Introduction: Save a Place in the Lifeboat for Me

 

 

AGAIN THE QUESTION: Is this about rock and roll? Is this about funny people of the movies? You tell me.

This is the second-earliest story in the collection. It was written in September and October of 1974, a heady personal time for me; a fairly disastrous one for my career. I’d been living for six months in Bryan, Texas, in the Monkey House, what would have been called in earlier days a Slan Shack; a house full of SF fans. I wrote and wrote and wrote while I lived there. Absolutely nothing I wrote in those six months while living there sold. I moved to Austin in late October 1974. Everything I owned, plus a medium-sized dog, fit in a friend’s VW Beetle.

I hadn’t been in Austin a week before all that stuff I’d written in Bryan started to sell, and it all sold in the next few months. Why? I don’t know. I don’t give a damn! Third Base!

 

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Comedians. Everybody loves them; nobody, as Dangerfield says, gives them any respect. When people make a list of the greatest actors—male and female—of all time in the movies—hey! Where’s the funny folks?

From the silents to right now, the comedians are there; they’re appreciated, loved; they’re in the feel-good movie of the year; everybody knows them and goes to see them. But to get any respect, they’ve got to go against type, get serious, deal with a heavy subject in a heavy way.

Chaplin knocked the blocks out from under his career that way. Langdon, as Capra said, never knew what hit him after he started directing himself, instead of listening to people who knew exactly what he could and couldn’t do (like Capra) and could tell him how to do it, and roll the audiences in the aisles.

Did Tom Hanks win an Academy Award for Joe vs. The Volcano? No, it was for Philadelphia, after he’d been knocking himself out for ten years doing some of the best acting ever seen. In comedies . . .

So then, a story about 1959, but with characters from the history of film scattered all through it, in parts they couldn’t have gotten in life, and true to their art.

This being an early story, I hear you ask: Would you like to rewrite this now, knowing what you do? Of course, but as someone said once, that would be confusing literature with journalism, wouldn’t it? Would I do it differently? You bet, but you can say that about almost anything, once you see it in print. I could rewrite this: better construction, some tightening, places to be more subtle, places not to. I know how to do all that stuff now, twenty-six years later.

But if I did, I don’t think it would be as good a story. I was writing then to show how much I liked all those people, and how many guts they’d made me bust over the years, and I think that comes through, and that’s what I wanted to say. So there.