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2.8 Could It All Be So Simple?: The Mummy's Foot by Theophile Gautier (1840/1890) trans. Lafcadio Hearn

It was all a dream. Whether those words make you think of the wisdom of Biggie or the famous ending to that towering work of German Expressionism, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), I've always been fond of the multiple possibilities encased the phrase. For most of my teenage years those words were my obnoxious response to friends who feared that I might spoil a movie or television show they hadn't seen:  "See so then Tony Soprano walks out of the room and…" "Don't say anything I've got the episode taped!" "Oh, it's all a dream." Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) That the concluding twist of a story could be the revelation that it was only (or that it was all) a dream is, at this point, so rote and hackneyed my response was always met with a raised eyebrow and a guffaw (in the light way akin to "foh.") Played on to the point of absurdity, the twist can now seem somewhat surprising, as it does in ...
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1.4 The O. Henry Twist: Friends in San Rosario by O. Henry (1902)

There is a moment in the penultimate episode of the 2016 mini-series  The People v OJ Simpson  that re-framed how I understand narratives. While the whole show is about the importance of persuasive stories this episode examines what it means for a script to escape the control of the author. In “Manna from Heaven” Marcia Clark and Chris Darden discover something new in the audio tapes which feature officer Mark Fuhrman detailing, with pride, his racist practices in the LAPD.  While Fuhrman’s vicious quotidian account has already made the tapes controversial, Clark and Darden listen and hear the officer misogynistically insulting Margaret York, one of the highest ranking women in the LAPD. York is also Judge Lance Ito’s wife. This bit of information, combined with a form signed by York that acknowledges that she had no prior relation to Fuhrman, threatens to ruin the case and cause a mistrial. O. ...
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2.5 Ticking Away: Purple and Fine Linen by May Edginton (1926)

In the last post I expressed that my surprise at how long it took to find an author like Joseph Hergesheimer; in today’s post I am frustrated that only now—in the fifteenth post—have we come to the first story written by a woman.   “Purple and Fine Linen” was written by May Edginton, a British writer whose work Hollywood frequently adapted. Stars like Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur moved across the screen in the various cinematic translations of Edginton’s work which began in 1912 with the short Double Cross and ended in 1936 with The Manhattan Adventure . More than a dozen films had their story sourced from Edginton’s work. Accomplished directors like Frank Borzage worked on one film while Alfred Hitchcock was the art director for Dangerous Virtue , which began as a play by Edginton.  Unexpectedly but disturbingly it is hard to find information on Edington other than the most basic notations: she lived from 1883 to 1957. This lack of info...
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