.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson