All this talk of the upcoming Green Lantern movie makes me think of one question. “What does Paul Riddell think of this and is he disappointed Denis Leary didn’t make the cut?”
Between 1998 and 2002, Paul T. Riddell wrote for various SF/Fantasy and comic book magazines, fanzines and websites. (Most of these are long gone) He also maintained an online collection of his articles, “The Healing Power of Obnoxiousness” and an e-mail newsletter :The Hell’s Half-Acre Herald”. What made his stuff worth reading (To me) was his willingness to rip into the general stupidities, not just of SF/Fantasy fandom (“The Church of Saint Spock, The Pointy-Eared”). but also of the industry itself (Bad publishing practices, screwing the writers, lack of mainstream advertising to pull in non-fan readers). All with a style that was inspired by his own literary heroes, Hunter S. Thompson and Harlan Ellison.
If you can laugh at the following phrase (Slightly paraphrased) Riddell came up with, perhaps his writing would have appealed to you…If it makes you fly into a rage…well…
Regarding Star Wars…“Although George Lucas may have had the bigger budget, everyone knows Ed Wood was the better writer!”
Despite his best efforts, Paul, realizing he was getting nowhere as far as being a mainstream writer, decided to call it quits, shutting down the site and the Herald. He did some time blogging on his time working at a credit card call center and a separate blog where he continued his snarky style, but shut both down around 2005/2006 in order to devote more time to one of his strongest interests, raising carnivorous plants.
It’s a shame he’s not online anymore, I always enjoyed his writing, but I can respect his choice to quit and move on if it wasn’t working out.
Paul Riddell is now co-owner and operator (With his wife) of The Texas Triffid Ranch, a nursery devoted to “carnivorous, prehistoric, and otherwise exotic plants.” If you really are interested in his writing there are three resources:
- Visit the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine and fill in the field with the address: www.hpoo.com. Click any entry before mid 2002
- Purchase one (or both) of Paul’s collections of his “best” material: Greasing The Pan: The Best Of Paul T. Riddell and The Savage Pen of Onan
So what does this all have to do with the Green Lantern movie? Well, back in April 1996, Paul wrote an April Fool’s article for The Met, a defunct Dallas based weekly paper about a underground film-maker, Edgar Harris (A name Paul would use as a pen name for comedy articles) being hired by Dreamworks Pictures to shoot a Green Lantern film with Mel Gibson as Hal Jordon, Michael Dorn as John Stewart and Denis Leary as Guy Gardner. The actual point of the article was to criticize how Texas, at the time, screwed over local artists and film-makers. As Paul later said, it should have been obvious since he says the producer was John Simon Richie (Sid Vicious’ real name) and the head writer was Cordwainer Bird (A pen name used by Harlan Ellison on scripts he wrote that he felt got edited/censored to death) and Paul ended the article with “the whole story could be an April Fool hoax.”
Lo and behold, chronicled in an article he wrote a couple of years later, the article was ACTUALLY TAKEN AS FACT by the fandom community. Paul painfully recollected how one guy kept calling Dreamworks asking for a release date and the times he overheard at conventions, people taking about the movie and how he had to prove them wrong and claim responsibility for starting it all…and some of them STILL wouldn’t believe him!
So there’s the whole story. Whenever the REAL Lantern movie will be good remains to be seen. It just would have been cool to hear what Paul would have thought about it all.
…And it would have been cool to have Denis Leary play Guy Gardener….
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