The distinction between "cult TV" and ordinary, run-of-the-mill, mainstream television is rapidly becoming hard to make.
Fan behavior once reserved for unabashedly cult programs like "Star Trek" now pops up even for what seem like decidedly mainstream shows. Ardent "Sex and the City" fans hold viewing parties, memorize trivia and learn to love cosmopolitans because they're Carrie Bradshaw's signature drink. Most of them do, however, draw the line at dressing like Carrie, whose unintentionally ironic lack of fashion sense makes even a typical Starfleet officer seem like a runway model.
On the other side of the ledger, cult TV shows are gaining followings that now extend well beyond their historic core audience of sci-fi geeks, animation fans and Britcom aficionados. (For you newbies, "Britcom" means "British comedy.")
"Lost," for example, dealt with such cult-TV subjects as time travel and parallel universes. Yet it garnered huge audiences for ABC, and its series finale provided heated water-cooler talk for the entire nation. The same goes for "Heroes" — at least during the first season, when it was still good. Before bad writing drove its audience away, "Heroes," a show all about comic-book iconography and characters with superpowers, was a mainstream hit.
Last year, I was in a local shopping center, minding my own business, when two teenage girls told me my "Doctor Who"-themed T-shirt was cool. That never would have happened 20 years ago. But now "Doctor Who," the dictionary definition of a cult show, is identifiable enough in America that it doesn't demand an explanation.
So, there are shows that are mainstream yet develop cult followings, and there are shows that are filled with cult-TV themes while still attracting millions of viewers. That makes it really difficult to determine what exactly is — and what isn't — cult TV nowadays.
That dilemma informs one chapter, titled "Mainstream Cult," of "The Cult TV Book: From ‘Star Trek' to ‘Dexter,' New Approaches to TV Outside of the Box." Edited by Stacey Abbott, the book is comprised of 26 chapters by different authors, writing about every facet of "cult television," plus case studies of various shows, from "Twin Peaks" and "The Prisoner" to "The Sopranos" and "South Park."
"The Cult TV Book" is good reading for fans of cult TV, as well as for anyone interested in where American pop culture now stands. But I won't try to recycle its conclusions here because I already have my own, which are deserving of their own cult following.
What makes a TV show a cult TV show? Is it the subject matter? Is it fan reaction? Is it having a small audience? Can a cult show have a large audience, just so long as a small portion of it is enthusiastic to the point of obsessive displays of devotion? Can I cram one more question into this paragraph?
Basically, any show, no matter how popular and regardless of its subject matter, can be a cult show if it has among its viewership a small, obsessive fan base. And there are more cult TV shows now than ever before simply because, between broadcast and cable, there are more shows than ever before. The only programs that can't be "cult" are popular reality and talent shows like "American Idol," because apparently everyone who watches them becomes obsessive.
Even the news can be cult TV, as anyone who has ever met deranged partisans of either Keith Olbermann or Glen Beck could tell you.
If a small group of people went to conventions dressed like Archie and Edith Bunker and traded tips about how to make scale replicas of Archie's easy chair, would "All in the Family" be cult TV? You know, it probably would.
But I'm not betting on any "All in the Family" conventions being held any time soon.
One of the world's most recognizable fictional characters is now almost unrecognizable. Wonder Woman has received a makeover.
Her new costume, designed by artist Jim Lee, combines every fashion faux pas of the 1980s. Gone is Wonder Woman's iconic star-spangled one-piece. In its place, she is now wearing black leggings and a dark-blue jacket with shoulder pads.
Fox News pundits predictably complained that the new costume's lack of American flag elements was unpatriotic. (News flash: Wonder Woman is also a foreigner — an Amazon from an all-woman island, no less! — who worships Greek gods!)
This isn't Wonder Woman's first wardrobe malfunction. Still, the hype this time has reached all the way to CNN and the New York Times, which also made big deals out of the deaths of Superman (he got better), Batman (he wasn't really dead) and Captain America (he got better). In comic books, costume changes are like death. Rarely is either permanent, unless you're Batman's parents or Spider-Man's Uncle Ben. Even Wonder Woman has done the dead-and-back thing. Twice, at least.
Costume changes are common and fleeting. In the '90s, Superman briefly wore a hideous electric-blue unitard. He even sported a mullet for a while. Before that, Spider-Man ditched his red-and-blue long johns for a sleek black costume. But that lasted only until he realized the black costume was an extraterrestrial who wanted to kill him. (It's a long story.)
Wonder Woman's look has evolved over the years since her debut in the pages of All-Star Comics No. 8 in 1941. Originally, she wore a star-spangled skirt instead of the now-familiar trunks. And since the '40s, artists have made minor changes.
But Wonder Woman's costume remained basically the same until the late 1960s. Wonder Woman's circulation was down, so DC Comics looked to modernize the character and boost sales. Wonder Woman lost her powers and her costume. In their place, she picked up martial arts skills and some instantly dated, mod-style jumpsuits. She became a globe-trotting, Karate-kicking Emma Peel clone. The book's writer, Denny O'Neil, mistakenly thought this new Wonder Woman was a more "empowering" figure. But few agreed with him, and the mod Wonder Woman lasted just a couple of years before she returned to her classic look.
One of those who objected to O'Neil's revamp was Ms. Magazine's Gloria Steinem, who isn't wild about Wonder Woman's latest ensemble, either. But this time, she is more upset about changes to Wonder Woman's back-story.
Incoming writer J. Michael Straczynski has changed Wonder Woman's history so that the Amazons have been killed off and Wonder Woman is now a lone survivor forced to grow up on the grim and gritty streets of the big city. Basically, she's now a cross between Superman and Batman, which isn't exactly groundbreaking.
Steinem complained the whole thing "seems to be the brainstorming of a very limited group of brains." It also seems like desperation. DC's parent company, Warner Bros., has spent years trying to get a Wonder Woman movie into production. The new-look Wonder Woman with the grim-and-gritty origin looks like yet another attempt to jump-start a movie franchise.
If so, Warner Bros. has forgotten the lesson of Halle Berry's Catwoman movie: Don't make a film about a well-known character and then not have that character appear in any recognizable form.
Wonder Woman is an icon. Audiences aren't likely to accept a substitute. And Wonder Woman without the star-spangled swimsuit simply isn't Wonder Woman.
But don't get too worked up about it. It may take a year or two, but Wonder Woman will be back in her classic costume eventually. She's already come back from the dead.
It was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president. Sylvester Stallone was re-fighting — and winning — the Vietnam War. And high school students were fending off a Soviet invasion.
You didn't mess with America, and if you did, you were soon sorry. This was the era that spawned every Chuck Norris joke you've ever heard.
In the gung-ho decade of "Red Dawn" and "Invasion USA," a mullet and guns — lots of guns — were all you needed to take on the Forces of Evil. It was "morning in America," every day was the Fourth of July and Hollywood got busy settling the U.S. of A.'s old scores.
Sometimes the plots were, to be charitable, a little silly. But even for anyone who thought "Red Dawn" was a documentary from the future, there was one movie that made all the others seem sane. That movie was 1987's "Nightforce."
If you've never heard of "Nightforce," that's understandable. This straight-to-video action flick received most of its airplay on late-night cable TV. The VHS tape is long out of print, and it isn't a likely candidate for reissue on DVD. And that's a shame because while "Nightforce" is in no sense a good movie, it is bizarre artifact from a decade that now exists only as a target for jokes on VH1.
Here's the plot: Central American terrorists kidnap a U.S. senator's daughter, and for reasons that don't make any sense, especially because we're talking about a senator's daughter, the government is powerless to act. Meanwhile, the senator refuses to give in to the captors' demands because "we don't negotiate with terrorists."
It falls to the daughter's mullet-headed, polo-wearing college friends to come to the rescue. They load a jeep with automatic weapons and ammunition, then head south of the border on a rescue mission you just know is going to end with half of them dead. But one way or the other, they'll rescue the girl and shoot a bunch of foreigners, especially that one guy who looks like a burly Fidel Castro. He's a dead man.
There's also a subplot about said senator's daughter, Christy, getting married to some rich guy even though she's in love with the rich guy's younger brother. But as far as I can tell, the subplot is there mainly to justify the sex scene that occurs in the first 10 minutes. That's reason enough, come to think of it.
Amazingly, Christy's friends drive all the way to Central America without getting their throats slit.
They also have the good fortune to meet a friendly mercenary played by 1980s B-movie mainstay Richard Lynch, who gives them even more guns, plus some tactical support.
Most of "Nightforce's" (unintentional) entertainment value comes from its absurd script, but you can't discount the cast. Apart from Lynch, there's Linda Blair — smack in the middle of her post-"Exorcist" career's action movie phase — playing Christy's best friend and leading the rescue operation.
Then there's James Van Patten, son of "Eight is Enough" patriarch Dick Van Patten, as Steve, the younger brother/love interest. (Or is he the older brother? I honestly forgot.)
Somehow, Lynch spent a fair chuck of the 1980s dealing with Dick Van Patten's children. In "Nightforce," he tries to keep James from getting killed, while in 1985's "Cut and Run," he tries to kill Dick's TV son Willie Ames.
Lastly, there's Christy, played by Claudia Udy, best known for her title role in the Cinemax After Dark favorite "Joy," due on DVD later this month.
It almost goes without saying, but Udy spends most of the movie in various states of undress.
Basically, "Nightforce" is the sort of untrained-Americans-kick-butt-against-skilled-adversaries movie that could only have come out of the '80s, with just enough exploitation elements to keep late-night viewers awake.
For all of its schlock value, "Nightforce" says something about the prevailing attitude in America during the decade it was made. America was finally over its post-Vietnam funk and looking to kick butt.
How quaint those pre-Iraq, pre-Afghanistan days seem now.
If summer 1967 was the Summer of Love, then summer 2010 is shaping up to be the Summer of Blood.
With the June 13 premiere of its third season, "True Blood" has cemented its place as HBO's must-see successor to "The Sopranos."
On Sunday, ABC rolled out "The Gates." Think of it as "Desperate Housewives" meets "Dracula," set in a private gated community where everyone has a dark secret. And you can already hear teenage girls and their moms squealing with anticipation as Edward, Bella and Jacob get set to return Wednesday in "Eclipse," the third installment in the inexplicable yet unstoppable "Twilight Saga." Wherever you turn, you can't help but run into vampires, werewolves and, sometimes, even a witch or two.
Never ones to be left out, zombies are on the prowl, too. AMC has already geared up its publicity campaign for its new series, "The Walking Dead," which debuts in October. Filmed in Atlanta and based on the acclaimed Image Comics series written by Robert Kirkman, "The Walking Dead" follows the survivors of a zombie outbreak as they try to avoid becoming dinner for the undead.
Vampires, werewolves and zombies — between them, monsters are having a major resurgence, not unlike the blossoming of horror movies during the Great Depression, when Universal Studios unleashed Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy and the Wolf Man on unsuspecting theatergoers. According to the conventional wisdom, there is something about hard times that makes people turn to the macabre.
But the "conventional wisdom" is seldom right, and "macabre" doesn't really describe this new batch of "monsters."
Werewolves are no longer tortured souls condemned to turn into ravenous beasts during every full moon, posing an unwitting danger to those they love. Instead, they can transform from human into wolf at will, while still retaining their human intelligence.
Meanwhile, not all vampires are destined to lurk forever in the darkness. Some can venture out into the daylight and lead largely normal lives, apart from slipping off for an occasional bite. They run multinational corporations, have spacious homes in the suburbs and jet around the world to meet with the head vampire, or whatever. Some of them even sparkle in the sun, but the less said about that, the better.
Zombies are a bit harder to tame, but you can at least make fun of them. Except for "The Walking Dead," which plays the zombie genre straight, most recent zombie stories have played zombies for laughs. Whether it's "Zombieland" or "Shaun of the Dead" or "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," it's getting really difficult to take those shambling, brain-craving corpses seriously.
Sure, vampires and werewolves still come down with a case of bloodlust from time to time, especially when they are fighting each other during one of their interspecies turf wars (see: "Twilight" and "Underworld"). But for the most part, they have gone from being bloodthirsty monsters to romantic heroes, or at least anti-heroes.
And they fall for the dullest women. Seriously, are there two more boring fictional characters than Bella Swan and Sookie Stackhouse? I haven't read the books, but if the movies and the TV series are any indication, they're the least interesting characters in their own stories.
So, what does it mean that vampires and werewolves are now romantic leads? For one thing, I suppose it means people don't mind May-December romances anymore, even if December is in an entirely different century. Also, excess body hair is apparently no longer a deal breaker, which is good news not only for werewolves but for Robin Williams, too.
Or, maybe it means that the suave romantic vampire represents bloodsucking capitalists who sell themselves to the masses via slick marketing, while the werewolf represents the oppressed working class trying to strike back at its centuries-old oppressors, only to lose its shirt and the girl in the process.
Or not. I'm pretty sure you have to be a Marxist college professor to buy all of that, but you never know.
George Romero's zombie movie "Dawn of the Dead" is supposedly an allegory for mindless consumerism. But what I learned from it was that the mall has everything I need to fight zombies.
The saying in Hollywood is no one sets out to make a bad movie. But sometimes, that's exactly what happens.
Take "Atlas Shrugged," the long-awaited film adaptation of Ayn Rand's best-selling, 1,300-page novel, first published in 1957. Rand's fans have waited 50 years for the book's leap to the big screen, and plans for a movie version have circulated for three decades.
Now the movie is finally happening, but it's likely to leave even Rand's most ardent admirers shrugging.
The adaptation that started production this week is like nothing anyone had expected, or wanted. Instead of a star-studded epic befitting a novel of "Atlas Shrugged's" size and scope, this "Atlas" looks like it'll be something you might one day stumble upon on Lifetime Movie Network, late at night, when no one else is watching.
Paul Johansson, best known for his role in The CW's "One Tree Hill," is both directing and playing the pivotal role of John Galt, who leads a "strike of the mind" against the twin forces of big government and the unproductive businessmen who run to the government in search of bailouts and subsidies.
You could say the story is topical.
I don't know about you, but when I think of Rand's personification of the heroic ideal, I don't think of "One Tree Hill's" Dan Scott. Actually, I never think of "One Tree Hill," period.
Starring opposite Johansson is Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, around whom most of "Atlas" revolves.
Schilling's resume is thin. She is fresh from playing the lead on NBC's critically panned — and canceled — medical drama "Mercy." But according to the Internet Movie Database, her only previous role was in the 2007 film "Dark Matter."
Helping round out the cast of virtual unknowns is Grant Bowler ("Ugly Betty") as steel magnate Hank Rearden.
Not to slight any of these actors, but we are talking about a project that has, over the years, drawn interest from A-list talent like Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and, most recently, Charlize Theron.
Proposals to adapt "Atlas Shrugged" for the screen have ranged from film adaptations, sometimes breaking the novel into multiple movies, to a TV miniseries. Suggested budgets have gone as high as $40 million, no doubt with the hope that top talent would take pay cuts in exchange for coveted roles.
Instead, we're getting a rush job with a no-name cast, a budget of just $5 million and the promise — or is it a threat? — that at least one more movie will pick up the story where "Atlas Shrugged Part One" leaves off.
How did it come to this?
John Aglialoro, CEO of exercise equipment manufacturer Cybex International, paid $1 million for the movie rights to "Atlas" in 1992. Yet, despite years of false hopes and false starts, he failed to get the movie going, and his time was running out. If "Atlas" had not gone into production this week, Aglialoro's option would have run out.
So, Aglialoro is pressing on with what he has, which isn't much. That's why his "Atlas Shrugged" looks like more of a scheme to hold onto the film rights than a proper movie.
This wouldn't be the first time someone has rushed a low-budget movie into production just to retain the right to make a better version later on.
In the early 1990s, a German company held the rights to make a movie based on Marvel Comics' The Fantastic Four. With their option running out, the German producers brought in American B-movie king Roger Corman to make a quickie FF movie so they could keep their option alive.
With a reported budget of $1.4 million — would that even cover the catering on most films? — and featuring a no-star cast, Corman's "The Fantastic Four" became the stuff of legend. It was never commercially released, and it exists today only as bootleg DVDs you can sometimes find at comic book conventions. It's the "Star Wars Holiday Special" of superhero movies.
Eventually, 20th Century Fox would release two big-budget Fantastic Four movies. But they aren't particularly good, either, come to think of it.
Will this B-grade "Atlas Shrugged" movie ever see daylight, or is it destined to follow Corman's FF into obscurity? Who knows?
Who is John Galt, anyway?
The next time you're in a movie theater, look at the posters hanging in the lobby. You'll notice they have one thing in common.
They're boring.
Once upon a time, movie posters were little works of art, prized by film buffs and collectors. Now, they're a testament to the evils of Photoshop.
According to my unscientific survey, half of all new movie posters simply depict the heads of actors Photoshopped in orbit around the movie's logo. These posters are creatively bankrupt and fail at what should be their one and only job: generating excitement for a movie.
A recent offender is a poster for "Iron Man 2" that shows the cast's publicity photos floating above an explosion. It's every movie poster sin collected in one place, as if to serve as a case study of what not to do.
Obviously, the studio wasn't counting on that poster to sell tickets, since "Iron Man 2" already had a built-in audience. But that excuse doesn't keep a boring, unimaginative poster from being a boring, unimaginative poster.
Horror posters are even worse. Every installment of the "Saw" franchise comes with a now obligatory poster depicting an amputated body part. That gimmick wasn't particularly clever the first time, never mind the fifth. The only suspense is, what body part will it be next time? So far, we've had a foot, a couple of fingers, a head and some teeth.
Before Photoshop made things too easy for lazy movie marketers, movie posters had style. Often they were the work of talented artists and painters. Most famously, Clint Eastwood recruited Frank Frazetta to paint the poster for "The Gauntlet," Eastwood's 1977 police thriller. In good condition, original prints of Frazetta's poster now go for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
The iconic 1977 "Star Wars" poster, featuring Luke with his lightsaber raised above his head and Princess Leia showing more leg than she actually would until "Return of the Jedi," is another classic example of a movie poster that draws you in. They don't make them like that anymore.
Old-school posters did have their clichés, but at least they were memorable clichés. The beautiful woman in the arms of a monster, alien or robot was a favorite. It popped up everywhere from "Creature from the Black Lagoon" to "Forbidden Planet."
And to be fair, floating heads predate the Photoshop age. But when one of your floating heads is Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster, you've already succeeded in generating audience interest.
The best old-style posters were often for low-budget movies destined for rural drive-ins and urban grindhouses. The artwork was usually lurid and accompanied by over-the-top proclamations like, "What he does to your nerves is almost as frightening as what he does to his victims!" from "The Toolbox Murders."
But an effective poster could also be simple, such as the giant shark coming up from beneath the swimmer on the "Jaws" poster. If someone were to make a poster for "Jaws" today, it would probably show the heads of Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfuss floating above an exploding boat, with a shark hidden somewhere in the background.
Maybe movie studios think they don't need movie posters to promote movies anymore because they have the Internet. But if "Snakes on a Plane" proved anything, it's that Internet hype doesn't always translate into box-office success.
And "Snakes on a Plane" had a lousy poster.
If you haven't seen the conclusion of "Lost" yet, come back later. There are spoilers ahead.
So, was that the ending "Lost's" creators had in mind from the start?
Probably not, because it seemed a lot like an ending cobbled together during the final season to make up for most viewers having already guessed the original ending.
If you had "they're stuck in purgatory" in your office pool, you're a winner.
Well, almost. It turns out the "sideways timeline" introduced in season 6 was purgatory, while the Island was pre-purgatory, or maybe semi-purgatory, but definitely not just plain old purgatory, since that's what everyone had already guessed. Whatever the Island was, it made me glad that, unlike many of my friends, I hadn't invested a lot of time and emotion on "Lost."
On the list of TV shows with polarizing finales, "Lost" is going to rank pretty high, along with the likes of "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Sopranos," both of which had controversial endings I'll happily defend, after enough drinks.
If ABC's remake of "Life on Mars" had lasted more than one season, people would be arguing about its final episode, too. But nobody much cared about "Life on Mars." That's the difference. Viewers and critics alike really cared about "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Sopranos." And now some of them say they've been betrayed.
A common complaint about TV dramas with complex mythologies and storylines is the writers are just making things up as they go. That's how most TV shows are made, but for mythology-rich shows like "Lost," making it up as you go is a cardinal sin.
The major offender here is "The X-Files." Chris Carter clearly had no idea where his show was going, so in the end it's a miracle that all of the various conspiracy plotlines fit together as well as they did. If you have a couple of hours and a flow chart, you can see how all the threads converge.
The problem with "The X-Files" isn't that Carter had no grand plan and definite endgame. It's that the show stayed on the air too long. Most shows run out of steam around season 5 — for example, "House," which has been a disappointment all year. "The X-Files" should have ended with season 7. Instead, it limped along for two more pointless, mostly David Duchovny-free, years.
That's one thing "Lost's" staff writers got right. They decided to end with season 6. Besides, any longer and they would have had to explain how Hurley is the only person in history to gain weight — without resorting to cannibalism — while stranded on an island.
If I'm right that the Island was originally meant to be purgatory, then "Lost's" problem isn't making it up as you go but sticking too close to the original plan while pretending you're not.
Sticking with the plan has its own hazards. J. Michael Straczynski mapped out "Babylon 5" before the first episode aired. He even built in "trap doors" so he could make changes on the fly if an actor decided to leave. But he couldn't account for everything. He rushed season 4 to tie up loose ends in case the show didn't get its planned fifth season.
And when "Babylon 5" did get a fifth season, it mostly marked time until reaching its predestined conclusion.
So, if there's a lesson here, it's that you can have a master plan or you can make it up as you go. The risks are the same. Just don't end your TV series with anything involving purgatory.
Apart from "Iron Man 2," the most exciting thing I've seen this month is, of all things, a political advertisement.
Dale Peterson's ad hit YouTube on Sunday, and by Monday afternoon it was everywhere — Fox News, political blogs, and websites devoted to things that are either awesome or just plain weird. You name it.
In media speak, the ad had "gone viral." By midweek, it had attracted about half a million views on YouTube, and at least one media pundit — a blogger for Time magazine — had declared it the best campaign ad ever.
Hardly anyone had even heard of Peterson before his ad stormed the Internet like battalions of GIs attacking the beaches at Normandy. Now he is the most recognizable candidate in Alabama's Republican primary for state agriculture commissioner. Not that that's saying much. With everyone's attention focused on the contentious race for governor, the candidates for commissioner of agriculture are barely an afterthought.
Peterson's ad is like a John Wayne western. The background music evokes "The Magnificent Seven," without being so similar as to require royalty payments.
When Peterson first appears, he is, naturally, riding a horse. He's also wearing a white cowboy hat, just in case you have any doubt about who the "good guy" is supposed to be. Then he hops down, takes off his sunglasses, looks us right in the eye and goes on a glorious rant that makes him sound more than a little like R. Lee Emery's drill sergeant in "Full Metal Jacket." You half expect him to tell you to drop and give him 20.
It's the political equivalent of Tourette syndrome. He even calls one of his opponents a "dummy," which is either rude or refreshingly candid or, for all I know, possibly both.
But this ad is no dummy.
With the help of some fast-paced editing, Peterson comes across as a decent character actor with superb comic timing. If he doesn't win the election, he could go to California and perhaps replace Emery as Hollywood's go-to military guy.
Peterson tells us he's been "a farmer, a businessman, a cop, a Marine during Vietnam, so listen up." When he takes off the sunglasses, he's like David Caruso at the start of every "CSI: Miami" episode. But instead of assaulting us with a bad pun, he talks about the "thugs and criminals" who try to keep Alabama voters "in the dark."
I'm not entirely certain what he's talking about, but it sounds pretty good. Besides, "thug" is a great word. People don't use it nearly enough. Thug.
He does lose focus a bit when he starts talking about "illegals." I realize you can't get elected dog catcher in this state unless you support a homegrown Berlin Wall, but immigration doesn't have much to do with the agriculture commissioner's job description. Still, he gets right back on target when he fumes about his opponents stealing yard signs from his supporters.
I like a politician who has his priorities straight.
But seriously, it's not that he's complaining about stolen yard signs. It's that he's so deadly earnest about it. And to prove it, almost the next thing he does is brandish a rifle.
Other campaign commercials this election cycle have shown candidates carrying rifles, but Peterson is the only candidate I can imagine actually shooting one. (Sorry, Bradley Byrne.)
Is it wrong for voters to choose a candidate based on one clever commercial? Of course it is. But voters make decisions based on lots of wrongheaded notions. So why not this one?
Frank Frazetta didn't create Tarzan or Conan the Barbarian, but he did bring both to life. His brush strokes transformed fantasy into reality.
Heroes and villains, monsters and maidens — Frazetta painted them all. His fantasy artwork, appearing mostly on magazine covers and paperback novels, depicted worlds that previously had resided only in the imagination.
Frazetta, the father of fantasy art, died Monday after suffering a stroke at his home in Fort Myers, Fla. He was 82.
Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, N.Y., Frazetta got his start in the 1940s, drawing for comic books and, later, newspaper strips like Al Capp's "Li'l Abner." But it wasn't until the 1960s that he found his true calling. That was when he began painting the cover illustrations for Robert E. Howard's "Conan the Barbarian" stories, which were published in a dozen paperback volumes by Lancer Books and Ace Books.
Most of what people now think of when they think of the sword and sorcery genre comes from Frazetta's paintings.
Every cliché is there, but when Frazetta began painting, they weren't yet clichés: the thickly muscled barbarian warrior wielding his ax or sword in battle, naked (or mostly naked) maidens chained to dungeon walls and sacrificial alters, hideous monsters emerging from subterranean depths to prey on the innocent. Every sinewy muscle and every lurid detail pointed to Frazetta's passion for his art, which he pursued at the expense of a professional baseball career.
The 1982 film "Conan the Barbarian" starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is as much the product of Frazetta's vision as it is Howard's. And the two visions are sometimes at odds because, as Frazetta once remarked, he never read the books.
"I didn't read any of it. It was too opposite of what I do. I told them that," Frazetta said. "So, I drew him (Conan) my way. It was really rugged. And it caught on. I didn't care about what people thought. People who bought the books never complained about it. They probably didn't read them."
People did read the books, but Frazetta was right about one thing — no one complained.
Frazetta reached his creative peak in the 1970s. He was still painting covers for the Conan series when he took up the adventures of two other classic pulp characters, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, both created decades earlier by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
With John Carter, like Conan, Frazetta had an entire world to imagine — a Mars populated by beautiful princesses and 12-foot-tall, four-armed warriors who call their planet Barsoom. When you see Frazetta's Dejah Thoris, you immediately know why Carter would take up arms against all of Mars to defend her.
Frazetta also painted magazine covers for Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, and the 1983 animated film "Fire and Ice" was based on characters he created.
His admirers include Clint Eastwood, who hired him to paint the promotional poster for his 1977 thriller "The Gauntlet," and George Lucas.
Frazetta also is the subject of Lance Laspina's 2003 documentary, "Painting with Fire." And "painting with fire" is as good a metaphor as you'll find for Frazetta's work.
Unfortunately, Frazetta's final year adds a sad footnote to his story. His wife and muse, Ellie, died after a yearlong battle with cancer, and their children subsequently squabbled over their father's original artwork.
For the rest of us, however, Frazetta's legacy is an enduring testament to the power of what art snobs try to dismiss as mere commercial art. That legacy is right there on our bookshelves.
Directing "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans" is not the greatest challenge of Werner Herzog's film-making career. He did not, after all, have to drag a steamboat over a mountain. He just had to direct Nicolas Cage.
Since winning his Oscar, Cage has turned in a number of lackluster performances. The less said of "Ghost Rider," the better. But in New Orleans police Lt. Terence McDonagh — the titular bad lieutenant — Cage has found a role that suits his eccentricities.
Perhaps that is what drew Herzog to make a film that, at first glance, doesn't seem like a Herzog film. The title suggests either a remake of Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant," which starred Harvey Keitel, or a sequel. But it is neither.
Herzog has long gravitated toward obsessed or deranged characters, finding more truth in them than in mundane reality. How else could he have survived his long partnership with Klaus Kinski, which he documented in the film "My Best Fiend"? Now, with Cage, Herzog has formed a new partnership. But the insanity remains in front of the camera. This time, there are no urban legends of the uncompromising German director threatening his star with a gun.
Lt. McDonagh, however, threatens many people: young couples, drug dealers, elderly women tethered to oxygen tanks. Relentless insanity bubbles beneath his surface, rising violently only to recede again like the ocean tide.
New Orleans, through Herzog's lens, is similarly relentless, a near barren post-Katrina wasteland. We see the French Quarter from its edges, but we see the Lower 9th Ward in full view.
Cage's McDonagh is strangely mesmerizing, hunched over like Richard III and fueled by Vicodin and cocaine. Ironically, the bad lieutenant's bad habit is the result of a good deed. He injures his back while saving a jail inmate from drowning during Hurricane Katrina. Afterward, he must pop pills and snort lines merely to function.
"Bad Lieutenant," however, is not a brief against drug abuse, although it portrays it as anything but glamorous. McDonagh is a high-functioning addict. He juggles gambling debts, a high-class prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes), the mob, a drug lord (Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner) and a murder investigation involving a slain family. All, however, threaten to fall, and in so doing alert his fellow officers to his illegal doings.
Was McDonagh a bad cop before his injury and substance abuse? We do not know. Is he truly a bad cop afterward? By all legal and moral standards, yes. Yet he is still more ethical than his partner, played by Val Kilmer.
Herzog does not offer easy answers. What, after all, is the significance of the alligator and the iguanas who, shot on a shaky video camera by Herzog himself, appear as mute spectators to the proceedings? Are they merely McDonagh's hallucinations? Or do they hold greater significance?
And what are we to make of the dead man's soul, which McDonagh sees still dancing even after its corporeal home has been shot full of holes? Is it just another sign of his insanity?
In the end, perhaps there are no answers, merely a punch line, but a punch line well worth the telling. For Herzog and Cage, all is a dark comedy, and the joke is on humanity.
"Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans" is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.
