Paradise Tales Read Free

story, as far as I could push it, checked out.
    My best-selling book—I mean, the book that sold the most copies though it remained well below the Borders threshold of perception—was called A History of Special Effects .
    If the film was a fake, I knew all the people who could have done the work. There are only about forty companies in the entire world who could have animated the Tharks. I wrote to all of them, and visited the five or six people who were personal friends. I told them what I’d seen.
    There had been at least two serious attempts to make an ERB Mars movie in the ’80s. Had anybody done a particularly fine test reel?
    Twice I thought I’d found it. Old Yolanda out at Pixar, a real pioneer now doing backgrounds, she told me that she’d been on board a John Carter of Mars project. She still had some of the production design sketches. We had a nice dinner at her place. I saw the sketches. The princesses all wore clothes. The clothes showed off their lovely and entirely human legs.
    I visited Yong, a Thai animator who now worked for Lucas. I told him what I’d seen.
    “I know, I heard,” said Yong. He’d done some work on a Burroughs project in the ’90s. “Look, you know that only us and a couple of other companies are that good. And if it wasn’t that good, somebody like you, you’d spot it straight away.” He nodded and chuckled. “It’s gotta be a publicity stunt for a new movie.”
    “Well whoever did it, they’re hot. This stuff was the finest FX I’ve ever seen. But the weird thing was the whole style, you know, of the titles? That was all perfect for a silent movie.”
    Yong chuckled. “I gotta see this. It sounds good. Really, really good.”
    I went home and took out some of my old scripts. Those would have made perfect little films. Only they didn’t.
    One was about a mother whose son and his boyfriend both had AIDS. She gets over it by counseling the boyfriend’s mother, an evangelical. Would have been a great two-hander for Streep and MacLaine. Way ahead of its time. I had the delight of seeing it starring Sallie Anne Field, made for TV. Somebody at the agency just ripped it off.
    Another was a crisscross Altman thing about race in LA. Sound familiar? The script is just dust on a shelf now.
    One of my best isn’t even dust. It was a new take on the Old South. Now it’s just iron molecules on a scrambled hard drive. Always do your backups. That script now is as far away as Burroughs’s Mars.
    At twelve I was an ERB fan. I still had some of my old books, and got one down from the shelf. It was the Ace edition with the Frank Frazetta cover.
    I’d forgotten that Burroughs himself is a character in the book. He says he knew John Carter, a kind of uncle. His uncle disappeared just after the Civil War and returned. He stood outside in the dark, arms outstretched toward the stars. And insisted that he be buried in a crypt that could be opened only from the inside.
    Something else. John Carter never got older. He could not remember being a child, but he could remember serving kings and emperors. And that was why, somehow, he could waft in spirit to Somewhere Else, Barsoom, which even if it was some kind of Mars, did not have to be our Mars.
    I got a call from John Doe Appropriate. “There’s been some more film show up,” he said. He sounded like someone had kicked him in the stomach. “In the mail. It’s … it’s in color.”
    Even he knew they had no color in 1911.
    “Can I say that I’m not surprised?” He didn’t reply. “I’m coming over,” I said.
    When he opened the door, he looked even worse than he sounded. He had a line of gray down the middle of his cheeks, and the flesh under his eyes was dark. When he spoke, it sounded like slowed-down film. “There’s somebody here,” he said, and left the door wide open behind him.
    Someone was sitting with his back to us, watching a video. On the screen, a cushioned landscape extended to a surprisingly close horizon.