The Drink Tank 278 (2011).pdf

A Drink Tank with a cover by Mo Starkey!

Gotta love it! There’s also a Dann Lopez piece

for the ﬁrst time in ages!

First off, I love my new computer. After having

two die (one had the Power Supply catch ﬁre, the other

fell off my desk and cracked the motherboard in half)

and then I got my new computer from work (which is

really nice) and then I bought a new MacBook off of

eBay and it is just awesome! It’s got all the iLife and

iWork stuff, plus Microsoft Ofﬁce for Mac plus i had

an old version of inDesign laying around, so I can lay

my zines out and have a regular Word Processor and

photo editing system. I didn’t have that on my old Mac,

so it’s a plus.

This will likely be the last Drink Tank for a bit

becauseI’ve got to move. I hate moving, so it takes a big

thing to make me move.

In this case, a mould bloom that needs to be

eradicated by a multi-week dry-wall/sheet-rock rip-

ping out project that I wouldn’t be able to stay in my

place. I’m looking, but with my ﬁnancial limits as well

as spatial limitations, I’m having trouble ﬁnding a place.

Until then, I’m stuck in the apartment with the mould,

though once they start the work, I’ve gotta be out. It’s

not a good situation, only made worse by all the folks

I ask who have leads on places say things like “We can

get you an affordable place. There’s a one-bedroom go-

ing for just 1200 a month.” which really depresses me.

There’s a lot of other stuff going on too. I broke

my toe. It was an ironic break, in fact. I woke up in the

middle of the night and walked out to the bathroom.

It was pitch-black, so I walked in and slammed my toe

hard into a pair of crutches I had laying around the

house.

That’s right... crutches!

Of course, the big thing of the last couple of

weeks was Cinequest. I saw a lot of ﬁlms, though less

than previous years. I’ve got a long article on all the

ﬁlms I saw, which tended to be very good. I did see

a couple of ﬁlms that I thought were weak, and one

that ranks right uo there with the worst ﬁlms I’ve ever

watched, but overall, I can’t complain too much. I also

realised that I have a much more comedy-based ap-

preciation for festival ﬁlms than most other folks. My

two favorite ﬁlms from last year were both comedies,

my favorite this year was a comedy (from Norway!)

and I could see why I liked it so much. It wasn’t that it

was a bit of levity in a festival full of pathos and trag-

edy, it was the fact that I got to interact with a group

of knowledgeable ﬁlm fans who were enjoyng a good

laugh. That’s a rare thing.

I also seem to have fallen in love with the music

of Florence + The Machine. The song Dog Days Are

Over seems to have captured me in a tight embrace,

but their entire album Lungs is almost as good as the

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

So, what’s this issue got? 52 Weeks to Science

Fiction Film Literacy presents Destination Moon! Me

and Frank Wu talk about it. Then there’s Reportage on

various aspects of CInequest! It’s gonna be a good one

as we’ve got a couple of folks who you don’t see in

these pages all the time!

I’m also working on the Keynote for Nova Al-

bion. I’ve had to write it three times (on three differ-

ent computers) and then I’ve got to re-do the Dining

Guide for WesterCon. All a part of the new Cruelty!

52 Weeks to Science Fiction Film Literacy: Destination Moon

I hate Robert Heinlein.

It’s not just ‘I’d rather read some other author’

or ‘there are pieces that aren’t my favorite’ but it’s ‘ev-

ery word I’ve read from that man has raised bile to the

back of my throat’-type hatred. I can not stand his nov-

els, I hate his juveniles, can not stand his short stories.

HATE HATE HATE!!! That may make it slightly odd that

I’m about to heap praise onto a ﬁlm in which he had a

serious hand in getting made.

Destination Moon is one of the greatest sci-

ence ﬁction ﬁlms ever made. It was one of the ﬁrst to

take the real problems of space travel and put them

into a serious story. It’s a ﬁlm that is powerful and intel-

ligent and everything good, but it is also a ﬁlm with one

of the most impressive pedigrees in the history of sci-

ence ﬁction ﬁlm. Producer George Pal, the man behind

so many of the greatest science ﬁction ﬁlms in history.

There’s Chesley Bonestell, perhaps the most important

astronomical artist of the 20th century. There’s also the

name Robert Alphonse Heinlein title. ‘Based on a novel

by Robert A. Heinlein’, which is true, though they don’t

indicate which one. There’s a reason, because the ﬁlm

was actually released before the story was published.

They wanted to get this ﬁlm to the screen fast!

It reads like a Heinlein novel, at a glance. A group

of business folks decided they need to build a rocket

and ﬂy it to the moon. It’s so simple and so Heinlein.

The whole Libertarian angle and Business interests be-

ing the right way to go. The sabotage of the ﬁrst test

of the rocket by the Russians, or some such entity, is

twisted from the original story where they were Nazis.

Nazis would have been better. Never go wrong with

Nazis as your bad guy. The business interests manage

to make the rocket plan happen, followed by a sudden

trip to the Moon, completely in the face of governmen-

tal interference. It’s a typical Heinlein concept. Man is

the Superman, Fortune favors the Bold, Carpe Diem

and all that. They end up on the Moon, they do some

nice exploring stuff, they use too much fuel on the way

there, end up having to get rid of everything non-essen-

tial, then a guy has to stay behind, and a dude makes a

choice himself without regard to the rule of the Mission

Commander who represents the government concept.

It’s so typical of the stuff that always annoys me about

Heinlein. Yes, I probably would have gotten along with

his political view, but I don’t care what your political

view is, if you hammer it so often like that, I’m gonna

grumble.

On the other hand, this story reminds me a lot

of Stephen Baxter’s Titan (and Ark, for that matter).

Here, it is business in the rider’s seat over government,

which it’s science running the show in Titan. While I

tend to think that Baxter is far more of a Wells guy, but

I think there’s a lot of Destination Moon in some of his

novels. I guess they were both strongly inﬂuenced by

Wells, so what are you gonna do?

Early in the ﬁlm, we’re shown a ﬁlm that the

business interests are shown. It’s an effective technique

to explain the nature of rocket science. It was a sig-

niﬁcant part of the story since the audience had to

understand at least something of the concepts so that

they would get the danger that the crew was facing

at the end. The technique used Woody Woodpecker as

the character that helped explain. The idea would be

used over and over in SF ﬁlms, including Solaris and,

most similarly, Jurassic Park. It’s a great concept and it’s

cute and smart and funny. It’s one of the best Woody

Woodpecker things from that era. It’s also another leg-

endary name in the book of creating this amazing ﬁlm.

The name that has the most inﬂuence on the

visual of the ﬁlm is Bonestell. He was the consultant

on the astronomical imagery. I love the look, espe-

cially with the color Cinematography. This was a ﬁlm

with some of the best shooting of the era. This was a

great time for Cinematography, and the shooter, Lionel

Linden, was a master and one of the most important

Director of Photography in the history of television

who also shot ﬁlms like Around The World in 80 Days

and The Manchurian Candidate. His eye is pretty pre-

cise, but the real key is that he has to work with matte

paintings and tight sets and it looks great. You can sort

of see how early television shooting came from the eye

of Linden in here, particularly in the scenes leading up

to the building of the rocket.

There’s so much here to talk about. One of

the greatest ‘we can build it!’ montages in history is

here, featuring one of the few bits of footage left of the

UCLA Differential Analyzer designed by Richard Ham-

ming. It’s like two or three seconds, but it’s almost all

that’s left of it. The ﬂow of the ﬁlm is summarized in

that montage, really. The way they use the telling bits

of science in that two or so minutes is just brilliant.

It’s one of the things that really comes out of the ﬁlm

tradition instead of the literary concepts. You can see

authors like Baxter, Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert

J. Sawyer, who use the slipping time concept to move

past large periods of time, but no one does it better

than a ﬁlmmaker. Here, it’s perfect, the height of the

form. You can see everything in the future, from Weird

Science to Iron Man, radiating out from this excellent

montage.

There’s the legendary music of Destination

Moon. Leith Stevens is another important part of the

history of television as he was an early Music Supervi-

sor whose work on Destination Moon is almost assur-

edly his second best work. Why only second best? The

James Dean Story is undoubtedly his best stuff. It’s got

an atmospheric quality that would actually help deﬁne

the sound of the science ﬁction ﬁlms of the 1950s. You

can hear a ton of 1950s and 60s B-Film scores that

plopped out of those inﬂu-

enced by Stevens’ score.

Back to Chesley

Bonestall. He was the single

most important astronom-

ic artist of the era and was

one of the greatest science

ﬁction artists of all-time. He

was the driving force behind

the imagery, speciﬁcally the

images of the moon and

the Earth were designed by

Chesley and would end up

as the deﬁnition of the ﬁlm

for many folks. Of course,

there were limitations and

the un-moving star back-

ground when they are on

the Moon didn’t exactly

drive any form of believabil-

ity. The art direction wasn’t

great, but the matte painting was remarkable. It’s an art

that’s really been lost, Matte Painting. It was a hugely

signiﬁcant part of the world of ﬁlm until the 1970s.

Rarely is science ﬁction ﬁlm running close to

the edge of what the literaryists are working on in the

magazines and novels. So rarely is there a point where

they cross. Bladerunner right there with what the Cy-

berpunks were doing is the best example I can come up

with. Destination Moon was so close to the stuff that

was being portrayed in Astounding. It’s impressive how

strong Destination Moon was when you’re looking at

what was going on elsewhere as well. In a way, Destina-

tion Moon has been over-looked in favor of ﬁlms like

The Day The Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet,

which is weird since I consider Destination Moon to be

the superior ﬁlm to either of them. It’s more realistic,

a huge step forward into a world that had rarely been

seen. This was a science ﬁction ﬁlm that was close-at-

hand, something that is difﬁcult to pull off, and Destina-

tion Moon did it.

Destination Moon has its problems. The Brook-

lyn mechanic being the start. I mean re-watch Counter-

blast and the performances there and compare them to

the broadness of the characters in Destination Moon.

The English ﬁlm scene of the late 1940s was much less

simplistic than the same scene in the US. The structure

of the ﬁlm is ﬂawless right up until the very end and

the launch back home. Then, it falters a step or two,

but it does so with a certain amount of charm. The

production, though to today’s viewer somewhat under-

whelming, was magniﬁcent for the time. This was a ﬁlm

that was made with incredible precision, with a great

accuracy and a smart point of view.

So, maybe Robert Heinlein wasn’t the worst

thing to happen to the English language since the Nor-

man Invasion.

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