Read Online The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Ads: Link
was a kind of sequel to that. In the 1960s I wrote a fair amount for Playboy and was delighted to do so: not only did they pay an order of magnitude better than the science-fiction magazines, but from time to time I got to meet Hefner and the bunnies. I survived through several changes of editors and thought nothing of it when a new fellow named Robie Macauley became fiction editor. I sent him a few stories, and he bought a reasonable proportion of them.
Then one day I happened to be in Chicago on other business, and stopped by the Playboy Building to cement relationships. Turned out Robie had been an ay-jay himself; more, it turned out that we had actually met at that Boston convention, back in the teen-age dawn of time. We had a very pleasant chat, cutting up old touches and parting on the best of terms. Wow! Every young writer's dream come true! The buy-or-bounce guy at a major market turns out to be a boyhood chum! But it didn't work out that way. I never again sold a word to Playboy in all the years Robie was fiction editor. Well. I'm sure it was only coincidence. But all the same, every once in a while I wondered just what I might have said or done, forty years ago in Boston.
With only three science-fiction magazines and hardly any science-fiction books we were on near-starvation rations of sf-in-print. But there were snacks to be had elsewhere, and once in a while a full meal. And a lot of the nourishment came from science-fiction films.
The 30s were the great years of the film for everyone, not just science-fiction fans. Every hamlet had its own million-dollar Palace of the Movies, plush carpets and tinkling fountains, architecturally a bastard son of the Bolshoi out of the Baths of Caracalla. Most were left over from the manic expansion of the 20s, but nerve was seeping back into the builders. The Radio City Music Hall opened when I was around thirteen. The Music Hall didn't care much for science fiction on its screen, but the hall itself was a kind of science fiction, ultramodern of 1932, and I must have visited it fifty times to see whatever was there to see: my first color film ( Becky Sharp ); Will Rogers comedies; my first, and almost only, 3-D (a short subject; you wore red and green celluloid goggles to make it work); above all, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, on which I doted. The Music Hall gave you more than a film. There was a stage show with the Rockettes and the Corps de Ballet, and a symphonic overture and an organ interlude, hopefully planned to empty out the house between shows. I had a fixed itinerary at the Music Hall. Up in one of the balconies for the film, so I could smoke. Down in the front rows, far left, to watch Jesse Crawford play the organ at microscopically close range. Middle aisles of the orchestra, two-thirds of the way back, to watch the Rockettes.
But there was a growing amount of science fiction, too, if not in the music hall, then at some other theater, even the "nabes." The original King Kong (only film I have ever seen that gave me nightmares). Claude Rains in The Invisible Man . Boris Karloff in Frankenstein . The very first sf film I saw was Just Imagine , produced in 1930, about the incredibly distant future world of 1980 (autogyro traffic cops, Martians, babies out of a slot machine): it was a slapstick comedy starring El Brendel, notable now mostly because it was the first American film made by lovely Maureen O'Sullivan, later Tarzan's favorite Jane. There were gadgety future-adventure movies like F P 1 Does Not Reply (floating airport in the middle of the Atlantic, where planes refueled en route to Europe) and Transatlantic Tunnel (marvelous zappy machines boring through the undersea rock). There were semi-satirical spoofs like It's Great to Be Alive . What was great about it, for the hero, was that some pestilence had killed every male in the world but him, and he was therefore the object of every girl's affections. It was a musical, and the way the
Then one day I happened to be in Chicago on other business, and stopped by the Playboy Building to cement relationships. Turned out Robie had been an ay-jay himself; more, it turned out that we had actually met at that Boston convention, back in the teen-age dawn of time. We had a very pleasant chat, cutting up old touches and parting on the best of terms. Wow! Every young writer's dream come true! The buy-or-bounce guy at a major market turns out to be a boyhood chum! But it didn't work out that way. I never again sold a word to Playboy in all the years Robie was fiction editor. Well. I'm sure it was only coincidence. But all the same, every once in a while I wondered just what I might have said or done, forty years ago in Boston.
With only three science-fiction magazines and hardly any science-fiction books we were on near-starvation rations of sf-in-print. But there were snacks to be had elsewhere, and once in a while a full meal. And a lot of the nourishment came from science-fiction films.
The 30s were the great years of the film for everyone, not just science-fiction fans. Every hamlet had its own million-dollar Palace of the Movies, plush carpets and tinkling fountains, architecturally a bastard son of the Bolshoi out of the Baths of Caracalla. Most were left over from the manic expansion of the 20s, but nerve was seeping back into the builders. The Radio City Music Hall opened when I was around thirteen. The Music Hall didn't care much for science fiction on its screen, but the hall itself was a kind of science fiction, ultramodern of 1932, and I must have visited it fifty times to see whatever was there to see: my first color film ( Becky Sharp ); Will Rogers comedies; my first, and almost only, 3-D (a short subject; you wore red and green celluloid goggles to make it work); above all, the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, on which I doted. The Music Hall gave you more than a film. There was a stage show with the Rockettes and the Corps de Ballet, and a symphonic overture and an organ interlude, hopefully planned to empty out the house between shows. I had a fixed itinerary at the Music Hall. Up in one of the balconies for the film, so I could smoke. Down in the front rows, far left, to watch Jesse Crawford play the organ at microscopically close range. Middle aisles of the orchestra, two-thirds of the way back, to watch the Rockettes.
But there was a growing amount of science fiction, too, if not in the music hall, then at some other theater, even the "nabes." The original King Kong (only film I have ever seen that gave me nightmares). Claude Rains in The Invisible Man . Boris Karloff in Frankenstein . The very first sf film I saw was Just Imagine , produced in 1930, about the incredibly distant future world of 1980 (autogyro traffic cops, Martians, babies out of a slot machine): it was a slapstick comedy starring El Brendel, notable now mostly because it was the first American film made by lovely Maureen O'Sullivan, later Tarzan's favorite Jane. There were gadgety future-adventure movies like F P 1 Does Not Reply (floating airport in the middle of the Atlantic, where planes refueled en route to Europe) and Transatlantic Tunnel (marvelous zappy machines boring through the undersea rock). There were semi-satirical spoofs like It's Great to Be Alive . What was great about it, for the hero, was that some pestilence had killed every male in the world but him, and he was therefore the object of every girl's affections. It was a musical, and the way the
Similar Books
![[Ganzfield 2] Adversary](https://fs.dianahicksbooks.com/519785/thumbs/152x264/ganzfield-2-adversary.jpg)
