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Praise

From the reviews of A User’s Guide to the Millennium:

‘Like Wilde, like Burroughs, Ballard has a great facility for paradox, inversion and subversion. He points a camera at a subject from a new and oblique angle, focuses, and invites us to look through the lens. The insights come flowing thick and fast. In an age when novels are going the way of poetry and becoming an increasingly minority interest, here is a writer who still really matters. There is enough meat here for the most ravenous of appetites.’

DES TRAYNOR, Irish Independent

‘A rich and varied collection of journalism from one of our major novelists. There is much to relish and wonder over. The pieces are short but supercharged, reminiscent of Orwell at his best. Ballard is the least provincial and inward-looking of writers. His autobiographical piece on his return to Shanghai is remarkable. Ballard is a very divergent and original writer and his mordant wit, evident in so much of his work here, comes as something of a surprise.’

City Life

‘Ballard is a highly imaginative essayist with a wide range of interests and a marvellous eye for a telling juxtaposition.’

NICHOLAS MOSLEY, Daily Telegraph

‘Ballard is never less than trenchant and accurate. Originality and provocativeness are the chief tools in Ballard’s literary kit.’

ROY HERBERT, New Scientist

‘He may live in suburban Shepperton, but he still has the cruel glare of Shanghai in his soul.’

NICCI GERRARD, Observer

‘A writer capable of the most amazing narrative feats. A canonical writer, and something of a loose cannon, J.G. Ballard can gut a book with the dexterity of a Billingsgate fishwife. He is a master of the pithy review.’

JOHN SUTHERLAND, Sunday Times

‘A fine aphorist, and one of the finest apologists for his troubled time.’

ALAN BOLD, Glasgow Herald

‘A brilliant anthology that includes fantastic pieces on Dali, Coca-Cola and Einstein. Totally essential.’

i-D

From the reviews of J.G. Ballard’s novels:

‘Is Ballard our best novelist? Perhaps. He’s certainly the most interesting, the one whose account of the last half of this century has the most to tell us.’

New Statesman & Society

‘Ballard is the most modern of writers; his art engages with the artefacts and obsessions of the second half of this century in a manner and with an intensity unmatched by any other writer.’

WILLIAM BOYD, Daily Telegraph

‘Ballard is a magician of the contemporary scene and a literary saboteur. No one else writes with such enchanted clarity or strange power.’

IAN THOMSON

‘One of the most brilliant and unnerving of writers … Ballard is a writer with talent to burn.’

The Times

‘Ballard has claims to be the most interesting living English writer at work. He offers a consistent and unmistakable view of the world, an alternative reality, strange yet coherent.’

Guardian

‘A writer of extraordinarily distinctive vision and power.’

Literary Review

‘One of the most sensitive and enigmatic novelists of the present day.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Present in everything Ballard writes is that sense of a unique and profoundly original mind.’

ANGELA CARTER

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

1 FILM

Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet …

2 LIVES

Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito …

3 THE VISUAL WORLD

Warhol, Hockney, Dali and the Surrealists …

4 WRITERS

Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade and William Burroughs …

5 SCIENCE

Einstein, the Gene Pool, Freud and Richard Feynman …

6 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

From Shanghai to Shepperton …

7 SCIENCE FICTION

Inner Space, Early Manifestos, and the Billion Year Spree …

8 IN GENERAL

Coca-Cola and Walt Disney, Mein Kampf and the Astronauts …

9 AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Memories of the Rising Sun …

Keep Reading

Index

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

1 FILM

Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet …

The Sweet Smell of Excess

Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 Ian Hamilton

In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money. His plight is summed up in Sunset Boulevard, where Joe Gillis ends his unhappy career lying face down in the swimming pool he always wanted, rather than admit his failure and go back to the humble newspaper office in Dayton, Ohio.

Nowadays, of course, his successors lie face up in their Hollywood pools, with not a tragic shudder among them, and the huge fees they receive, often for scripts that are never filmed, could buy most provincial newspapers outright. But the problem of the screenwriter’s role still remains, especially when the director is once again taking almost all the credit for any success. What part is played by the film script, how much does the screenwriter contribute to a film, and does he merit the status which literary people generally assign him? The difficulty of answering these questions lies at the heart of the unsatisfactory Hollywood careers of Chandler, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Nathanael West, which fixed for ever the popular myth of the literary artist exploited and degraded by a philistine industry.

With some reservations, Ian Hamilton seems to accept this point of view, tracing the history of the screenwriter from the silent era, when regiments of ex-newspapermen were hired to rough out storylines and supply static captions, to the birth of sound and the recruitment in the 1930s of a far classier and more self-important literary set – the serious novelists, Broadway playwrights and Algonquin wits, who were patronizing about the crudities of popular film but had noticed that the green slopes of Beverly Hills were covered, not with leaves, but thousand-dollar bills. All of them, to varying degrees, made the mistake of assuming that the primary creative contribution to a film would come from themselves.

Much of Hamilton’s book is drawn from the standard defensive biographies of Chandler, Fitzgerald and co., and a stale air hangs over these anecdotes. He never asks why these pre-eminendy literary writers so failed to get to grips with Hollywood. Like most outsiders he underestimates the importance of the producer, in many ways the greatest creative force in film. He knows nothing about screenwriting or, for that matter, the writing of fiction, and misconceives the function of the scriptwriter, which lies closer to the original role of story-outliner and caption-supplier.

As far as the novel is concerned, the importance of the writer is still paramount, though all of us have learned to keep a close eye on the rear-view mirror. In the theatre the playwright is at least the equal partner of the performers, but in film the writer is shouldered aside by director, actor, producer and editor, who together transform the printed word into something far more glamorous and evocative.

Years ago I was offered the chance to do the novelization of a film then being made by a leading British director. The script outlined a hackneyed story about a malevolent stowaway, with dialogue that rarely rose above ‘Chow-time. Where’s Dallas?’ Topside.’ ‘Uh-huh.’ What amazed me was not that someone had decided to film this script, but that he had been able to form any idea of the finished movie from these empty lines. Yet the film was Alien, one of the most original horror-movies ever made, and the throwaway dialogue perfectly set off the terrifying vacuum that expanded around the characters.

By some unexplained alchemy, a film can effortlessly transform sentimental clichés into something emotionally compelling, as in Sunset Boulevard’s last lines: ‘Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her…’ No serious novelist would dare to end a book with these lines, and no middlebrow writer would have the talent to invent them. But Billy Wilder is the exception. He may have quarrelled with Raymond Chandler (over Double Indemnity), but they were really on the same side, both lovers of the word. Wilder’s films, dominated by their bitter-sweet dialogue and filled with theatrical characters who always seem aware of their audience, are untypical of anything in today’s cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock (whom, puzzlingly, Hamilton scarcely mentions) is a far better guide to the true relationship between screenwriter and film. Reading the script of Psycho, the ancestor of so much present-day cinema, one is struck by the off-kilter construction – Janet Leigh’s almost unmotivated crime, and the grotesque retribution carried out by the ‘innocent’ Norman Bates. The real villain, Mother, does not appear until the last moments, when she adroitly turns into her son. Despite all this, Psycho is one of the most powerful films ever made, a psychotic Little Red Riding Hood in which Granny disguises herself as the wolf. Chandler, Fitzgerald and Faulkner could never have written the script (by Joe Steffano) and would have ruined the film had they tried. The novelistic constraints of motive and characterization would never have allowed Hitchcock to achieve those states of extremity where his imagination thrived, though few screenwriters would accept this.

The most interesting films of today – Blue Velvet, The Hitcher and the 30-second ads for call-girls on New York’s Channel J (some of the most poignant mini-dramas ever made, filmed in a weird and glaucous blue, featuring a woman, a bed and an invitation to lust) – are a rush of pure sensation. Blue Velvet, like Psycho, follows the trajectory of the drug trip. Paranoia rules, and motiveless crimes and behaviour ring true in a way that leaves a traditionally constructed movie with its well-crafted plot, characters and story looking not merely old-fashioned but untrue.

As Hamilton points out, the disappointments of the 1930s and 1940s screenwriters were compounded by the Hays Office and its ludicrous moral code. However, cinema was then a public medium, watched by audiences made up of complete strangers, and the restrictions accorded with the conventions of ordinary social life – on those occasions when we stray into the bedroom of a strange woman we usually find, alas, a husband with one foot on the floor in the approved Hays manner. Now, though, cinema is becoming a private medium. We watch on video either alone or with one or two intimates, and the imaginative demands for greater sexual freedom are all the more urgent – needless to say, I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is desperately needed. And both might give the screenwriter a new lease of life in liberating him from the written word.

Independent on Sunday 1990

Magical Days at Rick’s

Round Up the Usual Suspects: the Making of Casablanca Aljean Harmetz

Nostalgia may not be all it used to be, but films really were better in the 1940s and 1950s, and this account of the making of Casablanca clearly shows why. Hollywood today seems set on returning to the simple and unsophisticated spectacle of the nickelodeon era, when my grandfather’s generation gazed in amazement at express trains speeding over viaducts. Fortunes are now spent on the kind of computerized special effects that appeal to the Super Nintendo mind-set of the present-day twelve-year-old, for whom adult relationships, political beliefs and the bitter-sweet ambiguities of love and loyalty – the magical stuff of Casablanca – are as remote and boring as the kabuki theatre.

Most critics consider Citizen Kane the best film ever made, but the best-liked must be Casablanca. Yet no one involved in making the film ever imagined that it would achieve its legendary status. As Aljean Harmetz records, when shooting ended in August 1942, everyone was glad that the production was over. There was fierce rivalry between Jack Warner, the studio boss, and the film’s producer, Hal Wallis. The director, Michael Curtiz, had constantly abused his crew and bit players, and with one or two exceptions, the actors had disliked each other. Paul Henreid was contemptuous of Humphrey Bogart’s acting skills, while Ingrid Bergman was baffled by her role and said of Bogart: ‘I kissed him but I never knew him’, a line worthy of a movie all its own. The film’s dramatic climax, when the hero renounces the woman he loves and nobly returns her to the husband, was decided upon only at the last moment, and the famous closing words – ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ – were written and inserted weeks after shooting had ended.

One of the myths about Casablanca is that the director and screenwriters made up the story as shooting went along. In fact, almost every key character and scene were present in the original play, Everybody Comes to Rick’s, by Murray Burnett, who had visited prewar Vienna and been appalled by Nazi behaviour. On his way back to America, he paused in a bar in the South of France and thought: ‘What a setting for a play!’

But the transformation of this unsuccessful play into a Hollywood legend required a huge range of talents, from the seven scriptwriters to the producer, director and the leading stars. As important was the strong cast of supporting actors who gave Casablanca a dramatic depth that no contemporary Hollywood film can match. Producers today rarely allow the camera to leave the face of the $10-million leading actor. By contrast, Casablanca is rich in supporting roles that give the film a telling authenticity – the cast-list is packed with Jewish refugees, some of them playing refugees, and the others playing the Nazis.

Round Up the Usual Suspects is filled with surprises, and a feast for movie buffs and late-night viewers of classic films. It had never occurred to me that the patrician Claude Rains was a born-and-bred cockney, or that he and Bogart, off the screen as on, could have struck up a close and lasting friendship. Some academic film critics have suggested that Casablanca is a thinly veiled parable of homosexual passion, to which one can only say: ‘Play it again, Sam’ – the film’s most famous line but one that never actually appears in it. Now that is the true measure of a legend.

Daily Telegraph 1993

Hollywood Sex Idols

Brando: A Life In Our Times Richard Schickel Mae West: Empress of Sex Maurice Leonard

Is Marlon Brando the Mae West of contemporary cinema? At first sight, no two Hollywood stars could seem less alike, but reading these biographies one begins to sense how much they resemble each other, especially in the way that they enjoyed immense fame as the avatars of a new kind of sexual frankness, and then fell victim to the celebrity they had helped to create.

Both Brando and Mae West rose to stardom by projecting a powerful and lazy carnality rarely seen before them, though Brando always had the advantage of the bigger breasts. Both completely overwhelmed the parts they played, and were great on-the-set re-writers of their scripts, adding a depth and bite for which they were rarely given credit. After their first runaway successes, both saw their careers collapse when Hollywood reset its sails in a changing social and commercial climate, and sank into a series of lacklustre films from which they briefly rescued themselves by sheer force of will. And, by the end, both became enduring camp icons, adored for the same mix of failure and combative pride that lovers of camp have always found irresistible, as in the case of Barrymore and Judy Garland, and the butt of the kind of cruel joke that Richard Schickel quotes. What do Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando have in common? Answer: many people believe both of them are still alive.

Schickel, the astute and generous film critic of Time, writes as an unabashed fan of Brando, and a member of the generation whose frustrated coming-of-age in the smug years of Eisenhower prosperity was galvanized by the appearance of the young Brando as the unforgettable Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Sly, illiterate and aggressive, and supremely confident of his sweating and animal body, Brando’s Kowalski became the idol of a rebellious generation, if not ready to rape their mothers, represented by the prim and self-deluding Blanche Du Bois, at least ready to rape their mothers’ values.

Schickel convincingly traces the bruised outsider of Brando’s early films – The Men, Streetcar, The Wild One and On the Waterfront – to his middle-class Illinois childhood, outwardly respectable but deeply marred by his alcoholic parents. He suggests that die children of alcoholics, trying to deflect attention from their shame, seek out those even more troubled than themselves, and that this explains Brando’s choice of the underdog roles in which he excelled. Whatever the accuracy of this, it’s certainly true that Brando’s characters have sustained more violent beatings over the years than those of any other Hollywood actor.

By the mid-fifties Hollywood was desperate to defend itself against the rising power of television. Led by Darryl Zanuck, the studios began to invest in lavish cinemascope spectacles, and the first and greatest phase of Brando’s career was over. He found himself for the next two decades playing in a series of Technicolor schlockbusters such as the ludicrous Desirée (in which he appeared as a shy and spaced-out Napoleon, keenly looking forward to St Helena, one feels), Sayonara (slow death on Mount Fuji), and The Fugitive Kind (in which he became the first actor to be paid a million dollars for a single film).

By now, elevated to superstar status, he could no longer find the demeaning roles that satisfied his need to be humiliated, and as the years passed he seemed to grow ever more depressed, hiding behind a screen of weird accents and mannerisms. Schickel praises his fey and foppish Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty, and in particular his ‘English’ accent – every bit as extraterrestrial as any of Meryl Streep’s – and it is sobering to reflect that, to Americans, most of us sound like this.

Then, at last, he broke free, first with The Godfather, and again in what I feel is his greatest role of all, Last Tango in Paris, in no sense a pornographic film but a stunning portrait of male middle-aged despair, in which he wrote a large part of his own dialogue. After this he made a few guest appearances in second-rate films and reserved his best performances for the world outside the film set, culminating in what many observers considered to be his brilliant impersonation of a father convinced of his son’s innocence at Christian Brando’s trial for murder.

Of Mae West it’s safe to say that for her the distinction between film set and reality was never worth more than a sidelong glance and a faint switch of the hips. Determined to make the most of her sexuality, whatever the location, she was only too happy if a crowd came in and stayed to watch. On stage from the age of seven, as a child vaudeville performer, she never left it until her death in 1980 at the probable age of eighty-seven.

Sex, the Broadway play she both wrote and starred in, put her on the map in 1927, and landed her in jail for ten days, guilty of ‘corrupting the morals of youth’, although I like to think that, far more valuably, it was the morals of the middle-aged that Mae managed so wonderfully to corrupt. A gangster’s bag-man named George Rauft, smooth as a gigolo, collected the box-office receipts, and later, as George Raft, starred with Mae in her first film, Night after Night. ‘She stole everything but the cameras,’ Raft observed. In a series of spectacular successes she single-handedly saved Paramount from bankruptcy, perfected her screen persona and polished to a gemlike brightness the string of one-liners that survive to this day, above all the immortal ‘Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?’ and, in reply to ‘Goodness, what lovely diamonds’ – ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’ Most were long-standing vaudeville gags, but no one ever delivered them like Mae West.

Above all, she brought humour into sex, then as now, sadly, a deadly serious business. Sex, for Mae West, as Maurice Leonard comments, was not only fun but went unpunished, a revolutionary notion whose hour had come in those Depression years. Even Benito Mussolini became a devoted fan – Mae West was an example of ‘Virile, healthy womanhood’, the Duce opined. But the puritanical Hays Office, and the code of restrictions that the film industry accepted, spelled the end of her career. Nervous of the moralistic Hearst press, producers were afraid to offer her roles.

Gutsy to the end, she reinvented herself as a camp icon, presiding over a Hollywood apartment decorated like a boudoir-scale Versailles, touring in Diamond Lil, and making guest appearances in over-the-top extravaganzas like Myra Breckinridge, when her memory had gone and her lines were relayed to her through an earphone. Over the years she drifted into eccentricity, urging enema kits on to her friends, obsessed with spiritualism, and surrounding herself with retinues of muscle-builders. The concept of an octogenarian nymphomaniac which she patented and so brilliantly sustained (amazingly, there had long been rumours that she was a man) showed that she had never lost her touch, and makes her a continuing inspiration to the rest of us.

Guardian 1991