Elizabeth, that's awesome that you saw the herd of deer, quarantine or no quarantine. :) I'm excited too that you got to see 'em, and for me it reminds me of a hike in Whitney Canyon last Fall. I had driven out there on a whim, and as I was walking along with my camera, no sooner did I think "maybe I'll see a deer" than I turned and saw three of them across the trail. It really was instantaneous from "think" to "see". I posted a photo of one of them with his head turned and his hind leg pointing, can't recall if it's on Flickr or Facebook, but yeah - to see a deer is wonderful any time (and especially in Japan!) :):)
I'm glad you're hanging in there, and though it's not easy to be stuck inside, it's better than being sick and stuck inside. I figure by the end of this month, things might ease up a little bit. I'm gonna count it down by 10 (as in 10,9,8,7,6....) going three days at a time, so after April 3rd, it'll be "one down, nine to go". I'm a numbers person and that's my way of trying to make it go quicker, all the while counting my blessings and knowing I am fortunate to be well. I love "The Ocean", by the way. It's a beautiful song and I like the way you take the vocal up a notch with approximately twenty five seconds remaining, on the lyric "it's like a tidal wave". That can be a powerful technique for singers, to go up "over the top" of a phrase to add emphasis, usually on a last verse or chorus. You did it there and it's very effective. :)
Today I finished "Roadshow" by Neil Peart, and I'm both happy and depressed to have done so, haha. Happy because it's one of the greatest and most vivid, life affirming books I've ever read; depressed because I finished it! It's one of those books that you wish could've gone on forever, just like Neil should've gone on forever. Ahh, well.......he is still with us, just on The Other Side, which I have come to know is not an impenetrable barrier. I began a new book in it's stead, called "Gobekli Tepe : Genesis of the Gods" by Andrew Collins, about the monolithic and mysterious stone temple unearthed in Turkey in the late 1990s. It is similar in design to Stonehenge but far more massive and complete, and much older, yet the similarities between the two - and with other such temples and astronomically aligned megaliths on other continents - suggest the possibility of a worldwide consciousness or awareness around the time of 12000 BC that led to the building of these structures, beginning at the end of the Ice Age. But how could these temples coincidentally appear, across oceans thousands of miles apart, long before sailing supposedly began? Did wildly different cultures all have the same spontaneous idea? Or did they have help? It should be an interesting read!
My movie tonight was "Phantom From Space"(1958), directed by W. Lee Wilder, who also made the better known "Killers From Space" starring Peter Graves. There are no big names in this picture but the cast gets the job done and are subordinate to the Phantom anyway, a guy in what looks like a diving suit, complete with round brass helmet. As the movie opens, his flying saucer is being tracked by the Air Force over Alaska, moving at five thousand miles per hour. At that speed, it doesn't take long before he's above Santa Monica, California, where for some reason his ship slows and crashes into the ocean. Maybe he ran out of gas. Anyway, the Air Force can't locate him, his ship having disappeared from radar prior to the crash. That same night, on the Santa Monica beach, a married couple and their young male friend are having a cookout when an intruder approaches. A fight breaks out, and the husband is killed, the young man knocked cold. He is taken to the hospital, and when he comes to, a police detective is waiting to interview him.
He tells the cop a crazy story about a man wearing a deep sea diving suit, who walked up the beach and attacked them. The cop is skeptical, obviously, because of the description. He thinks it was more likely a spat between the two men over the woman. "Were you having an affair"?, he presses. The young man insists he was not, and suggests the officer interview the wife to get a concurring description. "We're going to as soon as we can find her". They do find her and she corroborates what the young man has said. Still skeptical that they could've concocted the story, the detective returns to ask the young man what the diver looked like : "Did you get a look at his face"?
'Well that's the thing, Detective. From what I could see, he had no face".
Holy Smokes and Great Jumpin' Jiminy, my fellow sci-fi fans! It's time to be alarmed!
The detective now thinks the young man is a raving lunatic, but has to revise his opinion when the cops get a call from the Huntington Oil Field (I looked it up, it's a real place near Huntington Beach). There's been an explosion at the site. A man was seen running away, wearing a diving suit. Okay, now the kid's story has a little more credence, except for the "no face" part. Well, maybe he was smoking some funny cigarettes. But it looks like there is a guy running around in a diving suit. Better get down to the oil field and investigate.
I should point out that it's never explained why he went to the oil field. My own theory reverts to the "out of gas" supposition - maybe he was just trying to refuel? Heck, I don't know. The important thing is, that when he gets there, the detective and the Field boss find a diving suit with nobody in it. The helmet is missing, though. The suit is made of a Strange Fabric, it can't be torn, cut or even burned. Okay, time to call in a Scientist (not a Mad One, however). The scientist arrives with his Geiger counter - always good to have one handy in these movies - and of course the suit is buzzing with radiation. "How on Earth could he have survived in this"?, wonders the scientist.
Hmmmm........this is just me speculating here, but maybe the guy's not from Earth. Maybe he's from Outer Space. Better call the Air Force.
Yep, sure enough! They were tracking an unidentified flying object the very same night. It must've crash landed in the area. (maybe the kid's story isn't so crazy now, eh?)
A full search will ensue, with all hands on deck, the Air Force, the cops and the scientists. To cut to the chase without revealing all of the plot, a call will come in later that night from a research facility that is obviously the Griffith Park Observatory. Doors have been observed opening and closing by themselves, could you please come have a look? All sorts of theories have been proposed by now about the nature of the man in the radiation suit, so the "invisibility" claim is holding more water. When the team arrives at the Observatory, a female scientist is heard screaming inside the laboratory. She grabs the in house phone to report that "something" is inside the lab with her.
"And all it is wearing is a helmet"! I paraphrase here, as I often do when attempting to recall exact dialogue, but what she means is that the guy is freakin' invisible (and somewhere the kid from the beach is thinking, "See? Told ya so...."). The Phantom, because he is clearly that, doesn't attack the lab woman. Instead, he takes away the knife she is pointing at him and begins tapping a table with it's handle. "I....I think he's trying to tell me something"!, she reports over the intercom. "It sounds like a code"!
Oh man. If only we could've gotten this straightened out at the beginning, we could've saved all that trouble at the beach, and the explosion at the oil field, too. It's gonna turn out that the Phantom is an essentially harmless fella. The detective recalls that he didn't even start the fight at the beach. According to the young man, the wife had thrown the first punch. Maybe this guy was just defending himself. Yeah, that's gotta be it, because he isn't harming the lab worker. But what's that code he keeps pounding out? And why did he remove all of his clothing except for his helmet? Ahh yes, the radiation......and perhaps the helmet helps him to breathe? Yes, that's got to be it! It has tubes in the front, which must contain elements of his atmosphere!
Then that's what the code is referring to! He's trying to tell us he's running out of air (or whatever it is)!
And that, my friends, is all I am going to tell you. I very much enjoyed "Phantom From Space", which has great location shooting and an alien who is a sympathetic figure for once. It's not a classic like "The Thing From Another World" but it does have a lot of action, a fair sized budget with some good FX, and an intelligent script incorporating the police investigation into all the science.
Best of all, for me, was my discovery of the film's screenwriter. As the credits rolled, I was startled to read "Written by William Raynor".
Wow!, I thought. How cool is that? Bill Raynor was mostly a TV writer for shows in the 1960s, such as "Get Smart", "Gomer Pyle" and "The Doris Day Show". He also wrote a few episodes of "The Brady Bunch" and later on "The Dukes of Hazzard". But early in his career he penned several motion picture screenplays as well, including "Phantom From Space" and the aforementioned "Killers From Space".
But for me, what was really cool about Bill Raynor was that he was our neighbor when I was a kid in Reseda. He and his family lived across the street, which would be just around the corner from Pearl's house, so when I am working I pass his old house every day. My sisters used to play with his daughters, Jan and Jill, but the coolest thing of all is that Bill Raynor took some great baby pictures of me when I was about 2 years old. He was also an amateur photographer (and a good one) who had taken night classes in photography at Reseda High School. I still have the pictures he took of me, wearing a little kid's jumper and holding a pipe of all things, haha. Maybe he wanted me to look sophisticated, lol. My hair is perfectly combed and the photos resemble studio shots. I might even have posted one in one of my FB albums, I'll have to look. But yeah.......that's Bill Raynor, writer of shows and sci-fi movies, and our neighbor from 1953-1965 or so. Very fun to see his name at the end of this movie, which gets Two Big Thumbs Up from me. /////
It is now Thursday afternoon at 5pm. Elizabeth, I was happy to see your photo of the trees this morning. They brought be some serenity too, as now all of our parks have been closed and I can't even go to Santa Susana. I am glad you can still go out, though, so keep posting if you feel like it, and stay well. Now I shall go for a CSUN walk. Have a great evening and I will see you later tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment