Signed Books: THE MELANCHOLY DEATH OF OYSTER BOY & OTHER STORIES by Tim Burton

 

This edition of The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories was published in the UK in 1998 in a superior, cloth-bound, limited-signed-and-numbered edition, complete with slip-case. I can't remember how much it cost, but – suffice it to say – it wasn't cheap. But as a committed fan of that wild genius, Tim Burton, I had to own it! 

 

The story of Oyster Boy is a curious and tragic little tale and – together with the other characters and episodes in this dark little volume – feels like an unholy child of those two masters of mournful histories: Edward Lear and Edward Gorey... 

I've had a number of encounters with Tim Burton over the years: interviewing him on the release of several of his films, including Batman, Mars Attacks, Ed Wood and Alice in Wonderland (as well as being the unheard 'prompter' for his audio commentary on The Nightmare Before Christmas) and, as a result, a number of signed items have accrued from those meetings. 

When Sleepy Hollow had its UK release in 1999, I interviewed him about the film at London's Dorchester Hotel and took Oyster Boy along with me, hoping that I might be able to get my already signed copy 'upgraded' with a personal inscription. The conversation went like this...

 

SIBLEY: This is a really easy autograph request –– you’ve already signed the book, so all I’m asking is whether you’d be kind enough to add a personal dedication.

 

BURTON: Well, since I’m saving on the ink I’d have used to write ‘Tim Burton’, I’ll use it to do you a little drawing!

CARROLL-SINGING

Move over Tim! Let's have a look at another Burton - two other Burtons in fact - in a rather more conventional Wonderland.

In 1983, Richard and daughter, Kate (by first wife Sybil Williams) appeared together in an American TV version of Alice in Wonderland based on actress Eva Le Gallienne's celebrated Broadway adaptation of 1932, to which - for a time - Walt Disney acquired the film rights. That's Miss La Gallienne, on the right, as the White Queen in the original production.

Of course, the White Knight, is not a true Wonderlander, but an escapee from Looking-glass World, although as far as dramatists and filmmakers are concerned, Lewis Carroll's two books are pretty much interchangeable and invariably amalgamated!

Never mind, we never had many opportunities to enjoy Richard Burton singing (outside his Broadway cast recording of Camelot) so this performance of 'The White Knight's Song' about the "Aged, Aged Man A-sitting on a Gate" is a true rarity.

The music for that production was by Richard Addinsell who composed numerous film scores including Fire Over England, Goodbye Mr Chips, Gaslight, Blithe Spirit, Scrooge, The Prince and the Show Girl and, most famously, Dangerous Moonlight for which he wrote the 'Warsaw Concerto'. He also collaborated with Joyce Grenfell on a number of revues and one-woman shows. The lyrics, of course, are Lewis Carroll's "own invention".

Anyway, this is just an excuse to share another Carrollian rendition that is one of my personal favourites. From Jonathan Miller's haunting black and white BBC 'Wednesday Play' adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, first televised in 1966.


All the characters (including the animals) were portrayed as eccentric Victorians and the cast for a Brit TV show, was phenomenal: Peter Sellers as the King of Hearts, Michael Gough as the March Hare, Peter Cook as the Hatter, Leo McKern as the Duchess, and Michael Redgrave as the Caterpillar among others.

The film was filled with moments of inspired brilliance, of which the most memorable was 'The Lobster Quadrille', filmed along Pett Level on the Sussex coast with popular journalist and TV pundit of the time, Malcolm Muggeridge, as the Gryphon and John Gielgud as the Mock Turtle.

This YouTube clip is taken from the 'menu' of the DVD version, so you'll have to ignore the 'buttons' at the bottom of the screen, but the absurdity and poignancy of these two old men dancing among the rock pools, silhouetted against the wide vista of sunlit sea and heaped-up cloud is, I think, bliss...

You'll find some more pictures and another clip here.

Please note the Richard Burton Alice in Wonderland
advertised above is a Region 1 DVD only.

QUEEN BEE

One of the interesting things about Tim Burton's take on Lewis Carroll's Alice is the decision to rename Wonderland's monarch, the Queen of Hearts, as the Red Queen (an identity formerly belonging to the far-less violent ruler of Looking-glass World).

In the process she has acquired a new 'look', as can be seen from this comparison of John Tenniel's original illustration in the first edition of the book, Walt Disney's clearly derivative depiction from his 1951 animated feature and Helena Bonham-Carter as she appears in Burton's film...

As a film aficionado, I couldn't help feeling I had seen a similar-looking queen somewhere before...

The clue was in the name bestowed on the film character, Iracabeth! Where could that have come from but a Humpty Dumpty-type portmanteau-word combining 'irascible' with 'Elizabeth' That's when I realised where I'd previously seen this regal personage - she was none other than Miss Bette Davis as the Virgin Queen in the 1939 film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex...

Don't you think so?

Anyway, it's a good excuse to play you the film's trailer hilariously heavy with hyperbole and laced with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's sumptuous score.

Yep! That's how to tell history!

ALICE IN WONDERINGLAND

For several days, last week, it was a case of "Will you, Won't you, Will you, Won't you, Will you" be able to see Disney's release of Tim Burton's film, Alice in Wonderland, in 3D at an Odeon cinema near you.

The dispute raged over Disney's intention to reduce the time between the film's release and its being issued on DVD from the conventional 17 weeks to a mere 12 weeks. For the cinema chains, who have been investing millions in new projection equipment to screen 3D films, this was unacceptable because films with huge appeal that might play longer in theatres would be threatened by early 'Coming soon on DVD' posters.

Disney, like other studios, are aware that DVD sales fell last year by 10% and want to rejuvenate the home entertainment part of their business (up until now the most lucrative) by getting DVDs of films out into the marketplace while there is still public awareness of titles and in the (probably vain) hope of preventing some of the piracy currently eating into their revenue.

The face-off was dramatic and although finally resolved (on terms that neither party are willing to divulge) it has, ultimately, probably only succeeded in boosting the already considerable hype about the latest Burton movie!


Tim Burton's revisionist take on Britain's seminal children's classic is the latest in a LONG line of interpretations (rarely beautiful, often bizarre, sometimes beastly and frequently bland) that demonstrate just how swiftly and completely Carroll's unorthodox Victorian imagination touched a universal consciousness. Alice, her dream-world, the characters she met there and the conversations she had quickly became - and have remained - part of international popular culture.

The first film version, silent and running for 8 minutes, was made in 1903 - just five years after Carroll's death - by British film pioneer, Cecil Hepworth...

Walt Disney had a long fascination with Carroll's book and one of his earliest (pre-Mickey Mouse) series was 'Alice in Cartoonland', featuring a live-action child in an animated world. None of the familiar Carroll characters appeared but the fact that the pilot for the series was entitled Alice's Wonderland tells you the source of Disney's inspiration.

As soon as the possibility of making animated features became a reality, Disney was itching to put Alice on film and would have done so sooner had he not been pipped to the post in 1933 by Paramount Pictures who produced the first of a long-line of star-laden Alices. Tim Burton - as I hardly need remind you - has a cast led by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Anne Hathaway, Matt Lucas, Michael Sheen and Sir Christopher Lee. Back in 1933, Paramount trotted out W C Fields, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Edward Everett Horton, Edna May Oliver and a dozen others.

Disney bided his time and, in 1936, made-do with a Carroll-inspired Mickey Mouse short called Thru the Mirror...

Eventually, in 1951, Disney got to take us on that full-length animated expedition he'd been envisaging for two decades.

Here's the trailer...

Walt's excursion into Wonderland wasn't the success he had hoped for: perhaps because it lacked the sentimental, romantic appeal of the studio's established line in Prince-and-Princess fairy-tales and because it outraged purists critics - especially in the UK.

Now, in a more culturally-tolerant era, Disney is back in a Wonderland of sorts in company with Mr Burton, cinema's tirelessly inventive enfant terrible...

So, what are we to make of this film which opens today?

Well, first it has to be said - probably sooner rather than later - that this is not Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, or a version of it, or a sequel to it. It is a Burtonesque phantasmagoria that trips the dark fantastic in the way only Mr B can do!

The names of many of characters are the same or similar to the well-known denizens of Wonderland and Looking-glass-world, but they are their own selves and the Alice who blunders into their realm is, some of the residents think, the Wrong Alice!

In fact, things are even topsy-turvyier than when Carroll pitched the first Alice down the rabbit-hole 145 years ago, since the place itself turns out to be not Wonderland but Underland!

Once all that is understood, you'll have no trouble with the Queen of Hearts morphing with the Red Queen and being at war with the White Queen or the story's New Alice (aged 19), clad in white armour, riding forth like Joan of Arc to slay the Jabberwocky (sic) with the vorpal sword that the Red Queen has kept locked in the courtyard kennel of the Bandersnatch...

I could go on, but you get the drift and any further revelations can only spoil the surprises!

However, you can hear more of my thoughts on the new Alice on BBC Radio 2's Arts Show tonight at around 10:30 pm, when presenter, Claudia Winkleman, will be playing an interview I had with Tim Burton and, afterwards, talking with me about the film

And, if you miss it you can catch the broadcast for the next seven days on BBC iPlayer.

TRICKSY TREATS

And here, courtesy of Tim Burton, are Jack Skellington's friends and compatriots to wish you all...

A HORRIBLY HAPPY HALLOWE'EN!

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD LAND

At last (or, 'already', depending how you look at it) we have our first animated - as opposed to still life - peep into Tim Burton's Wonderland...



Well, it's certainly suitably Burtonesque, but it's probably just as well - all things considered - that Mr Dodgson is not still with us...

ALICE IN BURTONLAND

When Walt Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland, was first released in 1951, the film critics in Alice's homeland gave it a pretty hostile reception.

How times have changed!

Fifty-eight years on, the British press are enthusiastically greeting the early press releases and photos from Disney's latest foray into Lewis Carroll's nonsense realm with Hollywood's resident enfant terrible (though he's hardly an enfant any more), Tim Burton as tour guide.

Of course, unlike Walt and his 'fifties artists and story men who attempted to follow the Carroll text while giving it Disney-appeal, Burton - aided and abetted by screenwriter Linda Woolverton (who penned the scripts for Disney's animated features Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Mulan) and, naturally, his joined-at-the-hip composer Danny Elfman - are using the original as an inspiration for what probably ought to be called Alice's NEW Adventures in Wonderland.

The premise is that Alice (now aged 17) revisits the dreamworld of topsy-turvydom where she find that she is not the only one who has changed during the years since her last excursion...

Anyone familiar with the look of such previous Burton films as Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and, most recently, Sweeney Todd, will not be phased at the brooding, gothicky settings depicted in the artwork which has gone on show...

Click on images to go to my flickr album for the option to view at a larger size

As for the cast, there are some predictable presences notably Burton's leading leading man, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter - and judging by the eye make-up that is even more excessive than Jack Sparrow's - mad certainly seems to be the word...

Nice liquorice All-Sorts bow tie, though...

Burton's real life leading-lady, Helena Bonham Carter appear (despite the accompanying heart motif) as The Red Queen, who seems to be a cross between the strict-but-benign Looking-glass monarch and Wonderland's blood-thirsty despot, the Queen of Hearts, resulting in a somewhat pinker version of the Wicked Witch of the West...

Maybe the taste for butchery that she picked up in Mrs Lovett's pie shop has equipped her for all those essential beheadings...

Other players who have been shown in costume include Anne (The Princess Diaries) Hathaway as Glinda the Good --- sorry! The White Queen...

And Little Britain's Matt Lucas is doubling-up as Tweedledum and Tweedledee...

It is pretty much de rigueur that every Alice-in-Wonderland has to be played by an actress who has been selected after a long, world-wide search that is the casting office's equivalent of the Quest for Holy Grail. In her latest incarnation she is portrayed by (if the picture is to be believed) a very small Mia Wasikowska, who comes from Australia or, as Alice once said, the "Antipathies"...

Yet to be revealed are the likenesses of the ubiquitous Michael Sheen as the White Rabbit (Brian Clough via David Frost and Tony Blair out of Kenneth Williams? Yes, I can, sort of, imagine that) and Alan Rickman (last seen chewing the scenery as Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd) as the Caterpillar that, despite the passage of time, seems to have avoided turning into a butterfly.

Then there's the newly elevated Sir Christopher Lee to look forward to as he comes whiffling through the Tulgey Wood as the Jabberwock - will he, I wonder, be sporting even longer fangs than those he used to bare as D******?

And it might also be fun to watch the omnipresent Stephen Fry in his feline persona as the Cheshire Cat disappearing - momentarily at least - from sight!

However, we've got to contain our enthusiasm - or, as the case may be, our skepticism - for over nine months until 5 March 2010, when the film opens. In the meanwhile, you can visit the official website and, by clicking on the price-tag attached to the Hatter's topper, you can register for updates...

There's a lot more Burton-Alice news, gossip and some additional pix to be found on Tim Burton Collective News.

Images uploaded via flickr.

And my thanks to Good Dog for the heads-up (as opposed to the heads-off) on this fascinating farago...