Egomania

  And then there was James Dean. Oh, that sad young man whose won-derful career was shattered short during the making of his third big film, Giant, when he was involved in a terrible auto accident, in Southern Cali-fornia. Of course, fans didn’t want him to be really, actually, in fact, dead! Another basket case, I suggested, with tongue thrust sadly through both cheeks in a snide reflection as to the depths that fans will go in their denial of evidence to the contrary. And Dean’s death had hard evidence; no body disappearing into thin air. But some fans will believe what they want to, regardless of the facts.

  In the book I had been dealing with exposing such rumors.

  Fair enough. Still, I got a phone call from somebody who was furious that I would claim James Dean was a basket case, and wanted to know where I got that information. I was more than shaken a bit. Nonetheless, I managed to explain what I’d actually said and was pointing out the habits of fans creating unwarranted rumors. I had a few moments when I won-dered if some gang of furious fans would turn up to pound me into the ce-ment of some dark and dank night alley. You can rest assured that I avoid-ed dark and dank alleys, even during the daylight hours. I wasn’t about to take any chances.

  There are a few other moments of interest involving the book.

  I was told by a man who, I knew for a fact, had hard evidence that Marilyn Monroe had been calling Washington, DC the night of her death, and was attempting to connect with the President or his brother Bobby—and perhaps had. I knew a bit more than I recorded in the book, only adding there had been a call to DC. I’d been warned not to reveal any more. And this was years before such information became common public knowledge. I had, also, met Fatty Arbuckle’s widow, Minta, at a private party given by my parents. But never interviewed her for the book, a bloody mistake, I suppose.

  Such are the little items of business behind the scenes insofar as writing is concerned.

  In this book, as an added confession: the publisher’s demand was to leave each section with an “open-ended” concept, a mystery un-solved. Well, that wasn’t very difficult in the long run.

  In the present edition I updated much of the book and gave some new material to each section. So in this version it is far more complete and satis-fying as a story about the Hollywood of the early years when the town was the center of the movie industry.

  Today, well, Hollywood is more of a symbol that represents the idea of film making, and has become more universalized over the decades to in-clude the whole world not only in location but also in creative efforts that bring movies to Planet Earth.

  Still the “sins” of those early decades are evident even today, for hu-man beings are much the same, with much the same hungers and frustrations. If anything, the madness of greed and lust for ever more tantalizing pleasures has escalated to enormous proportions. The now fill all the newly creative forms of visual technologies of today, from mega monstrous screens to tiny pocket devices, penetrating all our living spaces both public and private, hardly anything left to our imaginations. Celebrities become not only larger than life, but a part of our living “family experience” on an every day basis. The news media of today has penetrated into the Internet and combined with nasty tabloids style gossip. All this feasts on the false rumors and distortions of truth and most of all invasions of privacy. For the long telescopic lenses connected to cameras aimed right into the celebrity’s bedrooms seek out naked reality wherever it can be exposed. Without shame or concern for personal feelings. If one seeks fame their lives are on public display. That’s the rationalization, coupled with: ya pay a price tag for fame, like it or not.

  Rumor and facts never make any attempt to do less than blur reality. And those who are targets become victims of their own fame in ways never imagined possible in the beginning years. The rich and famous have always been a target of public imagination and interest, but today it has become such a tragic invasion of their private lives that it creates havoc not only for the film industry but for our political leaders, as well. Not to mention, ex-ecutive, spiritual, commercial, editorial, and cultural leaders—to name a few strongly influential power blocs that have a hand in shaping our world today.

  There are few secrets that can’t be distorted and lied about that the me-dia doesn’t greedily seek to exploit.

  So maybe I should step down off of my verbosely out of context soap-box and get back to the business of hacking books, my personal specialty.

  What I’m trying to say is that this book is a sampling of how it was in the beginnings of the twentieth century, when the film industry was still quite young and developing into what ultimately has become a vast interna-tional net of complex media exploitation.

  I have offered in Hollywood Mysteries some views of how it was and is and will continue to be worldwide for those who seek fame. For the public always has an inquiring mind that demands intimate, even if not true an-swers!

  THE EPIC DIALOGS OF MHYO

  I never, generally, went for the artsy kind of literary writing. At least that’s been my claim. I never attempted to write literature beyond the commercial knock-em-out stories—as a “hack” paperback writer. Which, to me, meant, hopefully to write something that was entertaining and not expect more than offering the audience a few moments of enjoyable escape. Not certain where all that came from. Perhaps a bit of the influence my father had on me. He was commercial, commercial and commercial, favoring the use of his talent to reach the people with what they wanted, rather than attempt to be “instructive” or “artsy” in the so-called classical sense of the world. Though he had his moments when his artwork was hung in various collector’s showcases and galleries. At least one found its way into San Francisco’s Legion of Honor. But that wasn’t his goal and this was drummed into me for as long as I remember. Dad didn’t go for attic painting done to please a few, but rather using his talent to make a living and be commercially successful artist.

  Well, be that as it may, it certainly put me on the commercial side of the creative fence.

  Ah, but we all fall into traps and standardized holes even against our wills. To be truthful, I always tried to say something useful in my writing. Better me than the next fellow, who might not be as attentive in such mat-ters of pubic illumination.

  I was, in life, many times affected by what a writer had to say. Even the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, which the author admitted to as being escape novels, had their strong effect over my young mind. There is very little that I have read which didn’t feed me with some valued viewpoint or idea.

  That’s the very nature of writing—expressing one’s ideas.

  Expounding on my own ideas through my writing is self-evident, if you haven’t noticed, by now. It is just about impossible to avoid expressing one’s personal concept of the world when writing. Bringing it down to the basics, all we can add to a written story or article is something from our own experience or at the very least our own concept of life. Even in the most unbiased news article, the inclusion or exclusion of miniscule facts does not make it any more or less true, but it tells something about those who put out the article; what bias, what facts, they want the public to be informed about.

  We develop ideas in the very act of living; and, in the process of writ-ing, such conclusions and concepts creep their way into our written words. Like it or not, we write what we are, nothing more, nothing less.

  We all are obsessed with communicating ideas and, if smart enough, seek the widest possible audience to reach!

  Simply put: writers tend to want to say something they consider im-portant, and they do it one way or the other. Editors may very well hack such stuff out of existence before it gets into print.

  So, always beware, as a writer, to hide your precious hammer-headed life lessons or conclusions in way as to make them almost unseen. Or if seen, viewed only within the context of entertaining material which is so compulsively designed that the reader will absorb it all without realizing their minds have been so invaded by the writer.

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nbsp; The Epic Dialogs of Mhyo was one of my very few, if not, perhaps, my only, leap into any attempt to be “silly-serious” about my writing. Well, okay. Originally, the thematic ideas originated from notes I had made throughout therapy over a period of time many years ago. I put those notes into a question and answer form and then gave the dialog a bit more per-sonality by applying it to characters and expanding on that as a result of each character’s character. Then, to make things a little more readable, I expanded it all out into a kind of fictional plot structure that allowed some humor. The original Q&A sequences were broken into scenes and then ex-panded. At the same time I found it necessary to cut, cut and cut some more in order to simplify complicated and convoluted and even redundant concepts which were plaguing the whole bloody thing.

  After some 20,000 words I called it, for lack of a better title, The Wall Book—don’t ask why, just a matter of giving it some working title. By that time, a concept of Talking Walls materialized.

  But The Wall Book had become something of a wallflower tucked away in a dusty file and lost for around ten to twenty years, I suppose. I attended to it from time to time, gradually considering it such a wonderful masterful literary bit of business that I simply had to find some way to make used of it. But what? How? It had a lot of basically good material and a lot of quotable stuff. Enough to power countless stories and/or books. However, I wasn’t interested in doing more writing, and certainly not a series of books. So it kept festering in the backwoods of my files and churning in my mind. What to do with it? Expand or contract? It was so complicated and convo-luted.

  There is a lot more I could say involving the process from the earlier version to the final one, but it would all boil down to my decision, for bet-ter or worse, to simply go for one single story, and to condense what I had in the course of finalization of the bloody thing.

  So I called it The Epic Dialogs of Mhyo and went about condensing and cutting and re-polishing and adding the sub-plot.

  The final style of a “document found in a little shop in India” was a great “invention” which made it possible to convert everything into its pre-sent form. And more importantly make it possible to write the different pieces, with the computer word-processor I now had, simply jumping around and putting down what seemed necessary to make my points as di-gestible as possible. I could tongue-in-cheek it all, I could make a lot of short clips which worked for me, and never have to write something I didn’t wanna bother with ’cause I could use the brackets to indicate miss-ing parts […] in the crumbling document. All I had to do was make certain that what was actually written made sense as far as it went. I even had some fun in making a satire of porno, while at the same time sticking my mental pin into the balloon of high-minded censors! And also avoid having to write porno, which I wasn’t in the mood to do, especially under my own byline.

  And thus came out an “arty poo” fairytale designed for a more adult’s mind than a child’s with the following challenge at the front end of the sto-ry, now a part of the back cover lines:

  This is an “adult fairy tale” concerning an ancient document discovered in a small shop in India. Or it is an ancient document discovered in a small shop in India, here published as an “adult fairy tale.” Well, even the pub-lisher couldn’t get that one right!

  But most of all there are the Walls that Speak, including the most pow-erful, popular Wall of all: GODWALL; and the most deadly of all the Walls, DEATHWALL, itself!

  Do you dare to continue?

  SLAVEGIRL OF NOOMAS

  The long awaited sequel to the Torlo Hannis story! How exciting that sounds in print. Even verbally spoken.

  It has been, in truth, a long time in coming about, and would never have happened but for the suggestion of Robert Reginald! And I would not have gone about writing an original book at this time without some serious col-laboration. As it turns out, Heidi Garrett has been a great help in proofing a number of my e-books in the last few years, and has gotten to know my style of writing and thinking to such an extent that I felt totally comfortable in saying: “Hey, if you think something needs cutting or editing, go right ahead and do your thing!” And for the most part I never looked back, feeling safe with her work. I had been busy updating and revising and adding new material to a number of these stories, so I was quite busy. Her efforts on my behalf made things much easier.

  So, when it came about dealing with doing a sequel to Torlo Hannis of Noomas I decided to ask for her help before committing to it. We had talked about doing some story together for a long time, and this seemed a very logical place to do just that. Heidi came up with so many ideas and suggestions in the development of the storyline that it was obvious we were in fact already collaborating,

  Collaborations are done in a number of ways. Usually there’s a top-dog and an underling. To make things very confusing, there are some basic rules concerning all this. If somebody hires a writer but wants to take full credit, then it is ghost-written and the real writer is not even listed. In the case where a writer is hired to do a book for somebody else, but given co-author credit, then their name is under the author’s “famous” person’s name. If it is written in collaboration between two writers, but one doing most of the work (or perhaps book is based on something that writer has previously done) then that writer’s name goes on top. Perhaps. Maybe. Sometimes you just bow to alphabetical order of name. Or ladies first, perhaps? Now we are set with some confusion: is the bottom name the main writer or the secondary one? All depends, as we have seen.

  Sometimes a new pen name will be invented to take into consideration both names.

  Ah, the illusion of it all, and the confusion to boot.

  In this case we’ve decided original author, first draft writer first. Now that might be because I’m an uncaring bully of a fella, or simply a matter of truth in action.

  But it does not in any way reflect a lessening of influence or degree of creative effort or work on either of our parts. The fact is that the order of things, here, are obvious: I originated the series, so… thus it is.

  Yet there is another factor involved. Heidi had to have her arm “bro-ken” to take on the byline credit, not being convinced as to her rights to such a status. And the truth is that her work on this book has been amazing-ly creative and wonderfully helpful in so many ways that it would never have been the same without her as a full partner.

  All of this, of course, involves endless emotional, mental, and creative battles about micro points of order, to say nothing about major leaps of mu-tual faith.

  In this case I think it would be fair to state we both have worked hard to design a book that lives up to the expectations of all readers and is a neat bridge to the final book in the Noomas Trilogy.

  As to that last item of business, now titled Conquest of Noomas, con-tinued and finished the Noomas in a 500 page book, almost as long as the previous two books in this trilogy.

  In an interesting way the following book and “Epic Dialogs of Mhyo” plus a few others, like “Lost City of the Damned” are indirectly connected to the Noomas series, insofar as Haldolen is a factor that ties into their his-tories. This is the same Haldolen which was first discovered in the follow-ing book.

  SWORDMEN OF VISTAR

  Boy have I gotten in trouble with this one; at least with the hard-core ERB fans. Not meant to. Just happened. My character’s name Thoris is not based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs famous Princess of Mars Dejah Thoris, (at least not done consciously) but thought of as an extension of the God Thor! Be that as it may, I still wouldn’t change his name. After all, he pre-dated any ancient Thor insofar as he was a warrior from 30,000 BC. Now try to top that if you can!

  In any case, this was expected to be a series, but never went beyond the original book, even though I was encouraged by the publisher to write new stories about Thoris—alas, Powell Publications went under and so did any sequels. When AlexLit released it as an e-book, I suggested an Epilog, which, in effect, would offer a completion
of the story, as best it could be told. After all, since it was the telling of an ancient warrior’s life, translated from long lost scrolls, all related in the published Introduction (now re-leased by Wildside Press), I simply offered the extra material as explanation for a lack of any further stories. I was delighted with the results.

  An interesting thing happened, right after the novel’s publication in pa-perback form back in the mid-twentieth century. I got a furious letter from a reader, I believe in Canada, who was angry about my mentioning of the Mu books by James Churchward, which had been quite popular as hard-cover editions. Even I had read the first one; a rather fascinating suggestion that there had been a continent in the Pacific Ocean called Mu that ex-plained many ancient ruins and mysterious structures, such as those on Easter Island.

  To put it bluntly: I expanded on his idea, through the story of a profes-sor who discovered an ancient text which predated anything that Churchward had told, and let him claim a different origin and explanation of all such matters in the telling of Thoris of Haldolen’s story, published as Swordmen of Vistar.

  Well this letter I got was raging against the claim in the Vistar book that Churchward was basically wrong. Well, to confound and confuse matters I simply wrote him a letter back pointing out it wasn’t me saying such things, but the Professor’s claim.

  I supposed the letter-writer was somewhat annoyed by my answer, but never did I hear another word. At least he got the autograph of the writer in question.

  Thus I would like to add to this: it was not my intention to be insulting to the Churchward books or the theories thereby presented. But I will sug-gest that serious modern science has pretty much put to rest such ideas as fanciful. The general acceptance of information concerning continental drift has moved from mere theory to pretty much solidified fact.

  Ah, the ancient “universe” of Mu has been somewhat softened in its re-ality.

  As to my Haldolen and its existence: Heck, there is so much hard evi-dence of its existence that I have a website under that very name, Haldolen.com! Now, tell me, can there be any better proof of its reality than that?