In 1964, John was between books. After Jadoo, he suffered from writer’s block awhile (which he wrote about in 1959), and hadn’t yet started to investigate ufology. He took on a number of TV and movie jobs, many of which never made it to production. He collected his work for that year in a bound volume. And, as usual with John, it’s filled with surprises and puzzles.
It begins with The Keystone Kops, a pilot script for a TV show. Some rummaging around the internet tells me that an animated show was considered in the ’60s, but this script calls for live action. It was never made, and there’s no indication of who was considering it.
It’s followed by a skit for “The Cole Bin,” a regular segment on the Clay Cole Show. Cole was a New York DJ who did a music show on WPIX-11 on Saturday nights; the last 15 minutes were devoted to “The Cole Bin,” in which musical guests did comedy bits. I assume Chuck McCann, who often worked with him, was also involved (no episodes survive). John’s script has a safecracker contending with a safe that’s also a radio, emitting blasts of music when the dial is turned.
Next is an article intended for the magazine Better Home Movie Making, on “Editing 8mm Sound-on-Film.” In the cover letter, John proposes a series on 8mm sound movies, with an eye to a future book. This, too, seems to have gone nowhere.
This is followed by ten episodes of Snooper Scope, a cartoon featuring “the greatest detective in the world,” and his assistants Billy Venture, Pokey, and Flutter, as they battle the evil Professor Disc Spicable. It was intended for Copri Films, but seems never to have been made. I asked animation historian Jerry Beck about it, and he had never heard of it. Copri sometimes imported and dubbed foreign cartoons, so maybe that was what Snooper Scope was meant for. At any rate, John wrote them ten scripts, with exact timings.
“Nosey” is another puzzle. It’s another comedy sketch, this time for two puppets, Nosey and Dosey, and two humans, Dan and Mr. Pumpernickel. Maybe this was also meant for Clay Cole and Chuck McCann; they often worked with the puppeteer Paul Ashley, who created several big-nosed characters.
“How Man Learned to Fly” is the script for a children’s record on one of John’s favorite subjects, aviation. Again, I haven’t found any indication it was ever produced.
How to Murder Your Wife was indeed produced, and starred Jack Lemmon. John wrote a trailer for it, which, again, seems not to have been used.
One of the more curious projects in this file is The World of the Living Dead, a treatment for a remake of the 1932 movie White Zombie. John dutifully turned in 34 pages of zombie story; according to his agreement with the producer Sherman S. Krellberg, he was paid $250 for it.
There are two more brief scripts: a series of skits for Candid Camera, and a brief treatment for a film to be called The Nudists from Outer Space, which I posted here, way back when.
Tucked in among all these is a curious article called “The Year 2000,” in which John imagines the world of the future. Like most prophecies, it often misses the mark, but remains a fascinating look at the dystopia that John (and no doubt others) thought lay ahead. And after all these unrealized projects, there may also be some wishful thinking in his prediction that future audiences will “demand high quality entertainment,” and that “painters, writers, and entertainers will be in the highest income group.”
buy Pregabalin india The Nudists from Outer Space, ah? Interesting that a couple of years later UFO contactee Woodrow Derenberger claimed to visit planet Lanulos, inhabited by nudists. Keel mentions in The Mothman Prophecies that the UFO entities that communicated with him through contactees took their names from his obscure novels. Did they also read his unpublished stuff?
Reading those predictions I felt the way I felt rereading recently Keel’s The Eighth Tower. Both pile contradiction upon contradiction in a most remarkable way. When Keel reports actual incidents he does it in a straightforward, understandable way. But when he tries to figure something out he seems to get lost in the woods.
Comment by Mestiere — November 5, 2021 @ 8:07 am
In fact, back in 2002 I wrote a short article on Derenberger for the special Mothman issue of the Fortean Times, and called it “Happy Nudists from Outer Space.” John was amused, because of his old film idea — which, of course, I hadn’t known about.
Most predictions seem to assume that trends will continue in the same direction. Few people in 1964 would have predicted the pendulum swinging back to anti-intellectualism, fundamentalism, and nationalism, or the effect the internet was to have on publishing and entertainment.
Comment by Doug — November 5, 2021 @ 8:28 pm