How They Made The Canterville Ghost Better Than Oscar Wilde's Original

Why I Like What Some Screenwriters Do to the Stories They Base Their Movies On.

Just finished watching the 1944 movie, The Canterville Ghost and then went back and refreshed my memory of the original Oscar Wilde story from which it was drawn. There have been other versions, but I like the '44 outing with Margaret O'Brien and Robert Montgomery. It is the kindest version of the lot. 

First of all in the movie, Sir Simon is only guilty of cowardice. In the book he murdered his wife in cold blood along with 4 other people who died as a result of his prodigious haunting ability. He is an evil spirit and lies and manipulates the daughter of the American minister's family who have come to live in Canterville Chase while working for the American government. Sir Simon delights in pointing out the hypocrisy of the minister. This is not in any way a story to create good feelings between the British and Americans.

The '44 movie version, on the other hand, is set during WWII and the story is adjusted to promote good feelings between the Brits and their American cousins jammed into southern England preparatory to crossing the channel into France. In the story, a platoon of Army Rangers take up residence in the castle and are confronted by the ghost. The soldiers aren't intimidated by the ghost and drive into a corner in deep depression. Margaret O'Brien who is delightful as the Lady Jessica DeCanterville, meets her spectral  ancestor and sets about to help him find a brave relative to help him end the curse.

The original story also has a female character, Virginia Otis, whom Sir Simon manipulates into helping him cross over to the other side. Given his track record, I suspect that bright light he goes into are the fires of hell, but that's just me. Wilde seemed to be saying that the unrepentant Simon managed to manipulate his way to heaven without having to repent of murdering his wife.

One of the American soldiers in the '44 movie, Cuffy Williams, played by Robert Montgomery, turns out to be a descendant of the Cantervilles and as such can do a heroic deed in Sir Simon's name and free his spirit to rest in the garden behind the pines. He overcomes his own fear, does the heroic deed proving that all Cantervilles are not cowards and frees Sir Simon's spirit from the curse his father had put upon him when he was walled up in the closet. This Simon did repent and was more of a hapless victim than the Oscar Wilde Simon. 

I think the movie is way better than Oscar Wilde's cynical version. Wilde, a gay socialist and aesthetic, never wrote anything I cared for other than ones that screenwriters managed to give happy endings like Canterville. The poor man kept looking for God, but didn't seem terribly interested in obtaining forgiveness or changing his ways. Wishful thinking may explain why Sir Simon in his story manages to take advantage of a pure hearted girl and a letter of the law ritual. Wilde attempted to do much the same by doing a last minute Catholic conversion and last rites on his deathbed. 

I like movies with happy endings. So sue me!

Tom King
© 2023
                                              

The Writing Life: To Pander or Not to Pander: That is the Question!

Must writer's pander to an increasingly illiterate audience?

Lucy Barfield

Too much of what passes for literature these days is made up of strings of naughty bits held together by slim ropes of dialogue, designed to appeal more to inflamed teenaged hormones than to any sort of intellect. I won't name names. They know who they are.


Reading such stuff makes me mad.  I know I'm being manipulated by the author; hurried along through pages of "action" with a hint of something hormonal about to happen.  Makes me tired.

Thankfully we still have some good writers about that do write things with some depth to them.  I think the cheesy stuff we see is a result more of pandering to an increasingly almost functionally illiterate crop of children than to a lack of will on the part of authors.  That doesn't mean there isn't an intelligent group of kids and young people out there who read stuff with meat on its bones.  J.K. Rowling proved that you don't have to lather your prose with sex in order to sell books. The big thing she did right with the Potter novels was to keep the kids as kids.  Of course, they grew up and formed relationships, but at least they weren't levitating in and out of each others' bedrooms all the time.  They behaved as children, not as hormone-ravaged sex-maniacs.  And the story had real depth to it.  Publishers were stunned that kids would force their parents to buy a two inch thick $25 hardcover book, much less read it cover to cover repeatedly and demand sequels.  

Occasionally I discover that someone likes a book that I treasure as well.  Most of the time they describe the book with the preface, "When I was little my Father (or Mother) used to read it to me...."  I read many of my favorite books like Caddie Woodlawn, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and the Chronicles of Narnia to my own children at bedtime night after night.  I hope one day they will read these stories to their own children.

The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narnia, Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time novels and even The Little Prince have depth to them and draw young readers even in this day and age where reading good books is increasingly spurned in favor of garbled text messaging with other semi-literates.  The ability to self-publish these days, however, will hopefully bring more intelligent books to out electronic bookshelves and we shall see some books that might never have passed muster for some New York book editor because it might sell a mere 20 or 30 thousand copies.  Such books, marketed as ebooks on Amazon, can make passable money for an author.  In addition it may allow readers to see authors in their natural state, writing what they really wanted to write rather than what someone thought would sell.  Who knows, there may be some real classics lurking there for us to discover.

To would-be authors of books for both young people and old people, I would refer you to the dedication from C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe".   I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather,  C.S. Lewis

You write not to this year's children, but to tomorrow's parents and grandparents.  Write what you love even if like Harper Lee and Margaret Mitchell you only have one book in you.  Make it the best you can create.  We look forward to reading it.

Tom King © 2103

Credit Where Credit is Due

The Thorny Issue of Authorship on the Internet

Someone posted a humor bit on Facebook this morning that was very, very funny. It was also presented without the name of the original author and was somewhat modified from his original work. The piece was a barely disguised rip-off of W. Bruce Cameron's 1997 copyrighted piece "The Chili Judge". Bruce (left), a noted humor columnist, is also the author of "8 Simple Rules for Dating my Daughter" the column and later book that was turned into the John Ritter sitcom of the same name. You can read the original version of his lesser known ode to chili here:




The Chili Judge
Copyright 1997 by W. Bruce Cameron
http://www.wbrucecameron.com/

I've had two or three humor or parody pieces of my own ripped off without a byline credit or my copyright notice, so it bothers me when someone swipes something like this without crediting the author and rewrites it without permission.

Some people do credit me when I spot the parody piece and write to remind them that I wrote it. Problem is, the thing is posted all over the place and circulates in e-mails by the millions, so I have no control over the work anymore. You may have read it yourself - "Lou Costello Buys a Computer" It was written as a skit, so now there are even several video versions of the piece all over Youtube. Cameron's Chili Judge also has a video version rewritten in some places, but in several places paragraphs were lifted whole from Cameron's column.


It would be nice if someone would do a little 5 minutes of author research before deciding the "funny fairy" musta wrote it and placed it in the public domain for them to automatically use as they see fit.

I realize it's a compliment to the author that someone thought the piece was good enough to steal, but a compliment, that doesn't mention who it is that you are complimenting, isn't really very complimentary.

I allow anyone who asks to use the Lou Costello/Computer skit freely. It's included in at least one book I know of where the book's author asked me to allow her to use it to illustrate a point.

I was pleased to grant the rights to her - no charge. She very kindly included my byline, copyright notice and web address.

The people who post funny stuff like this may not credit the author. We authors have little or no control over that.  An author probably won't sue you for compulsively passing his or her work along to ten friends in the next 20 minutes so that you don't have bad luck or people won't think you don't love Jesus.

But if you decide to send something you found funny and enjoyable to several hundred friends, it would be polite to check who the original author is and at least give them credit or ask if you can send a link to the author's posting of the original piece.

Like this guy did: http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/ChiliCookOff


or this one:  http://www.chilicookin.com/humor.htm

I'm just sayin'

Tom

P.S.  And don't assume the person who sent something funny to you actually wrote it. People take credit for things they didn't do all the time (see Wikipedia under "President" or "Congress").
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The Hazards of Going Viral

I was fooling around with Google today and searched the title of a piece I wrote several years ago, then rewrote and released back in May on this blog. It's a spoof on the famous "Who's on First" sketch by Abbott and Costello. I was stunned to pull up nearly 2000 entries. Now I admit I posted the piece on several of my blogs, but not in that many places.

I wrote it as a skit. I posted it in a couple of places about 4 or 5 years ago and then left it to marinate on my hard drive. Back in May I dusted it off, updated a couple of the software references and posted it again.

Turns out there are 5 or 6 videos on Youtube of people doing the piece. One's quite good. The skit is posted word for word on hundreds of joke forums and in not one single instance am I credited as the author.

In the old days I'd have sold the piece to Reader's Digest and made a little money, but now, your work gets spread so fast via the Internet, but by the time I prove it's mine, I'm not sure it would be worth the money. At any rate, I'm at least trying to get folks to add a weblink and copyright everywhere I've found it posted. Maybe it'll do some good.

I'm trying to go back and add copyright notices to all the stuff I've written, but I have few illusions about getting credit when a piece goes viral. I do plan to take credit for it on my resume'. Here's one of the best of the films.



It's kind of flattering that someone stole my work and took it this far. I'm sure, with it being all over the web and posted as anonymous, no one though of it as stealing and I do know that posting something on here leaves it virtually unprotected. I am, however, going to stick my copyright on everything that I post on the web. I can always use the film credits on my resume'.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

by Tom King (c) 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Contact twayneking@gmail.com for permission to reprint

The Decline and Fall and Rise of the Invisible Writer

America is a nation of writers. Though formal literature got off to a slow start, the bulk of early American writing was done by millions of diarists writing alone. When someone died in those days, particularly someone of position or influence, the first things the family did was find his diary. You wanted know what your dearly departed had said about you that might be problematic.

To this day, old diaries represent a major source of historical evidence, despite the subjective nature of the writing. I used to wonder why people stopped keeping diaries. Teenage girls, of course, kept it up. Accumulating a secret stock of damning written ‘evidence’ against all the people who have ever mistreated you, that can be read aloud at a special high school assembly after your tragic death, has always been attractive to teenage girls for some reason.

The average American, however, has left off keeping extensive personal diaries. I wasn’t sure why until the great ice storm of 2004 left our rural community without power for nearly a week. I played the guitar a lot; listened to my Walkman till I ran out of batteries. Finally, in desperation, I dragged out my old journal. I dutifully entered daily handwritten entries up until the television came back on.

Ah, but personal writing is not dead! To paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of personal writing has been greatly exaggerated. While the keeping of handwritten journals and private manuscripts may remain in decline, actual private writing may be experiencing something of a comeback. Recently I did a personal inventory to find out what all I had written over the years. I went through my stuff from the 60’s and 70’s in no time. My Sweet Baboo long ago tossed most of it in a fit of cleanliness that extended even to the top shelf of my closet. My extensive early works were gone. Then, I waded into the computer era. My hard drive and pile of backup CD’s yielded 3 full books and 3 unfinished ones, a biography of my son, some 200 poems, short stories, thousands of photographs, humorous, religious and political essays and a dozen web pages.

Then, I hit the Internet. I found 5 blogs, 8 forums I contribute to regularly, three books in progress on webooks.com, an e-book excerpt from my only published book, and two poetry websites with my poetry collections. I also host a poetry class that I plan to turn into an e-book. I’ve published hundreds of web-based articles on subjects ranging from rose bush pruning to treatments for dog diarrhea.

I’m thinking that if I croak, my family is going to have a devil of a time finding the electronic equivalent of my diary. It’s scattered all over the Internet. I suspect that’s pretty common these days. Lots more people write than used to. They just aren’t using paper. The Internet conveys a sense of anonymity that attracts the shy writer. It allows us to be far more courageous than we would be otherwise. Someone who might never stand up in a public meeting and criticize the mayor, will fearlessly take his honor to the woodshed on his weblog.

The invisible writer is baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

He’s just not so invisible anymore. He has a poetry web page his kids don’t know about. She writes a political blog with hundreds of followers. His family tree website has photos and stories from five generations. She teaches an on-line class for organic gardeners and is completing a new e-book on growing organic hothouse tomatoes.

The beauty of the Internet for the shy writer is that it frees us from the tyranny of the publishing industry which had built a virtually impenetrable wall about itself to keep out the riff raff. In defiance, millions of would-be writers publish their work daily on the Internet and are finding an audience. Talented people can build an audience one reader at at time. Best of all they don’t have to pass through the soul-destroying process of finding a publisher. You can work on your draft novel on-line with the help of a half dozen friends and nobody sends you a rejection slip. We may not make much money, but we are honing our wordsmithing skills.

Today, invisible writers like Emily Dickson would have had a devoted following on Poetry.com instead of having had to die first and hope someone accidentally discovered her manuscripts. You wonder how many brilliant “invisible” writers we lost because nobody ever opened that box in the closet after they died. Nowadays they’d simply live on in cyberspace.

How cool is that?

© 2009 by Tom King

Beware the Penguins!

Someone whose advice I respect suggested that if you want to be a writer, you should WRITE!

That seems obvious, but you'd be surprised how many would-be writers ignore that bit of advice. I suppose they hope someone will bump into them at the mall and go, "Hey, can you write? I really need someone who can write the great American novel for me. I'll give you a million dollars in advance!" Of course, that's not very likely and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to happen. I seems that being a successful writer requires some hard work and something else that is foreign to many of us who would like to live the writer's lifestyle.

I'm speaking of self-promotion. Publicity is the lifeblood of a successful writer. Getting your name up front is the name of the game in the publishing biz, or so they tell me. Emily Dickinson called it "telling your name the live long day, to an admiring bog." Of course, Emily locked her work in a drawer and wasn't published till after she was safely dead. Someone more aggressive than poor Emily found her poems and sent them to a publisher. While a successful method of self-promotion, the die-and-be-discovered method leaves a lot to be desired and is not terribly effective anyway.
You wouldn't know it just looking at me or my work, but I am a shy person and self-promotion is always painful to me.  I'm awkward at it and when I do screw up the courage to push my own "brand", I come off like one of those pathetic geeks with delusions of grandeur they make fun of in those movies about cool teenagers in love. Heck, my own kids make fun of my pathetic efforts at self-promotion.

I am the Napoleon Dynamite of the American literary scene. I've written a book that has a huge potential audience, but I think I went with the wrong publisher (which wasn't hard since they were the only ones to offer to publish it). So, to make the book fly, guess who gets to push the marketing of it?

The shy guy!

My writing mentor suggested that if you want to be a writer, you need to discipline yourself to write a minimum of 500 words a day. I have been doing that for about 5 years now. As a result, I've got a couple of other books done (one co-authored with my Sweet Baboo). Several are almost done and others are in various stages of completion. I've got a magazine article that was accepted, but may never be published. I've written hundreds of thousands of words on my various weblogs, a poetry site, dozens of forums and a cooperative book writing site, not to mention an old journal and tons of uncatalogued bits that are sitting around in my computer of file cabinet.

What's missing for me, I suppose, is the ability to be aggressive in behalf of my own cause. Over my career in education and in the nonprofit sector, I've fought for so many causes for others, I can't begin to count them. Where I fail is in being able to fight effectively for my own cause. That I've never been very good at. I once wrote a successful federal grant for one million dollars. I think I made 4 months salary out of it (and I worked 40 additional hours a week for 4 months to get that). I got almost nothing for my 6 months of solo work on the grant. I walked away and gave the organization to people with disabilities who are still running it as a self-help independent living program.

I can't tell you how many people have asked me, "Are they paying you to do that?" and then looked at me like I'd just landed from Mars when I explained that I'd volunteered to do whatever it was I was doing for nothing. I'm always embarrassed to submit an invoice for services rendered. Lots of people (who drive nicer cars than mine) have no problem with that at all.

In the movie Madagascar, there are these insane penguins. The penguins have the kind of aggressive streak I wish I had, but probably never will. They probably don't have any trouble submitting a bill. They may roll in like gangbusters and then proceed to wreck the place, screwing up whatever it is they're doing in the process, but nobody fails to notice them and I bet they collect a paycheck. They have that whole "purpose driven life" thing going.

I don't think I'll ever have that - at least not the kind that gets you a career as a writer. I'm trying to learn the art of self-promotion, but I probably am going to look like a self-conscious penguin doing it.

Jesus says the meek shall inherit the Earth. Boy I hope so, cause I sure could use the cash!

I'm just sayin'

Tom


* Note:  Since writing this blog I've written and sold close to 1000 stories to various web-based publications. For these stories I was seriously underpaid. I put up with it because I am still a shy person and am continually surprised when someone actually proposes to give me money for what I do. Publishers love shy people when they can get their claws into them. - Tom King, 2/15/2012
 

*That by the way was my 500 words for today.