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Ha-P 9T B-Day 4e!
Nov. 28th, 2006 08:12 pmI was a Monster Kid.
I may have somewhat of a reputation as a "serious" person and theatre artist now, a thoughtful, well-read (if not "intellectual") artsy-type, with a perhaps unusual penchant for VERY VERY LOUD rock and roll as my main eccentricity. But I was THAT kid.
I was the kid who lived for movies starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaneys Junior and Senior, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine, and, even more obscurely, Lionel Atwill, Max Schreck, Evelyn Ankers, and J. Carroll Naish. I was the kid who bought makeup kits and messed up my face with latex scars and foul-smelling fake blood, whose dad helped him cast a flat "Frankenstein Monster" head out of plaster (not "Frankenstein," he was the DOCTOR, dammit!) and built all the Aurora model kits of the Universal horror films with him. I was the kid with a Super-8 movie camera doing bad stop-motion imitations of The Blob with Play-Do, cans of "Slime," and Evel Knievel action figures. I was the kid who knew the names Ray Harryhausen and Eiji Tsuburaya (even if I couldn't pronounce them), and who sometimes wanted to be just like them when I grew up. And when not wanting to be them, who wanted to be another Lon Chaney (Junior or Senior), and play monsters in movies when I grew up, and who forced my bored kindergarten classmates to endlessly re-enact the movies I'd seen on TV over the weekend, with me as the starring monster. Which led directly, I think, to theatrical acting and directing today.
And it all started in one place . . .
Famous Monsters (or Famous Monsters of Filmland, sometimes) magazine, known to some of us kids as just FM. It was edited by Forrest J Ackerman (aka 4SJ or 4e, or Dr. Acula, or . . . ten million other nicknames/pseudonyms), who turned 90 years old this past Friday. Ray Young at FLICKHEAD hosted a Blog-a-thon in Forry's honor on that day, but my theatre commitments got in the way of being on time with anything then, and most of what I wanted to say has been said by other people in the Blog-a-thon (there were many of us Monster Kids, and we all grew up much the same). Still, as I wouldn't be who I am today, doing what I am today without them, I have to say a few things about 4SJ and FM. But just a few, and mostly about myself.
So check out the rest of the Blog-a-thon at the link above, and you can read more about Forry here.
And more about Famous Monsters here and here (this last including a wonderful gallery of all the covers of FM).
As for myself . . . as a small child, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I was poking through a pile of magazines in my grandparents' attic in Rye, NY -- probably ones that belonged to my dad or uncle from the previous decade, when the covers of two magazines caught my eye. One is above (issue #20, November, 1962), and this was the other one (#23, June, 1963):
Art by Basil Gogos on both, though I certainly didn't know that yet (didn't take long for that to sink in, though; his art was as much the look of FM as the distinctive logo). These two issues of Famous Monsters threw some kind of switch in me. I can't remember if I had any interest in monster movies before I saw these -- I think I was into Star Trek by that time, but maybe not -- but after reading these over and over again, monsters were all I thought about.
Luckily, at that time, monster movies were plentiful on the TV. Between the local NYC channels 5 (WNEW), 9 (WWOR), and 11 (WPIX), the back libraries of most studios were being run continually, and there was ALWAYS a classic horror/SF movie on SOMEWHERE, it seemed. I remember channel 9 had the RKO library and others, channel 11 the Universal films, and channel 5 a catchall of various oddities (I think they showed all the William Castle films, and things like The Manster and Frankenstein 1970, and maybe some Roger Corman films). The local ABC affiliate (channel 7) had most of the Hammer films, but unfortunately almost always aired them in the middle of the night, and I remember trying to stay up to watch Horror of Dracula several times and failing, and being sleepwalked off to bed by my great-grandma Duering around 3.00 am (I finally saw it when I was in my mid-20s and was horribly disappointed; the stills and descriptions in FM were much more exciting). Channel 7 did however frequently run Roger Corman's Vincent Price/Poe movies on their Monday through Friday 4.30 Movie show, so I got to see those many many times, running home from school to try and not miss a second.
Also, channel 13 (PBS) showed massive quantities of silent films, and I got to see Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Golem, Metropolis, and many many films starring Lon Chaney over and over again -- something that, judging from what others have said in their blogs, was not-too-common across the country at the time.
Soon after finding those two issues, I discovered that Famous Monsters was still in business, and I got my first new issue, #101, at the Post Stationary store (aka "Lou's" for its beloved owner) in Cos Cob, CT in late '73. And I got most of the issues from then on until it folded (in that incarnation) ten years later. And soon enough, not only was I learning about these monster movies, I was learning about the other people out there like me who loved these movies, and about Forrest J Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters, who WAS the magazine, whose personality infused every word of every article in it, and who seemed to be The King of Monster Movie Fans.
Ackerman was at the same time, even to me as a child, both a stodgy, square, horrible pun-pushing, old-fashioned big silly guy who could embarrass you, and a nutty, encouraging uncle who shared your interests and made you feel okay for liking these weird things that the other kids didn't. 4E lived in what appeared, from the photos he would publish, to be a magical house in "Horrorweird, Karloffornia," filled with a treasure trove of memorabilia from fantastic films of the past: models, costumes, props, makeup pieces, etc. from seemingly every horror/SF film ever made. And if you ever visited L.A., you could just give him a call (at MOON-FAN) and he'd show you around the place. He was somehow genial and goofy in his persona, but you also got how SERIOUSLY he took these genres that he loved, and I think this was a good introduction to the idea of taking the WORK seriously, but never taking yourself seriously -- a good way to try and maintain sanity when creating. He also made it seem perfectly alright for adults to take horror and science fiction seriously, which meant you could (and should) do the same as a child.
Luckily, as opposed again to some of what I read in other blogs, my parents and teachers were cool and encouraging with my interests (my folks were divorced by this point, but still, not differing on this with me), and I even attended the Famous Monsters Conventions in NYC in 1974 and 1975 (of which I have next to no memories). So, horror and "sci-fi" (a much-hated term coined by 4SJ) was pretty much my life for most of my childhood, until my dad sat me down one evening and made me watch Citizen Kane, and a whole new world opened up for me.
But while I went from wanting to be Lon Chaney Jr. to wanting to be Orson Welles (which I'm still working on), I was still the kid who went down to Lou's every month and bought the new issue of Famous Monsters. And I'm still the guy who can summon up the names in the credits for dozens of monster movies from memory (and who gets frustrated because it probably was once hundreds of movies, and I've lost so much of my personal database over the years). I'm still the guy who uses Ronald Stein's music from Roger Corman movies in my oh-so-"serious" plays for tense moments, and who used to show Super-8 movies behind a friend's band in the 90s, movies I still had (and still have) from ordering them from "Captain Company" in the back pages of FM, Castle Films abbreviated versions of the Lugosi Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Psycho, and Man-Made Monster (the latter being one of the first films I can remember seeing as a small child on channel 11).
I'm the guy who was a slightly-older kid in 1979 who went down to Lou's and got the new issue . . .
. . . took it home, and discovered I had won a short-short-story writing contest in the back, and there was my silly little story (which I was ashamed of even then, and NO I don't want to see it again, if you're tempted to find me a copy). The contest had given the first and last sentences of a story, and you had to fill in the middle (a technique I've wound up using quite a bit over the rest of my life, including on this blog entry). I was amused years later to see a photo of Forry and Stephen King together in an issue of the "new" Famous Monsters where Forry had dug out from his files a story little "Steve" King had sent Ackerman when King was 11 himself, and which 4e finally published -- in the photo, Forry is handing Stephen King a copy of the very issue in which my story appeared!
Silly as it was, seeing that story in print -- actually, more importantly, seeing MY NAME in print: "Ian W. Hill, age 11" in white on black Helvetica (and when DID I decide to use my middle initial, anyway?) -- somehow gave me the feeling that all my ego dreams of writing, acting, directing were POSSIBLE, could be achieved. Being in Famous Monsters meant something, some kind of approval, and gave me the feeling I could do it again, could actually make making things like this my whole life.
So happy 90th, 4e, and I hope you achieve your goal in being the George Burns of sci-fi and staying with us another 10 years at least! Someday I hope to shake your hand and thank you personally for my life. Everything I have in my life, everything I love, goes back to finding those two issues in the attic, and the encouragement that Famous Monsters and Forrest J Ackerman gave me to pursue what I loved. So here I am.
I'm a Monster Kid.
I may have somewhat of a reputation as a "serious" person and theatre artist now, a thoughtful, well-read (if not "intellectual") artsy-type, with a perhaps unusual penchant for VERY VERY LOUD rock and roll as my main eccentricity. But I was THAT kid.
I was the kid who lived for movies starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaneys Junior and Senior, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine, and, even more obscurely, Lionel Atwill, Max Schreck, Evelyn Ankers, and J. Carroll Naish. I was the kid who bought makeup kits and messed up my face with latex scars and foul-smelling fake blood, whose dad helped him cast a flat "Frankenstein Monster" head out of plaster (not "Frankenstein," he was the DOCTOR, dammit!) and built all the Aurora model kits of the Universal horror films with him. I was the kid with a Super-8 movie camera doing bad stop-motion imitations of The Blob with Play-Do, cans of "Slime," and Evel Knievel action figures. I was the kid who knew the names Ray Harryhausen and Eiji Tsuburaya (even if I couldn't pronounce them), and who sometimes wanted to be just like them when I grew up. And when not wanting to be them, who wanted to be another Lon Chaney (Junior or Senior), and play monsters in movies when I grew up, and who forced my bored kindergarten classmates to endlessly re-enact the movies I'd seen on TV over the weekend, with me as the starring monster. Which led directly, I think, to theatrical acting and directing today.
And it all started in one place . . .
Famous Monsters (or Famous Monsters of Filmland, sometimes) magazine, known to some of us kids as just FM. It was edited by Forrest J Ackerman (aka 4SJ or 4e, or Dr. Acula, or . . . ten million other nicknames/pseudonyms), who turned 90 years old this past Friday. Ray Young at FLICKHEAD hosted a Blog-a-thon in Forry's honor on that day, but my theatre commitments got in the way of being on time with anything then, and most of what I wanted to say has been said by other people in the Blog-a-thon (there were many of us Monster Kids, and we all grew up much the same). Still, as I wouldn't be who I am today, doing what I am today without them, I have to say a few things about 4SJ and FM. But just a few, and mostly about myself.
So check out the rest of the Blog-a-thon at the link above, and you can read more about Forry here.
And more about Famous Monsters here and here (this last including a wonderful gallery of all the covers of FM).
As for myself . . . as a small child, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I was poking through a pile of magazines in my grandparents' attic in Rye, NY -- probably ones that belonged to my dad or uncle from the previous decade, when the covers of two magazines caught my eye. One is above (issue #20, November, 1962), and this was the other one (#23, June, 1963):
Art by Basil Gogos on both, though I certainly didn't know that yet (didn't take long for that to sink in, though; his art was as much the look of FM as the distinctive logo). These two issues of Famous Monsters threw some kind of switch in me. I can't remember if I had any interest in monster movies before I saw these -- I think I was into Star Trek by that time, but maybe not -- but after reading these over and over again, monsters were all I thought about.
Luckily, at that time, monster movies were plentiful on the TV. Between the local NYC channels 5 (WNEW), 9 (WWOR), and 11 (WPIX), the back libraries of most studios were being run continually, and there was ALWAYS a classic horror/SF movie on SOMEWHERE, it seemed. I remember channel 9 had the RKO library and others, channel 11 the Universal films, and channel 5 a catchall of various oddities (I think they showed all the William Castle films, and things like The Manster and Frankenstein 1970, and maybe some Roger Corman films). The local ABC affiliate (channel 7) had most of the Hammer films, but unfortunately almost always aired them in the middle of the night, and I remember trying to stay up to watch Horror of Dracula several times and failing, and being sleepwalked off to bed by my great-grandma Duering around 3.00 am (I finally saw it when I was in my mid-20s and was horribly disappointed; the stills and descriptions in FM were much more exciting). Channel 7 did however frequently run Roger Corman's Vincent Price/Poe movies on their Monday through Friday 4.30 Movie show, so I got to see those many many times, running home from school to try and not miss a second.
Also, channel 13 (PBS) showed massive quantities of silent films, and I got to see Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Golem, Metropolis, and many many films starring Lon Chaney over and over again -- something that, judging from what others have said in their blogs, was not-too-common across the country at the time.
Soon after finding those two issues, I discovered that Famous Monsters was still in business, and I got my first new issue, #101, at the Post Stationary store (aka "Lou's" for its beloved owner) in Cos Cob, CT in late '73. And I got most of the issues from then on until it folded (in that incarnation) ten years later. And soon enough, not only was I learning about these monster movies, I was learning about the other people out there like me who loved these movies, and about Forrest J Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters, who WAS the magazine, whose personality infused every word of every article in it, and who seemed to be The King of Monster Movie Fans.
Ackerman was at the same time, even to me as a child, both a stodgy, square, horrible pun-pushing, old-fashioned big silly guy who could embarrass you, and a nutty, encouraging uncle who shared your interests and made you feel okay for liking these weird things that the other kids didn't. 4E lived in what appeared, from the photos he would publish, to be a magical house in "Horrorweird, Karloffornia," filled with a treasure trove of memorabilia from fantastic films of the past: models, costumes, props, makeup pieces, etc. from seemingly every horror/SF film ever made. And if you ever visited L.A., you could just give him a call (at MOON-FAN) and he'd show you around the place. He was somehow genial and goofy in his persona, but you also got how SERIOUSLY he took these genres that he loved, and I think this was a good introduction to the idea of taking the WORK seriously, but never taking yourself seriously -- a good way to try and maintain sanity when creating. He also made it seem perfectly alright for adults to take horror and science fiction seriously, which meant you could (and should) do the same as a child.
Luckily, as opposed again to some of what I read in other blogs, my parents and teachers were cool and encouraging with my interests (my folks were divorced by this point, but still, not differing on this with me), and I even attended the Famous Monsters Conventions in NYC in 1974 and 1975 (of which I have next to no memories). So, horror and "sci-fi" (a much-hated term coined by 4SJ) was pretty much my life for most of my childhood, until my dad sat me down one evening and made me watch Citizen Kane, and a whole new world opened up for me.
But while I went from wanting to be Lon Chaney Jr. to wanting to be Orson Welles (which I'm still working on), I was still the kid who went down to Lou's every month and bought the new issue of Famous Monsters. And I'm still the guy who can summon up the names in the credits for dozens of monster movies from memory (and who gets frustrated because it probably was once hundreds of movies, and I've lost so much of my personal database over the years). I'm still the guy who uses Ronald Stein's music from Roger Corman movies in my oh-so-"serious" plays for tense moments, and who used to show Super-8 movies behind a friend's band in the 90s, movies I still had (and still have) from ordering them from "Captain Company" in the back pages of FM, Castle Films abbreviated versions of the Lugosi Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Psycho, and Man-Made Monster (the latter being one of the first films I can remember seeing as a small child on channel 11).
I'm the guy who was a slightly-older kid in 1979 who went down to Lou's and got the new issue . . .
. . . took it home, and discovered I had won a short-short-story writing contest in the back, and there was my silly little story (which I was ashamed of even then, and NO I don't want to see it again, if you're tempted to find me a copy). The contest had given the first and last sentences of a story, and you had to fill in the middle (a technique I've wound up using quite a bit over the rest of my life, including on this blog entry). I was amused years later to see a photo of Forry and Stephen King together in an issue of the "new" Famous Monsters where Forry had dug out from his files a story little "Steve" King had sent Ackerman when King was 11 himself, and which 4e finally published -- in the photo, Forry is handing Stephen King a copy of the very issue in which my story appeared!
Silly as it was, seeing that story in print -- actually, more importantly, seeing MY NAME in print: "Ian W. Hill, age 11" in white on black Helvetica (and when DID I decide to use my middle initial, anyway?) -- somehow gave me the feeling that all my ego dreams of writing, acting, directing were POSSIBLE, could be achieved. Being in Famous Monsters meant something, some kind of approval, and gave me the feeling I could do it again, could actually make making things like this my whole life.
So happy 90th, 4e, and I hope you achieve your goal in being the George Burns of sci-fi and staying with us another 10 years at least! Someday I hope to shake your hand and thank you personally for my life. Everything I have in my life, everything I love, goes back to finding those two issues in the attic, and the encouragement that Famous Monsters and Forrest J Ackerman gave me to pursue what I loved. So here I am.
I'm a Monster Kid.
