Forum; Christopher Bram: Frankenstein's James Whale

from the longhorn radio network the university of texas at austin this is for him trey very well because of his fiction but it's about a real name and early on i decided that james well the perimeters the facts are so if you have got between the sofa to be a lot of novelist christopher bram author father of frankenstein by never stepped over those those boundaries you know what happened and know what my imagination came up with james or would happen and the ground in the swimming pool at the end of the story there is no way around that in terms of his passes after a while i was always true to that in terms of people he knew but then the novel covers the last month of his life and terms of day to day events and the people he saw during those days there

have had too many liberties the pa this is all it is a novelist and critic of books and films who has found his interests into one stylized description of the last days of hollywood director james whale author christopher plant has titled his book father of frankenstein in homage to whales role as director of the classic hollywood films frankenstein and bride of frankenstein having written part biography and part fiction mr bram expands the end of mr wills life through his memories and through his interaction with real and fictional characters christopher breen what makes his past shadowy well he gave very interesting life which is one of things

that drew me to him as a subject you came for the english working class he actually worked in a factory himself until he was in his early twenties he's served in the trenches during the first world war then he became involved in theater when he came to hollywood in the nineteen thirties he reinvented himself he passed himself off as being upper class and i was intrigue right away by just but this man had had so many laws and how are those was reflected in his movies and at the end of his life how would lose lives come back to him he's had it he had a stroke a few months before he died and it and in effect of the liquid only affected him mentally and this is an invention of mine i don't know how much truth it has but i haven't been flooded by memory its sale at one point his doctor says you're suffering from oven and incontinence of memory and so that's the return of the repressed all coming

back to him to what end as the hollywood environment support the kind of life that he answered living in canada dry well it ended in hollywood he could remake himself is as the real james wilson i'd do have him sit in the novel the whole world as plaster of paris there was that kind of slippery mats that plasticity and he could be whatever his imagination wanted he was a self made man and sewed presented his life i have in deciding that what he needs a self made debt as well when you insert actual people of this canyon through this are the true to the images or have they also run through a prison to treat it well they've also gone through a prism i like a theater troopers among them being true to the spirit of them

with some of it also lancaster for one of her appearances i drew on her autobiography and andy i really didn't capture her to speak to her spirit and that scene and there's a ceiling on the set bride of frankenstein other people that are less well known such as david lewis who was a producer and hood and wales lover for twenty years with him i took their lives last known about him so i mean i knew his basic his work and what he'd done and i didn't have any what he was like so i had to kind of come up with the sort of man who would lose somebody for twenty years then break up with him and remain friends who does hollywood strike you as a place that cherishes as much as someone like quayle gave to it the cherished wail only as long as he was successful and frankenstein the first reagan

signed was a huge box office success so his bride of frankenstein showboat was inexpensive movie but it too is very successful or lose the main theories about why wales career came to a premature end the usual it is that because he was openly gay because it made no secret of his being gay but the thing is hollywood in the nineteen thirties it was a very small town in the small community everybody knew about everybody else anyway there was no way to make it keep their homosexuality a secret at the same time where was he was only a director hollywood care about the image is only of their of their starters a director with a guarded also said that mr beatty it is the director was the brother in law he was a technician he wasn't somebody really important and so say producers as a world even while the producers were they were the real people in power so another

idea of the kind of hollywood mogul saad the thirties and forties i don't think there were any gay producers i'm even david lewis was like associate producer an assistant producer he didn't have the power in some elite david cells maker louis b mayer or even call only seen your head wilson is actually didn't really create poems firmly start making films the current hollywood homophobia didn't really kick in until after world war two but it was not popular to be liberal or prosecco well there was of war two symmetry this trend nationwide have a sexual panic before war two it was in that day people were accepted but they were treated they were seen as threats they were seen as kind of clowns are or lesser people but they were demonized after world war two it became demonized returning about just in the fabric of the social

country going on on screen and i'm going back in the fabric of the culture are on screen they were invisible there will be i would be the code which went into effect one nineteen thirty four one uses no control homosexuality at all some directors got a wellness they would be impressed the impression sturges comedy is there are men who are not called gay but they don't make any sense except his good math i mean and he treats them as jews or other part of his cast of characters heated a dozen mock them as being any more ridiculous than everybody else james whale and bride of frankenstein doctor reporters played by ernest the center is clearly a gay man it's just one more one more aspect of the character and it's so and i'm a huge dog records is an old quaint and that this scathing for all sense of wet and

then we watch it now we immediately see him as that back then maybe one the audience recognized when he was but but the studio didn't care and it wasn't true it is cause for a war end after the second world war and he still had the hays code was still in effect and there are no open broke trails of hummus actually but in in books in the time politically in the news pink scare that happened along with the red scare of sexually was seen as a threat to something dangerous and that's when gay directors ran into big problems george tiller when movies were very difficult years for him but will have already stopped making pills but in his last film was a nineteen forty one and on not really sure we're having said he is a universal studios

and the lamb ways father and son let him do whatever he wanted as a result he made movies that made them lots of money the land was lost the studio in nineteen thirty six and the people who took control wanted to run the studio the way other studios were run where everything had to be approved by the front offers you could not improvise on the seller and how well haiti working under those conditions let them know he hated it he has assignments became worse and works until finally he didn't know a picture he walked he said it i've been saving up my bare is i don't need this and he took early retirement uses fifties by them and went home and spent the rest of his life painting is he generally figure in your book it is her oboe quiet way i mean he's

basically always looking out for himself but the same time he is there's no self pity and here i mean he's in great pain after the stroke and i'm very confused but there's no self pity as i don't say his dignity he has control he wants to know that's the most important thing to do is to kind of maintain to be active to be in charge he wants to be in charge even of his own death what impacts him in this future placed him and whether it's other people horror of other forces will in the novel the man the main dramatic event that takes places will become fascinated with his yard man twenty six year old ex marine named clayton and clayton's big in his broad shoulders is a flat

top haircut and the reader is going to pick up longing for whale picks about that he bears a slight resemblance to the monster from the frankenstein movies and well it becomes obsessed with what's in some ways it's sexual but there's something else more going on he sees he says klare says angelo that and also because nick ways porn of view and clay has israel tough front runner but he is and here's a bizarre he's very confused underneath he is a tender side he's is a much more complex man then that will thinks it doesn't understand not really no he takes him a long time to even understand that will lose good wills housekeeper maria has to come right out and tell him before he gets any so the man who made frankenstein can be a homo really violent that sinks him at a time when he's already is fascinated by well both as this is a man who

made famous movies and this is a man who's been telling him stories whale sort of unloads has encountered memories on clay and talks about his time in the trenches talks about is his childhood in the poverty of his family and play develops a bond with him up on that he doesn't understand that it confuses him he's not supposed to feel this kind of sympathy for for this old coot who turns out to be a ferry to the but it has filled is enormous said is he owned vehicle through which wales celebrates his life it isn't summer celebrate his life airs unload his life through what is what whale is confused about his life as an infinite it's these two different styles of confusion a young straight man's an old gay mans will spend most most of his life out running his past and now he said it's his past is catching

up with him an overwhelming him and he doesn't know what it means and he's trying to the sorted out but they are we inserted us attorney in the stories that he unloads on climate when you write any of your novel this one included are you and looming on your readers something that you are trying to tell them you're a message to serve thread in this book about whale is part of that or is this a departure from think security written now i'm usually i am in learning things on readers whether it's a message to them and i had any huge progress in india unloading something different in father frankenstein what i realized early on what attracted me about that story and what was fun and i want to explore in writing about it

was what does a man's life look like at the end of that like what is there such thing as a time when that meant he's looking through that small and yet is oregon's on for the telescope and i mean so we still have been through so many untimely deaths with friends dying of it and so i i still haven't sort of the cell and so kind of understand it myself the connection of the first world war was this massive massive slaughter and ritual whole generation was wiped out in a way that and i feel something similar has as happened with my generation and then we have james will a man who survived that slaughter and went on to have a full life and he's looking back on and see what that life might mean has he got to the end of it he and has his he

had his successful moments he died in relative comfort ye yes and he died in a way of his own choosing of his own making when you're writing history from any standpoint you're subject to exercise a little revisionism and can you say you know how you have changed this history deliberately for your amusement what they want is a un revising here and i'm not sure why i'm doing it for them bring it closer to the truth as is the usual penance is to see gay men of previous generations of generations before stonewall as being victims as being martyrs as being have locked up tight and little closets and both israel and i've known them my friends and just the research i did on a whale i realize now that's not the case that's not

always the case and i wanted to to show that these evening when men were in slightly closeted lives as close as could be very large they were not as debilitating as we imagine these people were not as stupid as we sometimes think of more as we had pat ourselves on the back and say oh we're so much better off than they were no not necessarily but in hollywood where no bets are off in the sense that the hollywood society was different from americana and you know in hollywood it was a different situation you're definitely because it exists in hollywood i'm not really sure about the senate does now that's for sure but i know your soldier's is an attempted certain personalities or

reputation but that was limited actors were young then but the problem with them was not at all interested and directors it seems that and those are confidential magazine which in the fifties when the story's a liberace and word anything scandalous about actors usually sexual a sign of shrinking fights over that didn't exist until nineteen forty nine the most of the magazines in the thirties were literally a part of the hollywood industry so they were going to write anything on on people's sexuality anywhere part of their exploitation of those opposed personalities yelp there they were those personnel at her product and they were going to injure their product did whale feel abandoned by their life when when he left it i don't think so

that's the usual way to talk about whales is that he was spent the rest of his life kurt and resentful that he was like norma desmond wanting a comeback but i don't think he did the little evidence that come across in this is revisionism where this might be wishful thinking on my part also this one will but we'll have had a very full life he worked constantly from the time he was fifteen years old and then after you left the movies because he was right about fifty five and it brought his kids travel an enormous distance i miss working class childhood to do this very nice upper middle class house in santa monica canyon where you could just spend all day and pain and go for drives and and i like to think he really enjoyed himself during most of the time he was retirees away every had the stroke that that pain set in but that he had

he had achieved a lot and could could be satisfied with that and not one more as your book gets attention readership circulation how do you respond to those who criticize you criticize in a filibuster away what what do you hear back from readers and critics well it's early yet i hear many different things only a couple of people have said oh well if you're interested in james well this missile be a perfect book but if you're not it will mean i think he but that her lover's farm from people have heard firsthand from people who read the book to me vaguely new james will was but not really had never seen any of the movies

and isn't really work for them they were fascinated really driven into it it meant something to them so that i'm going to get those two extremes i mean in a way to me the book is really about a man looking back on his entire life and before he says goodbye to the life and it just happens to be that his life much of it was spent in making movies and that those movies happen to be horror movies gave me away to a different way to look at death and life you mean the horror genre itself your yard in one sense of the fear it elicits it's i mean it's i'm a whore movies are kind of like this enjoyable fearless controllable fear but what if that fear is no longer controlled it's whether it's just the sheer mystery of death or and will's life with after his stroke with his mind just

complete chaos i mean to me that's a real porpoise knows nothing enjoyable about that kind of poor but i do think it is work in the movie the movies would help and try to get a grasp on that and metal or now in his head course if you tamper so freely with the actual frankenstein story from an initial if it all it takes is it something totally different from iowa mary shelley her camry credit wheel with the vision that we do have a friend's dying because of the spill i i think we can blame he had a lot of input in the look of the monster in the book a flat topped head the un quickly with jack pierce i was the makeup artist and the two of them together kind of designed this creature

and which is there's no resemblance to what to the creature in the mary shelley know we'll also have a lot of input on his scripts he never really the scripts and some of the people we've heard that he would reject them or sentence is going in the wrong direction give me something and another day he had a bride of frankenstein he had far more and put it probably even wrote some of it himself i mean the whole character of dr butch morris was specifically written for wales friend ernest the center also we'll would improvise a lot on the set he was really your weight of directors in the studio there were more often than not just technicians but will was more he was he would improvise he would yeah he would bring things in hebei was an altar in this way is this novel in your estimation a contribution to a

gay cannon it is a contribution to gay literature i think definitely a review for about a day can and it's meaning books that must be read or one day books that must be read i would like i would like it to be i think the literature has had such a blossoming and blooming in the past fifteen years it's we're so much to choose from and that's it's hard to say what will be the must reads and what won't they knew he would nominate i will nominate a frankenstein at this and my previous novel almost history with his book about a gay man in the state department and follow his career from the nineteen fifties to nineteen eighty six and is i want my intent to do reggae war and peace it's the agave epic an attempt to see how much life i could put into a

book that had a gay protagonist and so it's still a third of the way the good book but from their perspective can look out of everything out as much of the world as possible but you and i assume the publishers well expect the readership to be homosexuals water sector are young or we do we disco was strange realities of publishing is that looks like this can now be published without any difficulty because publishers are found there isn't a gay readership that are kind of based market that that will read anything with gay subject matter and then straight readers are kind of the frosting on the cake there's the hope for the myth of the crossover novel big a book that will find a straight audience and

wealthy publishers count on that the way they used to and they don't it's to be honest i think very few gay officer read by straight people on the same openness the only one who really springs to mind dorothy allison but that was for a book where the protagonist is so young age doesn't really come out of much of the sidewalk so is this then met and terry different or new area of the marketing it to be explored it's been going on for about science was about nineteen seventy eight and just returned from kosovo still trying to find out how to market these and then knowing that if we put them there gave to police will buy them others still experimenting for a while the experiment was well we've got a book here that was not mentioned anywhere on it that there's that the protagonist is gay and see how that is and they found that didn't work on and they were hoping major gen a non gay reader would pick it

up and read it but i know that being more honest and open at this so this is a gay bar or this work as a gay preparing a surrogate character in it and because all these other things going on and they trust that the reader will eventually catch up to to this time a literary revolution and we'll all realize you don't have to be good to read again but knows the stories last week guess these interest of frankenstein the views expressed on this program do not necessarily reflect the views of the university of texas at austin or this station technical producer for forum david alfaro its production assistant diane a bullet and jennifer proctor i'm your producer and host

olive gray maybe in austin texas seventy seven when to do that for him because at ut austin austin texas seventy seven exchange commission and this is the long war in radio network