Pulp Fiction and Body Count

The heading may be misleading… Yesterday I was interviewed on camera for PULP FICTION – THE GOLDEN AGE OF STORYTELLING, a documentary about the great pulp magazines published from the 1920s through 1950s.

Marc Scott Zicree

Ray Bradbury and other legendary figures have been interviewed for the documentary. Then various folks suggested to the filmmakers that they interview me, because I came up with the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode of DEEP SPACE NINE, in which Commander Benjamin Sisko finds himself a science fiction writer in the Fifties — the first time that world had ever been presented to a mass audience.

The interview lasted an hour and a half, and I got to reminisce on my friendships with such science fiction icons as Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon, plus tell the tale of how I came up with “Far Beyond the Stars” (the inspiration was meeting Sturgeon and being mentored by him when I was a teen, and then hearing a tape recording Harlan Ellison made about writing for the science fiction magazines of the Fifties).  I also got to opine about Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, even Zane Grey!

It’s really fun being interviewed for documentaries; you get to say whatever comes to mind, and then you’re viewed as an expert on the subject.

Talking myself hoarse – the horror, the horror

Yesterday I had the fun of recording audio commentaries for the forthcoming blu-ray releases of TWILIGHT ZONE and Boris Karloff’s THRILLER – three-and-a-half hours of non-stop talking!

Marc recording the blu-ray TWILIGHT ZONE commentary.

I’ve done audio commentaries before, both on my live-action and animated work (including REAL GHOSTBUSTERS and STAR TREK “World Enough and Time”) and on TWILIGHT ZONE.  It’s a challenging but exciting task.  The main thing to always remember is to be interesting and informative.  It’s very easy to fall into simply describing what’s happening onscreen (“Now he’s sitting down…”) or going off on weird tangents (check out Kurt Russell and John Carpenter on the audio commentary for BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA).

First up, I teamed with Gary Gerani, author of FANTASTIC TELEVISION, to talk about the THRILLER episode “The Hungry Glass,” written and directed by my good friend Douglas Heyes, who also helmed phenomenal episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, including “The Howling Man,” “The Invaders” and “Eye of the Beholder.”  Doug is no longer with us but years ago he’d told me about his experiences shooting THRILLER and we’d actually watched this episode together.

Day of two brilliant guys

One of the best things about living here in L.A. and having been in the game this long is that some days I get to hang out with the coolest people – who are doing work that I love, admire and learn from – and the other day I got to spend time with two of my favorites.

Marc Zicree and Nick Meyer

It started at Le Pain Quotidian in Brentwood, where I got to enjoy lunch with the remarkable Nicholas Meyer. Nick burst on the scene with his bestselling novel THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION, a Sherlock Holmes adventure where Sigmund Freud helps Holmes beat his cocaine addiction. Meyer then adapted this into a swell film starring Nicol Williamson as Holmes and Alan Arkin as Freud. Following this, Nick directed one of the best time travel films of all time, TIME AFTER TIME, starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. This led to Nick’s various writing and directing chores on STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, STAR TREK IV and STAR TREK VI.

The way Nick and I initially met was on the WGA picket line. I gave him a copy of “World Enough and Time,” which he was good enough to watch. Later, he told me how impressed he was by it, saying, “It was terrific.” This was an enormous thrill, as I’d studied WRATH OF KHAN in detail as a way of prepping to direct it and had learned a lot from watching Nick’s work on it.