Category Archives: Film

Actor Clement Von Franckenstein Dies

Clement von Franckenstein Actor HeadshotA sad headline. Clement von Franckenstein was a British character actor who appeared in a number of movies in smaller roles, and guest spots in television. His most notable recent appearance was as the French President in The American President with Michael Douglas and Annette Benning. He also had parts in Lionheart with Jean-Claude Van Damme, Death Becomes Her with Meryl Streep, and in Hail Caesar! with George Clooney, playing Sestimus Amydias. He played George R.R. Martin the author of the Game of Thrones source books in the Bizardvaark TV series, and noted himself his connection to Frankenstein lore for his role as an extra in Young Frankenstein in his early days as “Villager Screaming through Bars”. For most of his acting days he went by the name Clement St George. He was listed in People Magazine in 2001 as one of “America’s Top 50 Bachelors” and he remained so.

I’m not writing this as an obituary, but because I had met him only just recently at a social event and we had a discussion about his name and its connection to Mary Shelley. In his family legend he liked to say that she borrowed the name for her book and had to change the spelling for legal reasons, or perhaps he had just heard that from somewhere. The name connection appears as a note in most of the bios being written about him. He was a charming fellow and often played urbane diplomatic types in later films.

His full name was Clement George Freiherr von und zu Franckenstein, and he was the son of Sir George Franckenstein, an Austrian diplomat who served as Ambassador to the Court of St James until the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938, when he moved permanently to Britain. He apparently did not know his family all that well. His father and mother died in plane crash near Frankfurt, Germany in 1953 when he was nine years old and he was raised by family friends. He attended Eton College and served as a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys in the Middle East and Germany. He was a singer with a baritone voice and studied opera before focusing on acting.

The question of Mary Shelley’s taking the name for her book and main character from knowledge of a German/Austrian noble family and having to change the spelling is probably unlikely, but there is a connection. In her lifetime Mary Shelley never told where the name of Frankenstein came from. It is most likely to have come from the castle along the Rhine River from her elopement trip with Percy and Claire in 1814 as told in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

Frankenstein Castle Tower in Darmstadt

The Franckenstein (Frankenstein) family began as von Breuberg in 1200 when Konrad I built Breuberg Castle in the Odenwald forest between Darmstadt and Aschaffenburg, when they were called Breubergs. His son Konrad II, built another castle on the other side of Darmstadt around 1245, the one which still stands as a ruin, called Frankenstein. There likely was an earlier medieval fortification there with the name, as it means “stone fort of the Franks” and quite literally, any stone redoubt in the region along the Rhine from the dark ages where the Franks held sway may have been called a “frankenstein”, but the family took the name from it as Freiherr Von and Zu Frankenstein.

The Free Lordship of Frankenstein was a designation in Germany meaning it was an independent land only under the jurisdiction of the German Holy Roman Emperor. The family had land holdings in Nieder-Beerbach, Darmstadt, Ockstadt, Wetterau and Hesse. German Emperor Frederick II died in 1250 and the German kingdom fell into division. Two hundred years later, during the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther in the 16th Century, the Frankenstein family sided with the Catholic Habsburg emperors and fought with the Protestant Landgrave of Hesse in the wars of the Schmalkaldic League.

The family sold their land holdings in Hesse to the Landgrave in 1662 and abandoned the castle. The title of Freiherr (Baron of the Empire) was formally granted to the family in 1670 by the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I. The family retired to lands in Franconia, distant from Hesse, and bought the Austrian Lordship of Thalheim Bei Wels just across the current German border in the 1800s. Family lines continue in Germany, Austria and England and those that came to America, including Clement.

Could the family have complained about the connection of the name to the horrific events in Mary Shelley’s novel? Is that why Mary never said the name came from a castle on the Rhine? The libel laws in England relating to a foreign family in 1818 would be limited and the changing of one letter would not be much of a disguise. Variation in spelling of names, especially German ones was very common.

See Castles of Germany

The Von and Zu Franckensteins of Austria did not make an appearance in England until 1920, so only the European branch of the family could have heard of it, once it gained international notoriety. In the novel the family is Swiss and Italian in origin, so no formal connection to Germany or Austria. Was this a deliberate shift, or just that the main story details came from her visits to Switzerland.

Could she have known the family origin of the castle name? She might have been told of it on a visit, but more likely interested in another Konrad, its later owner, who dabbled in alchemy, Konrad Dippel, who manufactured a product called Dippel’s Oil, made from boiled animal bones and who promised the Landrave of Hesse he could find the Elixir of Eternal Life and ultimately died from apparently trying it out on himself.

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All is True. I’m not so sure.

All is True Poster ImageKenneth Branagh stars in and directs an English movie about the later days in the life of William Shakespeare, from a screenplay by Ben Elton. The title is taken from an alternate title, or perhaps more an advertising slogan, for a production of the Life of Henry VIII offered at the Globe Theater, during which, according to the pre-titles a prop canon set the Thames bankside theatre ablaze, burning it to the ground, and with it the creative life of Shakespeare. The film begins with him galloping home to Stratford-Upon-Avon, to settle back into a quiet country life, haunted by the memory of his son, Hamnet, who reportedly died of plague in 1596 at the age of eleven.

The title of “all is true” seems to suggest that the film is making the argument against the controversies surrounding the authorship of the plays and poetry William Shakespeare. The film presents an engaging enough but fairly dramatically limited picture of the domestic home life of the renowned author, taking some sparse public records of his activities in Stratford and drawing a picture of life at home, with a Puritan son-in-law hoping for his fortune and wife long abandoned for his busy days in the London.

If this was the intent, I am unconvinced. The film does make a very clever argument for the oddity of bequeathing his “second best bed” in his will to his wife Anne Hathaway, but not all that much else. The film furthers an authorship controversy theme by postulating that Shakespeare doted on some poetry verses he believed written by his dead son, when his daughter eventually claims that she came up with them and her brother only wrote then down, because boys were taught to write.

This curiously intersects with some of the controversy or at least mystery, surrounding the anonymous publishing of Frankenstein, leading to questions of its authorship over the centuries, and thematically at the center of the recent biopic version of “Mary Shelley”. Kenneth Branagh directed “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” the movie that intended to hear closer to the novel than previous film versions, so that Branagh will be forever connected in search algorithms to Mary Shelley. Perhaps even how you found this article.

The arguments against the man from Stratford, son of a middle-class glove maker, who left a limited education to write of kings and foreign lands with such convincing authenticity, to return to life of middle-class modesty, has always been about where does writing inspiration come from. Some have argued that it was about class, but I have always held it is about experience. The writer of “All is True” was born in Australia, but he writes about Shakespeare because he went to a college in Stratford, and so was steeped in the lore of the town.

If you visit Stratford-Upon-Avon, signs in the famed tourist town will warn you that only seven sites in town are officially connected to an historic William Shakespeare. What it doesn’t say is that none of them point to a creator of a library of plays and poems that have defined the English speaking world. The film posits that after the Globe burned down, Shakespeare decided he would never write again and spent his days in solitude digging a garden to honor is dead son, named Hamnet, so close to Hamlet it seems a misspelling by a grave marker mason. In seeming to attempt to answer where the inspiration and knowledge to produce his body of work came from, in the form a question asked by a young writer hopeful, like many a Comicon convention attendee might ask at an autograph signing, “how he did it”, Branagh as Shakespeare, answers dismissively of the earnest seeker of wisdom, that it was all from his imagination.

Mark Twain, who notoriously offered his opinion on many things, especially authorship, a subject he felt close to, was a non-believer in the man from Stratford. Twain complained of his friend and companion author, Bret Harte, that the dialogue of his pioneer west characters had the ring of an author who wrote of people he observed, rather than a life he lived, though the writing did come from his travels in the worlds of his stories. Twain traveled and wrote of his travels, but his most genius books came from his earliest days of personal experience and drawn on people he knew well.

In the present worlds of film and television, aspiring writers are told to “write what you know”. An entire system of hiring writers to work in writers rooms, based not on the alien worlds they can imagine but the authenticity of the lives they’ve experienced are what counts. Writing a courtroom show, hire a former lawyer, a spy show, a former spy. Maybe add some imagination.

Does this relate to the teeming theatre world of the Elizabethan Age of the late 16th Century? Could a young man of 19 from a small provincial town, seeking a stage acting career, sit down in some inexpensive hovel in London and invent entirely from his own imagination the accurate lives of royal households, details of foreign lands and indeed what was important to foreigners, setting his stories in Italy as mere convention, and produce accurate descriptions of the landscapes of Burgundy, France, cited from Lear by the Shelleys in their travels in the very landscape in the Secret Memoirs on Mary Shelley?

The puzzling question of Shakespeare has always redounded to idea that one man of ultimate genius created that incredible oeuvre of work of vast understanding of the wider world and laser grasp of the human heart and behavior. Whether candidate for authorship be the man from Stratford, DeVere or others, to dismiss the fact of the breadth of Shakespeare’s work as “I imagined it all”, seems at best a hopeful, yet hopelessly hollow, belief in miracles. And then to set it all aside in later life to retire with never a look back, beyond a casual visit with an old theater pal, entirely unsatisfying.

Mary Shelley didn’t just imagine a monster from a waking dream. She took the sum of experiences from her youthful life, her many travels and the complex people she knew and lived with and formed them with some research into one rich and imaginative enduring work. Mark Twain wrote often and the best from his experiences growing up on the Mississippi River in frontier Missouri.

Shakespearian scholars point to historic events which they site to attempt to place the date of his 37 or so credited plays. They count on public notices at the time which seem to indicate an upstart playwright, but relating as much to an actor, but almost no identifiable element that can point to an author’s inspiration or interest from the life of a provincial glove maker’s son who found his way to London, while swaths of elements in the plays and characters can be tied to the lives and experiences lived by others. Maybe Shakespeare was a really good listener and someone offered him visiting privileges to their private library, but to accept that all the Shakespearian canonical lore is true, requires an even broader imagination.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Mary Shelley gets to theaters in the U.S.

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the film version of the Frankenstein author’s story, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley arrives at theaters in America on May 25th, 2018, from IFC Films. The film which we’ve been following from its inception a few years ago under the title “A Storm in the Stars”, to its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival has taken the long road of an independent film production to the big screen,  released in the UK in 2017.

The movie, an Irish production, filmed on location in Dublin standing in for London, and in Luxemburg for the Geneva Villa Diodati scenes tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing, finding inspiration when she meets the dreamy Percy Shelley. Mary soon becomes pregnant with his child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and visit Lord Byron and John Polidori at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva, where the stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein monster story. Then, Mary struggles to find a publisher and to get the credit for her creation.

The film also stars Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane. The original script was by Emma Jenson with Al Mansour as additional writing. Ruth Coad and Amy Baer produced.

Reviews for the film have been mixed. To sample a few – Fanning gives an earnest performance, though perhaps a little miscast, while Tom Sturrage as Byron chews the furniture, and Booth as Shelley pouts and broods, a traditional period biopic flavor trying hard to be modern. The film does make a mark for inclusion, written by a woman, directed by a woman, and produced by women, and adds a decided feminist cant to the story around whether Mary would get the credit for writing her story. Shelley comes off as a bit of a cad, not revealing he’s married until after they get involved, but in fact Mary went into the relationship with her eyes open and she had already met his wife. Though, he does arrive at a saving bit of honor in the perfunctory, tied-in-a-bow ending. Beautifully photographed by David Ungaro, with moody atmospheric production design by Paki Smith, the film is a little more intent on stating its theme, than illuminating the complex characters and relationships which make up this world. Still room for more.

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Guillermo Del Toro Thanks Mary Shelley

Shape of Water Hawkins and CreatureGuillermo del Toro wins BAFTA as best director for 2018

As he has on other occasions, Guillermo del Toro, in his acceptance speech on winning the best director honor at the BAFTA Awards, where other winners thanked their agents and mothers, thanked Mary Shelley, referring to the 18 year old girl who created a monster to represent the fear man has in his own psyche and foibles. Del Toro says that Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein saved him and he often thinks of her in his work. If she was still alive, she might return the favor.

The reference for Del Toro is his view that the horror film monster is a stand-in for the audience’s fear of what they themselves might become if overcome by the inner demons everyone carries. A working theory that has served to scare movie goers since the medium began, not to mention comic books, plays and of course, novels.

The fantasy drama film “The Shape of Water” directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer. Set in Baltimore in 1962, during the height of the cold war search for new possible weapons, the plot follows Hawkins as Elisa Esposito, a mute from childhood female custodian at a high-security government laboratory, where a singular humanoid amphibian creature has been captured and special tanks have been built to contain it. The government, led by the archly brutal Michael Shannon as Colonel Richard Strickland, wants to understand his secrets, though Strickland seems more interested in tormenting and torturing the being than understanding it.

The lonely Elisa lives in an apartment above a movie theater, just next door to the kindly, also lonely and gay, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins, who serves as a unofficial sort of father figure-friend. Elisa goes through a regular morning routine of bathing and masturbation before heading to work as a janitor at the secret government facility, where she works alongside Octavia Spencer as Zelda. They are present when the creature is brought in a specialized tank. Hawkins hides to observe the creature from afar, and when no-one is around, makes friends with it, feeding it from her lunchbox of hard boiled eggs.

The aquatic creature, like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, having no name, but looking very much like an upgrade of the iconic “Black Lagoon Creature ”, takes a shine to the kindness of the young woman and a passion for her boiled eggs. When Elisa learns that Strickland intends to vivisect the creature, she hatches an elaborate rescue plan, enlisting the aid of Giles, Zelda and Michael Stuhlbarg as Robert Hoffstetler, a sympathetic scientist and secret Soviet Spy.

Keeping the creature alive in her bathtub with boxes of salt, the mute lonely lady janitor no longer needs to masturbate with a real live fish-out-of-water creature available, and some mysterious lyrical underwater lovemaking occurs, until the government villains close in and Hawkins must help the creature escape in a poetic, romantically violent denouement.

The film offers a stunning design look, which also won a BAFTA for its artists, enveloping the decidedly odd, yet lyrically fascinating story in a world vision where its human-creature romance can take its flight of fantasy.

One can see the influences of the Frankenstein story in the film, although this creature is not created but merely found. What it presents is Del Toro’s monster as human psychological id concept,  though it seems to owe as much inspiration to watching the 50s “Creature From the Black Lagoon” escapist horror film and wondering, if the scaly fish monster from the deep carries the beautiful girl off in his arms, what exactly does he intend to do with her? And how does that work?

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Bride of Frankenstein Left at the Altar

bride_of_frankestein_lookThe she-mate of the creature of Mary Shelley’s imagining is not jilted, just put off for some soul(less) searching. The Universal Pictures version of the “Bride of Frankenstein” which had been moving forward on the production and release schedule of Universal Studios under the direction of Bill Condon, best known for recent Hollywood musicals (Chicago, Beauty and the Beast) has been pushed back for more work on the script with writer David Koepp (The Mummy, Angels & Demons).

The studio released a statement: “After thoughtful consideration, Universal Pictures and director Bill Condon have decided to postpone ‘Bride of Frankenstein”. None of us want to move too quickly to meet a release date when we know this special movie needs more time to come together.”

The lackluster box-office and critical reception for the Tom Cruise starrer “The Mummy”, the first film in Universal’s new “Dark Universe” idea to turn their horror movie library of the past into a modern franchise world like Disney’s Marvel comics superheroes and Warner Bros. DC Comics, finally getting some steam with “Wonderwoman”, has apparently made the studio a little gunshy, and the experiment in rebooting a true classic of horror is causing a few shivers up the spine in the executive suite.

Javier Bardem has been attached to play the monster of Frankenstein’s creation for some time, while Angelina Jolie has recently been in discussions to play the eponymous “Bride”, but she may be putting a sequel to “Malificent” for arch rival Disney in front of the schedule, perhaps allowing more time to rethink the script. In the original 1935 Universal Boris Karloff version of the story, directed by James Whale, which takes its concepts more from the later parts of the novel, left out of the first “Frankenstein”, the female mate the creature demands his creator make for him for a little companionship doesn’t appear until the last few minutes of the movie, and then just sort of freaks out like a mail order bride getting a look at her scary husband for the first time.

The bride story was always a bit of a flight of fancy. In the novel, Victor Frankenstein only briefly attempts to make a female mate, gathering a few “materials” for the gruesome task but doesn’t complete it, deciding that creating a franchise race of monsters was a rather horrific idea. But since the intent of the Dark Universe idea is to build a franchise world, in this rebooting of a pure movie story, the “Bride” in the title gets to be a major character, befitting a star for the role, though what sort of kitchen table discussions the creature couple might have is of curious conjecture.

Production of the film was set to start in February of 2018 in London, but the decision was made to hold pre-production to allow some time to sharpen the script for the vision Condon and Koepp have for the film, lest the audience have the same reaction to their creation as Elsa Lancaster’s creature bride did the first time around.

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“Mary Shelley” to Premiere at Toronto International Film Festival

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the movie, (formerly Storm in the Stars) has been announced as the Saturday Night Gala Premiere film for the Toronto International Film Festival, held from September 7 to 17, 2017. Toronto is one of the most commercial festivals on the International circuit, launching films like the Academy Award winning “Room” and horror film “Cabin Fever”.

The film directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley was filmed on location in Dublin and County Wicklow, Ireland and Luxembourg, was shot in Ireland with funds from the Irish Film Board by Parallel Film, the same company behind Soairse Ronan’s’ “Brooklyn”.

Mary Shelley tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing but yet finding inspiration when she meets Percy and is struck by love, but Percy is married with a child (actually it was two). Mary soon becomes pregnant with Percy’s child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and grieving for their child, they depart from London and Percy introduces Mary to Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva and the a stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein Creature story. Mary struggles to find a publisher and must fight for her monster and her identity.

The film also stars Douglas Booth as Percy, Maisie Williams as Mary Scottish girlhood friend Isabel Baxter, Bel Powley as Claire, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane as the parents, and Tom Sturridge as the mad, bad Lord Byron. The original script is by Emma Jenson with Alan Maloney and Ruth Coad producing for Parallel Films with Amy Baer of Gidden Media who originated the project.

The story covers some of the same ground as “The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: The Romantics” but skips lightly over the 1814 elopement trip and jumps to 1816 to 1818.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

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Mary Shelley – A Title Change but No Release Date Yet

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieThe film project about young Mary Shelley previously titled “A Storm in the Stars” with Ellle Fanning and Bel Powley, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour, has been retitled as the more obvious and direct Mary Shelley, especially as the competing Mary Shelley’s Monster project has fallen to the wayside in film development. Footage of the film still in post-production was shown at the Berlinale Film Festival with publicity images from the production released, primarily of Fanning as Mary sitting at her mother’s grave stone.

The film features two Game of Thrones cast veterans among the supporting cast: Stephen Dillane (Stannis Baratheon who roasted his own daughter in a failed bid for the throne) plays Mary’s father William Godwin, who treated this daughter only slightly better (he banned her from the house and refused to see her after her elopement with Shelley), Maisie Williams (the assassin-in-training of the Many Faced God) plays Isabel Baxter, Mary’s Scottish girlhood BFF who is forced to separate from her as well due to Mary’s shame…shame…shame. Douglas Booth plays Percy Bysshe Shelley, with Bel Powley (Diary of a Teenage Girl) playing Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont who gets them all entangled with Lord Byron, played by Tom Sturridge, while Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey) plays Mary’s evil step-mom Mary Jane Clairmont. The movie was filmed in 2016, with Dublin standing in for London, and on sound stages in Luxembourg for Geneva. The focus of the film is suggested to be the turbulent time in Mary’s life after the return from the elopement featured in The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley, and the “Gothic Summer” on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron and Polidori, and the repercussions of her “illicit” relation with Shelley.

There were no announcements of major sales from Berlin, yet, or a release date. but the film has popped up on movie pirate sites for several months, most of them dead end for the time being, so if you want to download the Mary Shelley movie for free, you’ll likely be disappointed, as the Shelleys’ battle for justice continues 200 years later, and still wait for a major distributor.

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Rachel on Rachel Lesbian Sex

rachel_mcadamsIt’s official, the beautiful and sexy Canadian actress Rachel McAdams is reported in negotiations to star in a film adaptation of the lesbian romance themed novel Disobedience, playing opposite the beautiful and sexy British actress Rachel Weisz.

Okay, so maybe this is off tangent a bit, and I have no idea if there will be any sex at all in this story, but just I couldn’t resist the headline, and the thought is certainly tantalizing in the imagination. Rachel Weisz acquired the rights to the novel and will be producing alongside Ed Guiney, through his Element Pictures and Frida Torresblanco, who will produce through her Braven Films, with participation from the UK’s Film 4. Sebastian Lelio will be directing the movie based on a script he co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

rachel_weiszIn the novel by Naomi Alderman, the story follows a young woman, to be played by Rachel Weisz (the Rachel of the first part) who returns to her Orthodox Jewish home after learning of the death of her estranged father. She causes a rising storm in the conservative community when she rekindles a repressed love affair with her best friend, played by McAdams (the Rachel of the second part) – a woman who is now married to her cousin.

The film production is expected to start in early 2017 and eagerly awaited. To make the multiple Rachel thing more confusing, Weisz is soon to come out in My Cousin Rachel based on the Daphne Du Maurier novel (book author of Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds fame), playing opposite Sam Claflin. Rachel Weisz is married to James Bond (Daniel Craig) BTW, but there has never been a Rachel in a James Bond movie that I know of.

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Frankenstein Universal Movie Sets

Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein Europe Village Universal Studios Tour

Frankenstein Universal HollywoodTCM cable channel Turner Classic Movies recently ran a Boris Karloff day and I had a chance to watch the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1934 Bride of Frankenstein shot four years later, both directed by James Whale. The difference between the two movies was quite fascinating. Boris Karloff had gone in the credits from a “?” to simply the one name KARLOFF by the send movie, having become a household icon in between. The original film deviated so far from the original book to be almost unrecognizable, and oddly switched Victor to Henry Frankenstein and Victor’s friend from the book to Victor in the movie. The Bride of Frankenstein went back to the book to borrow more, and famously dramatized the introduction with Byron and Percy Shelley in Geneva.

It is striking that the second movie relies much more on a humorous slant to the material, with the added villain character of Dr. Pretorius almost a comedy. Boris Karloff’s make-up had changed to a heavier face with almost a receding hairline in some angles rather than the black bangs of the first. If you go to the Universal lot you can still run into a green-faced Frankenstein monster wandering about, ready to snap a selfie. It’s become rather standard for the movie Frankenstein to be green, but in the black & white films, the make-up was actually a monotone gray.

Universal 1931 Frankenstein Village SceneThe Frankenstein Village set had changed quite a bit as well. In the original it was a Bavarian style village with the Frankenstein family house a high ceiling mansion in the middle of the village with an entrance looking out on the street. In the Bride of Frankenstein, the town had turned into a larger walled castle city with a gate and drawbridge. In the first movie, the science lab was in a mill tower on a hill, in the second, a castle tower as part of the city complex. Both films were shot on the Universal studio back lot.

western_front_archThe 1931 Frankenstein village set was actually built for the World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” shot by Lewis Milestone a year earlier in 1930, for where the soldiers left home to the fervor of marching bands, before the devastations of war. The archways and street scenes can be recognized between the two films, with the archway into town shot from different angles. Some small parts of the Old Europe called the Court of Miracles set on the Universal backlot is still there but much of the set areas were burned in a fire at the studio some years ago. A few remnants called Little Europe still remain on the Universal Studio Tour.

universal_tour_europeThe stored laboratory sets and equipment were famously used again in Mel Brook’s “Young Frankenstein” and some of those props still remain in the Universal props shop. The lake where the little girl scene was filmed is out in Agoura about 40 minutes from Universal out the 101 highway. Malibu Lake is now surrounded by houses and a golf course. The Paramount Movie Ranch with its much used western town set is about five minutes away from the lake, and is now actually a National Park as part of the Santa Monica Mountain Recreation Area, but the western sets, used for countless movies and TV shows also recently burned in a wild fire.

Curiously the idea of a Frankenstein Castle only comes from the movies, even though there never really was a complete one, and in the Mary Shelley novel, rather than working in a laboratory in a watch tower, Victor Frankenstein created his creature in his lodgings at Ingolstadt University. Imagine carrying dead body parts into your dorm late at night for a little all-nighter monster surgery. In the movie, the village where the Frankenstein’s lived was modified to a fictional “Goldstadt”. While a real village named Frankenstein, in the Rhineland of Germany where the ruins of a castle still guard on the hill above, bears little resemblance to the Bavarian Alps style architecture of the movie set design. TMC Hollywood Movie Locations Tour

Of course, the book is set in French speaking Switzerland and the country of the movie is never specifically stated, but it’s obvious German feel perhaps comes from the availability of the Bavarian style sets. The other oddity of the two movies Frankenstein and the Bride are the costumes. The original film was apparently set in contemporary 1930, post WWI, at least by the clothes, while for the Bride, they decided to make it more late 19th Century in style. It was the same director, so maybe budget played a part or they wanted to go more period in line with the Regency opening.

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Did Mary Shelley lie about the origin of Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley's Lost Book HateThe story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.

This telling appeared in the 1831 edition of the book, after the novels first appearance in 1818 without an author’s name and after becoming a scandalous sensation, came out in a new edition in 1822, with an introduction written by Percy Shelley, and then again in 1831 after Shelley’s death in Italy, with the lengthy preface, in which Mary said she included it after constant requests by readers to tell of how she came up with the story, told of how she struggled for several days to think of a worthy ghost story, and then finally one night, as she lay to sleep, “I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around.”

But is this story the full truth? As Mary said herself, “Everything must have a beginning, and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.” Authors do not wake up one morning and invent a full story. An idea, a concept, a vision, surely, but invariably informed by a personal past, a connection to something deeper in a lived experience. Mary drew for her characters and setting the world of Switzerland around her, the streets of the Plain Palais of Geneva and Mont Blanc outside her window. Yet, from where would the inner life of such a collection of characters of passion and betrayal come from in a young woman of eighteen? The influences of the exciting sciences of the day, electrified vermicelli and the buried, thought dead, ringing the bells from their coffins as they awoke from comas before they might be buried, were all around in the brewing ferment of the enlightening days of the late 18th and early 19th century. The author could infuse and develop these themes as the story took shape over time. But did Mary draw upon an earlier work to shape her first published book?

At the end of her “Six Weeks Tour” elopement with Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire in 1814, Mary began her first attempt at a novel, which she entitled “Hate”. She never finished it or published it, and this seminal work of a young budding author of remarkable talent has never seen the light of day and Mary Shelley did not reveal its themes or content.

There has been considerable academic discussion over the years about how much her husband, Percy Shelley, may have contributed to the writing of the Frankenstein novel. Certainly, he encouraged her in the writing of it, and he may have offered some editing of it, but how much does he actually appear in the characters of the novel, and who else is represented in the pages? Was Mary’s first attempt at a novel, with the theme of an unexplained hate, also an influence or cannibalized in the writing of the second work? And was Mary Shelley being artfully discreet in her description of the events of that summer in Geneva?

In her public writings, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was very careful in her telling of personal events to leave in the editor’s bin any of the extraordinary personal trauma of her life, mentioning only in the slightest passing of a phrase the deep emotional struggles and passions that must have accompanied the passionate personalities which surrounded her. Deaths of her first born, two suicides, the scorn of society, the longing for a mother and hated step-mother, betrayed by an idolized father and the willful schemes of a step-sister which brought them, with an illegitimate pregnancy, to the doorstep of Lord Byron’s summer rental.

This suggests a thematic origin of something well beyond a ghost story about the hubris of science born in an instant from the image of a waking dream. Did that waking image really come from a past experience and more deeper personal meaning than just a casual story competition. Why did she never reveal from where she derived the unusual title name?

And did Mary Shelley finally reveal the truth behind this waking vision shortly before her death in a discovered confession in the form of a personal memoir of her first journey to Switzerland, in a fuller and more intimate “revised” version of her six weeks tour in the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley  – E-Book

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – Paperback

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