What Bela Lugosi can teach every artist

Bela Lugosi was destined for immortality from the moment he donned the Dracula cape and arched his eyebrows for Tod Browning's camera. But thanks in large part to Tim Burton, the last two decades have seen Bela achieving a second everlasting life as the pitiable and desiccated muse of Edward D. Wood, Jr. Casual fans could be forgiven for believing that Martin Landau's portrayal of Lugosi writhing in a wading pool with a rubber octopus in Bride of the Monster was an accurate depiction of Bela hitting bottom, but truth be told, Bela's career had dipped lower than that any number of times. 

I've watched a lot of Bela Lugosi movies over the years. The Ed Wood movies are certainly in the lower tier, but at least they're made by a director with a distinct personal style and, more importantly, a genuine appreciation for Lugosi's talents and place in cinema history. 

Compare that to, say, William Beaudine, an insanely prolific, zero-budget hired gun who cranked out endless, soulless genre pictures. Beaudine directed what I would classify as the true low point of Bela's career, 1952's Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla. Lugosi's star was long since descended by '52, but this movie has so little going for it that I don't question the producer's decision to slap the star's name in the title and cash in on what little bankability he had left.

Actually, Bela isn't even the star of the movie that borrowed his name. He has fairly limited screen time as the mad scientist who torments co-leads Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo, a real-life comedy duo whose entire shtick was doing a passable impression of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Mitchell and Petrillo's subsequent lives and film careers are fascinating in their own right, but they're beyond excruciating in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, playing a nightclub act stranded on a remote tropical island populated by friendly, grotesquely stereotyped natives and one rogue geneticist who's determined to transform Mitchell into an ape.

It's an icky, unfunny wallow in undistinguished, undignified filmmaking, but you'd never know it to watch Bela's performance. Bela gives it his all, playing the role with all the sly intensity and creepy charm that marked the best work of his younger days. Obviously he had to know he wasn't involved with any kind of masterpiece - this was a star vehicle for a professional Jerry Lewis impersonator, for heaven's sake - but it just wasn't in Bela's nature to half-ass it for a paycheck.

I've seen Bela waist-deep in all manner of dreck, be it playing fifth or sixth fiddle to the sub-vaudevillian antics of the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla, toddling behind Basil Rathbone as a mute manservant in The Black Sleep or lurching around the city stealing spinal fluid in a ludicrous hairy mask in Beaudine's The Ape Man. (Side note: Bela Lugosi appeared in an inordinate number of simian-themed movies.) He got handed scripts possessed of not an ounce of imagination: he was repeatedly asked to rehash Dracula with diminishing returns and made at least four movies wherein he played a scientist driven mad by the death of his wife. It's safe to say that the vast majority of Bela's résumé was irredeemable garbage.

Despite all of that, I could not point you to a weak Bela Lugosi performance. Even in the direst of cinematic circumstances, Bela threw his heart into every vaguely drawn part. He played to the rafters, exuding menace and charisma as he glowered over long-forgotten actors many degrees his inferior. By all accounts he resented the hell out of his typecasting as a horror movie heavy, but he never let that distaste leak through to the screen. He did his damnedest to make sure people left the theater muttering, "That was an awful Bela Lugosi movie" and not "Bela Lugosi was awful in that movie."

Compare that ethic to any number of Lugosi's b-movie counterparts over the ages. Bela was far from the only trained, talented actor forced to slum it in terrible genre films. Lon Chaney, Jr's late-career performances (Spider-Baby excepted) range from bored to embarrassed. John Carradine never failed to deliver the bombast, but many of his low-budget roles were scarcely more than disdainful paycheck cameos. Vincent Price was dependable but prone to slipping onto hammy autopilot. Donald Pleasance occasionally roused himself for a sketchy role, as in Raw Meat, but more often than not just looked irritated to be wasting his talents on such trash. Of all the great names of bad horror, only Peter Cushing comes close to Bela in his dedication to craft in the face of adversity. But even there, Cushing's screen persona was far more mannerly, his menace much quieter. Even in the depths of dreck like The Blood Beast Terror, which found him wrestling a bloodthirsty humanoid moth-monster, Cushing was allowed his dignity. He was certainly never left to stumble around a papier-mache jungle while being outsmarted by Sammy frigging Petrillo and Steve Calvert in a gorilla suit.

But Bela was, and he squeezed every drop of lemonade out of every bag of lemons Hollywood handed him. Granted, he had a notorious opiate addiction driving him to take work wherever it was available, but he could have easily phoned in his performances in those low-grade cheapies and no one on set would have said a word about it. But he never did, and that's remarkable.

That's why I count Bela Lugosi as one of my greatest inspirations. I've been writing for money and pleasure for my entire adult life. In that time I've been asked to write all manner of things that do not interest me in the least, and plenty more things I might initially have dismissed as "beneath me." I'm the first to admit that I've made some unadvisable choices in my writing career, but I can't come up with many examples of me not putting my best effort into a project. Whether it's a feature for a national publication, a concert blurb for a local magazine or even a casual tweet on a Wednesday night, I try my hardest to make sure it's the best piece of writing I can muster.

Some of that is probably because I still believe - perhaps foolishly - that I'm a writer on the rise and every piece of work I put out to the world is a potential audition. I'll be interested to see whether I can sustain this attitude if and when I find myself irredeemably over the hill and past my peak, as Bela surely realized he was by the time he was paired up with Petrillo and Mitchell, or when he was "rescued" by Ed Wood.  It's one thing to give it your all when there's a promise of greater things shimmering on the horizon and quite another when all is lost and the art is truly just for the art's sake. Should I ever come to such a turn, I can only hope that I manage to do it as gracefully as Bela Lugosi.

"How I use my useless degree" or "English major? What're you gonna do with THAT?"

The Occupy Wall Street protests have inspired a whole heap of emotions, arguments and odd conjectures in my little corner of the internet. I’m not here to add to the ruckus by offering yet another inconsequential opinion piece on Occupy – I’ll just say I’m for it and leave it at that – but I would like to address one recurring complaint that hits close to home for me.

I’ve seen a number of people dismiss the Occupy protestors as kids who chose their college majors poorly. Depending on who you listen to, young students of the Liberal Arts are anything from pitiable suckers who’ve been duped by a cash-hungry university system to whiny morons who should’ve known better than to think a History degree would get them anything but a very expensive wall-hanging. In between lies a huge range of criticisms and even a few cogent points (the notion that many colleges have become tuition-gobbling diploma mills has much credence), but the underlying message is the same: in terms of employability, a Liberal Arts degree is useless.



I am the holder of not only a B.A. in English from a Big 10 university, but also an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from a big-city art school. Conventional wisdom suggests that my tuition fees were a poor investment, as getting “DO NOT HIRE ME” tattooed across my face would have gotten me the same results for a fraction of the cost. Back in my undergrad years I grew accustomed to witty wisecracks along the lines of, “English major, eh? Hope you like making lattes!” (I rather do, but that’s beside the point.) And yet here I sit in late 2011, a productive, tax-paying homeowner gainfully employed in an occupation directly related to my course of study. Either I’m some kind of paragon of hard work and overachievement or my education isn’t quite as worthless as you might think. (Hint: it isn’t the former.)

Contrary to popular belief, my liberal arts education has been instrumental in landing me jobs. My first genuine, cubicle-and-benefits job was writing copy for an apartment location service in Chicago. I’d been futilely sending out applications to all manner of companies for many months when a company I’d never even applied to contacted me out of the blue. The company’s human resources manager reached out to me because my CareerBuilder profile noted my creative writing background. During the interview she explained to me that they were specifically looking for someone with a creative flair, someone who could bring more to the table than the dry, lifeless copy one usually got from business majors.

That’s been a common theme throughout my career. Since leaving the apartment finders, my day jobs have included writing copy for a women’s activewear catalog and editing an online magazine for the mobile phone division of Best Buy. In each case, I started the job with no practical knowledge of, qualifications for or particular interest in the subject at hand. I was hired for all of those positions because the employers were looking for someone creative, talented and adaptable. Coincidentally, those were all skill sets I honed while pursuing my Liberal Arts degrees.



I can’t really blame folks for thinking artistic studies are impractical. Most of them are to some extent. (But what isn’t?) I certainly can’t claim that being able to write a 20-page essay on unconscious colonialist themes in Thoreau’s Walden has served me directly in the workplace. But I also think many people simply don’t know how wide the tentacles of the creative arts truly spread. When I tell people what I do for a living, I’m consistently amazed at how many of them give me a confused look and say, “So wait, you write for Best Buy? What is there to write? Like, the flyers they give out in the stores?” It has apparently never occurred to them that every word they have ever read, be it in a newspaper, on a billboard or down the side of a can of spray cheese, was written by an actual human being.

I’m looking out my dining room window right now at the Wendy’s parking lot two doors down. As an example, let’s look at the Wendy’s drive-thru order box. The name of every item on that menu was carefully chosen by a copywriter in the marketing department. Every word of text was diligently proofread by someone with editorial training. The incandescent portraits of burgers, shakes and salads were all snapped by a professional photographer. The font, the color scheme, the layout of items in a readable, customer-friendly tableau? These are all the domain of college-educated graphic designers. Hell, even the physical design of the order box itself is likely the work of a well-compensated liberal arts major. None of that crosses the mind of the average Wendy’s customer, but those arts students’ contributions have an undeniable daily impact on America’s lunch hours.



Even setting all that aside, I’ve never really understood what the alternative is supposed to be for us artsy types. It’s easy enough to say, “Study something useful and go get a real job,” but I can’t imagine that working out in practice. Sure, I could have relegated reading and writing to hobby status and pursued, say, an Engineering degree. The only trouble is that I would make an awful engineer. Not only would I find it dreadfully boring, I don’t believe I could ever be mentally capable of doing that kind of work. I often tell people that I’m good at exactly two things in life: writing and making coffee. It’s a joke, but one that’s not far from the truth. Certain people are good at certain things and it’s futile to pretend otherwise.

No one would toss a business executive on a stage and expect her to dance a palatable Swan Lake, but plenty of people would say a Dance major would be better off shoehorning herself into an unfulfilling office job. I don’t mean to suggest that every Dance major needs to stick it out and dance for a living or die trying. There are plenty of careers that incorporate physical grace and movement in much the same way that my office jobs employ my talent for creative writing. Sure, given the choice, I’d rather be writing short stories as my sole source of income, but that’s just not realistic. This is a way for me to both stay financially solvent and apply the invaluable career skills I learned while pursuing that Fiction Writing M.F.A. (Thanks again, Columbia College Chicago!)

Look, I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t a lot of pipe-dreamers in the liberal arts. Heck, when I was 18, it never even crossed my mind that I wasn’t going to be revered worldwide for my art by the time I was 23. I didn’t have a master plan or even a vague career path. I simply took for granted that the world would be gobsmacked by my creative genius and toss me right up the ladder of success. That’s just part of being a young kid with big dreams, and I don’t think I’d care to inhabit a world where it isn’t. For better or for worse, though, those dreams usually give way to a harsher reality. When that happens, those useless degrees may come in far more useful than a lot of folks would have you believe.

Criticizing Dave Eggers' critique of critics

For someone who seems to be a pretty genuine and decent guy, Dave Eggers inspires a weird range of emotions. I know plenty of people who regard him as the living embodiment of all that’s wrong with modern literature. I know just as many who think of him as the voice of his generation. I have mixed feelings about his work, but I definitely side more with the supporters than with the haters. I have nothing but admiration for the youth writing programs he’s helped foster across the country. I thought his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a very good memoir, even though I disliked its quirky footnotes and meta-textual devices. I like a lot of the work McSweeney’s has done, but I’m not much for its postmodern affectations.

Recently, though, I came across a quotation from Eggers that rubs me every which way but right. It’s from a lengthy 2000 interview in the Harvard Advocate in which a question about “selling out” prompts a passionate response. Eggers makes some excellent points about a particular, poisonous breed of hipster criticism, specifically citing an acquaintance who haughtily dismissed The Flaming Lips because one of their songs was used in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. He rails against those who would place limits on an artist based on an arbitrary code of authenticity or assail someone’s work to gratify their own egos.

I’m with him most of the way. His irritation with the ever-hypocritical “sellout” refrain is fully justified. His tone is pretty defensive throughout, but that’s at least partially excused by the interviewer’s own palpably smug tone. But when Eggers starts taking broad swipes at the institution of criticism, he loses me in a big way. I find this comment especially galling:

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.”

There is so much I disagree with in that passage, I’m not even sure where to start. I guess my biggest problem is with the idea that anyone who hasn’t written a book is unworthy of criticizing someone else’s. He does acknowledge elsewhere in the interview that there are some helpful critics in the world, but still holds that “by and large, the only book reviews that should be trusted are by those who have themselves written books.” So then, if I’m not allowed to dismiss a movie without having made one, am I also unqualified to embrace it? Am I within my rights to complain about my malfunctioning DVD player even though I’ve never built one myself? Is it OK for an author to perform a satirical reading lampooning Dick Cheney (as I saw Dave Eggers himself do in Chicago a few years back) even though the writer has never been Vice President of the United States? Eggers’ stance is elitism masquerading as populism, and I find it disingenuous and insulting.

I’ve been both a working artist and an arts critic for my entire adult life. Few things bug me more than artists casting criticism by “non-artists” as irrelevant. First of all, that suggests that criticism is not, in itself, a form of art. In my estimation, a well-written, well-reasoned piece of criticism can very easily stand on its own as an artistic statement made in reaction to someone else’s artistic statement. If the film writing of folks like Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin or Jaime Weinman is somehow invalidated because the writers are not filmmakers themselves, then I’ve wasted an awful lot of reading time over the years. (Yes, I know Ebert dabbled in film early in his career, so maybe he gets a pass by the Eggers standard.) Actually, an argument could be made that non-artists sometimes make better critics. People who work within the same discipline can be too close to the subject to view it objectively. I’ve had plenty of conversations with writers whose critique of others’ stories boils down to, “That’s not the way I would have written it!”

Eggers’ statement about his critical “rage and envy” also hits a sore spot for me. One of the most common knocks I hear against the institution of criticism is that all critics are failed artists lashing out against the world that rejected them. Maybe that was true of Eggers, but that doesn’t mean critics as a whole are a spiteful den of vipers – it just means Dave Eggers was a bad critic. As much as I like the idea of some shadowy cabal of critics plotting revenge on the art world like so many scorned supervillains, I think questioning anyone’s motives for writing anything puts one on shaky ground. Heck, half of Eggers’ piece is a defense of making art for money. Critics gotta get that dollar too!

I’ve worked with a lot of critics in my day, and in my experience there is no more enthusiastic group of art lovers in the world. One of the greatest periods of my creative life was when I worked as a music writer for Where Y’at magazine in New Orleans. On at least a weekly basis, one of the other writers would pop some hot new find into the office CD player and insist that the rest of us gather ‘round and share in the glory. Sure, Michael Dominici, the magazine’s Music Editor, sometimes used his podium to utterly savage albums he found lacking, but anyone who heard him gush effusively about relative unknowns like jazz singer Lizz Wright or swamp rock old-timer Joe Barry could have no doubt about how much the man loved music. Mike didn’t scorn or envy successful artists. He celebrated them and made it his mission to share just what made them and their work so special.

Maybe I’m misreading or oversimplifying. I know Eggers is specifically addressing people who turn up their noses at things that are perceived as too unhip or mainstream, but it seems to me that his argument also precludes artistic criticism, at least of a negative bent. Earlier in the interview, he says that “the critical impulse… is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art.” I disagree. That process describes exactly what Donna Bowman does in her exceptional, ongoing analysis of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, NewsRadio. Some might argue that Bowman’s approach is fussy and overly analytical, but no one could claim that she doesn’t truly love her subject matter. Her in-depth look at what made the show tick makes me reflect on the particular greatness of NewsRadio’s writing, cast and direction, and that only enhances my viewing experience.

In my estimation, Eggers’ stance supports the creation of art but puts strict limitations on how we should evaluate it. If every piece of art is left to bob around the world, seen but unanalyzed, does it even count as art? If we regard every creative endeavor on an even plane and keep our negative opinions to ourselves, don’t we effectively stifle an important, culture-wide dialogue? If we give the failures a free pass on the grounds of being “open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting,” don’t we do a disservice to the good and great works sharing the same stage?

Look, I know I’m getting a bit too worked up about a decade-old comment from a writer I generally admire. I really don’t intend any of this as a personal attack on Dave Eggers. He’s a sincere, hardworking writer who’s done as much good for writing in the past decade as just about anyone. It’s quite possible that his opinion has changed in the past ten years. He’s recently given a fair bit of time to The AV Club (my favorite arts publication, if my links weren’t enough of a clue), so it’s clear that he doesn’t eschew the critical establishment entirely. It’s just that I’ve seen too many artists blindly bashing critics over the years, and this piece happened to hit most of my hot buttons.

I understand that it hurts to have something in which you’ve invested your heart and soul assaulted on a public stage. I’ve gotten my share of negative feedback, and it’s never pleasant. It depresses me, angers me and puts me on the defensive. But it comes with the territory. Job evaluations are a part of every career. They help keep us at the top of our games. If my boss at my office job gives me a negative performance review, I don’t have the option of brushing it off as jealousy or ignorance or irrelevancy, even if I believe all of that to be true. Instead, I have to get my act together or risk dismissal. Criticism ideally serves a similar purpose for artists. We don’t have to take every negative word at face value, but we should at least acknowledge that there’s something to be learned from a reasoned critique. It’s just a fact that those who choose to share their art with the public will have it evaluated by the same. If you can’t handle seeing your work torn apart or otherwise “dismissed,” then you may have chosen the wrong path.

By the way, I’m pretty sure I’m authorized to make these comments, because I have written a book. Of course, my book hasn’t yet been published, so maybe I don’t make the cut. It’s a tricky gray area, that.

Note: I briefly posted a slightly different version of this entry earlier, then took it down when I decided it needed some clarification. Apologies if that created any confusion. Though I can't imagine what confusion that would create.

Five things I have never said to myself upon finishing a John Irving novel

1. "Is there a more fascinating narrative sport than collegiate wrestling?"

2. "If only he were less ambiguous about his feelings for Charles Dickens."

3. "You can never have too many queasy rape scenes."

4. "I wish there'd been a little more deus in that machina."

5. "Needs more bears."


(Photo courtesy of this interview)