THE CASE OF THE SPLIT BOOK: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

In August 2015 I blogged about the best and worst books on my shelves. Not in terms of content. Best-preserved. Worst-preserved. There are hundreds of books that I’d categorise as well-preserved. And hardly any books that are truly falling apart.
   At the time, I lamented the disintegration of a movie guide compiled by Leonard Maltin. If you are the sort of movie snob who sneers at Leonard Maltin and his cinematic output, preferring Leslie Halliwell’s dissection of cinema greats, note that even permanent grumpy bastard Halliwell acknowledged Maltin as someone who paved the way for so many writers in that field. Including the many writers who contributed to Maltin’s guide…
   Maltin comes across as a bright and breezy team-player. Halliwell was more of a lone gunman at a funeral, looking to settle non-existent grudges with the friends of deceased movie directors.
   The chief criticism of Halliwell? Still doing the rounds on the internet. In the case of Maltin and his crew, at least Maltin and his crew watched the movies they wrote about, whereas Halliwell, er, didn’t always see the stuff he panned.
   We can say that about him. He’s dead, and unlikely to sue.
   After that, the other criticism of Halliwell is that his view of cinema had a severe before and after phase. He liked the stuff he watched while growing up, and came to detest the stuff he saw floating past him as he grew old.
   What a grumpy bastard.
   I view Halliwell’s legacy as more about bringing old movies to television. That was his job. If you watched a black and white film on Channel 4 on a rainy day, chances are Halliwell was the guy who brokered the deal.
   No, I don’t have Halliwell’s guide on my shelves. Reasons. I saw his books on the shelves of movie snobs whose taste in films had clearly disappeared up someone else’s arsehole, never mind their own arseholes. And so, my perception is a little tainted.
   So. I have these Maltin guides. They are slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate interpretations of the source material. (John Donne, reviewing Hamlet for Leonard Maltin’s guide. The Zeffirelli version of the play. Three stars, with slightly catty comments in iambic pentameter.)
   Why do I use Maltin’s books? They list the movie running time very clearly, unlike many a Blu-ray cover. I see, glancing at the reference shelf, that I inherited an encyclopaedia on film personnel by Ephraim Katz. Had to move some dust out of the way to access that one.
   What don’t I use? Clearly, dustily, the Katz volume. I don’t put faith in star-rated movie review systems. Neither, it seems, did Halliwell. For roughly the last twenty years of his life, he stopped handing out four star awards to movies.
   Tell me the year of release and how long the picture runs. Note if it is in black and white. Don’t put spoilers if you can avoid them. By all means, give me your view of the film. Don’t tell me my view of the film, though. I’ll provide my own appreciation of the movie, thanks all the same.
   Without spoilers.
   Halliwell in particular had a reputation for spoiling movies. He gave zero stars to Titanic, and noted that this sort of Hollywood depiction of a real-life boat crash in 1912 was constructed squarely with one eye on a sequel.
   I made some of that up. He died in 1989. His books survive on reference shelves to this day. Turning to another work on my reference shelf – the Biographical Dictionary edited by Magnus Magnusson – I see there is no entry on Halliwell.
   Magnusson himself was such a figure of note, translating breezy Icelandic sagas to English, that he could have included himself in that dictionary, but, presumably, was too modest to say anything.
   Maltin’s crew served up enough atmosphere in short entries on cinema to satisfy the grumpiest tastes. If anything, Halliwell reminds me of Thayer David in Save the Tiger, meeting in a dive of a cinema to arrange a plot-based activity that I will not spoil for you here. Jack Lemmon wants him to (REDACTED), as that would save a lot of bother.
   I don’t know why Thayer David reminds me of Leslie Halliwell. Add glasses and a beard and you are nearly there. You could say that of Leonard Maltin, too, I guess.
   Don’t look at me. Watch the screen.
   Wonderful advice from Thayer David, for all professional movie writers. It’s not about you, but about the movie you watched. Or think you saw…
   I’ve sat through movie reviews in newspapers that dropped American political assassinations into the wrong year, put the wrong Bruce on the battlefield at Bannockburn, set forth a view on a movie based on the music that didn’t actually surface in that film – invalidating the point, and, most tellingly, threw a spoiler into American Beauty – Annette Bening’s character kills him.
   More accurate spoiler: she doesn’t kill him at all. What fucking film were you watching? Spoiler for the spoiler: Kevin Spacey’s character tells you, in his introduction near the start of the film, that he has less than a year left on the planet.
   Newspaper and magazine reviews of films. Yes, I guess they were a thing, once. Back in 2015, Leonard Maltin’s movie reference work lay just behind me, on the floor, in three chunks. I am about to remember the office layout. Just behind me is the wall. And I mean right behind me, right now.
   There was a time, in this book-festooned alcove, when the desk was turned to the left and I had space on the floor behind me. Space enough to leave the room, for that is where the door lives.
   The reference book was in three chunks. Now I write of the tome again, and it sits above me on a shelf, ahead, slightly to the right of this keyboard. Still in three chunks. Why mention it? I’ve only just replaced the book.
   But the new version isn’t a new version. It’s split in two chunks. I should say…in two volumes. Eventually, when Maltin stopped doing those annual paperback guides, the body of work was split into two pieces. The classic movie book takes us through silent movies up until the talkies in 1965. And the later, slightly thicker, volume goes up to the end of civilisation as we once knew it: revised, 2017.
   That was in the Before Times, when you could go to the cinema without catching the plague. For movie information, I head to the internet. This will always cover the latest releases, as if by technology. (Possibly, as if by magic.) If I want the Maltin-flavoured cinema observations of yesteryear, I now have those two books on my shelves.
   They are chunky paperbacks, and will not stand the test of time. Perhaps both volumes will split into three slices, as the earlier guide did. These replacement apples didn’t fall far from the tree. I described the broken volume as being a thick paperback made of thin paper with no more durable a spine than that of a liquidiser-fresh jellyfish.
   And I commented that the internet is the place I head off to for movie information. Maltin’s illness and the rise of the internet combined to bring his era to an end. It was a good run. He had decades out of publishing the guide, which went annual in the mid-1980s.
   But how to make money off that, in the digital world? Could it be done? Maltin and his team had a stab at it. But the book is the book. Creating an annual guide doesn’t translate into a minute by minute guide, online. The atmosphere is wildly different.
   Books like that, reference works, provide an alternative to just using the Wikipedia. (Shout out to Jennifer’s Body. Two stars from Leonard Maltin. Ah, taste is taste, opinion is opinion, and rarely the twain shall meet.)
   Reference works should be dead. I have a full shelf of them above me, with other reference books bleeding onto many a bookcase elsewhere. But they aren’t dead. I don’t want every snippet of information to come from the Wikipedia.
   Seek multiple sources. Granted, Wikipedia will provide you with multiple sources – nearer the site of the initial explosion of knowledge. If you are to read the Wikipedia at all, pay attention to the TALK pages. You’ll learn a little more.
   For example, if you accidentally stumble on a Korean pop-singer’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll note the invisible collision between Wikipedia’s standards and the standards of the average pop fandom.
   All those entries demanding the height of a poodle be returned to the main page as socially relevant…are cruelly crushed by soulless editors who simply state NOT DONE. The heartless fiends go on to complicatedly state, acidly, why Wikipedia is not a fan magazine.
   As for internet movie sites…
   No, I never go near Rotten Tomatoes. I only use the Internet Movie Database to check the extensive cast listings. Siskel and Ebert? Weren’t they on The Muppet Show…
   Metacritic? I don’t believe I have, though everyone’s a critic online. Including Halliwell, who is resurrected there. And who remains grumpy there, even when handing one of his cherished films four stars. Yes, I’ve read Halliwell’s line in movie chat…
   Offline? Halliwell? No thanks. Not on my shelves. Grumpy and Deaded. Deaded being one of the forgotten characters in that Snow White cartoon. (Four stars from Maltin. And from Halliwell. You can all stop arguing about this. Disney’s first gay character was the Wicked Queen from that cartoon. The end.)
   Movie guides provide opinions by teams of critics, reviewers, and space cadets wired to the back end of the moon. There are capsule overviews and space capsule overviews. You sometimes wonder which planet these opinions were formed on.
   But there are facts. Production details. Snippets. Trivial items. The overall writing style of Maltin and his crew appealed to me. And the book, falling apart on my shelves, bugged me. So I replaced that with two books that I reached for while researching films mentioned in this blog post. There. I’ve had my use out of them already.