The Fan Who Came In From The Cold

I know, I've given fans a lot of grief over the blog-year I've been doing this. Most of it was deserved, especially the pesky, airborne-mutated strain of 'hater' fan that breeds like kudzu on the internet. But it's worth remembering, and stating that every single person who got into this business did so because they were a fan. Of something.

The first thing I remember being a fan of was Snoopy. All of Peanuts, actually. I bought all the books, I watched the specials whenever they were on TV. (this was Pre-VCR. Oh, uh, a VCR was this thing that was like a TiVo but it...oh never mind, go ask your grandparents.) I loved Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and vowed to become a cartoonist. (This was an ambition of mine right up until I was about 13.)

After a brief detour into Evel Knievel, I found Steve Austin and The Six Million Dollar Man, and also the Bionic Woman (who may just have been my first object of unfocused, free-floating, I- don't -really -know -what -I'm -feeling -here lust. Don't kid yourselves. Boys start early.)

Anyway, I guess all you gangstas out there are really ripping it up now. Yesirree. The 70's was a far more innocent time. I spent some of that time in Florida, so I had an unfortunate dalliance with all things Disney. That didn't survive my move to Toronto.

But something else did. One weekend in May, about three weeks before we moved to Canada, my Dad took me to a movie. It was a movie that I'd heard about, and everyone else my age had heard about, but no adults seemed to know about. It was called Star Wars, and everything from that point on was different.

I'm hardly the first to remark on how Star Wars changed the landscape. And I know Star Trek was there first. But I was just young enough that Star Trek was something that older kids were into. Star Wars was mine. I wouldn't become a Trek fan until shortly before the movie came out in 1979. But I did have the "placeholder package" -- the promissory empty box that they put on sale before they put out the first Star Wars action figures. Yup. I was hardcore.

I loved Battlestar Galactica, too, of course. Though even then I got tired of the same three cylon raider shots played over and over and over. I also remember thinking how odd it was that the pilot had been released in movie theatres here in Canada -- but not in the USA. Yes, I was destined to go into television, parsing as I was the intricacies of foreign territory marketing at the age of nine.

Galactica also marked a turn for me toward a more critical eye toward the things I loved. Because much as I did love it, I found myself disappointed later in the season, because they stopped "telling cool stories." I sensed that somehow, the concept was cooler than the stories they were telling within that world. Then came Galactica 1980, and I had my first writer-reaction. I didn't have the vocabulary for it then, but if I had, I would have said in my prepubescent alto, "Fucking studio notes."

I guess, looking back, I got slotted into my path naturally, and gradually. I read voraciously. My father went through a period where he went to war with me over MAD Magazine, which I loved and he didn't want me reading. (He didn't appreciate the development of my sarcasm.)

(I can remember being traumatized a little because one time when we were back visiting relatives in New York, we had to take the subway, and he bought me a MAD and said, "read it and don't look at anybody." The fact that he bought it willingly terrified me. It meant the subway was even more dangerous than I thought it was. And seeing as this was the Son of Sam Summer of '77 -- he probably was right.)

My Dad need'nt have worried. I read everything. I sucked it all up -- by High School I became a fan of something else, when I discovered how much I loved Shakespeare. There were high school teachers who encouraged me to act and write: Ms Atkinson, Jim Hunt, Mrs. Salgo. By the time I went to university, it was a woman named Dr. Naomi Diamond and the great Dr. Bob Gardner, along with a kind and decent man named Clive Vanderburgh, who encouraged my talent. I picked up a couple of writing awards. And then I lost my way for a few years, losing nerve, spending time as a TV producer.

It was playwriting for Fringe Festivals that got me back on the horse. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd stayed the course and had the courage of my convictions at twenty-one. But then again, I probably wouldn't have made anything of it then, because I was a real asshole at twenty-one. (Seriously.)

Why am I thinking about all this now? It's not just cause of the series I have to write now. (Although Episode 3 is looming above me right now like a great, unbroken, looming, looming looming-thing. With teeth. And fur. Damn Story. I'll kill you, I will. You will be broken before me and I will hear the lamentations of the...)

Sorry. Where was I?

No. Okay. Here's why I started thinking about this.

It's a link to a Video Dog clip on Salon. It's a Star Wars fan film. A lightsaber duel. It's incredibly well done.

I've been aware of fan films before, of course. I think Troops is probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen. But there's still something humbling in seeing that something that made me slack-jawed with wonder when I was eight, is something you can do on a Mac today.

But as cool as that fan film is, or as cool as Troops was, it's still a derivative work. And that's why I feel really blessed to be in the position I'm in today.

Because I have friends whose fandom took them a different way. A couple of friends of mine took their high-school interest in horror and gore and became very adept Special FX and Prosthetic makeup artists. They've worked on most of the big shows that have come through Toronto. Lots of Zombie films and the like. Horror, Sci-fi, what have you...

There's only one problem: what they do is going away. The Star Wars kids with the Macs are, with every passing day, shrinking the need and window by which these guys can make a living doing practical effects. It's an intractible problem, and it makes me a little sad -- because nothing bores me more than those moments in the new trilogy of Star Wars films where you're watching one set of pixels fight another set of pixels for twenty minutes.

But writing, you see, is not a special effect. It's not something that goes away, despite Hollywood's attempts to try and prove otherwise. Sure, you can get directors to plan six big action sequences, and then try to get a writer to write around them (basically, how Robert Towne worked on MI:2) but that doesn't mean it's going to be any good.

Fan fiction, and the fan impulse to "fix" stories when they don't like where they're going, is something that's of endless fascination to me. Because the solutions fans come up with are inevitably so very much worse.

What we do -- what writers do -- is a rare commodity. And it's not going anywhere. And if you can actually do this thing we do, long after the executives lose their jobs, and the distribution model changes and the focus groups go home, and the bold new Presidents with a plan have taken their golden parachutes and skedaddled, you will still be there.

And damnit, that makes me feel lucky.