In the late 1970s and early 1980s, English fantasy author Michael Moorcock (born 1939) dealt with a fractious breakup of his second marriage. Faced with money problems, he accepted a lucrative job writing the screenplay for a Hollywood film about King Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. He relocated to Greater Los Angeles, stayed with friends (including science fiction author Harlan Ellison) until finding his own place in North Hollywood, and then a tiny place in West Hollywood, both shared with Linda Steele (an associate of Ellison's) who eventually became Moorcock's third wife.
While in California, Moorcock wrote long letters to his good friend, the author J.G. Ballard (Empire of the Sun, The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition). Ballard at that time was fiction editor of Ambit magazine. Some of these letters, originally published therein, eventually made it into book form, Letters From Hollywood (1986), an entertaining and honest account of Moorcock's observations of Los Angeles and other cities he visited; San Francisco and the Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, but concentrating mostly on L.A., a place the author enjoyed for its associations with the cinematic obsessions of his childhood. Driving with Linda on the Pacific Coast Highway in a borrowed red Mercedes Benz 450SL convertible, Moorcock remarks about the numerous memories elicited by sights along the way, hillsides to the ocean he's seen involved in classic Hollywood car crashes, for instance, or beach locations he remembers from old pirate movies.
Having been to Southern California three times, I can attest to this memory/movie location phenomenon. In La Jolla in 1983 I saw and recognized the Coronado Hotel, location for the Billy Wilder comedy of 1959, Some Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe. It's a startling thing to feel such a memory sparked unbidden, unexpected, conjuring moments from favorite films of one's past.
Moorcock's appreciation for Hollywood's products, its films, is not much felt in the present day of circa 1979 to 1984 when he lived periodically in Los Angeles except when he was in England dealing with difficult personal matters. The director of the King Arthur movie (name changed--I'm uncertain who the actual director is, but by the end of the book it's clear the movie never got made) is a great character even though he's based on an uncomfortably real man who drives Moorcock nearly nuts with his unsteady ideas about the movie.
Ike (the alias given by Moorcock) is in his late fifties, drinks milk instead of booze, has no appreciation for historical accuracy, doesn't understand plot or narrative or logical character motivations, has made it in Hollywood by directing lots of sequels. Moorcock, on his expense account provided by the unnamed studio, has to spend a thousand dollars per week, is given "anything" he needs--except for an escape out of an increasingly difficult situation--but has to endure Ike's crazy vacillating ideas about the movie.
Ike has Moorcock over to his house a lot, throwing ideas at him, each one more batshit crazy than the previous one. Pointing out two books on his coffee table, Moorcock is told to read the chapter in an Ingmar Bergman book about the Swedish director's film, Cries and Whispers, an intense interpersonal drama about sisters going through a difficult, painful time in their lives. The book has Bergman's "letter" that he wrote to his crew and cast about the film, giving the participants guidance on how to proceed. Ike loves this idea, wants Moorcock to write the script as a letter, borrowing psychological themes from Bergman's film. The other book on the coffee table is about the films of Akira Kurosawa. Ike wants Moorcock to emulate the bold action scenes of that director's Samurai films.
Samurai, Bergman, King Arthur, right.
Moorcock needs to get a rough script finished, then a rewrite, to be followed by a second installment of his pay, which will go a long way towards addressing his debts. Trapped in a kind of Hell, he serves a Master (modern Hollywood) that ultimately lacks any interest in producing the kind of good work Moorcock believes he must do to maintain his integrity as a literary artist.
Michael Moorcock wrote some of the best Sword and Sorcery fantasy I've read. His series of Elric stories and novels I've read and reread ever since high school. His books following the exploits of his anti-hero Jerry Cornelius combine experimentalism with spy novel tropes. He puts most of his fiction in a "Multiverse," a conglomeration of parallel universes so that his protagonists, like Elric, have counterparts in other universes with their own novel cycles: Hawkmoon, Corum, Jerry Cornelius, Erekosë, and others. Numerous other books deal with different concepts and settings. He's one of the most prolific writers in the field, already a literary giant by his early forties, when he was in Hollywood maintaining epic patience with some really stupid fucking people in the film industry.
In spite of such literary accomplishments he wasn't rich at this time, his second marriage had flopped, he was in debt, he had to latch himself to the unpleasant job of satisfying the ever-changing decisions of a flibbertigibbet seeking to combine the quiet intimacy of a Bergman movie with the spectacular dynamics of a Kurosawa film; someone, too, disdainful of Moorcock's efforts at writing a script true to the film's time and place, 5th century Britain.
Much of the book, though, demonstrates Moorcock's eye for detail, this time not writing about a made-up fantasy world as in the Elric books, but a made-up real world place called Hollywood. He lets his correspondent, Ballard, know about tattoo parlors, roller skaters in Venice Beach, Chicano gangs in his neighborhood, gunshots at night, sirens, neighbors yelling, radios blaring at two in the morning, the heat, but also his morning walks during which L.A. is cool and quiet, the smell of oleander in the air. His descriptions of L.A., for anyone who's visited, ring true. It's a fascinating place, a kind of decentralized mega-community founded in the early 20th century because of its light, movie film of those days requiring plenty of illumination, "interiors" for scenes open to the sky.
In the end, Ike's unreliability, and whatever else is going on behind the scenes at the studio beyond Moorcock's knowledge, put the kibosh on the King Arthur movie. He earns his two payments, but has spent a long time tethered to an insane business process. His own fiction projects must wait while he labors on the idiotic take on the story demanded by Ike. He drinks more and more, runs into fans who constantly offer him cocaine, marijuana, and whatever else. His reserved "Englishness" leads to many disadvantageous encounters with movie business Americans who, in their direct way, assume he agrees with everything they say. The drinking increases.
In the end, though, it's the sunny smoggy magic of Los Angeles, the visuals, the smells, the sounds, that attach their enchantment to his spirit, as he considers, finally, living in L.A. half the year and in England the other half. Moorcock eventually worked out such an arrangement, but with different locations. He now lives in Texas and Paris, eighty-one years old, still writing, not as prolific as in the past, but a major author whose contribution to speculative fiction, if not to screenwriting, remains and will remain a major influence on the imaginations of millions of readers.
Vic Neptune
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