Reel Politique: Links, More on Tim Lucas
In the aftermath of my profile of Tim Lucas at Green Cine daily, other material about the author and editor has popped up on the Internet. There is a terrific, lengthy and detailed interview with Lucas at DVDTalk, conducted by Stuart Galbraith IV, a specialist in Japanese films. Also, a competing profile of Lucas just appeared in the Cincinnati city magazine (in which my profile is quoted, but I am called “D. K. Hall”). I’m told that there is a forum thread about my profile of Lucas over at the Classic Horror Film Board, but I’m afraid to go visit it.
Thinking about Lucas I realized that he shares numerous characteristics with another favored writer, Bill James, recognition of whom was inspired by the baseball playoffs. James is the onetime author of the popular Baseball Abstracts series, followed by a historical abstract, and books on baseball managers and pitchers. In recent years, he’s been a consultant to the Boston Red Sox, and been profiledin the New Yorker .
James lives in Kansas City, Lucas in Ohio. James started out as a self-published writer before getting picked up eventually by publishers, and Lucas remains a self-published writer and editor. Both refer to their wives by their first name frequently and casually in their prose. Both are impatient with inaccuracy, unsubstantiated claims, and sweeping generalizations. Both have an engaging American prose style (though James is funnier). Lucas tends toward humorlessness, which I take to be a conscious, furious reaction to the way horror and genre films were written about in the old Famous Monsters of Filmland, all bad puns and denigrating jokes. Both writers attract fanatical acolytes and true believers, because the fields they write about attract such types, and they inspire a certain sentimentality amongst their devoted readers despite their oft-curmudgeonly demeanor. In the end they are purely American. They are in the tradition of those lone voices speaking out against stupidity. They probably still feel lone, despite having achieved success doing what they love (neither have had conventional office jobs in their adult careers). In their way they carry the spirit of the small town newspaper editor railing against injustice and the porous arguments of his enemies. James has probably changed the face of baseball, and Lucas has written arguably the best director survey ever published, and both are well-worth revisiting in the twilight of the night, or reading for the first time.