Gary D. Rhodes - Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine

Designed by George Chastain in 2018, this fantasy poster publicizes a planned, but unmade Lugosi/Monogram film.

Table of Contents

Bela Lugosi and the Monogram Nine

2019 Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Guffey. All Rights Reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Section 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher.

This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

Published in the USA by:

BearManor Media

PO Box 71426

Albany, Georgia 31708

www.bearmanormedia.com

ISBN 978-1-62933-428-8

Cover Design by Michael Kronenberg.

eBook construction by

Chapter 2

Write quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what youre writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.

Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

The above advice was offered by Andr Breton, the founder of surrealism, to budding artists who wished to practice surrealism themselves. But this mode of artistic creation was not the sole property of avant-garde surrealists. It was also, by necessity, the working method of a whole generation of screenwriters pounding out storylines for the masses throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. This surrealist methodology applies not just to the writing of screenplays, but to the actual act of committing these stories to film. B-films were often written within three or four days and sometimes shot in an equal amount of time. No one involved in the production had much time to prepare not the actors, not the director, and least of all the screenwriters.

A young Ray Bradbury once hung a sign on his typewriter that read, DONT THINK. Before his death, the poet Charles Bukowski requested that the following two words be etched into his tombstone: DONT TRY. The beauty of not thinking, of not trying, when creating any kind of art is that mysterious and wondrous ideas sometimes erupt from the sleeping brain and sneak out into the real world while ones consciousness isnt paying attention. The early surrealists in France wished to evoke this mysterious phenomenon, on purpose, via the method of automatic writing simply putting pen to paper and allowing the words to flow with neither rhyme nor reason. Purely on accident, half a world away, a whole community of writers were also practicing automatic writing. But most of them knew nothing about surrealism, and few of them were interested in making Art. They were little a artists who were interested in grinding out a product in order to make money. In Hollywood, particularly during the 1930s and 40s, strict deadlines necessitated that the most productive writers were those who didnt think about what they were writing and didnt try to produce anything of any social value whatsoever. It just so happened that these were also the goals of committed European revolutionaries who called themselves surrealists. The screenwriters under discussion in this essay called themselves hacks and were probably proud of it. Breton, a committed Marxist to the day of his death in 1966, would be appalled at the very notion that the basic tenets of capitalism could actually be the unwitting accomplice of surrealism. Breton believed that surrealism and revolutionary Marxism were inextricably linked; without one, the other could not exist. Breton was wrong.

But hes not the only genius who was ever wrong about something.

Breton believed that surrealism could be a medium with which to introduce revolutionary ideas into the minds of the masses, to shock them out of their somnambulism with beautifully disordered nonsense. Breton was right about this. What he didnt realize is that he and his colleagues would not be the ones to introduce surrealism to the masses. Breton and his colleagues were avant-garde artists who held the common man in contempt. They published their works in obscure literary magazines in Europe that would never be seen by the besotted underclass. The very sheeple Breton wished to liberate from the shackles of reality would never waste precious time in between work shifts at the local steel factory by reading nonsensical poetry jotted down by effete Frenchmen. But what these average people did like to do was see movies.

Without knowing it, thousands of filmgoers in the 1920s, 30, 40s, and 50s were introduced to surrealist techniques and philosophies in the form of cheapjack B-films. Even more poetically, the filmmakers themselves for the most part did not know they were making surrealist movies. This is the perfect surrealist conspiracy, for neither the conspirators nor the victims of the conspiracy were aware it was happening. One might consider this to be the ultimate exercise in automatic writing and telepathy, conducted on a mass scale by unwitting vessels of the surrealist spirit itself, a strange behavioral experiment that could only be comprehended in full several decades after the conspiracy had long been completed.

The very process of making B-movies, a process that remained in place in Hollywood until the early 1960s, encouraged and necessitated surrealist methodologies. A few filmmakers, the cutting-edge ones who understood their place in the Hollywood hierarchy and used it to their advantage, might very well have been aware of this, but most were not. The basic method of churning out these little celluloid dreams and nightmares enabled industrious filmmakers the ability to write, direct, edit, and distribute their films within a very short space of time within a matter of months, or even weeks, sometimes. Very often the small-minded businessmen who ran the movie studios didnt care what was actually in the films just as long as they generated money. This process was a veritable breeding ground for all manner of surrealist techniques and obsessions: automatic writing (as mentioned before), synchronicity, chance, happenstance, coincidence, telepathy, etc. Its a breeding ground that no longer exists in modern day Hollywood. Theres too much at stake now, economically, to allow chance or happenstance to have anything at all to do with producing a finished film. Every detail is planned out well in advance. Modern Hollywood has so many safety measures in place that art cant even happen by accident.