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Allen Mendenhall Interviews Joyce Corrington

In American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Fiction, Film, History, Humanities, John William Corrington, Joyce Corrington, Literature, Novels, Screenwriting, Southern History, Southern Literature, Television, Television Writing, Writing on October 28, 2015 at 8:45 am
Photo by Robert Corrington

Photo by Robert Corrington

APM: Joyce, thanks for doing this interview. The last time we did one of these, I suggested that we might do another one day. I’m glad that day is here. I guess if there’s a particular occasion for the interview, it’s that you and your son Robert have recently finished your project of making the literary works of your late husband, John William “Bill” Corrington, available to the public. How did you do that?

JC: Bill began his literary career as a poet in the 1960s, publishing in the “little magazines” that were prevalent at that time and also publishing five collections of his poems. Then he largely switched to fiction and published pieces of short fiction in literary magazines and in three collections, which were themselves collected into a publication by the University of Missouri Press after Bill’s untimely death.  Finally he published four novels, the last of which, Shad Sentell, was published in 1984.  Since almost thirty years have passed since then, all of Bill’s works were out of print and available to the public only as rather expensive used books.  Our son Robert, who works for Microsoft and is very informed about IT matters, told me that Amazon and its subsidiary Create Space would accept digital manuscripts and publish them at no charge as eBooks or print on demand books that would be offered to the public on the Amazon.com/books website.  So we began a many years long project to make all of Bill’s literary work again available to the public in inexpensive editions.  The “many years” was due to the fact that we had no digital manuscripts.  I had to retype the poems, short stories and novels on my computer and then Robert edited the digital files and created original covers for the books in Photoshop.  Finally, with the recent publication of Shad Sentell, we are done!

APM: Having recently reread the entirety of Bill’s published works, what is your overall impression?

JC: It was interesting to read a lifetime of work in a relatively short period of time. I found that a sense of history permeates Bill’s work. Even many of his poems have historical themes and his first novel, And Wait for the Night, was concerned with the consequences of the Civil War, as were many of his short stories.  Also infusing the work is a strong sense of morality and religion.  This might surprise someone who casually reads The Upper Hand, which is about a priest who loses his faith and descends into the “hell” of the French Quarter.  Much of it seems sacrilegious and offensive to a person of religious sensibilities, but the first words of the novel are “God Almighty…” and the last are “the living the dead,” both phrases which appear in the Apostle’s Creed.  Bill’s novella The Rise’s Wife resulted from a deep study of Hinduism.  Of course, as many have noted, Bill’s taking a J.D. midway in his life resulted in many lawyers and judges becoming characters in his fiction.  This allowed Bill to explore the logos of a moral life.  Finally, and almost in contrast to all these other serious themes, Bill displayed an ironic and even black sense of humor in many of his poems, such as “Prayers for a Mass in the Vernacular,” in his short story “The Great Pumpkin,” and especially in his novel The Upper Hand.

APM: You’ve said that Shad Sentell is your favorite of Bill’s books. Why is that? 

JC: Mostly because the humor in Shad Sentell is farcical and not black.  It is a really fun read, if you are not prudish.  Shad, who is a “redneck” Don Giovanni, is likely one of the most carnal characters in literature and this, thirty years ago, was perhaps shocking to many readers.  I hope that today readers can see that this novel is (excuse my partiality) a work of genius that records for all time the character and language of the Southern redneck.  Bill shows he has a surprising depth of intelligence and sensibility that one would not suspect from his bluff and crass surface.

APM: Do you remember the circumstances under which Bill authored the book? In other words, do you have any memories of him writing it?

JC: Bill had been disappointed that his first three “serious” novels had received little critical acclaim.  He decided to write one aimed at what he thought was more to the taste of the general public.  In this I think he was far ahead of his time, but I hope Shad Sentell will eventually find its audience.

APM: I once read something that Lloyd Halliburton wrote about how you critiqued parts of Shad Sentell and caused Bill to rethink some passages. I can’t recall the details. Do you know what I’m referring to?

JC: I always acted as Bill’s sounding board and editor as he was writing a novel. We would sit over coffee in the morning or maybe a gin a tonic in the afternoon and discuss his ideas on what was to come next.  I thought he got carried away with the farcical fun of the Mardi Gras scenes and, when his agent agreed with me, he let me cut much of that material from the manuscript.  But likely the biggest change I suggested was the ending.  Bill’s first idea was to have Shad die in the climactic oil well explosion, but I told him I thought that was a wrong decision.  Despite his seeing Shad as a modern day Don Giovanni, Shad Sentell was a comedy, not a tragedy, and the hero survives in a comedy.  Bill went along with my suggestion.

APM: Where did the character Shad Sentell come from? Was he based on any one person?

JC: Bill had a very good friend, Sam Lachle, who shared many of Shad’s characteristics. During high school and college Bill played trumpet with local bands in the bars of Bossier City.  He had a very smart mouth and it would likely have gotten him into more trouble than it did if he had not hung out with two very large friends, Sam and Don Radcliff, who protected him.  Sam died of a stroke at an early age and Shad Sentell, which is dedicated to him, is to some degree a loving memorial.

APM: I assume the newly released version of the book that you and Robert have put together will be available on Amazon, right? What about your website?  Can readers find and purchase it there?

JC: My son Robert not only formatted the books but created a website, www.jcorrington.com, which lists all the books that are available on Amazon. There are also biographies and a menu of critical works.

APM: This changes the subject a bit, but you once mentioned, I think when I was visiting you in New Orleans a few years ago, that there was a graduate student writing a dissertation on Battle for the Planet of the Apes and that he was trying to read into the screenplay something that wasn’t there. Does this ring a bell? Am I remembering this correctly?

JC: Bill and I wrote six films, one of which was the last in the original Planet of the Apes series. Bill never took film writing seriously, which was probably for the best since as writers we never had any control over what was done with our scripts after turning them over to the producer who hired us to write them.  We were actually quite dismayed when the film Battle for the Planet of the Apes was released to find some elements had been dropped and others added (a crying statue, for heaven’s sake), but we wrote it off as “just an entertainment.”  Imagine my surprise when years later I received a phone call from a young man who was doing his Ph.D. dissertation on the Planet of the Apes series!  He asked for an interview which I was happy to grant.  I soon discovered that his thesis was that the films were really about racism in America in the 1960s.  I told him that I would not try to speak for the other films, but ours was actually a Cain and Abel story (the apes had previously been presented as innocent pacifists compared to warmongering humans and our story was of the first ape killing another ape).  The graduate student chose to ignore this and stick to his thesis.  He won his Ph.D. and even later published his dissertation work.

APM: I ask in part because the latest installment of the Battle for the Planet of the Apes series came out last year. That was Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which followed the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes. What do you think about these latest films?

JC: I am afraid I did not bother to see it.

APM: Giuliana and I saw Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the theater, and we waited around after the film to see if you or Bill received any mention in the credits. I can’t remember if you did, but I’m inclined to say that you did not. Do you have any comment about that?

JC: I don’t think we did receive any credit because the Writer Guild of America would have sent me a notice to see if I wanted to dispute the credit.  They did this with the remake of our film Omega Man, which was titled I Am Legend.  I asked if there was any money involved and when the Guild said no, I replied that I did not really care what credit we received.  Subsequently a lot of friends were surprised to see a credit for us at the end of the new film and sent me emails about it.

APM: I’m now thinking these interviews should be an ongoing thing. I’d like to continue the conversation. What do you think? We could do one every now and then for the historical record.

JC: I would like that very much. I especially would like to have an opportunity to talk to you about the Collected Poems of John William Corrington and the Collected Short Fiction of John William Corrington.  These are also recently published and available on Amazon.com or through my website www.jcorrington.com.

APM: Thanks, Joyce, let’s do it again soon.

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The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture

In Academia, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Book Reviews, Books, Economics, Fiction, Film, Humane Economy, Humanities, Liberalism, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Rhetoric & Communication, Screenwriting, Television, Television Writing on January 22, 2014 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in The Independent Review.

“Television rots your brain.” That’s a refrain many of us grew up hearing, but it isn’t true. So suggests Paul Cantor in The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, his second book about American film and television.

Cantor has become a celebrity within libertarian circles. He is Clifton Waller  Barrett Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Virginia and recently became a visiting professor at his alma mater, Harvard University.  What’s remarkable about his appointment at Harvard is that it is in the Department of Government, not the Department of English. That doesn’t surprise those of us familiar with his breadth of knowledge and range of interests.

Recognized as an interdisciplinary scholar, Cantor attended Ludwig von Mises’s seminars in New York City before establishing himself as an expert on Shakespeare.  Besides publishing extensively on literature of various genres and periods, he has been a tireless advocate for Austrian economics, even though Marxist theories and their materialist offshoots dominate his field. In 1992, the Mises Institute awarded Cantor the Ludwig von Mises Prize for Scholarship in Austrian Economics, and his work at the intersection of economics and literature resulted in Literature and the Economics of Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010), which he edited with Stephen Cox (while contributing nearly half of the book’s contents).

Like that work, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture owes much to the theories of Friedrich Hayek, in particular the concept of spontaneous order. It is a reflection of spontaneous order that the most beloved films and television shows did not spring perfectly from the mind of some genius working in complete isolation.  Rather, they emerged out of the complex interactions between producers and consumers and the collaborative efforts of scores of diligent workers. Viewer feedback facilitated modifications and improvements to films and television, which  advanced in meliorative stages.

Hayek discusses spontaneous order to refute the belief that government intervention and central planning ought to force order onto the marketplace. Cantor discusses it to refute the belief that artistic creation stands outside of commercial exchange. Examining depictions of freedom and coercion in a wide variety of films and television shows, he highlights the disparity between elitist and populist understandings of American culture, which he links to “top-down” and “bottom-up” models of order, respectively. His position is that the popularity and artistic appeal of film and television appear to be proliferating despite the objections and insults levied by the cultural elite, who, it should be added with not a little irony, nonetheless probably watch a great deal of television.

Against the cultural elite and their promotion of patrician—and mostly  European—standards for the arts, Cantor maintains that the marketplace enables  creative and experimental forms of expression that aren’t so different from earlier aesthetic media such as the serialized novel or popular plays. He reminds us that “nineteenth century critics tended to look down on the novel as a popular form, thinking it hardly a form of literature at all,” and adds that it “was not viewed as authentic art, but rather as an impure form, filled with aesthetically extraneous elements  whose only function is to please the public and sell copies” (p. 7). This once “vulgar” medium has lately been celebrated as one of the highest and most impressive categories of art. The form and content of great American novels—whether by Twain or Cooper or Salinger or Pynchon—should remind us that popular novels have been elevated as canonical even though they have rejected the standards and conventions that highbrow critics insisted were necessary for a work to constitute “literature.” Twain and Cooper recognized that highbrow presuppositions and expectations for novels derived from influential Europeans, so they set out to forge a uniquely  American literature free from Old World constraints.

Because film and television are commercial, they allow ordinary Americans  (as opposed to academics and the cultural elite, including and especially the neo-Marxists) to determine aesthetic standards and trends by indicating what does and does not interest them. Authors and television producers, in turn, become responsive and attuned to the demands of their consumers; they become, in short, entrepreneurs who must struggle against the status quo, defy the odds, and push the limits of artistic acceptability.

The elite disparage this process and advocate for aesthetic criteria divorced from the tastes and pleasures of the general public. As Cantor explains, “Elitists who profess to believe in democracy nevertheless have no faith in common people to make sound decisions on their own, even in a matter as simple as choosing the films and television shows they watch” (p. xiv). The elite would have film and television removed from the marketplace, but without the marketplace there would be no film or television.

Films and television shows might just become the masterpieces of the future; they might have already provided us with canonical “texts.” It is too early to say whether they have contributed substance to what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.” Greatness, after all, takes time to ascertain.

Orwell, Dr. Johnson, and Hume adhered to the “test of time” measure of  greatness by which a work of art or literature is evaluated according to its ability to compete and survive in the literary marketplace over the course of generations.  This measure requires the sustained consensus of consumers as opposed to the esoteric judgments of elite critics. A work’s ability to attract vast and diverse audiences and to do so long after its production is what makes the work great.

It might seem odd to think of Cantor’s subjects—South Park and The X-Files, for  instance—alongside important literary works of the Western canon. And yet the groundlings who paid a penny to enter into the pit of the Globe Theatre, where they would stand and watch performances of Shakespeare’s plays, probably didn’t think they were witnessing greatness, either. Harold Bloom once said, “Cultural  prophecy is always a mug’s game,” and Cantor is wise not to prophesy about the enduring merit of any films or television shows. Cantor’s point is not that the products of film and television will be considered masterpieces one day, only that they might be.

For the record, I consider it extremely unlikely that South Park or The X-Files will achieve classic status, but I would not extend that speculation to such films as Casablanca or the Star Wars trilogy. Cantor himself takes pains to distinguish first-rate works from run-of-the-mill entertainment by invoking “traditional criteria for artistic excellence” (p. xxii). We should not take him to mean that film and television are media superior to that which came before them; instead, he considers them as substantially similar to their artistic antecedents, except that their  features signal an evolution in artistic preferences. The allure of art comes not from its alienation from popular culture, but from its ability to incorporate popular culture in ways that do not impede its power to speak beyond its moment.

To be sure, American film and television have produced an overwhelming amount of trash, but so did novel serialization. Not all novelists who published their work in contiguous installments in magazines and periodicals held the stature of Charles Dickens or Henry James or Herman Melville. Cantor points out that we forget about the thousands of bad novels from the Victorian era and extol only around one hundred novels from that period, which supposedly represents a  zenith in culture. Among the thousands if not millions of films and television shows that have been produced over the past century, perhaps a few will rival the works of Dickens, James, and Melville.

If Cantor weren’t such a generous and careful scholar, he might have become the bête noire of sophisticates and lambasted in the pages of The New Criterion for his embrace of the purportedly lowbrow. His command of economics and literary history, however, has spared him from such condemnation and even gained him a devoted following. To do justice to his latest book would require a more comprehensive treatment of his arguments about the figure of the “maverick” in film and television or about the value of collaborative work and coauthorship in  generating exceptional products. Yet these arguments demand more attention than a review can give.

The incomparable Cantor has blessed the libertarian movement with a literary  voice. He has expanded the study of Austrian economics into the fields that need it most. He himself is a maverick, reading and writing industriously to break up the habits of thought and monopolies on ideology that mark literary scholarship.  Would that we had more Cantors to show us how literature flowers when freedom flourishes. There is hope in the idea that artists can turn to the market to cultivate their talents and supply us with the arts we demand. No English department or cultural guardian can rob us of the entertainment that we enjoy.

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Allen Mendenhall Interviews J. Neil Schulman, Prometheus Award–Winning Author of Alongside Night

In Artist, Arts & Letters, Austrian Economics, Creative Writing, Creativity, Economics, Fiction, Film, Humanities, Imagination, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Philosophy, Screenwriting, Television, Television Writing, Writing on January 17, 2012 at 9:00 am

J. Neil Schulman

J. Neil Schulman is a novelist, actor, filmmaker, journalist, composer, and publisher.  Among his many books are Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza, both of which won the Prometheus Award.  Visit his website at http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/.

 

The following interview originally appeared here at Prometheus Unbound: A Libertarian Review of Fiction and Literature.

AM:  Right off the bat, it strikes me that I don’t know what to call you.  Will Neil work?

JNS:  Sure. It’s J. Neil Schulman in credits, and Neil in person.

AM:  Anyway, thank you for doing this interview, Neil.  You’ve had a fascinating and unique career.  You’ve written novels, short fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and other works.  Which of your works is your favorite and why?

JNS:  Every artist gets asked this question sooner or later. I asked it of Robert A. Heinlein when I interviewed him in 1973, and his answer was, “The latest one I’ve been working on.”

I’ve only completed one movie so far — Lady Magdalene’s — so it’s a Hobson’s Choice on that one. Ask me again when I’ve made two! But a lot of people also seem to like the script I wrote for The Twilight Zone, “Profile in Silver.”

I’ve written three novels. My first, Alongside Night [editor’s note: free in pdf], seems to be my most accessible and popular. I consider my second novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, to be my most layered, literary, and richest in explicit philosophy. My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is my favorite. It may not be as timely as my first novel or literary as my second novel, but it’s the one that’s closest to my heart…both the funniest thing I’ve ever written, and the one which is most deceptively simple. It appears to be a lightweight piece of comic fantasy, but it’s full of ideas that if examined more closely turn both traditional theology and rationalist philosophy on their heads.

Short stories? I’ll pick a few: “The Musician,” “Day of Atonement,” and “When Freemen Shall Stand” — all in my collection Nasty. Brutish, and Short Stories — and my latest short story, “The Laughskeller,” published on my blog, J. Neil Schulman @ Rational Review.

AM:  Your worldview is, in a word, libertarian.  Why is that?  How does libertarianism come across in your writing?

JNS:  In my nonfiction essays it comes across explicitly. In fiction, drama, and comedy, I try to examine libertarian themes without preaching. I was probably most subtle doing this in The Rainbow Cadenza. The utilitarian politics advocated by the chief villain, Burke Filcher, is so self-consistent that a lot of readers have thought this character speaks for the author. In fact, I wrote the novel to attack utilitarianism as a nullification of the natural individual rights I believe in. The novel reduces utilitarianism to absurdity — it’s a formal satire of it.

Alongside Night is less subtle, though I’m probably more successful in the new movie script than the 1970s novel when it comes to letting the audience make up its own mind. I have learned some refinements of my craft in the last three decades.

Alongside Night by J. Neil SchulmanAM:  I recently noticed that you commented on a post at the Austrian Economics and Literature blog edited by my good friend Troy Camplin.  Tell me about the influence that Austrian economics has had on you.

JNS:  I would say that Austrian economics — and more fundamentally, the analytical tools of praxeology and games theory — have been fundamental to my work for my entire professional career. They’re not the only tools in my kit, but they get shopworn as much as any of them. Austrian economics is most explicit in Alongside Night, projecting the social and political consequences of fiat money hyperinflation — but I used games theory in plotting “Profile in Silver” and applied praxeology to the afterlife in Escape from Heaven. Read the rest of this entry »

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Allen Mendenhall Interviews Joyce Corrington

In Art, Arts & Letters, Creativity, Fiction, Film, History, Humanities, Information Design, John William Corrington, Law, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Philosophy, Screenwriting, Television, Television Writing, Writing on September 22, 2011 at 8:31 am

Joyce Corrington is a writer who, with her late husband John William “Bill” Corrington, wrote several films, including The Omega Man (1970), Box Car Bertha (1971), and The Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).  Also with Bill Corrington, she co-authored four novels: So Small a Carnival (1986), A Project Named Desire (1987), A Civil Death (1987), and The White Zone (1990).  She was head writer for such television series as Search for Tomorrow, Texas, General Hospital and Superior Court, and she has been a co-executive producer for MTV’s The Real World.  She holds a Ph.D. from Tulane University.  Her latest book, Fear of Dying, is available in both Kindle e-book and paperback format.  Formerly a Malibu resident, she now resides in New Orleans. 

Photo by Robert Corrington

Joyce, thank you so much for doing this interview.  I’m surprised we haven’t done one before.  You’ve been an enormous help to me over the years.  You even allowed me to stay at your home in New Orleans so that I could do research on your late husband, Bill.  During that time I learned that you hold a Ph.D. from Tulane University, and taught Chemistry at Xavier University for ten years.  Tell me, how did a person with that background become a writer?

I’m sure it would never have happened if I hadn’t met and married Bill when we were both at Rice University.  He was working on a doctorate so he could earn a living teaching, but he wanted to write.  Bill succeeded in publishing a number of well-received novels, which I typed and edited for him.  But we did not become co-writers until Roger Corman read one of Bill’s novels and invited him to write a movie script.  This was not something Bill especially wanted to do.  But it paid better than college teaching, so we evolved a film writing partnership, whereby I would create a detailed story structure and Bill would write a script following my outline.  After six films, we became involved in writing television series and continued our writing partnership there and in the four New Orleans mystery books we published.  Bill passed away as the fourth was being written, so I completed it.

Why did you choose to continue the series?

After Bill died I found it difficult to get the same kind of writing jobs we had been used to doing.  I think this was because all of my credits were as half of a writing team and producers felt uncertain whether I could do the job by myself.  Thus I had about two years where I had little to do and, while I read a lot during that time, I also began writing a sequel to our New Orleans mystery series.  I think I wanted to prove that I could do it by myself.  Just after finishing the manuscript for Fear of Dying, I was hired to help produce The Real World, a job which I held for eleven seasons.  I did not get around to publishing Fear of Dying until I retired from that job. Read the rest of this entry »

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