Lucas Blogs About Remake

Huh, this is familiar.

So, what's this book's de—hey! We had a whole bit about this last time, if you're going to be blogging about each of these novellas individually, you gotta have a picture with their title!

My bad!

How prescient!

That's better. So, then, this book's deal is?

Well, like "Uncharted Territory," "Remake" is a sci-fi novella that Connie Willis published in the 1990s. Unlike "Uncharted Territory" it seems to take place on Earth in what must be the early 21st Century.

How d'ya figure?

Well, one of the characters was born the year Fred Astaire died, which was 1987, meaning that she's only a few years younger than me. It's probably set in the late 2000s or early 2010s.

Well, as scintillating as this discussion of how old one of the characters in the story is, would you care to elaborate on its deal?

Oh, right. Anyway, we open on our protagonist Tom, an on-again-off-again film student who has a side-gig doing remakes, paste-ups, and other digital film production work for his buddy, Mayer, a low-level executive at ILMGM. While looking for an old prop plane to digitally insert into another picture, he spots a familiar face in the chorus line in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, it's Alis (more on her later). Smash cut to several months earlier, Tom's in one of his off-again periods at film school and trying to track down Mayer to get paid for some off-the-books work he'd been doing when he espies a cute redhead at a party. His friend Heada (pronounced like "Hedda," just roll with it) tells him the redhead's name is Alis and she wants to dance in the movies. Tom, apparently thinking that shitting all over your love interest's greatest ambition is a great flirting strategy, sets out to prove that her dream is impossible to achieve in any meaningful way. And it seems like he's right. Not about negging, but about the fact that A) no one is making any live action films anymore (remember, this was written in the 90s); and 2) no one is making any musicals. Tom then starts stalking Alis, trying to convince her to give him the time of day despite the fact that he hasn't substantially changed attitude from that first night.

Wow. Sounds like a real prize, can't imagine why Alis isn't into him.

Well, yeah. But without going too far into how the story resolves, Tom does eventually realize what an asshat he's being.

I should hope so. Anyway, I take it that this is at least partially a Hollywood satire.

Indeed. And a prescient one. I seem to recall that in the 90s advances in computer technology gave people the impression that we were only a few decades away from completely photorealistic CGI and movies that were generated entirely on computer. And some of that has actually come to pass in the form of the deceased Fred Astaire dancing with a Dirt Devil, or the deceased Laurence Olivier portraying the villain in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, or the face of the deceased Peter Cushing being digitally painted onto the face of a stand-in in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. And also, you know, all the ways that digital effects have been incorporated into movies that you might not even have noticed. Willis also predicted the prevalence of mergers in the entertainment industry. In case you didn't catch it earlier, the protagonist works for ILMGM (a merger of Industrial Light & Magic and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which I embarrassingly took to be a merger of ILM and General Motors for longer than I'd like to admit). Admittedly these were both trends in film when Willis was writing, but as a smart satirist she was able to extrapolate the trends to an absurd degree.

And judging by the title she was also spot-on when it comes to the onslaught of remakes or re-imaginings or whatever.

Yes, though in the novella they're all created digitally. So, for example, you could do a remake of TRON starring Douglas Fairbanks, Jeff Bridges, and Jane Fonda.

But Jeff Bridges is already in TRON.

Yeah, but that's another thing they could do, digitally insert other actors while leaving one performance intact.

Oh. Okay. So, does the story work?

Sure. Tom's journey from drug-addled jerk to sober non-jerk is believable, though I'm not sure that it's good enough to make up for how much of a jerk he was at the beginning of the story. He also takes a less mercenary view of his job in the movie industry (you know, cause he likes movies). And Alis, while existing mostly at the periphery of the story as his crush object, does find a satisfying way to prove him wrong (due to another of the story's sci-fi conceits: the skids, a form of teleportation based mass transit). And, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the chapter titles which aren't so much titles as little jokes about film tropes and cliches.

Anything that you think doesn't work?

Again, Tom starts off as enough of a jerk that I'm not quite sold on his transformation. Also, the fake drug names like "chooch" and "klieg" sound a little too goofy.

Well, inventing believable new slang is always tricky.

Fair enough. But, yeah, overall I enjoyed "Remake." Also, one nice thing about living in the sci-fi future is that a lot of the dance sequences that Alis mentions in the text can be looked up on YouTube. I'm not crazy about extended dance numbers, but it was nice to be able to look them up and see what the characters are talking about.

That doesn't really have anything to do with the story though.

No, but it was nice.

"Remake" from Terra Incognio: Three Novellas by Connie Willis, Del Rey trade paperback edition, 2018 (originally published 1995), 147 pages, pairs well with a handful of unknown pills and a mediocre remake of a great film (just kidding, kids, don't do drugs if you don't know what they are)

Links:

Once again, in case you're into that kinda thing, Connie Willis's website.

And here's the dance number that Alis admires so much in the story: Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire dancing to Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" in Broadway Melody of 1940.