Bzzzzt!...and some Sendak stories

I love New York…because of free movies! My schoolmate May (a triple F-ing friend: Fellow Fantasy Freak) invited me to watch a free screening of The Fifth Element at Loews 34th. I said yes in a second! Awww! I saw the movie when it first came out in the 90s, and the characters that had me laughing are the ones played by Chris Tucker and Gary Oldman (his best scene: when he opens the Diva’s case). I completely forgot that Bruce Willis is in it, too.
Awooooo! The Fifth Element is a trip!
May and I are bonding over fantasy flicks – we caught the screening of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal at BAM during Muppet Mania week, and saw A Series of Unfortunate Events before the holiday break. We enjoyed all the screenings, but Jim Henson’s movies unfortunately showed their age. The two-decade old puppetry, amazingly, is still flawless (and we got a free demonstration from an ex-Mystic puppeteer to boot), but the script of both movies (especially Labyrinth) made me wince. And Henson always seemed to botch up climatic battle scenes – in Labyrinth, he went overboard with the slapstick. In Dark Crystal, the climax was so stretched out, slowed down, that by movie’s end I felt something was still unresolved.
Ack – and I call myself a Henson loyalist.
Apparently there’s a Maurice Sendak-Labyrinth connection. I didn’t notice it till this last viewing: Ludo, the rock-summoning Minoutaurish creature, stepped out of the pages of Where the Wild Things Are(the book itself enjoys not-so-subtle product placement, the first time we see Sarah’s bedroom). Of course, the idea of goblins stealing the baby sibling was pure Outside Over There.
The idea of kidnapping was Sendak’s childhood nightmare: he was a young child when the Lindbergh kidnapping occurred, and the event seemed to have haunted him for life. But I feel that the idea of a baby being stolen in the night (by goblins, by men) is a deep, universal nightmare that many people experience. Sendak relates how Outside Over There almost destroyed him:
(The book) was the most painful experience of my creative life. It brought on a catastrophe. It was so hard it caused me to have a breakdown. I left the business. I didn’t think I could finish it. At that point of my still-young life, I felt I had to solve this book, I had to plummet as far down deep into myself as I could: excavation work. Wild Things was excavation work, but I got up and out in time, like a miner getting out just before the blast occurs. Night Kitchen was a deeper run, and that was troublesome. But I did not anticipate the horror of Outside Over There, and so I fell down. I lost my belief in it, I didn’t know what I was doing, and so I quit; I stopped the book right in the middle and I stopped work.

Obviously, Sendak finally managed to overcome the terror, and finished the book. Imagine, the man suffered to make a picture book – a picture book! It makes me feel small, amateurish. I feel like I have to feed my liver to an eagle in order to write anything of worth.

Another Sendak story (one he may have made public for the first time in CLNE 2004!) For the 10th (or 15th?) anniversary of The Hobbit, the publishers thought of printing an edition with Sendak’s illustrations (who was then the children’s book industry sweetheart, having been awarded the Caldecott Medal for Wild Things). Tolkien, who drew the original illustrations for The Hobbit, wanted to approve any new drawings, and so asked for a sample of Sendak’s work. Sendak, though slightly offended, yielded to the request and sent two sketches: one scene of Bilbo peeking out of his hobbit hole, another of Bilbo and the dwarves celebrating their victory. A bumbling editor mislabeled the illustrations, swapping the description of one scene for the other. Tolkien then sent word that Sendak obviously didn’t know how to interpret his text. Sendak was so incensed and thought, what fool wouldn’t be able to see that a mistake had been made?
Editors quickly tried to appease both Tolkien and Sendak, arranging a meeting so things could be smoothed out between the two. Sendak, who was off to England to promote Wild Things, grudgingly agreed. But the day before he was to meet Tolkien, Sendak suffered his first major coronary. He and his editor immediately sent word to Tolkien to tell him of the situation. Tolkien’s responded with a telegram. It read: “I don’t like having appointments broken.”
Sendak’s response? “I sent out such a huge wave of hate, I could have killed him.” As a footnote, he added, "Then again, I send out huge waves of hate towards Bush all the time, and they don't seem to work."


Last Word:
We will rise to the occasion
which is life.

Virginia Euwer Wolff
True Believer