Introduction: A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .

 

 

THIS ONE PRETTY MUCH SPEAKS FOR ITSELF, and is the interregnum between the movie and television sections. It’s about all the stuff movies (and TV and the whole rest of popular culture) do to people. Especially moi.

The article tells of my introduction to dating in those heady 1959/1960 days. I later got my first open-mouthed kiss during Pepé (1960) with Cantinflas. (I didn’t kiss him, but you know what I mean.) There’s no telling what I got a little later in the decade at drive-in screenings of Door-to-Door Maniac (1961, with Johnny Cash) or those Dusk-to-Dawn Bugaramas (Earth vs. the Spider 1958; Beginning of the End 1957; Tarantula 1955; The Deadly Mantis 1957) so beloved at showings in the mid-sixties.

Event Horizon was a Web magazine by a bunch of ex-pat Omni Online (I killed it—see the introduction to “Mr. Goober’s Show” in the Radio Pictures section following) alumni—the ones I know were Ellen Datlow and Rob Killheffer, but there were more. It was a virtual magazine that (which) printed my story “US” and an article called “Chani. And Me. And You.” about the effects of ’50s SF movies on me and friends of mine. (You won’t find it here, as you can find it there, archived and available [ed. note: http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine/commentary/waldrop/0599.html].) I then wrote the following article. Ellen, Rob, everyone else loved it, contracted for it, paid for it, then, like nearly all markets that have taken something from me, died. It’s never been published before. Here it is.

Two days before writing this intro (long after Dream Factories and Radio Pictures was contracted and paid for) I received a package; in it was a contract for “A Summer Place, On the Beach, Beyond the Sea . . .” from another e-publisher along with Lincoln and Jackson shaking hands (in other words, the ultimate compliment, money up front). I had to write a letter saying “Tough beans, kid,” and put the check back in the envelope. And sending it back, for only the second time in my thirty-one-year career . . .

I cried all the way to the Post Office.