Greetings and Consternations,
We’re a week out from Halloween and, so far… no snow. Always a plus! Oh, you laugh, but I’ve had it before. And in the run up to Halloween, I made a borderline archeological film/TV discovery. A bit more on that after a bit o’ business and in the normal media section of the newsletter.
Editing is just about wrapped up on The Dragon Who Dabbled in Digital. Things should be on track to get the manuscript over to Erik to start recording the audiobook in November, after the Kickstarter transactions finalize. Backers should get their copy no later than January (barring unforeseen delays).
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let me back up.
The third Hardboiled Magic installment is The Dragon Who Dabbled In Crypto and I’m currently Kickstarting the audiobook edition.
Erik (“The Viking of Voice” and voice artist in League of Legends and Starfield) and I made a little video about this with all dignity and solemnity you’ve come to expect from us.
We tend to subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s theory of crowdfunding audiobooks – it lets you avoid DRM and having your tied to a single platform, like Audible/Amazon.
What’s this one about?
Something wanted the podcaster dead.
An attempt to blow the whistle on a cryptocurrency scam drew a response: a botched assassination by supernatural means. Management brought in a consultant to “fix” the problem, but a trail of scorch marks from incinerated bodies leads into a web of demonic financial crimes, purloined precious metals and eSports game fixing. What is the secret of the “Schatzhorde des Drachen” coin and will it lead Mister Lewis into the lair of… The Dragon Who Dabbled in Crypto?
The campaign ends at 9PM ET on Halloween. I hope you’ll give it a look.
Floating In the Media
I stumbled into Martin Landau’s lost occult detective TV show a couple weeks ago.
His what?!? Yes, that was my reaction, too. I later asked a few people I’d expect to have heard of such a thing and none of them had, so now I’ll tell you about it.
I’d been watching The Brides of Dracula on Prime and was flipping through the list of films people who watched that also watched, I came across what appeared to be an old Martin Landau horror movie called The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre. I hadn’t heard of this or associated Landau with horror, so I looked it up and proceeded to be shocked.
It seems that back in 1964, James Aubry (the president of CBS) commissioned Joseph Stefano to produce a pilot called “The Haunted.” Does the name “Stefano” sound familiar? He wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and was one of the writer/producers on the first season of The Outer Limits.
The Haunted would have starred Martin Landau – two years before Mission: Impossible – as Nelson Orion, an architect who moonlights as a paranormal investigator.
There’s not a ton of information available on this and I’ve heard conflicting stories. The show was picked up and then cancelled at the last minute when Aubry left CBS. The show was never actually picked it. It was a Nelson Orion/Martin Landau show. It was an anthology that Nelson Orion would regularly have episodes of.
At any rate, an extra 20-30 minutes of footage was eventually filmed, and it was released as a film, “The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre,” in Europe. And it’s worth watching. The pacing is perhaps a little off, which you’d expect if it’s being converted to film length, but it ends up feeling like a cross between Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. (And remember, Alfred Hitchcock Presents would do horror every now and then. Look up the Christopher Lee episode some time.) There’s even a genuine mystery weaving its way through the episode and red herrings as Landau’s Orion investigates an alleged haunting. Even more unusual: the special effects for the ghost are genuinely creepy and unsettling. Not exactly what you expect from ’64.
Aside from Stefano’s hand, there are other reasons for this to have a slight Hitchcock feel to it. Martin Landau had already been in North by Northwest. Guest stars (if you look at this as a pilot) Diane Baker would have been filming Marnie right around the same time and Judith Anderson was in Hitchcock’s Rebecca back in 1940.
Given that the timing of a 1964 pilot at CBS, this could have been envisioned as some sort of Twilight Zone replacement, although that’s purely speculation on my part. It wouldn’t have been totally unique at the time. Boris Karloff’s Thriller was doing horror in a somewhat similar “adult” treatment a couple years earlier, but an occult detective show on broadcast TV in ’64 or ’65? For context, the ’65 - ‘66 television season had the second season of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, the US debut of The Avengers, and first seasons of Lost in Space and The Wild Wild West for non-comedy SF/F shows. (For comedy, The Munsters, The Adams Family, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie were all around, so comedic takes on magic/horror were definitely alive and popular.)