azdak

In the way that one does on the internet, I recently stumbled across a video interview with Quentin Tarantino and Leo DiCaprio about Rick Dalton, the character DiCaprio plays in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. I don’t know much about Tarantino, my family having warned me off his films on the grounds that I’d find them too violent, so this was my first time seeing him and I was charmed by how delightfully nerdy he is – he went on and on about all the different 1950s and 60s TV Westerns he’d shown DiCaprio to give him a feel for the kind of actor Rick Dalton was, until apparently at some point DiCaprio said stop giving me information and give me something I can act (this made me laugh because as an aspiring director at drama school I had once been asked by the instructor who a particular character in a scene I was directing was, and I said, “He’s the personification of advanced capitalism!” “Well, yes”, said the instructor, “but how is the poor actor supposed to play that?”). Me and Quentin Tarantino, that makes two of us. Of course, the difference between me and Quentin is that I didn’t really have an answer back then (nowadays everyone would just say “Elon Musk!” and the problem would be solved), whereas Tarantino did; he came up with the actor Pete Duel from the series Alias Smith and Jones, because one of the other things Quentin Tarantino and I have in common is that we both really, really liked Pete Duel.

Alias Smith and Jones was a kids’ TV Western, which ran for three series – or, rather, ran for nearly two and then limped on for another half – between 1971 and 1973, about two big-name outlaws, Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry, who decide to go straight and then have to spend a year trying desperately to keep out of trouble, while still being wanted men, in order to convince the authorities that they deserve amnesty. It was a big hit, particularly in Britain where its popularity was such that when Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones of Not the Nine O’Clock News fame named their own comedy series Alas Smith and Jones, nobody batted an eyelid. I didn’t see Smith and Jones (of the Alias variety) when it was originally broadcast but at some point in my early teens I caught some of the reruns on the BBC and promptly developed some very intense fannish feelings for Pete Duel’s character, Hannibal Heyes. And then at some point I found out that Duel had killed himself. I remember having a very serious discussion with my friend Shari about why he might have done it. Shari, who clearly watched too much of the wrong kind of TV, thought it must have been over a woman, because what else could it be? – while I, an anti-romantic even in my early teens, was sure it couldn’t be that, but had no idea what else could have driven him to it.

Poor Pete Duel was something of a Richard Corey – he may not have been a banker’s only child, but he was good-looking and talented and came from a loving, wealthy family, and he was starring in a hugely popular TV series that looked likely to catapult him into major stardom. But shortly before reaching the end of the second series, an hour or so after midnight on December 31st 1971, he, like Richard Corey, put a bullet through his head.

Tarantino’s theory – based, as far as I can see, on a few interviews with castmates and family which mentioned that he was sometimes “kind of manic” on set, had a serious drinking problem and was depressed, is that Duel was suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder at a time when bipolar disorder wasn’t even a thing. Struggling with mood swings, and unaware that brain chemistry was the problem, not him, he self-medicated with alcohol. It was this that DiCaprio was able to seize on in creating Dalton, building it in as psychological subtext, although only the drinking problem is textual in the film.

Hollywood being what it was and is, Universal Studios dealt with the problem of their missing main actor by promptly recasting the character and having the cast and crew reshoot the episode, and all subsequent ones, without him, a strategy which was both mercenary and undoubtedly traumatising and which anyway failed to help, because audiences stayed away in droves. The death of Pete Duel hit a lot of the series’ young fans extremely hard. Tarantino says it was the first time he learned what the words “committed suicide” actually meant, and mentions that this was also true of 8-year-old Brad Pitt, who ran up to his bedroom to cry when he heard the news. Tarantino, Brad Pitt and me. That makes three of us.

Inspired by the interview, I went digging and discovered that all the episodes of Alias Smith and Jones (including the recast ones, which obviously are an abomination unto Nugget) are available on the Internet Archive, and so I sat myself down to watch the pilot. And my God, it was like pulling the handle on a time machine. Suddenly I was back in my mother’s tiny sitting room, glued to the TV, flooded with feelings I hadn’t felt in decades. That hat! The black cowboy hat with the leather band that he sometimes pushed jauntily right to the back of his head. The grey jacket, hanging from his shoulders in a way that somehow made him look oddly vulnerable. The neck scarf, the black gloves, the boots worn over his trousers (the costume designer should have won all the awards going just for the way she dressed Pete Duel; this, I thought in wonderment, this is what iconic means.) And that radiant smile, the mischief in those brown eyes, the kindness, the wonderful comic timing! It wasn’t just like being 13 again, I felt as if I was 13, as if all the intervening years had burned away and it was just me and Hannibal Heyes, the two of us against the world.

Nostalgia aside, the series is actually pretty good. It’s a lot of fun and there’s not a lot of real jeopardy. There are villains, but most people are nice and decent, and even hardened outlaws can be known for never having shot anybody in their lives. The comedy is well handled and there’s genuine chemistry between Heyes and Curry, who spark off each other in a way you can’t miss. The partnership is a brain-brawns combo, but not unsubtly done. Curry’s the uneducated one and the hot-head, so it’s lucky he’s also (currently, at least) the fastest gun in the West; Heyes is the schemer, the talker, the ray of sunshine who can pick locks and win poker games. Together, they’re quite extraordinarily charming little chaos gremlins, always in search of a quick buck and a cheap drink but constrained by their desperate desire for amnesty to stick to the right side of the law, even though fate keeps calling them to the wrong side.

It’s a kids’ show, so there’s not much violence by Western standards. People very rarely get killed, and if they do, they deserve it (with the wisdom of hindsight, this is a pretty funny moral message to send: “Hey, kids, don’t be a bully or you’ll end up being an innocent bystander killed by a ricocheting bullet!”) It’s also very white and very male-centric. I’m on episode 13 and I’ve yet to see a black person or a Native American who wasn’t a skeleton, and generally speaking only one woman per episode gets any lines. Often, that woman is the love interest (Curry, at least so far, is drawn to naïve 17-year-olds and prostitutes, but is equally nice to both, while Heyes has a weakness for clever, strong-willed women who genuinely fancy him but not as much as they fancy money). And yet, and yet… In a way you could say that the series is structured around a series of encounters with women, most of whom at least have an agenda of their own, often one that doesn’t quite align with Heyes and Curry’s. Most of them aren’t wet, and at least one of them is a prim little old lady who ends up with both the money and the love of the deputy sheriff.

And, of course, you can’t watch it now - knowing what happened to Pete Duel, knowing that he hated the show and never wanted to do it in the first place, that he wanted to do work that was genuine and meaningful, and ended up trapped by his own success in a cheap, lightweight entertainment property - without searching for some of that darkness in Heyes, for the moments when his unsinkable cheerfulness wavers and the despair shows through. It never does, though – I suppose that’s what fanfic is for.

Here’s Pete Duel in his iconic outfit, with his hat pushed back:





And for interested parties, here’s the interview with Tarantino (you can’t really say it’s with DiCaprio because he can hardly get a word in edgeways):

My sudden emergence from Dreamwidth retirement is thanks to a rewatch of 17 Moments of Spring, which led me to this 2014 newspaper interview with Leonid Bronevoy (aka Gestapo Müller) about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Given the current state of affairs in Russia, it is perhaps just as well for Bronevoy that he died in 2017.



"Everything that happened in the Soviet Union, even in the most terrible fairy tales, is a horrible, absurd, horror film that dragged on for 70 years: so heavy that we still haven't come away from watching it and can't get used to any other picture.

Just pay attention: how many people know about the atrocities in Stalin's camps, about the barges that were flooded with dissidents, about the shootings right at workplaces, about the millions of orphans - children of enemies of the people - and yet there are those who want to call Volgograd Stalingrad again, or go to the rallies of the Communist Party, which Yeltsin failed to ban only because vodka got in the way, and shout: "Stalin! Stalin!"

Fools, do you even know what you're shouting? I'll tell you a terrible thing: even Hitler is better than Stalin! Yes, yes, and although I hate Hitler, I respect him half a gram more, because at least he didn't touch his own Germans, but this fellow mowed down everyone: Ossetians, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians....

And decades later we have someone like Zyuganov, trying to prove to many millions of people that Stalin is more precious and valuable than Pushkin, because he did more ...

I wanted to be heard! It's not only necessary to remind ourselves how the system, which we still glorify and praise, poisoned people (at best - killed, at worst - forced others to kill), it is absolutely necessary! So that there's no going back to it, so that not even a single thought arises in anyone's head that it was good there, in that time! - Well, what can be good when half the country is in jail, and the other half are jailors?

By the way, those who were jailors are still alive - those who were in jail are almost extinct, but I, whose childhood was spoilt, whose birthplace - Kiev, the most beautiful of cities - was poisoned, and who have memories of how our family was scattered all over the Soviet Union (my father cut down trees in Kolyma, my mother wandered around towns and cities, and I wandered barefoot all over the place)*, have always said and will always say: don't you dare, don't you dare yearn for hell - you should remember good, not evil!

All our troubles, by the way, come from the fact that we do not remember the good. For example, what did those who fought get for this victory, who needs them as a result? Seven or 10 years ago on TV, a programme filmed in Russia and Germany showed an old front-line soldier lying without legs in a smoke-dirtied corner, with hideously ugly prosthetics lying around (who made them?), and then - Munich, a cosy house, flowerbeds, sandy paths... On one of them an old man is walking briskly to his Mercedes - a former Wehrmacht soldier: you can't tell that he's lost both of his legs! So who won, you ask, us or them?

Or our comrade Stalin and all the subsequent comrades and gentlemen, who absolutely do not care about the fact that people's health was ruined by the war, all so that they can now drive around in expensive cars and buy watches that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars?

During the war years, we, the ragged, hungry, louse-ridden, weak and wretched, were sheltered in the Central Asian republics. Uzbeks, Kazakhs and Tajiks took the evacuees into their homes and shared their last bite of food with them, and now in Moscow their children and grandchildren aren't considered human, and in Kiev, I'm sure, where they hardly ever see them, they sniff squeamishly and call them by this humiliating name "guest workers". And why don't Russians - I ask - pay back the "guest workers" for helping the evacuees, why don't they compensate them with money from the oil? Did they [the "guest workers"] not spend money on us then, or does anyone think that sweeping streets and plastering walls is the only thing these "guest workers" are good for? If so, then we, the victors, are no better than the Nazis who divided nations into superior and inferior ones - worthy children of the Father of the Nation, either way....

I have no right to give advice on how to live; after all, I don't know how myself. Anyone and everyone can reproach me with the fact that I received prizes, awards and titles in the USSR, that my father was one of the most cruel investigators of the Kiev OGPU, sadistically interrogating people, beating money and testimonies out of them... I can't change the path I've travelled or my biography, but I'm convinced that you can't go back to the past, and no order, no gain in the world is worth the price of a single tear from a person you've hurt.

I am grateful that I could speak out, and that I was heard, and if others hear and understand, it means that everything was not in vain - our meeting, our conversation, and life itself..."**

The interview is from the BULVAR GORDONA newspaper, No. 48 (500) December 2014, but I found it here on DW: https://systemity.dreamwidth.org/4420456.html (translated by DeepL and then tinkered with by me to make the English flow better).

* According to Wikipedia, Bronevoy and his mother were evacuated to Soviet Kazakhstan during the war; he subsequently went to drama school in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, so he knows what he's talking about when he mentions the kindness shown by the Central Asian Republics to evacuees. I can confirm via my Tajiki friend Akbar that Bronevoy is also correct when he describes the Russian treatment of guest workers from these countries.

** Wikipedia further informs me that "His [Bronevoy's] name appeared on a petition against the Russian annexation of Crimea. However, he told TASS that his name was placed without his permission, adding that he supported Vladimir Putin and Russian actions in Crimea." Obviously I'm not in a position to say which of these actions reflected Bronevoy's true feelings on the matter.

And finally, a picture of Bronevoy in his iconic role as Gruppenführer Müller of the Gestapo.

A while ago I realised that one reason why I find writing post-canon NiF fic so hard is that I'm only really interested if Mei Changsu is still alive. There are, of course, numerous excellent fix-it fics out there, but it seems like cheating to use someone else's idea, so here is my own explanation of how yet another branch in the many-legged trousers of time was opened up.


Title: The Care and Feeding of Snow Beetles
Fandom: Nirvana in Fire
Word Count: 3710
Location: AO3

I found out last night that legionseagle has died and these lines from Donne have been going round inside my head all day. Obviously, my sense of loss is nothing compared to the people who actually knew her. We were friends on Dreamwidth and I never met her in real life, or knew what she looked like, and I wasn’t entirely sure what her real name was. But I admired her enormously – her brilliance, her fierce intelligence, her fantastic fic – she was that rare beast, a fic writer who can not only write beautiful lines but also knows how to plot - and inextricably mixed in with all that, her courage, not only as a sailor (never in a million years would I wanted to face the hair-raising adventures she related so entertainingly), but in her online life, her willingness to put up a fight, to stand up to the scummier denizens of the internet and say what she believed without fear or favour.

For those of us who live part of our lives in fandom, a towering presence like legionseagle, who left her mark on every fandom she engaged with, plays a significant part in shaping our fannish world. I read a great deal of her fic (probably not all of it, she was an enviably prolific writer and her DW entries alone run to the hundreds), I even tread stories based in fandoms I wasn’t keen on. Harry Potter never caught my imagination, but I read all her LoPiverse stories because they were so damned well-written. Not only could she plot like a demon, she had an ear for a turn of phrase and psychological insight that could cut like a knife. Who cares if the original characters weren’t all that captivating when you’ve got that on offer? Sherlock was another fandom I never got into, despite watching some of the episodes, but I read every new volume in her Gondal saga which fused, amazingly, the Bronte children’s fantasy worlds with Sherlock. And why not? It was only one of the ways she broadened my fannish horizons, showed me the limitless possibilities of fic.

I watched my first ever k-drama because of the review she wrote of The King: Eternal Monarch, and my second, Hotel del Luna, for the same reason. When I discovered she was writing Nirvana in Fire fic, I was over the moon. A Long-Expected Party, co-written with caulkhead, will always hold a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf, it’s the kind of fic that makes you both giddy with delight to be reading something so utterly hilarious and wonderful and joyous, and at the same time plunges you into black despair because you know you’ll never write anything as good yourself.
And now, suddenly, she’s gone and there will no more fic, no more reviews, no more fists and feminism and rollicking sailing stories. And without her the world is so much drier a cinder.

This is niche interest, I know, but oh gosh, Kirill Gordeev and Drew Sarich in a concert version of "Die Schatten werden länger" from "Elisabeth" is not what I was expecting to find on Tumblr today. I really dislike the way the interaction between Death and Rudolph has to be staged in the musical theatre versions, so the concert-ness of this one is frankly an improvement, and boy, does it make a difference to have an actual star performing Rudolph, as opposed to the weedy and unattractive ones we usually get. The sound quality is sadly terrible, though.

In a Bridgerton-esque Central European country where the correct form of address for a baron is "Baron", would it be okay for the characters to address him as such in the English translation or would that make them sound like Americans who don't understand English titles? And specifically in a sex scene, does "Oh, Baron!" sound all right? (It's a screenplay that will be read by London-based producers).

The Story of Yanxi Palace is that rare beast, a historical c-drama that puts women, their lives and their relationships with other women front and centre and expects you to be interested.
( Read more... )

Great Nirvana in Fire vid here on AO3: Secret

I've been having trouble going to sleep recently and had the suspicion that it might have to do with watching k-dramas on my laptop shortly before bedtime. In the hope that reading wouldn't have this effect, I downloaded The Book of Koli onto my Kindle and started that instead. With the result that I was still reading at 1am. It's great to have found a book I can't put down but it wasn't actually the effect I was aiming for! Possibly struggling with something in Swedish would have a more soporific effect. But anyway, The Book of Koli: right up my alley, so heartfelt thanks to the poster who recced it.

In my last post asking for k- and c-drama recs, I mentioned a Taiwanese series I'd enjoyed called One Day or Some Day. It turns out the title is actually Some Day or One Day and whimsyful has a good, not-really-spoilery review here that explains why it appealed to me in when I was unable to do so myself. She also kindly provides a link in the comments to a very thoughtful blog post about the show https://invisibledragon.home.blog/2020/02/22/the-past-is-another-country-someday-one-day-episode-13/, although this IS spoilery and therefore should be saved till after watching.