Steve SANTA and the Alchemist Berrichonne

I hit the firing button for the 2 starboard missiles. The aircraft lurched as they leapt out in their pods. I stuck a short-term flash because the Griffins exited the tubes and ignited their rocket propellant He has also discovered a secret concerning every movie ever made which becomes part of his obsession. All the while, Hollywood itself undergoes convulsive changes as the studio system crumbles under its own weight. Vikar attempts, in his own way, to make some connections with those who come into his life including the young daughter of a struggling actress.

Zeroville is a poignant, disquieting and brilliant novel. Despite a very heavy schedule, Erickson kindly agreed to answer a few questions about Zeroville for TEV.

Well, the novel opens with Vikar arriving in L. His obsession is so strong that he wears it, he makes it part of himself.

Vikar is particularly drawn to movies that are deeply irrational — Vertigo, Humoresque, Written on the Wind , the Japanese Blind Beast and Branded to Kill , bonkers westerns like Johnny Guitar and Forty Guns — and I was struck by how the filmmakers who became part of the New Hollywood in the Seventies set out originally to be priests or philosophers, like Malick and Scorsese, or came out of highly religious, repressive childhoods, like Paul Schrader. When Vikar is a young divinity student studying to become an architect, he designs a model that his teachers suppose to be a church, never suspecting that inside the model, in the place where an altar should be, Vikar has put a small movie screen.

Finally he discovers a secret hidden among the frames of every movie ever made. Your novel begins in , when the film industry was gong through dramatic structural and artistic changes. With the collapse of the studio system, how have films improved? How have they suffered?

1. Emery BORKA's Friends!
2. THE DATING ADVENTURES OF CRAZY LARRY.
3. Fidel Castro (Critical Lives).
4. The Cheyenne Bride (A Western Romance)!

This novel is about loving movies. On the other hand, the anarchy of the business in the Seventies is the backdrop against which Vikar operates. Of course in the end the studios might have collapsed creatively, but not as business enterprises. A film like The Godfather was a synthesis of the Old Hollywood and the New, and then with the advent of the summer blockbuster, courtesy of Jaws and Star Wars , the studios reclaimed their preeminence. To a certain extent the studios reinvented themselves as less movie factories and more distribution houses, largely because the movie business became highly corporatized like other businesses, including, I might add, the book publishing business.

A studio like Paramount that made The Godfather and a publishing house like Simon and Schuster, which has published several of my books winds up owned by Gulf and Western. What they cared about was the profitability of movies. Obviously studios always have cared about making money but in the Thirties and Forties even Louis B. Thirty years ago, Star Wars was inspiring toys.

Vikar develops a parental bond with Zazi, the young daughter of Soledad Palladin, a beautiful but struggling actress. Indeed, his compassion for Zazi far exceeds anything he feels for anyone else. This theme seemed to culminate in the last novel, Our Ecstatic Days , where a lake appears in the middle of L.

Vikar learns how to edit films at the elbow of Dorothy Langer, a boozy but accomplished editor. Can a film succeed in storytelling if continuity is abandoned? On a purely nuts-and-bolts basis, not even getting into it conceptually, continuity is one of those things that filmmakers preoccupy themselves with scene by scene, even as the scenes of a movie are shot entirely out of sequence. When the cars chase each other into a tunnel in one scene, do they come out of the same tunnel in the next, or any tunnel at all?

There can be a continuity in narrative logic without necessarily a linearity in plot, and given its imagistic nature the movies is a medium that just naturally raises questions about these things. You weave into your plot scores of references to movies including specific references to particular scenes, history, actors, directors and editors. I also wanted to write about the "adventures" I had experienced.

Retiring gave me the time needed to concentrate my efforts on what and how I was going to write.

Review of “The Charlemagne Pursuit”…

I also read a lot. I devoured "Harry Potter" as each book came out some in French and some in English. I consider these two authors to be my spiritual God Mother and God Father for my authoring activities. I hope these few lines have given you an insight into what you can find in my novels. Below, you can click the cover of a novel to read a detailed summary of the book. However, Steve does resemble me in some vague way. Three years in the east of France, then honorable discharge and off to Nijmegen Holland for four years as manager of the Friden Technical Writing Department.

Then I started my own communications company in and ran it until retiring in The desire, the urge or even the need to write came early in my traveling life. Living in Holland, I already felt the desire to write about what I had learned about Europe and in particular, France and the French people. I also wanted to write about the "adventures" I had experienced.

Retiring gave me the time needed to concentrate my efforts on what and how I was going to write. I also read a lot. I devoured "Harry Potter" as each book came out some in French and some in English.