Month: December 2015

George Clayton Johnson

chris

Mr Johnson died on Christmas Day — my obituary of him appears here. I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person, but after intensive researches while drafting the article I rather began to wish I had.

Part of my researches involved having a look at what online extracts I could find of the film of his novel, Logan’s Run, released in 1976. (He co-wrote the novel with William F. Nolan, who survives him.) I remember reading Logan’s Run when it came out in the mid 1960s. By the more modest standards of that long-ago era it was fairly heavily hyped by the publishers, but when I read it I found it was a straightforward dystopian satire, better done than some of the other books of that type but not exceptionally so.

It was filmed a few years later, directed by Michael Anderson from an adapted script by David Zelag Goodman, and starred Michael York and Jenny Agutter. I can’t remember much about the film beyond the fact that I did go to see it, so looking at some of it again was a revelation, especially in the context of the currently released Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The ‘first’ Star Wars film was released less than a year after Logan’s Run, and of course transformed forever the interest of Hollywood in the science fiction idiom. The two films came out less than eleven months apart — because of the amount of process work that followed the live action shooting, Star Wars was probably filmed in the UK around the same time as they were making Logan’s Run in Hollywood. Yet they seem to come from different decades, not to say that they emerge from bizarrely different imaginative cultures. Logan’s Run is slow, preachy, unconvincing. The sets and special effects look phoney, the acting is coy, forced and lacking in conviction. As for the costumes: the scenes of life in the community are rather like an especially demented Abba video. Young extras tirelessly walk to and fro, holding hands, chatting and smiling in groups of two and three — the chaps all wear body suits and have blow-waved hair, the young women are in diaphanous one-piece mini-dresses. It’s a ghastly reminder of the awful ‘styles’ that were prevalent in the 1970s. ‘It begins where imagination ends,’ promised the trailer. Never was a truer word —

We saw the new Star Wars release a day or two before Christmas. Whether or not I liked the film is neither here nor there: in terms of the visual effects, acting styles, the costumes, the kind of writing and storytelling, the type of humour, The Force Awakens is entirely consistent with its predecessor, made nearly four decades earlier. Neither film dates the other. Of course, special effects techniques have changed out of all recognition in that time, and there are gentle in-jokes about some of the original actors looking a bit faded, but everything is put to the same service as before. And even in those pre-CGI days, the Star Wars miniatures were convincing, the script had wit, the explosions were not wobbly and semi-transparent, the costumes were non-specific to passing fads and hairstyle fashions. For the full embarrassing truth, check out the Logan’s Run trailer here.

There has long been a plan to re-make the film. Not in itself surprising, but I was astonished to discover how many top film makers and writers had been dragooned into the project, and for how long it has been going on. Efforts to make a new version go back to at least 2004, with directors like Nicolas Winding Refn and Bryan Singer attached, and writers such as Carl Rinsch, Andrew Baldwin and Alex Garland commissioned to write new screenplays. All have come and gone. As recently as July 2015 the experienced producer and writer Simon Kinberg was taken on to re-boot the old project.

I tended to see all this from the point of view of George Clayton Johnson himself. A modern remake of his book would obviously have brought him some welcome recognition, and an injection of cash. I went through something similar a few years ago, while I waited for a Hollywood studio to get around to filming my The Prestige — but in the end I had to wait only five years for the project to be greenlighted, and another twelve months to see the finished film on the screen. For Mr Clayton, the inexplicable process was going on for at least the last ten years of his life, when he was elderly and unwell.

I hope when they get around to it, they do him justice.

The Lights are Going Out — official

chris

If you have not bought a computer printer this year, an internet router or modem, a television set, a hair-dryer, a vacuum cleaner – all is well. If you are thinking of replacing the one you have, read on!

Sometimes the law changes inconspicuously: you hear something on the news, and you understand it and take it in, but it doesn’t have the press of urgency and so within a short time you tend to forget it. The consequence of this kind of forgetfulness has just happened to us.

A couple of years ago we bought a new coffee filter machine. We found one on special offer in Morrisons: £10 for a basic unbranded model. It worked swiftly and made good coffee, and with its large pot (which the manufacturers call a ‘carafe’) we had something that did exactly what we wanted it to do. In short, it sat quietly in the kitchen, exhaling a pleasant smell and from time to time muttering little contented noises. Hot coffee was on hand all day.

Last week it brewed its final pot, the heating element under the hot plate at last burning out. We ordered a replacement from Amazon. Familiar brand name, more or less basic design. (Not £10, though.) It arrived safely the next day. Unsuspecting of an event that was to waste our time for the next couple of days, we set it up, ran clean water through it, then made a pot of coffee.

Coffee filter machines are basic technology, whose simplicity is quickly grasped by anyone who uses them. The water is drawn down from a small reservoir, passes through an insulated heating element in the base, and is then expelled upwards to a nozzle where it drips on to the coffee grounds in a filter beneath. The fresh coffee percolates into the carafe, where it is kept warm by the same heating element under the hot plate. The new machine did all this, but we couldn’t help noticing that it had a number of extra buttons, a timing device, special lights, etc.

While we were still looking at the manual the main special light went out. The hot plate began to cool. We turned it on again. Then we noticed that our radio had stopped working. When we moved the coffee machine away the radio started working again. The new coffee machine was clearly emitting not pleasant smells and little contented noises, but a death-ray of radio interference. We were still trying to find somewhere we could have both appliances (in a kitchen, available free surfaces close to a power socket are not plentiful) when the coffee machine turned itself off again.

Amazon has an excellent, hassle-free returns service, which I recommend.

The next day we went into our local market town to find a replacement, one we could look at in the shop to make sure it wasn’t afflicted with the same level of high-tech irritation. The only problem was that none of the four shops we visited (including a huge general-supplies warehouse on the edge of town) had any in stock. This was surprising – we had assumed filter machines were common consumer products. We ended up driving a further distance to Barnstaple, where there is a branch of Currys. They had two models on sale: we bought the simpler, cheaper one. This too had extra buttons, a digital clock, LEDs that were said to change colour.

We ran fresh water through it, then made a pot of coffee. The radio continued to work, but a few minutes later the filter machine turned itself off.

It was only then that a faint, distant memory arose of some EU-inspired legislation change. A visit to Google confirmed the worst (here and here). From the beginning of 2015, many electric or electronic devices aimed at the consumer market have to turn themselves off if they are not used after a certain, fixed period of time. The reason: an urge to conserve energy, not in itself a bad thing, but because the new rules are aimed at consumers there is nothing we can do about it. There is no discussion, nothing to argue about – climate change is threatening the world. Things are being made differently now.

Governments, local authorities, big corporations are of course free to continue to waste energy however they like. A visitor to any big city after dark will see a blaze of lights, signs, displays, engines running, things being cooked, devices turning, vehicles rushing around. A night flight across North America or Europe will reveal the glare of city lights, which are sometimes so bright they dazzle even from five miles above. Hundreds of thousands of aircraft fly constantly above North America and Europe and everywhere else, millions (perhaps now billions) of cars and other vehicles gulp down fuel every minute of the day. There’s practically no point in trying to list the many ways in which energy is wasted constantly, by everybody, everywhere. The present British government is drawing back from supporting renewable energy sources, and now plans to ruin the environment of the countryside forever with plans to frack in quest of two or three years’ worth of “independent” fossil energy. For these reasons, our little one-kilowatt coffee maker has to turn itself off to prevent global warming.

My next modem, should the current one expire, will turn itself off if “no main task is performed”. Our vacuum cleaner, which noisily, swiftly and efficiently sucks up the usual weekly detritus of dust, bogies, cat hair, etc., will have to be replaced one day by an “eco-friendly” low power machine, which will take twice as long to do the same job and no doubt use up more electricity in the process. I have spent the last two weeks trying to find a decent light-bulb for my reading lamp, one which is bright enough to read a book by, but does not cast a pattern of variegated illumination on the page. I did not realize the difficulty of buying suitable light sources was a symptom of the same cause that now prevents me from having a supply of hot coffee all day: the meddling, inappropriate urge of some mad bureaucrat in Brussels, unresisted by a compliant British government, who wants to control how ordinary people use the precious fossil resources of the world.

This was of course why we had to search around Devon for a shop that carried even a small stock of these now more or less unsuitable coffee machines – people don’t want to buy them any more. And it was also, I now realize, why Morrisons were selling off their old stock at knockdown prices last year. I wish we had bought ten of them.