Elegy for "Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide"

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal published my piece about the discontinuation of Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide after a run of 45 years. The book has been a part of my life since its first edition, so I thought it would be fitting to reflect on how the guide, the movies, and America have changed during those years. You can read the article by clicking here.

The Way Nostalgia Used to Be

Are people nostalgic anymore? Nostalgia was a big deal when I was growing up -- not just the nostalgia of older folks, but the peculiar second-hand nostalgia than their kids felt for cultural artifacts produced long before those kids were born. There was a boom in nostalgia books in the late Sixties and Seventies, with hefty volumes celebrating the movies, radio and TV shows, comics, and pulp magazines of the period spanning roughly from World War I to 1960; nearly every college kid had a poster of Humphrey Bogart on his or her dorm room wall, despite the actor's demise nearly twenty years before. Yes, one can find books and websites these days devoted to these cast-off but still-cherished products of mass culture, but it's somehow not the same. Nostalgia -- both the first- and second-hand kind -- just isn't what it used to be. 

Even old-timers are too busy trying to catch up with the iPhone 6 and the plethora of tech devices being released at a furious rate. Who wants to be caught dwelling on the past?  And folks under 30, or at least an awful lot of them, show little interest in the cultural world of last month let alone the last century. It's chic to be retro, but that's more about being hip than being nostalgic; it's a cool pose, not a passionate longing for things past. Even old movies in black-and-white have become a tough sell. Do kids collect stamps anymore?  And what about old magazines? People are increasingly less interested in new magazines. The ones printed on paper and bound with staples, I mean.  Remember those? Remember?

Well, that's the title of a book published in 1963, nearly a decade before the nostalgia boom really exploded.  Charles Beaumont's book Remember?  Remember? is subtitled "A Nostalgic Backward Glance at Some of Yesteryear's Most Beloved Features of Our National Profile," and that in itself suggests its age.  Can you imagine a book with a subtitle like that today?  It sounds so...quaint.  But the unabashed nostalgia of the author for the things that gave him joy in his youth is infectious but also a bit sad, since Beaumont was only in his early thirties when the book came out, and he'd been publishing the pieces (primarily in Playboy) for the previous four years.  His youth had barely been over before he was memorializing it.

Beaumont, for those of you who don't already know (and shame on you if you don't), was one of the preeminent American short-story writers of the 1950s and 60s, specializing in brilliant, chilling tales that encompassed nearly every genre -- suspense, mystery, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and even a "mainstream" novel, The Intruder, about a racist demagogue down South that was made into a film by Roger Corman and starring William Shatner.  It's one of those films inevitably called a "cult classic" and beloved by anyone who's seen it.  I doubt there's anyone reading this who hasn't seen some of Beaumont's superb teleplays for such TV anthology shows as The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Thriller, and, most significantly, The Twilight Zone, for which he wrote 22 episodes, more than any other writer except the show's creator, Rod Serling.  You've seen them, even if you don't remember the titles:  "The Howling Man," "Perchance to Dream," "Of Person or Persons Unknown,"  Once seen, they're never forgotten.

A man spends the night at a monastery where the monks have someone locked in a room whom they claim is the Devil; they warn the man not to let him out regardless of how much he howls to be released.  The captive pleads with him to realize the monks are crazy.  But are they?  A man sees a psychiatrist because there's an alluring woman in his recurring dream who's trying to kill him; if he goes to sleep again, he'll be dead.  But he has to fall asleep eventually. What should he do?  A man wakes up in his marital bed after a drunken party and his wife doesn't recognize him.  Neither does anyone at the place he works, and there's no trace of his identity in his wallet or the phone book.  Everyone assumes he's crazy, but we know he's not.  How does he prove he is whom he says he is?  Each of these stories places the protagonist in a situation where he's forced to judge what's real and what's illusion, and nobody can help him figure it out.  It's like being plucked out of your everyday life and dropped into a world where things seem superficially the same -- except they aren't.  Not unlike a man of thirty looking at the world of America in 1960 and vividly remembering the years of his youth, where everything was so different.

The very title Remember?  Remember? has the insistence of a man in a Twilight Zone episode grabbing you by the labels and begging with you, pleading with you, to remember.  Remember who he is.  Remember where he came from.  After all, it wasn't so long ago....

In fact, the world Beaumont wants his reader to remember -- America of the Depression years and World War II -- was not the stuff that dreams are made of.  In fact, it was a vast nightmare, playing out across much of the world.  But if you were an American kid living in a small town, you could ride out those years without much harm coming to you, and enjoy the cheap but potent pleasures the culture had to offer.  Beaumont devotes 13 loving chapters to each of them (and I have little doubt that the master of terror intended that number to be precisely 13). 

He remembers the great era of American holidays, before they were tamed and commercialized, when Halloween and Fourth of July and even Christmas celebrations were often crude, raucus, and an unsupervised bacchanal of delight; the traveling carnivals and amusement parks with their terrifying roller coasters and haunted houses; the drug store soda fountains where there were professional soda jerks who would make you the biggest and best banana split you could ever dream of; the great dramas and comedies of radio's Golden Age, featuring such stars as Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and written by radio scribes like Norman Corwin and Arch Oboler; the early, utterly anarchic slapstick comedies of Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin; the comic strips from the era when they were larger than strips of microfilm, like Krazy Kat and Terry and the Pirates; the movie serials like Flash Gordon and The Valley of Vanishing Men that thrilled kids every Saturday afternoon, one chapter at a time; the lavish movie palaces that convinced a patron that he'd entered the world of the Arabian Nights; the classic horror films of the Thirties and Forties like The Bride of Frankenstein and all her ghoulish cousins; the now-vanished pulp magazines ("The Bloody Pulps") like Doc Savage, The Shadow, Weird Tale, Black Mask, and Amazing Stories and scores of other titles that filled newsstands across the republic; and the great railroads and the luxurious trains like the Super Chief ("Lament for the High Iron") that dominated American life before cars, trucks, and planes turned them to scrap iron.  And there's a  poignant reminiscence of the one time he met Bela Luogsi in the actor's declining years, and how the man who'd mesmerized millions as Dracula yelled at Beaumont, "Don't hit the dog!  You fool!"  when the hapless writer came close to running over a pooch while driving Lugosi to a film studio to pitch a film (that never got made).  

In each chapter, Beaumont draws on his considerable talent for description and persuasion to convince us that these things are not simply the objects of one man's nostalgia, but intrinsically good, in fact better, than the tame substitutes available to the domesticated young of 1960.  Every page of his book communicates the utter joy these supposedly sub-cultural product gave him.  A joy and nostalgia shared by his contemporary and fellow Twilight Zone writers Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, and before them, Thomas Wolfe.  A joy that he found missing in the world in which he was writing.  

But did he have a point?  Were those comics, films, trains, holiday celebrations and pulp magazines demonstrably better than what came after?

Beaumont is fully aware of the perils of nostalgic reasoning.  Like the radio and pulp hero The Shadow, nostalgia has the power to cloud men's minds.  He revealingly writes in the opening of his book:

The rate of a person's descent into senility can be gauged, it's said, by the degree to which he reminisces.  If he harks back to the Good Old Days no more than a couple of dozen times a week, he is considered competent to function; if, however, he is a compulsive reminiscer, forever glorifying the past to the debasement of the present, he is patted on the head and fed soft foods.  Certainly he is not taken seriously.  Why should he be?  Old coots are the same everywhere.  Because they've survived the past, they love it, and because they're not at all certain they'll survive the present, they hate it.  Of course, that would not be their explanation of the value judgment.  to them, the world was indeed a better place when they were young.  The girls were prettier then, the men were stronger, the games wilder, the grass greener, the sun warmer, the stairs less, steep, and oh! if they could only go back.  But they can't, and that's a blessing, because they would find their world as dark and frightening and confusing as the children of today find theirs.

Beaumont concedes that the girls of today (1960) are as pretty as they've ever been.  He's not so sure about the rest.  And history in some respects has validated his feeling.  As early as 1949, James Agee was lamenting the lost world of silent comedy in his classic Life magazine piece, "Comedy's Greatest Era," and posterity has tended to agree with him; in 1963, Chaplin was still forbidden to return to the United States, which had revoked his visa eleven years earlier, with J. Edgar Hoover himself declaring Chaplin "perhaps the most dangerous man to American values alive today."  (The Little Fellow, dangerous!)  Halloween had become a mass industry by the 1960s, with tacky mass-produced "horror" costumes and parents cautiously following along after their kids as they went trick-or-treating.  The riot of pulp magazines had been reduced to a mere handful of science fiction and mystery titles, now digest size and with more tasteful covers.  Movie serials had died an unceremonious death in 1956, and television filled in the gap with shows that had were less thrilling but more campy.  Both comedy and horror were more domesticated -- America had become a cautious, status-conscious place.  Beaumont particularly regrets the loss of sheer hell-raising in American boys (he himself fled high school after two years), a wildness that he sees as natural and liberating, just as film critic Pauline Kael some years later saw trashy movies as liberating.  People had become just too damned well-behaved.  And air travel, even in the early 1960s, was no match for the comfortable, leisurely, train journey through America, your nose against the window, watching the small towns go by.  Imagine what Beaumont would think of planes today?

Okay, time for a reality check.  I wasn't alive during the years Beaumont writes so fondly of, but I have my own nostalgia to reckon with (and my second-hand nostalgia, which I'll get to in a bit).  True, air travel has become a tedious, tawdry ordeal; who wouldn't prefer to ride the Twentieth Century Limited from New York to Chicago, with club cars and a dining room and high-quality meals and drink to ease your trip across the land?  But people today are in a hurry, for better or worse, and people in a hurry don't want to travel thousands of miles on a train, however well-appointed.  The radio shows like Orson Welles Mercury Theater on the Air were undoubtedly great -- I've heard recordings of them; but Welles then went to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane, which is arguably even greater.  The louche carnivals of Beaumont's childhood have certainly been cleaned up and been replaced by Disney or Disney-fied versions, wholesome and clean and fit for the whole family.  But I defy anyone to tell me that the roller coasters of today are less scary than the ones of seventy years ago.  And if you still hanker for a ride on Coney Island's Cyclone, it's still there -- and scary enough for me, thank you.

True, the pulp magazines are gone, but they were replaced by paperbacks, which peddled much the same material (and often reprints of the work that originally appeared in the pulps).  Today the Library of America puts out expensive hardcover volumes on acid-free paper of the writings of such pulp-masters as H, P, Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, not to mention a recent two-volume set of science fiction novels of the 1950s.  And the remaining science fiction and mystery digests -- Analog, Asimov's, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock's and Ellery Queen's mystery magazines -- still soldier on, both in print and online, and the writing is top-notch.  If you don't believe me, check them out.

The great movie serials that Beaumont and many others loved so much are indeed gone, though some are available on DVDs.  Having seen some of them, I confess that they're not terribly well-done, though the kids who watched them as they jeered the villains and cheered on the heroes didn't especially care about mise-en-scene.  If you're looking for pure mindless action-adventure superhero movie entertainment, there's something of a Golden Age going on right this minute, if you don't mind all the CGI effects.  Judging from the box-office receipts, the audience doesn't mind at all.  Will people still remember and love these blockbusters thirty years from now?  I have my doubts, but then I'm not the target demographic for these films.  I wonder if I would have liked them when I was ten.  Probably.  But at ten I actually thought Tang tasted good.

The drug store soda fountains and their highly professional soda jerks?  Gone with the wind, and the "server" making you a triple-chocolate Rocky Road ice cream cone at Ben & Jerry's is no lifer -- he or she is just biding time until finishing high school or college or until that big audition comes in.  Yet the ice cream, even to my jaded palate, still tastes great.

The comic strip is not what it once was in its glory days, but in some ways what we have now is even better.  While the newspaper comic strip has continued to shrink in size so that dozens of strips can appear on a single page, comic art is flourishing elsewhere as never before.  Whole raft loads of graphic novels -- once called "underground comix" or "alternative comics" -- fill both the comics stores and mainstream bookstores, and there's more talent on display in every genre than a single person can possibly read.  Whether you go for Art Spiegelman's now-classic Maus, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, David (Ghost World) Clowes, Alison Bechtel, Roz Chast, the indefatigable R. Crumb, Love and Rockets, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, or the more mainstream superhero comics, there's no question that a writer and artist has infinitely more freedom to say and draw what would have been unthinkable, much less printable, in the good old days of the family comic strip.  Is the work better because of it?  Yes and no -- depending on your taste.  But there are treasures there to be found.

The loss of the movie palaces is harder to justify.  If you don't care to sit in one of the 24 theaters in your multiplex, even with stadium theater, having to listen to the booming soundtrack from both your screen and the theater next door (and that's just the trailers), you can go to an "art" theater in one of our large cities and take an escalator to the basement, walk through a maze of sterile walls until you find a tiny chamber with a screen smaller than your cell phone where your film will be digitally projected.  Enjoy the movie!  If you wish to get a taste of what you're missing, check out the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, one of the last of the grand movie palaces Beaumont writes about in his book, and watch a classic like Lawrence of Arabia as you're surrounded by Middle Eastern castle turrets, an artificial night sky bejeweled with stars overhead, and a (mostly) unused organ from the 1920s just below the stage, for the happy occasions when a silent film is shown.  And during intermission, be sure to spend some time in the ladies' powder room (if you're a lady) and the men's smoking room (if you're a man, and smoking), as well as stroll by the fountains and Baroque architecture festooning the rooms of this amazing place, and you'll say, "By God, Beaumont was right."

Now here's the kicker that I alluded to before.  When the nostalgia craze was in full flower in the early Seventies, countless kids (including this writer) discovered the comics and pulp magazines and radio dramas and movies of that fabled time years before we were born.  We watched the films on our portable bedroom TVs or even projected 8mm prints of them on our walls late at night when we were supposed to be sleeping; we collected records or cassettes of the old radio shows and bought coffee table books filled with reprints of the old comic strips; we went to the science fiction conventions and actually met and talked to the stars and writers and creators of those old movies and comics and pulp stories.  And when we compared their work to the stuff being produced at the time, we couldn't help feeling that the older works were the real gold.  Even the scent of those browning, flaking pulp magazines seemed like a rare perfume, inviting us to voyage back to a more vigorous creative era.  To this day, the EC comics of the early-50s are seen as nearly matchless in their writing and artwork, and sell for appropriately large amounts on eBay.  Just owning one of them was like having a piece of the Golden Age in your hands.  That's second-hand nostalgia, and while it may not be as pure as Beaumont's first-hand kind, it was heady enough.

Ironically, even as he was eulogizing the past, Beaumont was busy creating some of the great pleasures of his present, which provide nostalgia for some people today.  His stories appeared in both Playboy and the digest science fiction and mystery magazines; his teleplays scared the hell out of millions of not-so-innocent viewers; and he wrote some of the splendid American-International horror films of the early Sixties that usually starred Vincent Price.  But life was crueler to Charles Beaumont than anything Vincent Price ever dished out to his movie victims.  At the age of 34, writing feverishly, with a wife and children and a home in North Hollywood, he suddenly came down with what doctors diagnosed as either the result of a childhood bout of spinal meningitis, or Alzheimer's or Pick's Disease, or a combination of all three.  Whatever the cause, he aged incredibly fast, and looked like a man of ninety-five when he died in 1967 at the preposterously young age of 38 -- just before the nostalgia craze, which he anticipated and brilliantly contributed to, swept the culture.

It's impossible not to think of the scene at the end of one his best Twilight Zone episodes, "Long Live Walter Jamison," when the eponymous hero, who has remained the same early-middle age for thousands of years thanks to the potion of an ancient Egyptian sorcerer, is confronted by one of his ex-wives -- now old and vengeful -- who shoots him in his study shortly after his engagement to (yet another) young woman.  Jamison, played to perfection by Kevin McCarthy, reverts to his true, ancient age in less than a minute, eventually becoming a pile of bones and then dust.  

It was a strange life.  A rowdy, ecstatic boyhood, a brief but highly accomplished adulthood accompanied by deep pangs of nostalgia for that vanished youth, and an early, terrible death.  It's a story Charles Beaumont might have written himself.