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This is a fiction (side)blog where most content is organised by genre/theme (science fiction, horror, gothic fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, stories about the sea, crime fiction, war stories, tragedies, westerns, the Cold War etc, labyrinths, mysteries, psychogeography, romances, gay fiction, medieval literature, early modern literature, mythology) and everyone is subjected to my largely unfashionable, sometimes obscure, tastes in literature, film, shows, radio & theatre. Sometimes I include art and poetry in the service of these themes. Things I’m currently reading/thinking about are tagged as x. I am variously an intellectual snob and a lowbrow devotee; to me it all makes perfect sense (: a sort of manifesto). If in doubt, remember I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I drop in and out but I like to chat. If nothing makes sense — or if everything makes sense! — drop me a message.
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Academy Award winner Marcia Lucas has died. While winning major awards for her work as an editor for Star Wars (alongside a team of editors, including Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew; some of her contributions outside of her work with George Lucas include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, and New York, New York), she mostly disappeared from the public eye following her divorce and essentially retired.
While Marcia dispelled the belief that she singlehandedly saved Star Wars in the edit (and very passionately defended George's craftmanship and ideas, which she felt were undercredited, as well as the work of their team in general), there was a lot of work she specifically did and I thought it would be good to highlight just how much she did and give her credit where it is due. There is a lot that came from her that most don't know about. Most of those examples are from Howard Kazanjian's biography, A Producer's Life, published in 2021.
On some of the uncredited dialogue and story revisions for Star Wars:
On some of her work in Star Wars:
On having the iconic trench run on the Death Star as her biggest work while working on Star Wars:
On her uncredited work in The Empire Strikes Back:
On how her input changed the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark:
On her joining the Return of the Jedi crew, an emphasis in finding the right cut for actors, cutting together footage of Luke in ROTJ after she and George disagreed with the characterization the director had given to Mark Hamill and unable to reshoot footage:
On editing the climactic ending in the Throne Room in ROTJ:
How To Find Your (British Actor) Blorbo On The Radio: A Brief Guide
(Disclaimer: British, because the main tool I'm using is the BBC's Genome.)
If you want more of your fave actor, or you love full-cast drama podcasts/audios (and audiobooks/NF content too) here's a guide on how to get your hands on BBC Radio broadcasts.
The BBC have a great free resource called Genome, which has all the Radio Times listings from 1922 to the present day (plus some of the actual articles), and it's searchable. Up until its arrival, it was really hard to do that, so \o/
Not all actors do radio and not everything you find will be obtainable, but it's always worth a try! It's especially likely for actor-blorbos who do other audio work, or theatre (theatre tends not to pay so well, and radio is a handy extra thing that can be more easily slotted in between performances than TV/film.)
Go to Genome, and put your blorbo's name into the search box:
Press search, which will bring back a bunch of results from both radio and TV listings from 1922 up to the current year:
2. Filter down to "radio only" on the sidebar to avoid scrolling through all the TV. At the top of the page you can change the display order to First broadcast (or Availability, if you want it only to bring things currently available to stream on the BBC website), among other options.
I can also cut down on extraneous results by selecting a date range that only covers when my guy was active.
I scroll down until I find something that looks interesting, in this case a proper audio drama, called The Hornblower Story. It's from 1980 and is an adaptation of a well known book. The details give me enough info to search the wider internet, and see if I get lucky...
3. Search the internet and listen to your blorbo act in radio drama!
There are several ways to obtain radio drama online. If you use streaming sites like Audible and Spotify, it may be there, although usually only if it's had a commercial release.
The BBC still broadcast old programmes on the radio, so it might be currently available on their website to stream - and unlike TV, you can listen to BBC Radio anywhere in the world! (If you are in the UK, you can also download and use the BBC Sounds app.) The Genome will usually provide a link for you to go straight there, if that's the case.
However, obviously, most BBC Radio from past decades is not available commercially or being broadcast by the BBC now and some doesn't exist in the archives, or was never recorded (as with TV), but as methods of recording audio at home have been widely available since the 1950s and 60s, there are loads of off-air recordings of radio made by listeners/collectors, and some have freely shared their copies online. Some are in closed forums etc., but three good sites to try first are YouTube, RadioEchoes & the Internet Archive.
I usually start with a Google search - e.g. '"Title" radio' or radio bbc and if that doesn't give me anything add on first "Radio Echoes" and then "Internet archive" to the search.
And I'm in luck! Radio Echoes appear to have the adaptation I'm after. I need to check the broadcast dates to see if they match up & then I can stream or download for free - and hear my blorbo play a stern Admiral for 5 minutes or less, hurrah!
Clicking on the links takes you to a screen where you can press play to stream or right click on the play bar to download the mp3 file to your device. (Click the "Save audio as..." option).
These are archive off-air recordings, so the quality can vary, especially for older programmes.
4. Rinse and repeat with each new likely Genome discovery.
If you find a copy of what you're looking for on the Internet Archive instead, you'll get up a page with a play bar (like the one above), with episodes listed plus details (to varying degrees) below. If you want to stream, just click play and enjoy. If you want to download it, then click on the MP3 files line on the right-hand sidebar, which will then give you an "X no of files" button to click and you can download them to keep.
(You can download all the files, but I usually cut straight to the chase and just nab the MP3s.)
Sometimes the BBC have released a commercial audiobook. In those cases, if you already use audio/music streaming subscription sites like Audible or Spotify, you should be able to find it there.
If you don't, or you want to buy a download, I've found the best option (weirdly!) (for UK users, at any rate) is to get the audiobook up at Penguin Books, which links to various paid subscription streaming and download options, so you can find the best one for you (and you know it's been recced by a hopefully reputable source.)
Last year, I wanted to buy Vivat Rex, the BBC's landmark dramatisation of all the English history plays rolled into one giant starry-cast Jacobean audio serial, and successfully used this route. (I'm very old by internet terms and still like listening via MP3 files on my MP3 player, as long as it survives.)
Pretty much the only affordable download option I've found so far I got courtesy of Penguin's links to Hive. (But this may be a UK only option.)
If what you're looking for seems likely to exist even if you can't find it by any of these methods - keep trying! New things are being added daily to all these websites, and the BBC cycle round old shows all the time.
And if you want to go deeper, there are closed forums etc. for radio enthusiasts where you need to make an account, but you may then be able to torrent or download an even wider variety of things.
Of course, whether or not your blorbo has been in anything good or any radio at all will depend on them, but I hope this guide will help enable you to find out!
YouTube, Radio Echoes, the Internet Archive and Old Time Radio all have radio from other countries too. So while the BBC Genome can't help you with anywhere outside the UK, the other links here can be good places to look around and browse for things you might be interested in.
You can of course use the same methods to search for things like a favourite author, or particular plays, to see if the BBC have done any radio adaptations - BBC Radio have done heaps of things that have never been adapted on screen, so it's always worth a look for anything you'd be into.
Radio Echoes is browsable as well as searchable, and while Internet Archive is a bit less so, there are some excellent collections you can look through, like the Saturday Night Theatre collection, and the BBC Radio Shows listings.
this is going around twitter rn but im also super curious: please tell me your top four comfort movies that you’re always down to watch bc my friend thinks mine are ridiculous and now we’ve realised everyone’s version of “comfort” is hilariously different
La Jetée uses time in the spirit of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. Overtly political, the time of La Jetée also ticks with the back-to-the-future fairy-tale socialist utopianism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere (or, An Epoch of Rest). Morris’s mise en scène is the medieval past and future at once, while Marker’s is the 1960s and the after-time of a future apocalyptic war, at once.
La Jetée takes place in a no-place (u-topia) in no-time (u-chronia): the time and place of the fairy tale. It is dystopia, with the hope of utopia. Or, it is utopia cut by the threat of dystopia. Even the sound of the title of the film resonates with the fairy-tale surprise of finding oneself in another world: La Jetée evokes “là j’étais” (there, I was).
Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil, and Hiroshima mon amour (2012)
“It is easy, for instance, to forget that the ‘natural’ association of vampires with Transylvania begins with, rather than predates, Dracula…. Transylvania was known primarily as part of the vexed ‘Eastern Question’ that so obsessed British foreign policy in the 1880s and ‘90s. The region was first and foremost the site, not of superstition and Gothic romance, but of political turbulence and racial strife. Victorian readers knew the Carpathians largely for its endemic cultural upheaval and its fostering of a dizzying succession of empires. By moving Castle Dracula there, Stoker gives distinctly political overtones to his Gothic narrative. In Stoker’s version of the myth, vampires are intimately linked to military conquest and to the rise and fall of empires.”
— Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: ‘Dracula’ and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”
