Psychotic Puck

Puck has wandered into the outline for my next novel and wants to take it over. I continue to resist his insurrection, but plan on finding a good and proper place for him in it. I figured I’d better catch up on Puck’s most famous literary appearance and re-read (and re-view) A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve always wanted to see this old 1935 adaptation of Shakespeare’s play and I finally watched it last night. What about Mickey Rooney’s portrayal of Puck?

He’s completely deranged and psychotic. It’s amazing.

I was intrigued by this quip from Amazon.com about Rooney’s performance:

The other actors are decidedly varied, and they tend to be overwhelmed by the production design. Not so Mickey Rooney, whose performance as Puck is a feral, antic act of imagination (he was 14 during filming); picture a boy raised by wolves who somehow memorized Shakespeare. His Puck growls and screams and mocks the drama of the other characters, a little postmodern imp before his time. (Critic David Thomson called this Puck "truly inhuman, one of the cinema's most arresting pieces of magic").

“A boy raised by wolves who somehow memorized Shakespeare.” That is amazingly accurate. Rooney’s portrayal of Puck is legendary – he’s off-the-wall, annoying, magnificent, profound, silly, and magnetic. His laugh is one of the three greatest film laughs I have ever heard, along with Tom Hulce as Mozart in Amadeus and Heath Ledger as The Joker. In fact, give Mickey Rooney’s Puck a knife and make him malevolent, and he instantly becomes Ledger’s psychotic villain from The Dark Knight.

I enjoyed this all more than I expected to. Definitely worth hunting down.



Here’s Gore Vidal introducing AMND on TCM. There’s a brief clip of Mickey Rooney in this with just a touch of that insane laugh of his. Pay attention to what Vidal says that Tennessee Williams once told him about Mickey Rooney.



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My Little Sondheim!

Okay, I confess -- I have become a fan of the latest incarnation of the My Little Pony TV show, called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. No, I haven't lost my mind. The show's popularity among adult men has taken the show's creators by complete surprise. We're called "bronies," and if you want more background on the topic, here's the famous Wired article about us. It's really very simple -- Lauren Faust, the force behind the show, trashed the saccharine sweetness of older My Little Pony shows and replaced it with sharper humor and the same girl-power sensibility she brought from her work with her husband Craig McCracken on his hit show, The Powerpuff Girls. (Faust also worked as an animator on two wonderful animated feature films, The Iron Giant (directed by Pixar veteran Brad Bird) and a forgotten treat, Cats Don't Dance (directed by Mark Dindal, who went on to direct Disney's hugely funny The Emperor's New Groove).) Faust has managed to make the new My Little Pony show innocent and fun without condescension or over-cuteness. It's more enjoyable than you might imagine, and yes, I cannot believe I am singing the praises of a TV show based on those silly toys from the 80s!

What does this have to do with the video above? Simply that I love semi-obscure references, in this case creating a parody (in the old-style sense) of a song by Stephen Sondheim for one of the episodes of MLP: FiM. The song was adapted by the show's composer, Daniel Ingram. I about fell out of my chair when I saw this! Not since I encountered the first semi-obscure Shakespeare reference in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 have I been so tickled. The song above is derived from "Putting it Together," from Sondheim's Pulitzer Prize winning musical, Sunday in the Park with George (one of my two favorite musicals, along with West Side Story). I love the tribute, and wonder what Mr. Sondheim thinks about all this.



Here's the original song (above) included in this scene from Sunday in the Park with George, featuring Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. The comments section on YouTube already has quips from bronies who've just discovered this; and yes, that is Brent Spiner in a portion of the scene.



And if you're interested, here's the complete episode of MLP: FiM (above) that contains the parody song. Enjoy! As Rainbow Dash would say, inclusion of Sondheim references instantly makes this show 20% cooler!

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P.S. Bonus video below! There are pony mashups, of course. This is the first thing I ever saw the ponies in, even before I caught up with the episodes of the show. It's a mashup of the trailer for The Dark Knight with images from MLP: FiM. And it ... is ... AWESOME!!!

The Shining

“Wow, Stephen King remade my movie for TV. And it sucks.”

Here’s a look at the real-life inspiration that prodded Stephen King to pen his best novel ever, The Shining, on the 30th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film version of the story.

Built in 1909 by the high-rolling F. O. Stanley, co-inventor (with his twin brother, F. E.) of a steam-powered car known as the Stanley Steamer, the Stanley sits in lucid splendor, in Georgian incongruity, on the eastern rise of the Colorado Rockies. The hotel is welcoming and comfortable; the mountain air is thrilling. King stayed at the Stanley in 1974, the night before it shut down for the winter, and his muse was tickled. Old World fixtures and furnishings; a vibe of vanished gaiety, of cigar-chewing autocrats and good-time gals, parties and their orchestras, all sliding down into darkness, like the Titanic … And then the hauntings, for which the Stanley was already famous: paranormal poppings-in by domestics and scampering children, and also by the scandalous Lord Dunraven, who likes to goose ladies in the closet of Room 401.

In the hands of Stanley Kubrick, The Shining became the finest film adaptation of any of King’s works. I don’t care what King says; Kubrick drilled down to the dark essence of the characters and created something that, when tried by lesser filmmakers, doesn’t always work – an almost personal riff on someone else’s creation – but which in this case worked fantastically. I was a huge fan of the book (I first read it when I was 14) when Kubrick’s film was released in 1980, and I hated the movie. Thirteen years later I rented the video to give Kubrick another chance, and I discovered what a masterpiece it is. (The less said about the King-scripted TV remake, the better.)

How powerful is King’s book? A few years ago I was re-reading The Shining for the umpteenth time during my lunch break. I was on the Plaza in Kansas City at the Penguin Court on a brilliant, sunny spring day. People were enjoying their lunch, shoppers were strolling happily about, and children ran around the bronze penguin sculptures that give the court its name. In the book, little Danny Torrance, all by himself in the Overlook’s playground, crawls into those concrete rings buried in the snow. The snow falls in, blocking the open ends. And Danny realizes…there’s something in the rings with him!

A beautiful, sunny spring day, and my skin crawled right up my body with a shiver. I’d read that scene many times, but god, how well it still worked! If I ever write anything that brings a reader an emotional response half that enduring, I’ll be happy. The Shining is only one of two books that contained a moment which, when I first read it, made me almost literally crawl up the wall behind me with fear (the other was The Silence of the Lambs). I can’t tell you which scene it was; you’ll just have to find out for yourself. But it took place in room 217.

Kubrick’s film is a different animal and is great in different ways. In a book about Kubrick, I once read an excellent analysis that convincingly proposed Kubrick’s The Shining as a literal anti-thesis of his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a remarkable discussion of how the use of mirrors and mirror-images in The Shining (think of that lake in the opening shot, or what you see reflected in the mirrors along the hallway outside the ballroom) differentiates between the worlds of Jack Torrance’s sanity and insanity. The story of The Shining has become so well-known that I would love to see, like Shakespeare, many different directors tackle the material and give us their personal take on it. King needn’t fear, for his original novel will always retain its terrifying brilliance.

"A Killer Vacation" (The Atlantic)

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Adaptation or Fanfic? You Decide!

The article linked below references musicals, that's why.

Fascinating post from Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing on another post at LiveJournal about Pulitzer Prize-winning fanfic, or what the rest of the world calls "adaptations." I know Doctorow wants all creative work to be open for use by anyone; but seriously, Cory, if someone makes a movie out of your terrific novel Little Brother, wouldn't you want some kind of payment for it? Still, I've never thought of Sunday in the Park with George in quite this way before, and it's kinda cool:

* Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In the Park with George, which is half-original fic, half-RPF (real person fiction) based on the artist Georges Seurat, and winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Of course, as far as what we all agree is fanfic, I'd love it if someone took a whack at fanfic based on one of my stories.

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