The Fedorable
One of the Regulars
- Messages
- 220
- Location
- Califonria
I'm not reading it anymore, but I just recently finished reading Scott Pilgrim. It's a lot of fun if you enjoyed the movie adaptation.
Tried to read “Munich” by Robert Harris, but couldn’t build up enough care for the characters to finish it.
Glad you had fun with it. I thought the class attitudes toward Reagan on the part of some of the other characters were pretty much to be expected -- East Coast money transplanted to the West never thought much of corn-fed Midwestern types, and Ivy League types were rampant in Hollywood after the dawn of the talkies, especially among screenwriters. Class remained a blind spot to many of these people, even many who claimed to be class-conscious, and it often showed in the scripts they produced.
I would, however, have loved to see a picture about the Spanish Civil War starring Ronald Ree-gan as directed by Howard Hawks.
Another element in the book, the idea of a time-traveler mining the creative products of "the future" for ideas in the past, was also a plot peg in the BBC sitcom "Goodnight, Sweetheart," which was running contemporaneously with the writing of this book. I don't know if Delacorte ever saw the show, which only had limited exposure in the US in the '90s, but it was the first thing I thought of when our hero started his screenwriting career.
I've never found out for sure where the change in pronunciation came from -- it was still "Ree-gan" as late as 1942 -- there's a Kraft Music Hall broadcast from that year where he does a guest shot with Bing Crosby, and is introduced by Ken Carpenter as "that Warner Brothers star Ronald Ree-gan," without any attempt to correct it. He made many radio appearances into the early fifties, and just from memory I think the pronunciation had changed for good by the end of the 1940s. That was around the time he was getting seriously active in the SAG, but I can't imagine any serious political advantage would come from changing the pronunciation of his name. "Ray-gun" does sound less working-class than "Ree-gan," and less ethnically Irish, I suppose, but that's about it.
Peter Delacorte has spoken of writing a sequel from time to time over the years, and I wouldn't mind seeing one. I wasn't satisfied by the inconclusive ending, as I wasn't by the ending of "Time after Time," so I think a sequel is callef for.
Had you finished it, I doubt our opinions would have been very far apart. My comments on it:
https://www.thefedoralounge.com/threads/what-are-you-reading.10557/page-396#post-2421492
Lizzie, I'm not kidding, this book is all but structured to be turned into one heck of a radio mystery play. If there was a market for it, it would have already happened. With you taking the lead with all your radio-writing experience, I'd love to take on writing it with you as it would be an outstanding and fun-as-heck project. But of course, there's no market for it and neither you nor I need unpaid work. Alas, it would have been a hoot to do.