Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

This is pretty much getting written last minute and with about 4 working brain cells, so we shall see what is produced. I just got out of the hospital after having mysteriously lost so much blood that they had to give me six units of whole blood over the course of three days, along with an entire bag of supplemental liquid iron. Needless to say, life has been screwy lately.

So anyway, this week we are discussing non-book media that has shaped and influenced us. I have to admit, this is my biggest topic. I am a very visual person, and movies have been a vast influence for me. I also have to include tabletop gaming in here as well. But movies, I mean, what’s not to love? The first movie I recall seeing in the movie theater was Empire Strikes Back when I was six. The first movie I ever got to see by myself was supposed to be who knows what, but somehow I walked into Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise. I do not remember how it happened, but I definitely remember the movie. So many weird memories based around movies. Like how insanely low budget and horrible Krull was, and yet the Cyclops’s death and that whole situation is indelibly burned into my brain as such a brilliant twist.

While enjoying all the mainstream science fiction, I have always been willing to spend times in the margins, searching for diamonds in the rough. I still sift through foreign films, occasionally finding gems like Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, which probably has one of the coolest special effects shots I have ever experienced. I sort through unheard of low budget and B movies and find things like The Art of Lying, with an alternate earth where everyone tells the truth naturally, and this guy suddenly discovers the ability to lie, leading to hilarity and self-discovery. Then of course, there is this little subgenre of weird foreign shows and movies I came across back in the early 80, when you could only find them in specialty comic shops, renting titles like Akira, Fist of the North Star, or Wicked City at $5 a night, many years before anyone in the US had ever hear of something called Anime.

I certainly enjoyed some of your typical “guy movies” like Godfather and Scarface well enough, but I leaned much more to the slightly deeper movies such as Casino or Full Metal Jacket (of which the second half was much more enjoyable, concentrating on Joker). Not saying one style is better than the other, just the direction I tend to lean. Another example, I liked Deep Impact with it’s personal drama better than the flashier Armageddon (which was still fun). Much to the loss of some pretty good storyline, I cannot handle horror, though I do enjoy a good psychological thriller or occasional ghost story (see The Devil’s Backbone, above). Probably my favorite genre outside of scifi or fantasy is Heist movies, and my guilty pleasure is “coming of age” stories. I think all of this bleeds over into my reading and writing in all sorts of subtle ways.

My biggest movie influence, hands down, no way around it, is of course Star Wars. I have been addicted to Star Wars since I was introduced to the toys by my neighbor when I was four years old. I learned main characters, backgrounds, and pacing from the original trilogy. When other scifi movies would spend anywhere between two to eight minutes doing panning shots over their wonderful spaceship models, Star Wars dared you to blink and miss theirs. They would rather show you six more ships in that first minute, then move on to the storytelling. And what storytelling! From Lucas I learned his greatest skill, worldbuilding. I grew up with the books and roleplaying games slowly being introduced, fleshing out insanely complicated details to the most minor of species, droids, vehicles, and background characters ever to be squeezed into one series. Just a couple of years ago, right before Covid, Wil Wheaton was invited to help contribute to a celebrity anthology of short stories, and he chose to come up with a backstory to that guy in that skinny crow’s nest on Yavin IV that scanned the X-wings as they were leaving. He laughed when he found out the guy had already been given cameo backstories twice before in other books!

But I learned another lesson from George Lucas later, which was to always be willing to listen to others around you, and be willing to accept critical advice. By the time he did Phantom Menace, Lucas had surrounded himself with Yes Men, and nobody was apparently able to tell him when he started coming up with questionable ideas during the prequel trilogy. I need to make sure that I keep myself open to other input. The third lesson that was cemented by Lucas, one I had been introduced to earlier, was that if you are going to sell an IP, be sure that you are willing to part with it. Eastman and Laird sold the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fairly quickly and cheaply, and really missed out. On the flip side, the creators one of my favorite stories ever, Elfquest, Richard and Wendy Pini, held on so hard to their IP that they struggled for decades trying to stay afloat and pushing for recognition. They held on so hard that they created their own publishing house, Father Tree Press, rather than bend one whit to anyone else’s thoughts or opinions on creative licenses. There has to be a middle ground somewhere in there. Otherwise you get the eventual capitulation of Orson Scott Card, who held on for so long, trying to get the contracts and setting just right, only to end up with the shiny mediocrity of the eventual Ender’s Game movie.

I can’t believe I have written so much and yet said so little. Well, I was going to include tabletop gaming and roleplaying games in here. Maybe even talk a bit about video games. But as you can see, this is just getting too long, so I am going to leave it here. I’ll find a time to do a part two to this. Next week you can hear me wax poetic about all my mommy’s good qualities. I did promise you, after all! Until then,

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham