Roger Zelazny TV Review: George R.R. Martin's adaptation of the Last Defender of Camelot

The Last Defender of Camelot is probably my favorite short story by Zelazny, and consequently, my favorite short story, period.

(It's either Last Defender or Divine Madness, but they occupy different places in my psyche. Divine Madness, as brilliant and haunting as it is, doesn't tell a story in the same way Last Defender does.)

George RR Martin, of A Game of Thrones fame, adapted it for the New Twilight Zone in 1986.

It's not me, is it? That really is a terrible typeface, right?

How did he do?

Well...It has its problems, and there is only so much a good script can do to overcome the restrictions of 80s Genre Anthology shows, which were seldom vehicles for subtle story telling.

Exhibit A: Tales From the Dark Side, Episode #13:

I saw this one with my buddy when we were maybe 14 or 15. It's about a couple celebrating their 25th anniversary.The episode is called Anniversary Dinner, and, as if that wasn't enough of a tip, every other line is "How can such an old sourpuss taste so sweet?" or "We're having the children over...for dinner!"

Even alarmingly obtuse teen Josh was like "They're cannibals, right? Surely they're not going to drag this out for another twenty five minutes?"  (The characters stop short of saying "You might say we just ate Uter and he's in our stomachs right now!", but only barely)

Television is more sophisticated than it used to be, and modern writers understand that viewing audiences have seen the same tropes and cliches on numerous occasions, and write to subvert those expectations. Joss Whedon was likely very influential in this regard. (Look, everybody! Josh said something nice about Joss Whedon!) That kind of thing hadn't yet taken hold in the 80s. Everything was played pretty straight. So..my expectations were not high. 

In my Damnation Alley review, I mentioned this adaption, and a friend who is also a Zelazny fan, said he immediately went out and saw it. I googled it, wondering if it was available for streaming, and found that there were several different uploads on YouTube. I've seen full length movies uloaded to Youtube and it seems like this be somehow legal, as it looks like every episode of the New Twilight Zone is on there, and whatever party owns the rights could hardly be unaware of this. None of them are very high quality, so perhaps that's a factor. 

Huzzah!!!

Scene One

On screen text shown over the clock tower holding Big Ben, and we open with an old man leaving what looks like a small private residence. He's observed by a trio of punks. He beats two of them unconscious, and I like that what is done on screen actually mirrors how it's presented in the book,

Then, with an upward hook as the man doubled, he caught him in the softness beneath the jaw, behind the chin, with its point. As the  man fell, he clubbed him with its butt on the back of  the neck.

at least as much is possible. Lance captures the third mugger, who says they were ordered to bring them to her. The punk reminds me of Sting playing Feyd-Rautha in Dune.

I was having trouble following his accent, which sounded like a cross between Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and those Cockney trolls that give Bilbo a hard time in the Hobbit,  so I turned on Youtube's automatic captions, which, based on its rather hilarious results, were also having a difficult time understanding him. I took some screen shots of those as well, and I'll put them up in a second post.

Changes: Lance starts in London instead of San Fransisco, which is fine. It's a change, but not an important one, and you don't need to spend money for two sets, and waste time explaining why he went from one place to the other. He also has a beard, and I'm pretty sure he didn't in the book. (A beard is never referenced, and there are some parts where it would have made sense to mention it if he had one.) More on the beard in the relevant scene. Tom, the punk, is a new character, presumably for audience identification, so Lance has someone to whom he can explain things. 

Scene Two 

Tom takes Lance to Morgan Le Fey. She calls Tom her "Knight in Shining Leather," which is kind of funny. Morgan is played by Jenny Agutter,  who continues to act today. Apparently she was a member of the council that oversaw S.H.I.E.L.D. in the Avengers. Huh. 

Lance offers some exposition which mostly covers the same ground as the story. She does get a new line that I liked. When Lance says "Merlin always said you had no morals," she replies "Merlin said a lot of things. Between him and Malory, I got horrible press." Heh heh. Also, I like the bit where she seems to be expecting Lance to light her cigar. When he doesn't, she asks, "What happened to Chivalry?" and he answers, "Haven't you heard? It's dead."

Changes: Nothing big. The conversation takes a different direction than it does in the book, but that's because the plots have already diverged. The encounter is a bit more adversarial than in the book, and Morgan is spunky, and a bit more colloquial in her speech and manner.

Scene Three

Lance departs with Tom to Cornwall. They talk a bit, and Lance tells Tom to wait while he goes into the cave to look for Merlin. Merlin and Raxas both look pretty silly. Raxas is forgivable, due to the limitations of budget and logistics of the show but Merlin looks like he's wearing a costume shop rental. Again, the conversation covers the same general territory in the book.


Changes: The dialogue is a good mix of new stuff ("Now there are weapons that can fire whole cities in an instant...and poison the earth for longer than you have slept.") , and lines that worked in the original. The impression I get from the original story, when Lance said he had left his walking stick in the cave, that was just a cover so he could get at the elixir, but here, when he returns to the cave, he happens upon the bottle, and only then does the idea to drink it occur to him.

Scene Four

Outside in the real Stonehenge, Merlin orders Raxas to prepare Tom to be sacrificed. Lance orders him to stop and boasts that he could take the knight apart. Merlin is considering it, and that decides that he definitely wants to see Lance hacked to bits when Morgan shows up on his side. He gives Lance the weapons and armor, but no horse. Lance says that he still needs his squire "Tom", which was a cool move. They fight, Lance cuts the head off the Hollow Knight, but he still fights on. (Also, even in the low quality Youtube videos, it's clear that they removed the head of the knight in post production, as there is a conscpicous black dot where his head should be that never quite matches the rest of the darkness.)

When Lance is distracted, Merlin is about to blast him with unconvincing 80s CG. But Morgan unleashes her own fake looking special effects first! But then Merlin retaliates and kills her. Lance destroys the knight, then advances on Merlin, blocking his lightning and cleaving his staff in two when close enough. Merlin ages to death like so many other villains have before him.

Morgan is not quite dead after all. Lance and Tom check on. She tells Lance and Tom that the right fork on the road will take them back home. But, on the left fork, they see a matte painting of a castle, and decide to walk towards that instead.

 
Changes:

I'm pretty sure this is why they gave Lance a beard. It's the easiest way to make it clear that he's become younger. Last Exit to Babylon, the fourth volume of the Collected stories of Roger Zelazny, have little more detail on why various changes were made, such as the absence of horses, and it's an interesting read.

I think the biggest problem is the splashy, dramatic magic. These effects are simply awful, and I say this as lifetime fan of Classic Doctor Who. Martin is a canny writer,and no dummy. For the rest of the episode, he removed or adjusted whatever wouldn't work on TV. Those effects simply do not work at all. They're silly, they're fake and they take me out of the movie.

Overall? It's a decent adaptation. Better than Damnation Alley, certainly. Martin did what he could within the constraints of the medium as it existed then. This wouldn't have made me seek out Roger Zelazny, but it wouldn't have scared me away, either.

On the writing of Single White Necromancer

CFC asked me how long Single White Necromancer took to write, and I told him it was about a year, and also that I'd reply in greater detail in a post, so that's what I'm doing here.

I couldn't even estimate a number of hours spent on it. The Word file the contains the final draft says 1080 minutes of editing time, except, I would often work on the story when I was away from my computer, and would write a bit, email it to myself and then paste it into the file, so that number doesn't come close to answering the question.

The best answer I can give is that it was written in fits and starts over the course of a year. I thought of the title first, which is unusual for me, as it's usually the very last thing I come up with, occasionally well after the story is written. I think it's the perfect title for the story, and a lot of the elements present spin out of that.

It started out as a Lonesome October story that I intended for the Lovecraftzine's Lonesome October issue, but it was already over 12000 words (and growing) and it that it was just too long to be feasible. That was June or July 2013. So I shelved it and wrote something else for the zine. That turned out to be Mother of Monsters.

There is a Roger Zelazny tribute anthology in the works. I submitted a Roadmarks story to it, but it's so specifically a Roadmarks story that there is no way to rework it into something else without rewriting the thing entirely. Too many plot points hinged on too many elements specific to the setting, leaving me with an unsellable story, as I don't own the rights and it's not like I can just resubmit it to the other Roger Zelazny tribute anthology in town.

I learned my lesson from that, and kept the story somewhat modular, in that, if I had to remove the ANITLO elements, I could do it without breaking the story.  That's what I did when I returned to it at the beginning of this year. So, while it certainly shows its pedigree, it also works as more general "Crazy Cultists want to open the way for their Mad Gods" story.

That said, Zelazny has been a huge influence on my writing, and there are number of nods to his work in the story, but I don't think it contains any specifically ANITLO elements beyond a broad similarity in the plot. (Another factor he influenced was the length of the piece. It's about 33,000 words. Something I truly enjoy about Zelazny's work is that his stories are only as long as they need to be. I think the novella is the perfect length for telling a story, and that's reflected here.)

I forget who said it, but a professional writer mentioned that he wrote 500 words a day. Some time he only got 500, and other times, what he was writing caught fire, and he got much more than that. I followed those guidelines. I had an ending in March, I shelved it again. Transferred the file to a tablet and did some final editing on a camping trip at the end of May, and poked and prodded it on and off until I finally published it.

However, I think drew more on the atmosphere of Nick Pollatta's Bureau 13 novels than anything written by Zelazny. Funny books, and while absurd, not quite comedy.

All right. More on this later. If anyone has any questions about any aspects of the book, I'm more than happy to answer them here.

Preview: George R. R. Martin's Adaptation of The Last Defender of Camelot

I was watching Martin's adaptation of the Twilight Zone episode on Youtube, with the captions on. I think this is one of the videos where the subtitles are automatically generated. However, the algorithms seem to be having trouble with the English accents. This is what the mugger said: "t was't any of my doin' sir! It was just to bring you to her, that's all! We wasn't supposed to hurt you."

And this is what the screen showed.

 

I think this is going to be a pretty great review.

Single White Necromancer Seeks Same

So, I published an e-book. I'm very happy with both the title and the cover. And the story, too, I guess. Judge for yourself at the Amazon page.

Roger Zelazny Movie Review: Damnation Alley, part II: "...I repeat: KILLER COCKROACHES!"

The second part of my review of Damnation Alley. The first is here. When we return after our brief intermission, Hannibal is playing a grumpy driving instructor to Stringfellow. In the other Landmaster, Perry is quoting some trivia from Car & Driver, and Keenan looks hilariously bored and miserable.

I'm not one for car porn, but I did find the passages about the capabilities of the vehicle to be pretty interesting reading. Zelazny's, presented here, was, of course more evocative, and I wish they could have found a way to work it into the movie.

There were no windows in the vehicle, only screens which reflected views in every direction, including straight up and the ground beneath the car. Tanner sat within an illuminated box which shielded him against radiation. The "car" that he drove had eight heavily treaded tires and was thirty-two feet in length. It mounted eight fifty-caliber automatic guns and four grenade-throwers. It carried thirty armor-piercing rockets which could be discharged straight ahead or at any elevation up to forty degrees from the plane. Each of the four sides, as well as the roof of the vehicle, housed a flamethrower. Razor-sharp "wings" of tempered steel, eighteen inches wide at their bases and tapering to points, an inch and a quarter thick where they ridged, could be moved through a complete hundred-eighty-degree arc along the sides of the car and parallel to the ground, at a height of two feet and eight inches. When standing at a right angle to the body of the vehicle, eight feet to the rear of the front bumper, they extended out to a distance of six feet on either side of the car. They could be couched like lances for a charge. They could be held but slightly out from the sides for purposes of slashing whatever was sideswiped. The car was bulletproof, air-conditioned, and had its own food locker and sanitation facilities. A long-barreled .357 Magnum was held by a clip on the door near the driver's left hand. A 30.06, a .45-caliber automatic, and six hand grenades occupied the rack immediately above the front seat.

However, the piece from Popular mechanics (which I, in turn, copied from Wikipedia) has its own virtues, as well, in large part because it is describing a vehicle that actually exists.

Three independent drive sources running from a gasoline power plant. Uses semi truck parts in the drive train. Can operate with the front or rear wheel trinary out of commission. Side and top hatches on the main unit and rear and top on the after section. Full running lights and brake lights for urban street use. External video camera is mounted on the forward pylon located just behind the front top hatch. Could also house the antenna. All pylons are hardened and armored. Can operate in water and will remain sealed when fully submerged. Can float while half full of water.

While the film is fiction, the Landmaster vehicle is real. In the story, the Landmaster was designed to use as many standard truck parts as possible, so that any junkyard would have whatever was needed for repairs. The real Landmaster is powered by a 390-cubic-inch (6.4 L) Ford industrial engine, and uses the rear-ends of two commercial trucks and an Allison automatic truck transmission. It features a fully functional, custom-built "tri-star" wheel arrangement, which could actually help it crawl over boulders. All 12 wheels are driven, but only 8 are normally in contact with the road surface at any one time.

I like the bit about being made out of standard truck parts. It seems like such a good, practical idea.

I'm a rebel, Dottie, a loner.

The characters encounter a storm made out of weird funnel cloud things. Perry obeys procedure and hunkers down and digs in. Stringfellow decides to outrun the storm, because he's a rebel who plays by his own rules.

Perry's wrong and Tanner's right, and Perry is killed when the storm uproots his Landmaster. They patch up Keenan, and continue on, stopping at Circus Circus in Las Vegas, and I must say, that marquee is in better condition than most of those at our local theaters.






Keenan and Tanner play some slot machines, while Denton seems to be reminiscing about happier times. I really like this scene, and I think these human moments are when the movie works best. Just as they're really getting into the nickel slots, the lady who lives in the casino shows up. I wonder if she was expecting company or what, or if she always diligently applies lipstick when she wakes up every morning in Post-Apocolypsia.

She joins our merry band. Her name is Janice, and she's played by Dominique Sanda, who is still acting today, which is pretty cool.  The team stops at a local town to refuel, but something seems off.


And it turns out that something is KILLER COCKROACHES! 

There are elements of the scene that work really well, and taken on its own, I think it's actually pretty well put together. The problem is that we're just lurching from one loosely connected set piece to the next, and, I'm not a screenwriter or anything, but a scene where the heroes meet a pretty woman living in a casino does not organically lead into a scene where Jan-Michael  Vincent rides his motorcycle up the stairs in order to escape a swarm of flesh-eating cockroaches.






 Also, I think Roger Zelazny is one of the most talented genre authors of his time. However, he missed the opportunity to include this line!

Tanner, this is Denton! This whole town is infested with killer cockroaches. I repeat: KILLER COCKROACHES!

Alas, poor Kennan! I knew him, Denton; a fellow of infinite appeal to flesh stripping cockroaches

"Hrm. Not Sweet Chariot sugar cubes, but will suffice."

Anyway, Keenan is eaten and they drive on to the next set piece, where Tanner is almost beaten up by a little kid played by a very young Jackie Earle Haley. Say what you like about Tanner in the book, he never would have been beaten up by a twelve-year old. Billy tags along as well.

They stop to resupply. Janice play the piano, and young Rorschach helps himself to what looks like a Tootsie Pop. A bunch of hillbilly rapists show up and briefly take our heroes prisoner, but baby Rorschach slips Tanner a handgun, and Tanner shoots one of the hillbillies in the face within the Landmaster when he's momentarily distracted by a hillbilly shooting at Janice outside. (Then he's immediately one-upped by Denton, who uses one of the Landmaster's missiles to blow up the building housing the bad guys.) It's another well constructed scene, and the effects they used on the sky, which I could otherwise take or leave during the movie, looked really nice here.

We're in the home stretch now! We get a montage on the Landmaster, which includes a scene of Janice coming her hair and I notice that Dominique Sanda is wearing a wedding ring. I don't know if that's any oversight and the actress accidently wore her own wedding ring during the scene, or something deliberate, as Tanner claimed she was his wife in order to protect her when the hillbillies were attacking.

(Though, on reflection, I don't think so, since Tanner's not wearing a corresponding ring.)


They stop for parts and chit chat, Tanner and Billy bond while Denton repairs the Landmaster. Something weird is going on with the weather. Billy has wandered off, as little kids in movies are wont to do. Tanner rescues him. This scene has zero tension. They get back to the Landmaster and Denton has finished the repairs. More 70s disaster movie scenes. A tidal wave submerges the Landmaster! But they get out! Whew!

When they open the other hatch, they see the bright blue sky above them while soft, triumphant music plays. I thought I saw Johnathan Livingston Seagull  flying overhead. (Is there room for one more wisecrack about the 70s? Josh thinks so!) If there had been a seagull and Tanner had nailed it with a cigar butt, I think that could have redeemed the entire movie.

The scene is very beautiful and pastoral.  At the end, now that the heroes are closer to Albany, they are able to pick up a second transmission, which gives them a frequency to call in.

Hey man, is that Freedom Rock?

There is a thriving population in Albany, and they're apparently amphibious as well, as they don't seem to have been at all inconvenienced by a tidal wave large enough to tilt the axis of the Earth. 

Speaking of which, it had been mentioned at several points in the movie that the earth returning to its proper axis might restore things, and also, that this might happen on its own. Apparently that's what did happen, and it makes for an unsatisfying conclusion. We get the happy ending, but it had nothing to do with anything the heroes did. What's the point?

As a film, or a spectacle for the big screen, it's not bad. There is some solid craftsmanship there, and most of the problems with the presentation are attributable to the fact that the technology wasn't there yet. (The movie had one person credited with special effects, with a handful credited with optical effects or laser animation. That's hard to imagine a crew so small on a modern movie, even one that's not a genre work.)

However, as a vehicle for telling a coherent story, it's pretty awful. I think that's why, even though there are some scenes I liked, I ultimately didn't like the movie. It's never more than the sum of its parts. The scenes never built to anything, and they certainly don't build to this ending.

Zelazny famously disliked it, though I did like his response, saying that the book was still there for those who would want to read it.

If, for some reason, you'd like to subject yourself to it, it's available on to stream from Amazon Prime.