Culture – Page 88 – Jimmy Akin

New B5 In 07

Babylon 5 creator Joe Michael Straczynski (JMS) has been hinting of late that there would be a new Babylon 5 project announced during his appearance at the San Diego Comicon (the world’s largest comic book convention, which they have here every year).

I didn’t go to the Comicon (there are so many people there that, to quote Charleton Heston, "It’s a madhouse! A madhouse!"), but I did Google his appearance this weekend to see what was being reported about it online.

Here’s what I found:

–JMS sold a movie to Ron Howard. It’s a thriller/mystery movie set in the ˜20s in Los Angeles. They want to get it into production as fast as possible and JMS is flying up there on the 3rd to meet with Ron Howard and those guys to go over the script and make sure everything is where it needs to be. It’s going to be a big budget film. Ron Howard is a nice guy. The first time JMS had a phone conference with him about the script, JMS called him Mr. Howard and the reply was "You hired my dad on Babylon 5, you can call me whatever you want." Possibly it could be in production by the first part of next year.

–JMS was up in Toronto recently and they did a 12 episode radio drama series for the CBC called the Adventures of Apocalypse Al. It’s kind of a film noir style comedy drama science fiction supernatural series a la Men In Black or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s in little 5 minute chunks and it’s fall-down funny.

–A pilot for Touchstone has started for a dramatic prime time network series called BORROWED LIVES. It was actually sold last year but it was too late to go into development but now they’re actually in the script stage.

–[JMS’s comic book] RISING STARS is in development with Sam Raimi’s production company for a series.

–[JMS’s comic book] MIDNIGHT NATION is being bid on by two different studios for a movie.

–He pitched [his graphic novel] DREAM POLICE to a major studio, they want to do a motion picture and they’re negotiating now for JMS to write it.

–And there’s something else: WB came to him as they do periodically wanting to do something with B5. They asked if he wanted to do a feature film but JMS declined mainly because he can’t yet picture structuring a B5 movie "as long as Andreas and Rick insist on staying dead." Maybe in a year or two he’ll be able to but right now he can’t do something big. What JMS suggested was a bunch of short films ‘little mini-movies, an anthology show set in the Babylon 5 universe. They said, "Okay." There’s a network already interested in carrying them but they’re also planned for direct to DVD. This will be "Babylon 5: The Lost Tales", a lot of small stories that never made it into the series that he’s rediscovered notes for. And JMS wants no interference, complete creative support "in writing". They said, "Okay." And JMS wants to direct them. They said, "Okay." The first will be three individual stories about three of the main characters (to be determined). The plan is to shoot in September, post-production Oct.-Dec. and they’ll probably come out the second quarter of 2007 [SOURCE].

How he’s going to fit this in amid all the other projects he’s got going on, I’m not sure, but I’ll be interested to see what they come up with.

Incidentally, JMS himself adds a few more details over at JMSNews:

[W]e’re looking at 3 half-hour
episodes/stories for the first DVD, with additional features and the
like in the other half hour. Each story will be worked around a given
established character, the specifics of which are still TBD contingent
upon availabilities and other issues.

We have a budget, we’re greenlit, we’re going.

As for what prompted the interest now at WB…it’s only recently that
they’ve finally run through all 5 seasons, which for many years now has
been a constant source of revenue, and I think they would love to have
something to continue to with. The recent news re: Changeling [that’s the name of the script he sold to Ron Howard] probably
didn’t hurt, but the deal was actually being negotiated long before
there *was* a feature film deal with Imagine. As I recall, we
finalized the deal right around the time that the Imagine news was
announced.

It was a rather extraordinary 24 hours.

I held off saying anything until I was cleared by WB to announce it as
a go project. Ultimately, whether we shoot in Vancouver or elsewhere
will be a function of the deal that gets made locally [SOURCE].

I was surprised at how little coverage there is on the Net so far, but a kindly reader also sent me a link to the coverage of the new B5 project on Ain’t It Cool News and–as commonly happens with AICN–they schmutz up the report with unnecessary offensive language and need to have their collective mouthes washed out with soap (make that lye soap, for good measure).

Weeeeelllllllll. . . . Isn’t That “Special”

EXCERPTS:

Meet Kathleen McGowan, novelist and self-proclaimed descendant of a union between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. McGowan, who says she is from the "sacred bloodline" Brown made famous in his mega-selling novel [The Da Vinci Code].

[A]mong believers are her powerful literary agent and the editors at New York publisher Simon & Schuster, who are throwing their weight behind her autobiographical religious thriller The Expected One, out July 25, with a sizable first printing of 250,000 copies.

"Everyone’s going to think I’m on The Da Vinci Code bandwagon, but I’m not," says McGowan, who began working on her book in 1989. The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003.

McGowan originally self-published her novel last year and it sold only 2,500 copies.

Simon & Schuster is spending $275,000 to promote The Expected One and is sending the author on a cross-country tour beginning Aug. 3 in Los Angeles.

Trish Todd, editor in chief at Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster . . . says she has no problem believing McGowan’s claim that she descends from a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "Yes, I believe her. Her passion and her mission are so strong, how can she not be?"

The Expected One is the story of Maureen Paschal, a woman who begins to have visions of Mary Magdalene, discovers she is a descendant of Mary and Jesus and undergoes a dramatic search for a gospel written by Mary that is hidden in southwestern France. In a parallel plot, McGowan tells what she says is the actual story of the marriage and children of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The title of the book, she explains, is taken from an ancient prophecy that tells of a woman chosen by divine providence to bring the real story of Mary Magdalene’s life to the world.

McGowan calls this a novel but says it mirrors her own life. Maureen’s visions, she says, are "verbatim" accounts of her own visions of Mary Magdalene. "Maureen is a fictional character," she says, "but there is a lot of me in Maureen. I know it will be hard for people to accept this, but it’s true."

Though McGowan says she is descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene, she won’t say whether she, like the fictional Maureen, is "The Expected One."

"I’m not grandiose about this, and it concerns me a lot that I could be portrayed that way," McGowan says. "I don’t want it to appear that I’m standing up and saying I’m the expected one. That’s a dangerous, ego-driven kind of thing."

So far, McGowan is offering only her word about her lineage and only hints at her proof. In addition to the visions, she says, she has discovered that her family is related to an ancient French lineage that traces its roots to Jesus and Mary Magdalene’s descendants. Legend holds that Mary Magdalene settled in France after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. "That’s all I’m prepared to say right now," McGowan says. Some members of her family, she explains, want her to respect their privacy and not discuss it.

Despite the lack of hard evidence, McGowan’s supporters include her literary agent Larry Kirshbaum, who left his position as CEO of Time Warner Books in December to start his own literary agency. McGowan was one of his first clients and he helped her get a seven-figure, three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. (Her next two books pick up where The Expected One leaves off.)

And USA Today has proven itself perfectly willing to prostitute itself in order to promote this trash, giving the subject voluminous amounts of space meant to promote the book, including an excerpt of the novel itself.

GET THE STORY.

AND THE EXCERPT.

AND A REVIEW.

Here we go again, folks!

Incidentally, McGowan gets further into her novel than Dan Brown did before she makes a literary blunder. The very first word of the first sentence of The Da Vinci Code was a dud. McGowan made it through at least six words before her first sentence started to go off the tracks.

OH, AND HERE ARE KATHLEEN MCGOWAN’S REVIEWS OF OTHERS FOLKS’ BOOKS ON AMAZON. INTERESTING READING MATERIAL SHE’S INTO.

AND HERE’S HER HOMEPAGE.

Kudos To Mr. Siegel

Why?

Because he walked out of a disgusting Kevin Smith film in protest.

EXCERPTS:

DON’T joke about women, donkeys and bestiality if you expect Joel Siegel to watch your movie. That’s what director Kevin Smith found out when the pun-loving "Good Morning America" film critic stormed out of a press screening of Smith’s "Clerks II," which opens Friday – an act that’s sparked a vicious war of words between the two.

"Time to go!" roared Siegel to his fellow critics. "First movie I’ve walked out of in 30 [bleeping] years!" His tirade came 40 minutes into the long-awaited Weinstein Company sequel to Smith’s 1994 cult classic about two foul-mouthed Long Island convenience store clerks who razz customers and goof off.

GET THE STORY (WARNING: Disgusting subject matter clinically discussed.)

Shame on Kevin Smith, too, for his disgraceful and BLEEP-filled response to Mr. Siegel.

And for making such disgusting trash to begin with.

YEE-HAW!!!

Just got these in the mail, and I can’t wait to watch them (though at the moment I’m still making my way through the new Doctor Who season that was just released).

For those of you who missed it, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. was a 1993 TV series that blended two of my favorite things . . . the Old West and science-fiction. Two great things that go great together (sometimes . . . like this time . . . or Firefly).

(It also blended in some of my other favorite things, like humor and action and romance and whiskers on kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string . . . well, maybe not the last couple.)

I didn’t see the series when it was on the air (because Fox’s advertisements for it make it look a lot more salacious than it actually is), but I discovered it in reruns on TNT and really enjoyed it.

Unlike many of the series on the air back then, it had a definite story arc spanning the entire season (I just love big story arcs) with significant character evolution a surprises as the story evolves. In fact, the main character, Brisco County Jr. (played by Bruce Campbell) starts the series as an ex-Harvard law professor turned bounty hunter to being the agent of 19th century robber barons who want him to track down the gang that killed his father to being a secret agent for the government.

Along the way we run across mysterious orbs from the future that give people superpowers (or kill them), evil robots, neurotic outlaws, a 19th century version of Elvis, Comet the Wonder Horse, and a bunch of anachronistic humor (before Hercules and Xena made it popular)–all of it fitting into a single, overarching Wild West saga.

And then there’s the show’s great theme music, which just makes you feel like it’s a warm, hopeful new day on the range, where anything can happen . . . and will.

Unfortunately, Fox aired the show in the Friday Night Death Slot and it didn’t get picked up for a second season.

Fortunately, the show’s creators did a rousing two-part season finale that tied up all the outstanding plot threads, so it works well as a season-long miniseries.

It took Warner Brothers FOREVER (13 years!) to release it on DVD, but now that it’s out you can

GET THE ADVENTURE!

The Immortal Johnny Cash

There have been a lot of sightings lately of the recently-deceased Johnny Cash. No, he hasn’t been backing-up Elvis at Memphis honky-tonks. His music has been selling like hotcakes.

"In life, Johnny Cash was merely a legend. In death, he is proving immortal.

"Almost three years after he died at the age of 71 after a decade of poor health, the country outlaw is the most popular artist in the United States, currently at No. 1 on the pop and country charts with an album of new material.

"The album, ‘American V: A Hundred Highways,’ recorded in Cash’s final months as he looked forward to reuniting with his late wife, June Carter Cash, sold 88,000 copies in the week ended July 9. It’s his first chart-topper since 1969’s live prison album ‘Johnny Cash at San Quentin.’"

GET THE STORY.

I suppose most of the Cash fans these days hopped on the bandwagon with the success of the bio-flick Walk the Line. Having grown up in a family of country-music lovers, I liked Johnny Cash before it was cool to like Johnny Cash. Some of my favorites are A Boy Named Sue, Ring of Fire, and One Piece at a Time.

[JIMMY ADDS: Those are three of my favorites, along with Folsom Prison Blues.]

The only thing that ever really annoyed me about Cash was not Cash himself but the idealization by many people of his marriage to June Carter Cash … a relationship that began when at least one of them was married to someone else. I forget the full details of their "love story" but my repulsion at the popular idealization of adultery is one of the reasons I skipped Walk the Line when it was in theaters. (To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying anything here about Johnny and June Carter Cash. My disgust is with those who seemed to think their marriage one of the Greatest Love Stories of All Time.)

As a side note, reporters can be a real hoot sometimes:

"Almost three years after he [Cash] died at the age of 71 after a decade of poor health…"

Wow, whoever heard of dying after a bout with "poor health"? And here I thought that only the healthy died.

In The Mail

I’m now working my way through

THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON OF THE NEW DOCTOR WHO SHOW.

For those who are keeping score, this is the first and only season to feature the ninth incarnation of the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston).

I’ve seen some of the episodes in the series, though I also missed a bunch because they conflicted with square dancing, and I’d be too tired to stay up to watch the repeats on Sci-Fi.

Like most Americans (or at least, most Americans who know about Doctor Who), I was introduced to the character when he was being played by Tom Baker (the fourth doctor) and the show was running on PBS stations across the country.

I have to say that, in the main, I like what I’ve seen of this series, though there are things I don’t.

I like the fact that there is an overall story arc to the series and the fact that they try to deal with the impact of time travel on the ordinary life of the Doctor’s main companion (Rose Tyler). Her mom and her boyfriend and her deceased father are significant characters in the series, and it’s nice to see what the effects would be on those close to a person if that person suddenly started jaunting about time.

I also like Eccleston’s portrayal of the doctor. He has a kind of enthusiastic optimism that he uses to hide an inner crushing grief, and the way that these two play off of each other is interesting.

Interestingly, Eccleston (who is a native of Lancashire) is one of the few doctors allowed to speak with a non-BBC accent, leading to one of my favorite lines in the episodes I’ve seen. When Rose has explained to a 21st century woman that the Doctor is an extraterrestrial, the woman asks, "Then why does your friend talk like he’s from the North?" to which Rose replies, "Lots of planets have a North!"

Still, if you’re a dyed-in-the-woolen-scarf Tom Bakerite, you might want to check out the other, recently-released complete Doctor Who season with its own season-spanning storyline,

THE COMPLETE KEY TO TIME SERIES.

Cool Things In Pirates Of The Caribbean 2

So I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest last Saturday (actually, before my pre-written post on it went up) and I thought it really rocked.

It had a bunch of cool stuff in it, some of which I can’t say because it would be too much of a spoiler, but here are some isolated snippets of cool things that won’t give away the plot.

COOL THINGS IN PRACTES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2:

1) Johnny Depp’s performance.

2) The way the crewman finishes the line "The captain is acting strange."

3) Davy Jones (SDG’s really right on this one; Davy Jones has the potential to rival Jabba the Hutt as an iconic image, which is why I’m not posting a picture of him; I don’t want to spoil his entrance)

4) The make-up effects for Davy Jones’s men.

5) In particular the conch-headed man, and especially what he does in his very last appearance in the film.

6) The island escape sequence. MAN, THIS TOTALLY ROCKS! I CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS EVER BEING FILMED BEFORE.

7) The "Jack-kabob"

8) The schlorp / shlub sound effects when the suckers on various tentacles are doing things.

9) The unusual "eye makeup"

10) The way that Jack and Elizabeth’s prophecies about each other come true.

11) The "Hello, beastie" moment.

12) The three-way swordfight.

13) The "rolling climax"

14) The humorous cliffhanger.

Don’t know what I’m talking about?

GO SEE THE FILM!

BTW, if the theaters are even half as hectic this weekend as they were last (when the film was selling out right and left), buy your tickes online or over the phone and make a point of showing up a little early.

If you have seen the film, feel free to share your own cool things in the movie. (SPOILERS OKAY since it’ll be in the combox.)

BTW, next summer’s final part of the Pirates trilogy may not be the end of the series.

JOHNNY DEPP HAS INDICATED HE’D BE INTERESTED IN PLAYING THE PART AGAIN.

Also Coming Soon To An iPod Near Me

Last week I did sometihng I haven’t done in around 20 years–I went to an actual science fiction convention. (More on that later.)

Scott of SFFAudio reminded me of something that I learned at the convention: There is a publishing house that offers ordinary HTML texts of many of the books it sci-fi books it publishes for download–either free or, in some cases, for a subscription fee.

The publisher is Baen, and it’s part of an interesting marketing philosophy that they’re trying out (i.e., letting people read some for free will prime their appetite to also purchase material, so you’ll end up making money).

Ordinary HTML files are great for me (as opposed to the formats many eBooks are published in) because I can easily turn them into audio books using my TextAloud program.

So I’m definitely going to be visiting their site.

CHECK IT OUT.

Coming Soon To An iPod Near Me

A reader writes:

Hello, Mr. Akin –

My name is Scott, and I just noticed on your most recent post that you use
your iPod for audiobooks. Though I’m sure you listen to a wide variety of
stuff, I know you have an interest in science fiction, so I’d like to point
you to my site, SFFaudio, which features news, reviews, and commentary on
the world of science fiction and fantasy audio.

I’m Catholic, and enjoy your site very much. My co-editor/website partner
is not a religious believer.

SFFaudio can be found at www.sffaudio.com. I hope it’s of use to you.

God bless, fellow audiobook fan,
Scott

PS – I’m currently listening to "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell from
Brilliance. I’m about 1/8 of the way in… it’s interesting that much of
the science fiction that treats religion in a respectful way (rare enough,
indeed) features a Jesuit. So far, the novel is quite good.

Cool!

Having a site that coordinates sci-fi, etc., audio is a great idea. I looked it over, and there’s a lot of useful resources there.

CHECK IT OUT.

In Search Of Ancient Astronauts?

Y’know that Erich von Daniken book Chariots of the Gods that was such a phenomenon back in the 1970s, what with its claim that ancient astronauts visited the earth and left behind various ancient mysteries along with legends turning them into ancient deities?

Boy, that book is annoying.

I mean, I’m sorry, but Ezekiel just did not see a flying saucer.

And the Nazca lines are just not alien landing strips (though NASCAR race tracks might be).

Well, as annoying as his book are (and they’ve inspired even more annoying imitators, like Zecharia Sitchin–as well as cool things, like Stargate SG-1), von Daniken wasn’t the first person to have the idea of deities "really" being aliens.

Others had that before him.

H.P. Lovecraft, for example.

And, it turns out,

THERE’S A DIRECT CHAIN LINKING LOVECRAFT’S WORKS WITH VON DANIKEN’S.
(CHT to the reader who e-mailed!)