Critic's Cherce.

Another rave review has appeared on the Tallyho, Tallulah! Amazon page, this time by Dylan Brody. A second rave. Dylan is, as I was, a scribe at The Huffington Post. His Huff Po writer's profile says:

"Dylan Brody writes and performs humorous short stories and whimsical essays in venues around L.A. and across the country. A thrice-published author and award-winning playwright, he has performed stand-up comedy on A & E's Comedy On the Road and Fox TV's Comedy Express and recently was honored to present a story at the New York Public Library's Tribute to George Carlin, hosted by Whoopi Goldberg. Mr Brody's CDs Brevity and True Enough are available through Amazon.com and iTunes. He lives in Sylmar, CA, a location he describes as 'crap neighborhood adjacent.'"

Here's What Dylan had to say about my new tome:

5.0 out of 5 stars.
"You know what? Make it a double."
By Dylan Brody

There's a particular type of boozy-broad snark that has been emulated for years by gay men. I have never fully understood the allure for some men of imitating a sedated and inappropriate aging Judy Garland or a gin-addled Dorothy Parker, frankly, but the impulse is clearly there and for many the attitude and snideness serve as a crutch for an inadequate wit.

Douglas McEwan does not adopt this persona, from what I can tell, as compensation for a lack. Rather, Tallulah Morehead, drunken, aging, Hollywood sexpot, serves as a vehicle for a wit that I found myself wanting to hear beyond her recognizable voice. Tallyho Tallulah, McEwan's second turn with the character (I haven't read the first), had me laughing from the introduction. Once the story was underway it held me, grinning and chuckling throughout.

The delightful debauchery of this tale of self-importance in the world of summer stock puts camp on the page so exquisitely that one can nearly smell the vodka in the printer's ink. If text can slur languidly, Douglas McEwan has figured out how to make it happen.

Do yourself a favor. Read this book. With a drink in one hand and a hot young pool boy in the other.

What excellent advice, even if he's fallen for the myth that Dougie wrote the whole book and that I am some sort of fictional character, just because that's what the book says. (My publisher's lawyers felt they had to allege that I don't actually exist so that I can't sue myself. Lawyers.) I wrote it with a drink in one hand and Eduardo, my gardener's son, in the other. Little Dougie did all the typing. Incidentally, if you opt for one of the less-expensive ebook formats, Kindle, Nook, iBook, you can eSmell the eVodka.

I should be back in a day or so, reviewing The Hobbit. I can tell you, Peter Jackson would like my review of it. Cheers, darlings.

The "Wisdom" of the Wrong-Wing.

America's Bane at Bain.

How lucky are we that the Republicans lost the election? Well look at the crap that pours from their mouths.

"Hello. I am extremely stupid and enormously ignorant. Vote for me!"

“…the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more.”
~ Michele Bachmann, Speaking to Iowans For [Rich People's] Tax Relief about the framers of the Constitution, who fought that Revolutionary War to free the slaves. Not THEIR slaves, of course. Jefferson kept his slaves until he died, but you know, they were all for Freedom --- for land-owning white males.

Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
~ Rep. Michelle Bachmann. So let's lock her in a room and pump it full of CO2. After all, it's not harmful.

"I'm rich! You're not! HA-ha!"

"Corporations are people, my friend… of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets. Human beings, my friend.”
~ GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. He means specifically HIS pockets, as though he were human.

“Exercise freaks … are the ones putting stress on the health care system.”
~ Rush Limbaugh, fat drug addict.

Mr. Health.
"Drug users not named 'Limbaugh' should all go to prison!"

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”
~ George W. Bush. Ignoring for a moment "Families is" rather than "Families are" from an alleged Yale graduate, don't you love it when Wings take Dream? (Is that what Wings took? Let's ask Sir Paul.)

“From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”
~ Texas Governor Rick Perry, on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in 2010, explaining why he worships BP as "God."

"I may be an asshole but at least I'm stupid."

Go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant — they’re quite clear — that we would create law based on the God of the bible and the Ten Commandments.”
~ Sarah Palin. Do you think she just believes that since she never read The First Amendment (or anything else), no one has? She was right about one thing here though, the Founding Fathers were "quite clear" on the matter.

“Grown men should not be having sex with prostitutes unless they are married to them.”
~ Jerry Falwell. So unless you're a teenager (Or a TV evangelist), if you want to patronize a hooker, divorce your wife and marry the whore, or just screw a free slut. At least he's now okay with wives having jobs.

“I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy — but that could change.”
~ Dan Quayle. Yup, especially if we elect Republicans.

“I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”
~ Mitt Romney, who earned $374,000 in speaking fees in one year according to his personal financial disclosure. In his defense; $374,000 is Mitt's idea of "not very much money."

"We're against gay marriage also. We're douchebags."

"I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.”
~ Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle, proposing the murder of Senator Harry Ried in a radio interview. This is what is called a "crime".

  “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”
~ George W. Bush. Well, the little buggars won't hold still while he spreads the peanut butter on them.

“I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.”
~ Dan Quayle. Certainly he needed to study something harder in school. The Republicans thought he should be president.

"If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president.” ~ Ann Coulter. How about we meet her halfway, and just not let Ann Coulter vote?

Ann Coulter's Driver's License photo.

  “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.”

~ South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, explaining why his state's poor residents should just be allowed to starve to death. This what they're talking about when they say "Compassionate Conservative." (A Compassionate Conservative is one who feels the super-rich's pain.)

“Our nation was founded on violence. The option is on the table. I don’t think that we should ever remove anything from the table as it relates to our liberties and our freedoms.”
~ Teabagger-backed Texas GOP congressional candidate Stephen Broden, suggesting the violent overthrow of the U.S. government if Republicans don’t win at the ballot box, interview with Dallas’s WFAA-TV, Oct. 21, 2010. The common term for this is "Sore Loser." The legal term for this is "Treason Against the United States of America."

"'Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up.’ English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!’”
~ Sarah Palin on why she's like Shakespeare. Let's lock her in one room and lock 1000 monkeys in another room, and see which writes Hamlet first. My money is on the monkeys.

“She’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President. And besides, she has cancer.”
~ Newt Gingrich being "presidential" about his then-wife. He's so right. First Ladies are required by The Constitution to be hot. Just ask Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Bush.

People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive for 1941.

  “The Federal Department of Education should be eliminated. The Department of Education is unconstitutional and should not be involved in education, at any level.”
~ Sharron Angle, July 12, 2010, who clearly has never been involved in education at any level, especially "receiving."

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
~ Pat Robertson. Damn! He's seen through our clever ploy! DOH!

“The only way to reduce the number of nuclear weapons is to use them.”
~ Rush Limbaugh. Volunteering to be a target, Rush? (He's never heard of "disassembling"?)

Rush Limbaugh on disarmament.

“There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.”
~ Michele Bachmann. Sadly, none of them have names. And the ones holding Nobel Prizes had to give them back to the actual scientists they belonged to when they came back to the table from the washroom. She doesn't seem to grasp what a "scientist" is. Michele, your pastor is not a "scientist."

"These are beautiful properties, with basketball courts, bathroom facilities, toilet facilities. Many young people would love to get the hell out of cities”
~ Carl Paladino on housing poor people in prisons. No, prisons are too nice for poor people. Let's house Republicans in them.

The Republican Social Safety Net.

"They [Republicans] say, ‘You’re too conservative.’ Was Thomas Jefferson too conservative?"
~ Nevada GOP and Teabagger favorite Sharron Angle, March 21, 2010. No, Sharon, Thomas Jefferson was not "too conservative." He was a liberal. Just ask King George III.

"I'm tired of some people calling me wacky."
~ Teabagger heartthrob Sharron Angle, also on March 21, 2010. Then I suggest she shut up.

“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles.”
~ Ronald Reagan, who stands by his words, and has refused to breathe that poison Oxygen for years now.

Friggin' Polluter!

“We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.”
~ Senile old man John McCain. The "Situation" being that there is no "Iraq-Pakistan border."

Pakistan? Hello, Pakistan? Where are you? I see Mordor, but not Pakistan.

“We need to execute people like (John Walker Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals.”
~ Ann Coulter. The sole good thing about Ann Coulter is that she's such an OPEN thug. She celebrates her own being subhuman.

"Evil? Moi?"

“Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.”
~ "President" George W. Bush. Is Africa's "incredible" disease "incontinence"? Because it's a continent.

“What people recognize is that there’s a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.”
~ Michele Bachmann, apparently unaware that the Soviet Union collapsed more than two decades ago. And something must be done to stop that Austro-Hungarian Empire! And those Etruscans will be trouble one day also!

Pound-Foolish, the Lying Clown.

Well, they lost. Why not celebrate with a nice new copy of Tallyho, Tallulah!? The perfect stocking stuffer. Cheers, darlings.

Fan Male, Not From a Flounder.

Barry skipped out early from his election victory party for the more-important publication party for Tallyho, Tallulah!
Honest.

This Reader Review, apparently written by a man of taste and perception (Though he seems to think that Little Dougie dreams up my adventures. I'd assure you this "novel" is true except I don't remember these events happening, but they're, you know, true-ish), has appeared on the Amazon.com page for the ebook of Tallyho, Tallulah! Enjoy, and thank you, Mr. Petretti.

5.0 out of 5 stars Tallulah's Back! November 24, 2012


By Robert Petretti

Format:Paperback



"Tallyho, Tallulah" is the second of Douglas McEwan's books to feature the irrepressibly hilarious movie "legend" Tallulah Morehead. Although the vodka-marinated Morehead had claimed in her autobiography, "My Lush Life" that she had no recollection of the 1970s, the timely discovery of her lost journal from the summer of 1974 documents that she was indeed on the move during at least part of that fashion-deprived decade - even if she wasn't totally conscious at the time. "Tallyho, Tallulah" chronicles the further adventures of this sloshed Old Hollywood siren as she descends on the unsuspecting California community of Alta Caca to claim her rightful place as THE star of that town's summer stock production of "BJ!" (a musical based on "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?") Between stage rehearsals with an obnoxious co-diva, teaching an "actor's workshop", and engaging in near-constant sex with hot young hunks, Tallulah wields her rapier wit to make mincemeat out of an assortment of Alta Caca's fools, hypocrites, and phonies - emerging triumphant from every encounter as only a TRUE star can. Those lucky enough to be tolerated - even liked - by this self-proclaimed enchantress soon find their lives turned every which way but routine - and (almost) always for the better. Blackmail, murder, forbidden love, one-way mirrors and an undiscovered Native American tribe are among the mysteries and intrigues pervading Alta Caca - until Tallulah arrives to act as catalyst for a summer no one would soon forget (except Tallulah).

"My Lush Life" was so rich with exploits that its readers might think Morehead had said it all; what a delight that McEwan has mined a new story that stands completely on its own. There are terrific laughs throughout - among my favorites is the kicking scene in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" reimagined as a choreographed musical number - and the author keeps the action moving at a brisk pace while presenting us with a number of comic characters.

If you relish intelligent, campy humor laced with a healthy dose of raunchiness, you'll thoroughly enjoy Douglas McEwan's "Tallyho, Tallulah". And if you haven't yet read "My Lush Life", pick that up too for a double treat.  


That was wholly unsolicited, which is why the judge had to drop all charges - again!   Cheers darlings

See you at The Hobbit: The Long-Expected Prequel. But hands off Gollum! He's mine! My own!
My preciousss....

Moby's Dick

A Whale of a tale.

Last night I watched the movie of Moby Dick. No, I do not mean the relatively faithful John Huston-Ray Bradbury film with a miscast Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. (To be fair, when wasn't Gregory Peck miscast?)

If only the whale in the movie looked anywhere near as exciting as the one in this highly-deceptive poster. Actually, sharks evolved LONG before whales did.

Nor do I mean the very faithful TV mini-series of a few years back with Sir Patrick Stewart as Ahab. Not even that peculiar shark version Spielberg made with Robert Shaw as Ahab, and the whale turned into a great white shark. (Which at least was white.) No, what I saw was my old friend John Barrymore's 1930 movie of Moby Dick, which was a remake of his silent version, titled The Sea Beast. (How close a friend was John Barrymore, my old drinking and shagging buddy? Well, he INSISTED on writing the forward for My Lush Life despite the fact that he had died 60 years before it came out. That is devotion! BTW, John Barrymore's dying on my birthday was not a coincidence. He did that to honor me!)

You would think Herman Melville might have objected to his billing requiring an electron microscope to read, but frankly, any inference that Herman Mellville wrote this movie is a black, black lie.

The first indication that any resemblance between this movie and the novel by Hermie Melville was unintended was in the opening credits, with  that billing for lovely Joan Bennett. She gets second billing. The number of women in the book is zero.

The second indication was also in the opening credits, in the cast list. Conspicuous by its absence from the list of characters was the name Ishmael. Clearly no one was going to speak the words "Call me Ishmael," the wonderful opening sentence of the book which carries the hint that "Ishmael" really had some other actual name but was writing under pseudonym, and given he's in bed with a naked Queequeg before chapter 3 concludes, one can understand why. In fact, Chapter 4 opens with: "Upon waking next morning about daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife." High schools teaching Moby Dick in Little Dougie's high school days sort of ignored this sort of thing in the book, instead drawing attention to admittedly great passages like: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off —then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Yeah, yeah. Blah, blah, blah. Let's get back to the mansex with the huge black sex god.

(The book is astoundingly full of homosexuality, given that it's a mid-19th Century American novel. Oh Melville tries to pretend he's agin it with such passages as: "No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply." Yeah sure, Herman. Pull the other one. Chapter 3 also contains this pearl of wisdom: "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." I might add that drunken Christian cannibals are the worst! Anyway, I'm drunk enough for two, not a Christian, and have eaten more men than most of the cannibals you meet on a daily basis.)

More proof that this is not going to be Melville's Moby Dick comes in the opening sequence, when a ship, and one NOT named "The Pequod" ("The Pequod" is not used as a name for any ship in the entire movie. It's like filming 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with Captain Nemo sailing about in a submarine named "The Good Ship Lollipop"), sails into New Bedford, and there's Ahab, aloft in the crow's nest, doing handstands to impress the ladies. Hardly Melville's obsessed, anti-social grump. Within a second or two of Barrymore beginning his handstands you also notice that he's got two legs. In fact, being Jack Barrymore, three legs. And none of those legs are wooden, even if he has wood in the center leg. No ivory either.

Who is this guy? Barrymore spends the first third of the film playing a constantly drunken womanizer with roguish charm. This performance has nothing to do with being Ahab and everything to do with being John Barrymore. Mind you, John Barrymore was a lot more fun to spend an evening with than Melville's Ahab ever was, but still, turning the first third of Moby Dick into a romantic comedy about a drunken harpooner (He's not even a Captain!) accidentally causing his brother's girl friend to fall in love with him is a peculiar choice, to say the least. I dread to think what Jack might have done to Billy Budd.

John Barrymore shows adorable Joan Bennett his enormous harpoon, much to his charmless brother's displeasure.

Finally, about a third of the way into the picture, Barrymore meets Moby Dick, whom we are repeatedly told is a white whale despite our eyes showing us a black whale, and Johnny gets his leg bitten off, though fortunately not his middle one. Apparently someone at Warner Brothers decided that Melville's 900 page novel was insufficient to fill out the full running time of a 75 minute movie, so they decided to fill out the skimpy storyline with Ahab's backstory, and to make it funny. Yes, when you see the name "Herman Melville," your first thought is always "Rollicking romantic comedy."

Herman Melville, 19th Century America's favorite comedy writer, the Patrick Dennis of whaling.

Apparently Moby Dick haunts the waters off of Los Angeles, because the unmistakable silhouette of Catalina Island dominates the background of the rather impressively rousing (for a film from 1930) and scary sequence of Jack's leg getting munched off by something whaleish. (One expects Moby to cough up Pinocchio at any moment.) Little Dougie spent his boyhood able to see Catalina from his backyard, and it's not something he's likely to mis-identify.

But this is capped by the convincingly hideous sequence where Ahab's leg stump is cauterized by a white hot iron. That puts a severe end to the comedy in the movie. For a few seconds we are reminded that Barrymore was a great dramatic actor.

Barrymore returns to his pretty blond fiancee in New Bedford, and she takes one look at his stump and shrieks and runs away. He doesn't take this well. She realizes what a ninny she's being. The important leg is still there, after all, and she can be on top. She's refused permission to come aboard so she sends Ahab's brother, her ex-boyfriend, to tender her apologies and assure him that she still loves him. Bad move. He, naturally, tells his brother that she now finds him repulsive and never wants to see him again. Heartbroken, Barrymore returns to sea, now with a grudge against Moby Dick for costing him his girl friend. Melville omitted this romantic motivation from his novel. He just has Ahab raging against the white whale as though raging against a silent God who abandoned his creations to chaos. How much simpler for Ahab to be pissed about losing a girl instead. How much richer this simplistic, hackneyed motivation is than a man raging against the universe itself.

Eventually, Ahab buys a ship, the Santa Maria (I guess at a Columbus Day sale), and becomes a captain. Then he returns to New Bedford again, has his first mate Stubbs (Played by the pug-faced Walter Long, who is best remembered for menacing Laurel & Hardy in Pardon Us) shanghai a crew (Silly old Ahab in the novel takes the boringly cliched approach of hiring a crew), and sets sail in search of Moby Dick. Finally, 59 minutes into a 75 minute movie, we've caught up to the beginning of the mammoth novel now to be squeezed into the remaining 16 minutes.

The "Auntie Mame" of 1851.

The movie, needing now to streamline Melville's novella down a bit, omits a few (all) of the incidents it has between Chapter 1 and Chapter 134. The crew is so grotesquely depraved-looking (And everyone is maimed in one way or another. One guy has only one arm, and that arm has a hook instead of a hand. How much of a help can he be at sailing and whaling?) that they make the villains' crews in the Johnny Depp Pirates of the Caribbean movies look like the Radio City Rockettes. Rather than New Bedford, it looks as though he shanghaied his crew from the island of Dr. Moreau.

The crew kinda mutiny, except the whale shows up and distracts them. During a very impressive storm, Ahab's brother, who got shanghaied with the others, tries to kill Ahab and gets his back broken by Queequeg. (Though he doesn't die.)

Shortly they are in the south pacific chasing a whale we are told is white no matter what our lying eyes are seeing. Fortunately, there is now little left of the book for them to mutilate. But that was a challenge they were up to. Ahab climbs up on Moby Dick's back, plunges his harpoon into M. Dick repeatedly (So at least a little of the homosexuality the book is flooded with makes its way in, albeit, solely symbolically), and --- Moby Dick dies! And there's more.

Aboard the Not-Pequod are Noble Johnson as Queeqeg, Barrymore as Ahab, and Walter Long as Stubbs. Wouldn't Stubbs be a better name for Ahab? Who can forget Mellville's description of Captain Ahab? "He had the most striking and handsome profile in all of New England." No wait. I wrote that.

We get stock footage of actual whalers actually skinning an actual whale, and some other equally stomach-churning parts of the slicing-up-beautiful-whales aspect of the revolting pastime that is whaling, which I'd be okay with if it had been put in for the purpose of reminding us how disgusting whaling is, only it isn't. Since this film was made in 1930, there wasn't any sound stock footage of whaling then, so we get footage shot at 16 frames per second now shown at 24 frames per second, thus showing us very hurried whalers skinning whales at a hell of a clip.

But no sooner than they finish showing us a whale being butchered, they finish the job of butchering the novel. The Santa Maria returns to New Bedford intact, the crew alive and as well as this grotesque bunch can ever be, Ahab reunites with Joan Bennett and they marry and live happily ever after. Yes, they give Moby Dick, a novel whose epilogue is titled "And I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee", and which ends with every major character and most of the minor ones dead except for Ishmael and the whale, a happy ending! I was reminded of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 9-hour stage adaptation of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby where the Vincent Crummles theatrical company present Romeo & Juliet with an intentionally hilarious happy ending.

This comic book is a more recognizable adaptation of Mellville's novel.
At least the whale IS white.

What we wanted going in to a sound film of Moby Dick and did not get was the great actor John Barrymore bellowing out Melville's great dialogue like: "To the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!" Talk about a missed opportunity! At the end of Moby Dick, one should not be thinking "How silly," or "What the hell was that?"

One aspect I rather did like, besides the always-enjoyable experience of watching John Barrymore act for 75 minutes, was the performance of Noble Johnson as a remarkably authentic Queequeg.

In a hand-colored lobby card, Barrymore's Ahab glares at Queequeg's pagan idol, which excites the heck out of QQ, as played by Noble Johnson.

Noble Johnson, who had one, was a great man, and a fine actor, not something you'd readily notice watching him play the native chief who sacrificed Fay Wray in King King or the zombie menacing Bob Hope in The Ghost Busters, but this was a remarkable man. Hollywood had boring ideas about how to cast him, or indeed any great black actor in those days. They managed to get it into their heads that Paul Robeson was great enough to deserve star treatment and actually have roles tailored to him, but not Noble, so we never got Noble Johnson's Othello. 

Noble Johnson in King Kong.

For a while, Noble was a film mogul himself, having founded and run the first all-black film studio, The Lincoln Motion Picture Company, founded in 1916, turning out all-black movies with all-black casts for black audiences, where black characters could be more than just maids, butlers, slaves, and bug-eyed comic relief, and have some human dignity, and lives that were seen for themselves and not just as adjuncts to their white masters. The studio only lasted until 1921.

Noble Johnson in Karloff's The Mummy.

An impressively built man (He was 6'2" and weighed 215 pounds), he was a personal friend for many years of both Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff. He lived to be 92. A biography of this amazing man is sorely needed. His place in black motion picture history is unique.

Noble Johnson in, oh my Dog, whiteface, shows Joel McRae to his room, past a tapisitry depicting the scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix where Delores Umbridge is raped by the centaur Firenze, in Merien C. Cooper's The Most Dangerous Game. One hopes he said: "Stay close to the candles; the staircase can be treacherous."

Noble's Queequeg is pretty much the only character in the film who seems to have emerged from the pages of Melville's novel, but even he gets cheered up. His whole premonition of death and building himself a coffin subplot is gone, but then, since the Santa Maria never sinks and there is no Ishmael, Ishy doesn't need Queequeg's coffin to keep him afloat, plus, Queequeg doesn't die, but lives happily ever after.

One author obsessed with Moby Dick was the late Ray Bradbury. He wrote the screenplay for John Huston's ambitious, miscast film of the book, and became unable to let it go. In a somewhat strange essay he wrote called The Whale, The Whim, and I, in which he discusses his approach to adapting this difficult book, Bradbury writes of looking in a mirror and believing himself possessed by Melville. "'I,' I cried, 'am Herman Melville!'" One needs only to make a brief look at Bradbury's unmistakable prose style, and then at Melville's overwhelmingly different style to see that Bradbury was not Melville ghost in Ray's body. In another quite peculiar, if more sane, essay, The Ardent Blasphemers, Ray sees enormous similarities, both of plot and of theme, though of quite contrasting approaches, in Melville's Moby Dick and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. To him, Nemo is another Ahab (That idea is far from deranged) but one who chose not to kill the whale, but to inhabit it instead. The essay is worth seeking out.

Doesn't it scream "Melville"?

But Ray could never let it go, and became determined to rewrite Moby Dick (I was unaware it needed rewriting) as a science fiction story set in outer space, with a comet replacing the whale. He wrote it as a radio drama titled Leviathan '99, and it was produced on the BBC with Sir Christopher Lee as Ahab. Now that I would like to hear! (Apparently a recording of the one-hour 1968 radio drama survives.) Still not satisfied, he rewrote it, doubled its length, and produced it as a stage play in Hollywood in 1972. I wish I'd known then, as I would have liked to have seen it. He admitted that the extra length killed it, and it received blistering reviews. He staged it several more times, always refining the script but never happy with it. Ironically enough, Leviathan '99 became Ray's white whale he could never quite capture and kill. However, he eventually adapted it as a novella, still titled Leviathan '99, and published it in 2007 with another, quite different novella, Somewhere a Band is Playing, in a volume titled Now And Forever, which is readily available. I haven't read Leviathan '99, but Now And Forever sits beside me here in my "Waiting To Be Read" stack, and I expect to get to it soon, sooner for having written this piece.

This pocket book is readily available.

However, Ray failed to notice that during the over-40 years that he wrestled with Leviathan '99, someone else, namely Nicholas Meyer, adapted Moby Dick as a science fiction story set in outer space, calling it Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, with Kahn, as overplayed by Ricardo Montalban, as Ahab, and Captain Kirk, as overplayed by William Shatner (Who most certainly IS white!), as his white whale. Even though Montalban actually got to deliver some of Melville's dialogue this time out, Ray may still have missed that it was really Moby Dick (Many missed this aspect of it) since they took the unique approach of telling the story this time around from the whale's point-of-view, so Ahab and crew all dying and Captain Kirk surviving is seen as a happy ending. Plus, they omitted Qeequeg.

The oddest Captain Ahab. He has one of the silliest lines ever written: "I've done more than kill you; I've hurt you!"

Well, Moby Dick is a gigantic masterpiece of American Literature. It had no trouble surviving John Barrymore and Ray Bradbury. It will survive all of you, and I alone will be left alive to tell the tale.

But if the 900 pages of Moby Dick seems too intimidating a tome to tackle for pleasure, you could instead enjoy the 215 pages of Tallyho, Tallulah! The whale lives in that too.

Cheers darlings.

The Spielberg Moby Dick may have been even less faithful to the novel than Barrymore's, but at least it wasn't a romantic comedy.

When is a Book Not a Book?

My two memoirs side by side in Little Dougie's writing nook, sitting on top of a three-volume, fully-annotated edition of William Shakespeare's Complete Works and an enormous 2-volume set of Charles Dickens books, as mine are the only books yet written to top Shakespeare and Dickens. But why has my head been squeezed between Norma Desmond and Tallulah Bankhead? They are not my parents.
(Oh yes they are. - Little Dougie.)

When it's an eBook!

Glorious additional news! My new memoir, Tallyho, Tallulah!, which has been out as a trade paperback for three weeks now, has now been issued in three different e-formats: Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. The Kindle edition is available from Amazon, the Nook edition is available from Barnes & Noble, and the iBook is available from iBooks. They tell me the iBook edition can be viewed (One does not "read" iBooks, one "views" them) on iPad, iPhone, and iPod. (I thought the last was the autobiography of the head alien in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: "I, Pod".) I have no idea what any of those things are, but if you just hate actual books, you can get the eBook edition, and people will just think you're net-surfing like a normal 21st Century person.

And the eBook editions are just $3.99! You can read the funniest book written this century for less than the cost of a shot of decent vodka, or four shots of crappy vodka. (After three or four shots, the quality of vodka becomes irrelevant anyway.)

Little Dougie in his Existing Room (Well, would YOU call that "living"?), holding what he calls his "Complete Oeuvre." Notice that two of the three books are actually by ME, so he takes WAY too much credit! His decorator is clearly blind. And then we come to his eyebrows. Since Little Dougie began looking older than I do (and I'm 115), he seems to have acquired J.R Ewing's eyebrows. Did Mommy McEwan sneak around with Larry Hagman somewhat over 60 years ago? Is Dougie an heir to "Hagman Oil"?

My publishers, Electric Noggin, have also put up an official webpage for Tallyho, Tallulah! Click on it and enjoy, though when you click on About the Author, you get a few lies about Little Dougie and not one word about me. The cheek! Check it out! But do NOT go to the library, ask for Tallyho, Tallulah! and check it out. Library books are filthy, and covered with deadly germs. One touch could be fatal. Every year, millions of innocent people die from handling library books. They're more toxic than Christian Science. By your own copy. That way, when you want to reread it and reread it, you don't have to keep going back to the library and checking out the same book over and over. Leave the library for people who can't afford computers.

Little Dougie shares my new work with my biggest fan.

About those strange two words below the book title on the cover of Tallyho, Tallulah!: "A Novel." My publishers forced Little Dougie to put those words there for "legal" reasons. Sure, it's a "fictional novel," that is, if you think I am a "Fictional Character!" But I ask you, do I smell like a fictional character? If I don't exist, who is drinking this vodka? If I were a fictional character, how could I be asking you these questions? The defining characteristic of "Fictional Characters" is that they don't exist. Like Karl Rove's ethics or Michele Bachmann's sanity, they are complete myths. Well I am not a myth; I am Myth Tallulah Morehead! I'm as real as pleasure.

There could be a more-sinister reason for those words being there on my totally non-fictional second memoir. (Which rightly belongs in Chapter 41 of My Lush Life, though, at 80,000 words, it would be the longest chapter in  the book, equal in length to about two-thirds of the earlier book.) As I said, Little Dougie TOLD ME the publishers insisted on pretending that it's all a made-up story, but he may have inserted those words there himself in order to take credit for the entire book, instead of just the portions he wrote. I tell my parts of the story in a memoir I dictated as it happened, in the summer of 1974. Little Dougie added some third-person narration just to fill in my gaps, which is the first time Little Dougie has filled a lady's gap in more than 3 decades. His contribution is, at most, one-third of the book. It would be just like him, credit hog to the end.

But I assure you every word is true, except for one word on page 27, three more words on page 184, the Table of Contents, all of Chapter 12, and the Acknowledgements. (Like I'd thank other people!) Sometimes reality is just riotously funny all on its own, at least, when I'm around.

So don't delay, buy yours today! Cheers darlings.

They're not my parents. For one thing, I'm older than either of them.
(Yes, they are.- Dougie.)