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.
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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-***" 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.