u/Crazy-Old-Stories

A biography of Fleming was being published that fall, so Life started running an abridgement. Even the abridgement is too long to post here, so here are the twelve most interesting excerpts:

1. After Fleming’s father was killed in World War I, his will left Fleming’s mother unusually sweeping financial control over her children—enough  to disinherit any of them.

Valentine Fleming, a fond father, was particularly attached to his second son and usually found time to write him a postcard from France. The last one arrived at the end of the Easter holidays in 1917. On May 20, Major Fleming was killed in action. He received a posthumous D.S.O. and left a gross estate of £265,596, then worth about $1.3 million. He also gave his widow sweeping powers to alter the terms of the will with respect to the children—in effect, she could disinherit any of them if she liked.

1. At Eton, Fleming was overshadowed by his older brother Peter, so he stopped trying to compete and deliberately made eccentricity and individuality his way of standing out.

At Eton, Ian was inevitably outclassed and outdistanced by Peter. Ian solved the impasse in the only way he could: he no longer competed. And since he could not win success as a respectable and hard-working member of his house, he found other ways of achieving distinction. One was to concentrate on being an individual—a bit of a dandy, a bit of an eccentric. Rupert Hart-Davis, the publisher, remembers him as “something of a swell, walking down late for a breakfast of buttered eggs.” He was admired for his wit and for his caustic turn of phrase, but he liked to spend at least part of the day alone. He was popular, but most people were a little wary of him. It probably suited him that way.

1. Fleming started writing during the “golden time” at Kitzbühel in Austria

Undoubtedly Ian would have come to terms with a lot of the difficulties in his own time; but as it was, the most important thing Ernan Forbes Dennis and Phyllis Bottome did for him was to supply aim and direction. For the first time in his life he really began to read—social history, anthropology and the history of science and technology. Encouraged by Phyllis Bottome, he wrote an imaginative short story—Death, on Two Occasions. Years later, when he was ill and famous, he wrote a letter in which he referred to those early days at Kitzbühel as “that golden time when the sun always shone.” He loved the Tyrol, the skiing, the climbing, the freedom. And the girls.

1. Kitzbühel was a turning point in Fleming’s attitude toward women (which is a big part of the Bond books)

The English girls Fleming had known up to then seem to have been either prudish or mercenary, boring or a source of trouble, and his frequently expressed objections to Englishwomen—that they never wash and have no idea of how to make love properly—already seem to have been born. It was all so different in Kitzbühel: no mothers to worry about, no moral codes to outrage. He looked at the girls and they fell into his lap. One of the women who knew him then says, “He was quite ruthless about girls, or perhaps a more apt word is absent-minded. Women were all a bit of a joke for Ian, a treat to enjoy but not to make any sort of fuss about afterwards.”

1. As a young Reuters reporter in 1933, Fleming was sent to Moscow to cover the Soviet trial of six British engineers accused of espionage and “wrecking”

He stayed on with his mother in London, and through her finally got a job. Sir Roderick Jones, head of the Reuters news agency, agreed to see him, liked the look of him and offered him a trial as a reporter. Fleming was lucky; after a year of routine work he was sent to Moscow to cover the trial of six British engineers who had been arrested by the Soviet secret police in March 1933 on charges of espionage and wrecking. An inexperienced reporter, Fleming was up against formidably expert competition. But in the final days before the trial opened, with the rumors exhausted and hard facts still untapped, he demonstrated the advantage of an ingenious imagination. He began a fill-in story with the knowledgeable line, “When the big hands of Moscow’s 300 electric clocks reach the hour of six. . . .”

“How do you know there are 300?” asked another reporter.

“How do you know there aren’t?” said Fleming.

1. Before World War II, Fleming was already recording ideas about boredom, sex and the need for ever-stronger stimulation that became part of the James Bond formula

In the years just before World War II, he began to talk of “that awful boredom,” and he echoed this in Casino Royale: “The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored [James Bond] almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement.” Fleming wrote in one of his notebooks, “What happens is that, as with drugs, [a man] needs a stronger shot each time, and women are just women. The consumption of one woman is the consumption of all. You can’t double the dose.”

1. Fleming entered British Naval Intelligence in 1939 almost by chance

In May 1939 Fleming was invited to luncheon in London’s Carlton Grill by Rear Admiral John Godfrey, a man he had never met. Godfrey had been appointed Director of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, and he needed a personal assistant. A previous director, whose assistant had once been a stockbroker, told Godfrey he ought to look for a stockbroker too. Somehow Fleming was recommended.

At luncheon, Godfrey was impressed, for at 31 Ian Fleming was a striking young man. In addition to charm, vitality and a sense of adventure, he had acquired a certain confidence and an air of authority. But Godfrey wanted a chance to see him at work, and during July 1939, Fleming began visiting the Admiralty three or four afternoons a week. “Within a month,” says Godfrey, “he had a better all-round picture of the N.I.D. [Naval Intelligence Division] and its place in the Admiralty than most of the people who had been there for years.”

In July 1939 Ian was made a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and by the time war was declared on Sept. 3 he had created a place for himself, even though he had a total lack of awe for admirals, generals and air marshals.

1. Fleming became notorious for schemes that sounded half like future Bond plots

In the winter of 1939-40 London was full of secret organizations. The geniuses and crackpots were getting their chance at last: even First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had pet plans which left fiction far behind. The fantasist in Fleming fed on the contacts between Naval Intelligence and the cloak-and-dagger world of Special Operations Executive, an organization set up to carry out irregular operations such as parachuting men and weapons to resistance movements.

“A lot of Ian’s ideas,” says Admiral Denning, “were just plain crazy. . . . But a lot of them had just that glimmer of possibility in them. . . . Just before the Dieppe raid [in August 1942] he had the idea of sinking a great block of concrete with men inside it in the English Channel to keep watch on the harbor through periscopes. We never did it, of course, but it might have worked.”

He also evolved a scheme to taunt the enemy fleet into giving battle by beaming a torrent of insults to the German navy’s wavelength from a British cruiser. It had to be dropped because no cruiser with a sufficiently powerful transmitter was available.

In 1941 Fleming became aware of a certain Nazi, Otto Skorzeny, who two years later was to carry out the daring aerial rescue of Mussolini and later was to become the inspiration for Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker. Studying the loss of the island of Crete to airborne German troops, Fleming sensed that Skorzeny and his group had been given a special role. Although they landed in the first wave, they had taken no part in the main fighting. It seemed to Fleming that their job was to grab British secret material: maps, divisional orders, codes and equipment. They were the first Intelligence Commandos, and Fleming was convinced this was an idea which N.I.D. could copy.

The result was what became known as No. 30 Assault Unit—or, as Fleming liked to say, “my Red Indians.”

1. Fleming trained in sabotage, safe-blowing, lock-picking—but could not bring himself to pull the trigger during an assassination test

The school at Oshawa [Canada] provided Fleming with a lot of tricks which he was to pass on to James Bond. Yet, despite Fleming’s success, none of his instructors seemed to think that he would have made a satisfactory agent in the field.

“Look what happened at the end of the course,” Stephenson says. “We used to book this instructor a room in a cheap downtown hotel in Toronto. Then we’d give the trainee the name of this hotel and the room number and say that the man staying there was a dangerous enemy agent who had to be destroyed. We’d try to pressure him into thinking that it was a genuine killing. Now, one of the tricks this instructor had picked up was the ability to dodge a bullet—a sort of circus trick. If you fired at him from five yards he knew how to divert you sufficiently for the shot to go wide. Well, after the success Ian had been having on the course we were all interested to know what would happen, and I briefed him myself. I made sure his gun was loaded. I told him that the games were over now and this was serious. ‘Open that door, draw fast and shoot straight,’ I told him. Several of us were at the hotel watching when Ian arrived. He got as far as the landing, and then there he waited a long time. Then he went away. He apologized about it. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I just couldn’t open that door. I couldn’t kill a man that way.’”

In real life Fleming liked to imagine that he had killed someone in the line of duty. To one friend he confided that the killing had been done with a sandbag. To another he hinted that he had performed the terrible deed by firing a small automatic. . . . Still another friend is convinced Ian slugged an agent of the wartime Vichy government in France and tipped him into the Marseilles harbor.

1. He indirectly helped come up with the OSS (predecessor of the CIA)

In June 1941 Fleming came nearest to living the life of high adventure he had always dreamed of. With Admiral Godfrey he made a top-secret trip to the U.S. to attempt to establish closer relations with American intelligence—a delicate matter, since the U.S. was not yet at war.

In Washington J. Edgar Hoover was uninterested in the Godfrey-Fleming mission; he already had his channels with the Canadian millionaire Sir William Stephenson, who represented British intelligence in the U.S. But in New York Stephenson received the admiral and the commander; Fleming immediately became a hero-worshiper of “Little Bill,” who opened up a whole new world to him. Stephenson was a master of the technology of subversion.

Back in Washington, Fleming disappeared for a couple of days, and when he finally returned to London he took with him a present from General “Wild Bill” Donovan, whom President Roosevelt had decided to appoint “Coordinator of Information.” It was a .38 Police Positive Colt revolver with the inscription, “For Special Services.” After the war Fleming would occasionally tell his friends that it was given to him by the father of the American Secret Service, without divulging what the “special services” were. But in a letter written a few years before he died, Fleming did say that he had spent some time in Donovan’s Washington home “writing the original charter” of the Office of Strategic Services.

1. The baccarat showdown in Casino Royale was inspired by a stopover in Lisbon.

During the stopover in Lisbon, Fleming played out the scene which was to grow in his imagination for 11 years until it formed the plot of his first book, Casino Royale.

Fleming himself has described how he got the idea of James Bond’s baccarat battle with Le Chiffre from a game he himself played in deadly earnest against a group of Nazis. However the reality seems to have been different. At the Lisbon gaming tables, Fleming did whisper to Admiral Godfrey, “Just suppose that those fellows over there are German agents!” But only a handful of Portuguese were present, the croupiers were bored, and Fleming played a long, unsuccessful game until he was cleaned out.

1. He microfilmed Japanese codeooks – another thing that got into Casino Royale in altered form

Stephenson even showed Fleming a little action and, while in Casino Royale, Fleming described the two missions which had earned his hero his double-O classification—a license to kill—one of them was the shooting of a Japanese cipher expert in New York. The death of the Japanese was a highly exaggerated account of an adventure in which Fleming took part with Stephenson. There was not a killing, but there was a Japanese cipher expert, in a Rockefeller Center office one floor below Stephenson’s. At 3 a.m. Fleming, Stephenson and two assistants “borrowed” the Japanese code books from the office safe and in no time at all got the code books microfilmed upstairs and returned to their exact place. To Stephenson it was a straightforward operation, to Fleming a great and gleeful adventure.

Batman Conquers America

On store counters: Batman shirts for men, Batman soap, cologne, shaving cream, socks, gloves... In the children's departments: Batman masks, capes, little trousers. In the large department stores there are special sections called “Batman merchandise.” Here you can find everything, right down to floor lamps bearing pictures of Batman and his assistant and constant companion, Robin. The counters of bookstores are being hit by wave after wave of Batman “literature”—comic books, adventure novels in the Batman series, and so on.

Who is Batman, the “bat-man” [человек-летучая мышь]? How did his career begin, already overshadowing the dizzying exploits of James Bond, that super-elegant super-killer [сверхэлегантный суперубийца]?

Batman and Robin look like this: they wear tights, capes, and masks. They have certain “flying,” webbed contraptions attached to their arms, making them resemble large bats. They have devoted themselves to pursuing, exposing, and capturing criminals. They are these supposedly [Этакие] idealized FBI types, a modern edition of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

They move with lightning speed, paying no attention to any obstacles in their super-speed machine—the Batmobile.

The “Batman Program” was first broadcast on television on January 12, 1966, and has been broadcast weekly ever since, increasingly captivating the minds of millions of children, teenagers, and mentally stunted adults [недоразвитых взрослых]. The figures reported in the American press inspire both horror and bewilderment. Forty million Americans—men, women, and children, according to the New York Times—eagerly follow Batman's adventures.

The production of “Batman merchandise” had already brought in millions in profits during the first months of the current year. Businessmen, rubbing their hands together, calculated that in 1966 they would reap a harvest of 75–80 million dollars from their stupefied fellow citizens.

Ninety companies are already engaged in producing “Batman merchandise” for adults and children. As the Saturday Evening Post remarked—an old hand that has seen plenty, but never anything like this []—“a climate of stupidity produces winds of idiocy.” [климат глупости порождает ветры идиотизма] These are no longer mere winds, but gales, samums, and tornadoes of idiocy, sweeping across the country.

When, in March of this year, television interrupted the Batman program to broadcast the announcement of the successful splashdown of astronauts Armstrong and Scott, more than five thousand people called the broadcasting corporation, furious that they had been distracted from Batman by some trivial matter.

Batman-mania, raging like a plague through American schools beginning with the very first grade, is already producing alarming results. Many teachers are sounding the alarm. Children's games have become strangely brutal. Asked, “Why are you fighting like that?” a child answers, “I'm acting like Batman.” All sorts of ugly behavior are excused with the words: “I'm like Batman. Batman can do anything.” Children are becoming indifferent to the pain of their companions, to the death of those close to them. They are Batmen.

One teacher tells how his pupils reacted to an accident in the street. A car hit a motorcyclist. The children looked indifferently at the man lying there covered in blood.

“Somebody got himself killed,” one boy commented.

No one was upset; no one cried. Everything was normal: somebody had gotten killed. Isn't that how Batman behaves? And don't the fathers of these children cry over corpses in Vietnam?

At one school, a teacher rushed to separate a couple of boys who had gotten into a fight. One of them lost consciousness from the blows he had received. The other children, who had been watching the fight and could clearly see that one of the opponents was unconscious, asked indignantly:

“Why did you spoil our fun? It was just like Batman.”

“But can't you see that Dick is sick? He's covered with bruises and contusions, and he'll have to be sent to the hospital!” the teacher exclaimed desperately.

The children stared at him with puzzled, cold, empty eyes. They did not understand. They were annoyed: their entertainment had been interrupted. It had been almost as interesting as it was on television...

One swallow does not make a spring [Одна ласточка не делает весны], just as one bat does not make a night. But Batman, spread across millions of television screens and thousands of store counters, makes the spiritual night hanging over America even darker.

A. Baranova

It's a Strange World, Isn't It

Blue Velvet

by Richard Corliss

“Things got a little out of hand,” nice young Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) tells his nice young friend Sandy (Laura Dern). Well, yes. Walking through the woods of peaceful Lumberton, Jeffrey found a severed human ear crawling with ants. The ear belonged to a man who, with his son, had been kidnaped by Frank (Dennis Hopper), a sicko on a helium high. Frank was blackmailing the man’s wife Dorothy (Isabella Rossellini), and hiding in Dorothy’s closet, Jeffrey watched Frank work his awful sexual will on her. When Dorothy discovered Jeffrey, she took him to bed. “Hurt me,” she said. “No, I want to help you” — but he soon enough acceded to her masochistic desires. Then Frank taught Jeffrey a lesson. He smeared lipstick on his own face, kissed Jeffrey hard on the mouth and beat him senseless. Sandy responds to such revelations like a child at the end of a nightmare fairy tale: “It’s a strange world, isn’t it.”

Strange and repellent and seductive — a world of power plays in which everybody’s somebody’s victim. Sandy is attracted to Jeffrey’s quiet intensity. Jeffrey is beguiled by Dorothy’s mystery, her dangerous demands. To keep her family alive, Dorothy must surrender to Frank’s depraved games. But even Frank is in the thrall of Ben (Dean Stockwell), an epicene drug dealer, who in turn is subject to the political power of a heavyset enigma in a yellow jacket. On that stroll in the woods, Jeffrey fell down the rabbit hole and found an inverted pyramid of moral monstrosity. “I am seeing something that was always hidden,” he says. Now he can’t take his eyes off it.

The plot alone would be enough to earn Blue Velvet this year’s Authentic Weirdie prize. But wait, there’s more. Writer-Director Lynch (Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune) has stocked his movie with artifacts from every decade of postwar America; it could be taking place now, then or never. Emotionally, the picture comes from outer space. Instead of seducing the audience, the characters are picture-book flat. Only the images are deep and dense. The friendly loggers of Lumberton wave at the camera; Frank screams an obscenity and poof! disappears; a corpse is bound and bowed like a Kienholz sculpture; the climactic gun battle takes just a few shorthand strokes. The acting styles collide fiercely too. MacLachlan and Dern have an innocents-in-hell sweetness; Stockwell does a preening Percy Dovetonsils number; Rossellini is a madwoman with all stops out; Hopper tops her, with maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history.

All of which is to say that Blue Velvet is in no sense a realistic film. It is not modernist camp either. Lynch believes every bit as much in the redemptive power of teen love — with families miraculously restored and two kids kissing to the crooning of a wedding-chapel organ — as he does in the force of evil. He and his film will surely be reviled, but as an experiment in expanding cinema’s dramatic and technical vocabulary, Blue Velvet demands respect.

China Seizure

Shanghai Surprise

Richard Corliss

Right now she is the world’s most popular chanteuse. Her album True Blue quickly went triple platinum; her Papa Don’t Preach single did time at No. 1. In her new movie she co-stars with Husband Sean Penn, that terrific actor and legendary cutup. Last winter, when the newlyweds made the film, they also made headlines on every tabloid front page. There would seem to be a bit of “want see” here. And yet MGM, the distributor of Shanghai Surprise, has drop-kicked it into the marketplace like a turkey carcass.

Hard to see why. The film is no winner but no atrocity either. We are in Shanghai, 1938. Warlords and China dolls are bumping into faded carbon copies of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. That must make Penn the Bogart figure — a hustler and self-styled “Glow-in-the-Dark-Tie King” who helps a prim but spunky missionary (yep, Madonna) find 1,000 lbs. of opium to help soothe the wounds of Chinese soldiers. “Guns cause pain,” she says fervently. “Opium eases pain.”

Like another doomed (and much more enjoyable) summer movie, Prince’s Under the Cherry Moon, this one attempts to fit a very modern one-name pop superstar into a traditional, golden-age Hollywood format. And why not? Who else has that old-time charisma? Only the bad boy and material girl of rock ‘n’ roll. With Prince it worked, mostly, because his blend of Little Richard and Little Egypt spiced the stew. But Madonna seems straitjacketed by her role, and Penn, for once, looks bored. She smiles, he glowers. Neither glows like the incandescent movie stars they can and will be. R.C.

Deep Throat was the porn movie that kind of became a fashionable thing to go see, so it was showing much more widely than most porn and raking in a huge pile of money. That money went to the producers and the actors were just paid 250 dollars (Linda Lovelace had a special deal for 1,250 dollars).

Federal prosecutors in Memphis decided to launch an aggressive crackdown using anti-obscenity laws, planning to go after every single person involved in Deep Throat. Before this, obscenity prosecutions targeted producers, distributors, or theater owners, not the actors, technicians, or crew members.

However, since prosecutors need witnesses, some of the Deep Throat people could escape prosecution by testifying for the government. Linda Lovelace and the movie's director did that. Reems tried to, but since he was just a "hired gun" for a few days' shooting, they didn't need him and so he was charged.

The film was shot in Florida and New York, but the prosecutors indicted Reems in Memphis using interstate commerce laws (which is what allowed this to be a federal case at all). Specifically, they charged him with conspiracy to distribute obscene materials across state lines.

He was going to be the precdent. If the government could convict him, someone with no financial stake or role in distributing the movie, they figured they would have a basis for going after the entire crew later. And that was the plan.

In April 1976, Reems was indeed convicted and he faced up to five years (in a federal prison) and a huge fine.

Hollywood and the publishing world figured out that if an actor or crew member could go to prison for performing in or working on a film that a conservative court later deemed obscene, this would put all kinds of limitations on the work they could do. So quite a few celebrites got involved with a defense fund for Reems. Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Gregory Peck, Shirley MacLaine, and Mike Nichols were part of it, and Hugh Hefner was obviously going to swing his support behind it.

So Playboy, which in the mid-seventies was taken seriously (to a certain extent) as a intellectual magazine, took up the cause and framed Memphis prosecution as government overreach, another attempt to gut the Bill of Rights. This ad is promoting Playboy's upcoming intestigative story, titled "Deep Throat Goes Down in Memphis".

[Spolier: Reems has his conviction overturned in 1977 thanks to the help of Alan Dershowitz, then only in his late 30s.]

From the August 1966 issue

by Richard Corliss

Sep 21, 1986

The Walt Disney Co. does not make just “movies” for its theme parks. Puny two-dimensional shadows projected on a flat screen would not do for the entertainment empire built on Uncle Walt’s idea for a better mousetrap. At Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., and at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., visitors sit in round theaters and are treated to postcard-panorama film tours of China and France through the technocraft of Circle-Vision 360. The 100 small panels that make up the huge screen in the Energy Pavilion at Disney World’s Epcot Center rotate in sync, creating gorgeous sculptured images. Filmed characters interact with spooky holograms and jolly robots. Thus it is with justifiable bluster that Frank Wells, the dapper, track-star-thin boss of Disney’s theme lands, describes the company’s latest park attraction as “far more than a motion picture. It is a total three-dimensional experience.” Rusty Lemorande, the film’s producer, calls it “not so much a movie as a ‘feelie.’ You don’t just see it, you feel it, experience it.”

The feelie in question is Captain EO, a 17-minute space fantasy with music and dance, which will be shown at the two Disney parks and, as the press kit trumpets, “nowhere else in the universe.” But even if it were a dirt-bike movie that played only seedy drive-ins, EO would be notable for the conglomerate of megabuck talent that confected it. The executive producer is George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars trilogy. The director is Francis Ford Coppola, once Lucas’ mentor as executive producer of American Graffiti, now switching roles with his former acolyte. The star is Michael Jackson, the pop- music thriller who composed and performs the film’s two songs.

Last week’s long-awaited “galaxy premiere” of Captain EO was kicked off with typical Disney glitz. Skyrockets and a thousand Mylar balloons crowded the air. A dozen chorus boys and girls in spandex and spangles boogied decorously. Mickey and Minnie Mouse arrived in matching silver-and-rainbow Captain EO garb. The film’s opening will also be celebrated in a one-hour NBC special this Saturday. All the hoopla underscored the magnitude of the gamble by Disney and Eastman Kodak, which split the movie’s costs. At $20 million or so for the film and its laser effects, Captain EO is, minute for minute, the most expensive movie in history.

The three creators have their own career dreams riding on the film’s success. Two years ago Jackson was No. 1 on the hot parade, but his penchant for reclusiveness and prolonged sessions in the recording studio (his new album, delayed several times, is due to be released in January) have dimmed his star power. Coppola has not made a hit film since Apocalypse Now in 1979. Lucas has sponsored a couple of expensive duds this summer (Labyrinth and Howard the Duck) and has seen his hugely profitable Star Wars merchandise inch toward the remainder shelves.

Lucas learned most of what he knows about merchandising from the example of Walt Disney, and Epcot’s emporiums are already filled with replicas of such cuddly EO creatures as Hooter (an oboe-nosed elephant), Fuzzball (a scarlet monkey butterfly) and the Geex, Idy and Ody (sort of Siamese-twin Wookies). Nor is the film a reckless investment for Kodak. The previous attraction in the company’s Magic Eye Theater, a 3-D film called Magic Journeys, was seen by 19 million people in less than four years. Asked how long EO will run, a Disney spokesman replies, “EOns.” Walt Disney and George Eastman might shudder at the expense (not to mention that atrocious pun), but they would appreciate their successors’ canny blending of commerce and entertainment.

Ah, but how entertaining is Captain EO? Pretty entertaining, actually. The first half of the film is an energetic rehash of the Star Wars space battle. The second half is an elaborate Michael Jackson video, in which the star emerges from his rickety spaceship to do battle with the Evil Empress, played with magisterial malevolence by Oscar Winner Anjelica Huston (Prizzi’s Honor). Jackson, who by now could double for his own Tussaud waxwork, is an improbable Han Solo, but he still dances like a jive Astaire and earned audible swoons from teenage girls at the premiere. The film’s 3-D effects are familiar but engineered with flair: an asteroid waits to plop in your lap, Fuzzball hovers adorably over your shoulder, and Huston’s tentacle talons virtually shred your shirt.

In one spectacular sequence, a C3PO-style robot is reconstituted into a rock band — the leg becomes a guitar, the torso a drum set — and Jackson kicks into high gear with his We Are Here to Change the World, an up-tempo anthem. Laser beams shoot into the theater; orange light splashes off the rear wall. It is quite a workout. Or, as Producer Lemorande notes, “it’s a very dense 17 minutes. It’s like desserts. They’re so small because they’re so rich.”

But dessert is not very nourishing. Captain EO is sugar but no spice, coating an audio-animatronic gridwork. What can be exhilarating and depressing about Walt Disney World is true of Captain EO: it is a triumph of the artificial, of high-tech wizardry and secondhand emotions. All of which makes EO just fine as a “total three-dimensional experience” but only the fourthbest film at Epcot. In the travelogues of China and France, and in Emil Radok’s enthralling documentary about, yes, energy, the imagination is served, not dominated, by the special effects. These films evoke intense feelings for people and ideas. Isn’t that what feelies should be all about?

WINNER TAKE ALL: MICROSOFT V. NETSCAPE

by Joshua Cooper Ramo

Sep 15, 1996

War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also the conflict of human interests. –Karl Von Clausewitz

On a cloudy morning last December, as the white light of winter picked its way across the face of Mount Rainier, William H. Gates III, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft Corp., rolled out of bed after a brief night’s sleep. There was no time for breakfast. He showered, pulled on his customary slacks, open-necked shirt and sweater, and climbed into his Lexus for the 20-minute drive from his suburban Bellevue, Washington, home to the Seattle convention center.

Gates had been at the center late into the previous evening–an eight-cheeseburger night, he calculates–preparing what he suspected would be the most significant Microsoft announcement in a decade. For two years the rapidly expanding global computer matrix called the Internet had nagged at Gates like a low-level headache. Even as his company shipped Windows 95 last fall–an 11-million-line program that solidified Microsoft’s PC hegemony–Gates worried about what lay ahead. Microsoft had long dominated the world of personal computing by providing the software that controlled the way users interacted with their machines–a program called an operating system. Microsoft’s operating systems, first DOS in 1980 and then Windows 10 years later, had given the company intimidating control over PC software. And lush profits, enough to vault Gates to the top of the list of the richest Americans.

But the Internet could undo all that. Gates had been warning his top lieutenants that the Net could change everything about the way people used computers, perhaps even the fact that they needed an $89 copy of Windows to make their machines work. But he hadn’t quite figured out Microsoft’s proper place in the new terrain, and the company’s thus far tentative market initiatives reflected that indecision.

This morning he planned to bring the uncertainty to an end. Microsoft would reorient every effort, every project and product to the new reality of the Internet. He was about to send a company with $6 billion in sales and 19,641 workers–all $70 billion worth–hurtling in that direction. In the future, as in the past, nothing was going to stand in Bill Gates’ way.

Nine hundred miles down the Pacific coastline, in Mountain View, California, James Barksdale, president and CEO of Netscape, was bracing for another day of standing in Bill Gates’ way. Barksdale slipped into a suit, grabbed a quick breakfast and pointed his Mercedes toward Netscape’s Mountain View headquarters.

With $81 million in sales and 600 employees, Netscape had enjoyed a comfortable dominance of the infant Internet world. Its killer app was a program that made navigating the Net as simple as pointing at what you wanted to see and clicking on it. Browsers brought order to the chaos of the World Wide Web, a corner of the Net stuffed with text, sounds and pictures. Netscape’s Navigator browser was the best on the market, and it had propelled the company through a wildly successful initial public offering in August. Some analysts were saying Netscape had an invincible lead in the browser business, even against Microsoft.

Barksdale knew better: more was at stake than merely the market for browsers. Netscape’s Navigator had the potential to be the next Windows: a method for launching programs and calling up information not only from the Internet but also from corporate networks and even from the user’s own PC. In short, it could supplant the operating system and finally break Microsoft’s hammerlock on the PC industry. Barksdale knew Microsoft wouldn’t–couldn’t–ignore the challenge. “It was such an obvious opportunity,” he says. “They weren’t going to miss it. We had always expected Microsoft to get hard core about the Internet.”

And so it did. That morning in Seattle, addressing hundreds of analysts and media, Gates hit a rare rhetorical high, offering up what amounted to his new digital gospel. To hammer the message home, he reached back into history, recalling the words of Admiral Yamamoto on the day the Japanese attacked the U.S.: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant.” The crowd chuckled its recognition: it was Dec. 7, 1995, and Bill Gates was taking Microsoft to war.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. –Henry Kissinger

Since his December announcement, Gates has backed up his martial rhetoric with action. Over the past three months, Microsoft programmers have released a stream of new products designed to seduce Net users away from Netscape. With everything from software giveaways to massive developer conferences (Microsoft rented 40 movie theaters on July 16 for a programmers’ gathering), the gang from Redmond, Washington, has pressed home one message: Microsoft is playing for keeps.

Proof of that came on Aug. 13, when Microsoft unveiled Explorer 3.0, the newest version of its Web-browsing software. The 8-megabyte behemoth matched Netscape’s franchise browser, Navigator, feature for feature, and at a much better price–free. Available over the Web, the browser notched a million downloads in its first week. Netscape stockholders voted with their feet: by late August, Netscape stock had shed half its value from a December high, while Microsoft shares approached record levels. And Gates swore the best was yet to come.

Netscape wasted little time in counterattacking. Two weeks later, on Aug. 26, company founder Jim Clark unveiled blueprints for a new software firm called Navio that will try to outflank Microsoft by putting browser software on pretty much anything with a screen and a modem. The first stop is likely to be an Internet TV, followed by a $500 network computer, online video gaming machines and Net-surfing cell phones. Organized around a powerhouse electronics alliance that includes just about everyone but Microsoft (Sony, NEC, Nintendo and IBM are supporting the venture), the company has one aim: to use the Internet to make Microsoft Windows irrelevant.

That sort of direct challenge to their business is the stimulus Microsoft employees love best. In just six months, Gates has refocused the work force onto Net-related projects, mercilessly eliminated a dozen others that were Holy Grails a year ago, and geared up an Internet-content group that will spend tens of millions of dollars this year. He has even withdrawn $1.5 billion in R.-and-D. money from a $6 billion cash stockpile Microsoft has tucked away against the sort of rainy business days they aren’t used to seeing in Redmond.

The transformation that has set Microsoft on the road to a Net-based future has also completed Gates’ beatification as not just a great hacker but also a world-class CEO. Microsoft’s warp-speed reinvention may set the standard for information-age corporate agility. “I don’t think you’d be interviewing me on this topic if we were any less nimble,” Gates told Time. “You’d be writing our epitaph.”

But in the odd world of high technology, a great product, a remarkable corporate transformation and market acceptance could in fact be an epitaph. The Next Big Thing, just a gleam in some undergraduate’s eye today, could put your company out of business tomorrow. Andy Grove, the Intel CEO who led his microprocessor company through a series of similarly wrenching changes a decade ago, has distilled the essence of competing in a high-tech world down to a single sentence: “Only the paranoid survive.” He’s right. Uncertainty is the watchword of the new digital age. That’s why Microsoft is throwing everything it’s got at Netscape. And that’s why, despite that onslaught, Netscape still has a chance.

When absolute superiority is not attainable, you must produce a relative one at the decisive point by making use of what you have. –Clausewitz

In the heady days after Netscape’s ballistic IPO last summer–the stock shot from $27 to $71 during its first day of trading–Barksdale preached humility in the company’s cramped halls. “I have a rule,” he explains. “You can’t talk about the stock price internally. We’re not going to get focused on paper worth. We’re going to keep building products.” So the sandy-haired CEO was surprised to discover that his assistant had set up an electronic stock ticker in his office. “I said, ‘Did you think I was kidding? Take that away!'” Barksdale recalls, laughing. “I try to lead by example, and here she was flashing the price.”

Friends say the story is typical of Barksdale, 52, who brought his lead-from-the-front style and slow Mississippi drawl to Silicon Valley last spring from AT&T, where he was CEO of AT&T Wireless Services. Though less well known than Netscape’s co-founders, Jim Clark and boy wonder Marc Andreessen, 25, Barksdale has what is clearly the most difficult, and most essential, job of the three: getting Netscape to live up to its $3.1 billion market value.

That will take some doing. Matching its fiscal reality to Wall Street’s hopes will mean completing one of the great Horatio Alger stories in the history of American business. As every self-respecting teenage computer ace knows, Netscape was born in the ratty University of Illinois dorm of Andreessen, then 21, a Midwesterner who liked nothing so much as an afternoon in front of the computer, geeking out. Over a few dozen of those code-filled afternoons in 1993, Andreessen and his youthful collaborators put the finishing touches on the Model T of Web-browsing programs. They called it Mosaic, because it combined all the pieces of the Net–text, audio, images–onto “pages” that could be viewed from anywhere in the world. Mosaic was the first glimpse of a multimedia future that giants such as Microsoft had been predicting but not delivering. And it changed everything. Among the digerati, the question “Where were you when you first saw Mosaic?” is as significant as asking people from an earlier generation where they were when they first heard the Beatles.

The sound of the Net revolution quickly made its way to Silicon Valley, where venture capitalist ears are always eagerly listening for the ringing music of a great new idea. Clark, a Valley millionaire who had a similar revelation a decade earlier when he founded Silicon Graphics to build high-end graphics computers, hired Andreessen and set up shop as Mosaic Communications. Six months later, the company shipped its first Navigator browser.

A classic entrepreneur, Clark is good at founding companies but less interested in running them. His fortune derives from vision more than execution. By late 1994, with Netscape growing fast, he knew the time had come to look for help. Clark cast a rich, stock-baited hook into a pool of one: Jim Barksdale bit.

Barksdale is one of a handful of corporate managers who make up the varsity squad of American CEOs. Though less well known than Coca-Cola’s Robert Goizuetta and GE’s Jack Welch, he radiates the same cocksure attitude, bred from an ability to project a vast strategic vision and master simultaneously each of its components.

And there was something else: Barksdale had already been to war. He was a veteran of Federal Express’s victory in the great overnight-delivery battle in the 1980s, and of Craig McCaw’s end run around AT&T and the regional Bells in the cellular wars in the early 1990s. He moved to AT&T after the long-distance company bought out McCaw. Barksdale made a fortune on the FedEx and McCaw successes, but both experiences netted him something more valuable: the confidence of a winner. “UPS had more money than God, certainly more money than Microsoft,” he says. “When they got into our business, we were scared to death. Well, today FedEx is a $10 billion company.”

Barksdale brings that same damn-the-torpedoes sensibility to his fight with Microsoft, where he has embraced a simple strategy: Get out, get known, get in. “We’re a little company. We can’t afford a big television advertising campaign,” he says, pointedly gazing north toward the Colossus of Redmond’s $100 million ad budget. Instead Barksdale is betting the farm on Netscape’s continued domination of the browser business. “Is it a sure success?” he says. “Hell, no. We work constantly at it. But this idea that somehow or other Microsoft says, ‘Thank you, boys, for thinking this up. Now we’ll come take it over,’ is way premature.”

The strategy has its risks: in a business where a six-month delay threatens obsolescence, any slip in Netscape’s warp-speed browser-development cycle could prove fatal. So Barksdale’s first priority is making sure Netscape’s programmers, who still report to Andreessen, have everything they need to stay on top. This means rooms of their own, all the caffeine they can absorb and hours of fatherly advice about working better, not more.

Barksdale knows that long-term success lies in turning Navigator into a viable alternative to Windows. Andreessen, Barksdale and Clark (a triumvirate insiders refer to as “Marc, Bark and Clark”) envision a future Netscape product that will assume many of the computer’s operating-system functions, browsing local files as seamlessly as it browses today’s Web.

Of course, for a Web-based OS to have any real value to consumers, it has to have programs to run. To fill that hole, Netscape has entered into a tight alliance with Sun Microsystems, a high-end hardware and software company that has developed a Net-based programming language called Java. What makes Java special (besides its name, which comes from the take-no-prisoners, drink-no-decaf corporate culture at Sun) is that it is designed to run across the Internet on any computer. For Web programmers, this means their pages can do more than just display pictures. Java-enabled sites will be able to act as word processors, telephones and even (if you have a TV receiver hooked up to your computer) vcrs. And although Microsoft has tried to embrace Java–its new Explorer browser will run programs written in the language–it is still seen more as a strategic weapon for Netscape, since Java software could one day compete with Microsoft products such as Word and Excel.

But this will matter only if Net surfers are still using Netscape software when that day arrives. And while Netscape has a dominant market share these days, the company has been seeing a little more of Microsoft’s shadow than Bark likes. “We have enormous appreciation, admiration and fear [of Microsoft],” he says. “But like I tell people: I love my brothers, but I don’t let them eat my supper.”

To keep from losing his supper, Barksdale has retained Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who has built a reputation for bashing Microsoft. In early August, Reback mailed a legal letter bomb to the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division on Netscape’s behalf, accusing Microsoft of every anticompetitive behavior short of kidnapping programmers. The charges infuriated Gates, who has already battled Justice on antitrust issues. Worse, Reback’s letter played right into the media’s general portrayal of Netscape as a lonely underdog facing off against a cheating giant.

That courthouse seriousness, however, is in stark contrast to the playful tone that Barksdale has set inside Netscape. Conference rooms are whimsically named after cities, prisons and characters from Dr. Seuss (the Cat in the Hat Room). Barksdale regularly works the halls, passing out praise, spinning yarns and trying to make new employees–Netscape has 700 of them so far this year–feel welcome. The company also now encourages employees to take one three-day weekend a month, and last spring Barksdale shut the whole place down for a “Netscape Escape Day.”

“Work less!” may seem like a strange motto for a company that’s competing with Microsoft, where employees embrace the dramatic simplicity of “When I’m awake, I’m working.” But plenty of others have tried to outwork Microsoft, and Gates has beaten them all. Barksdale’s approach, at the very least, could someday lead to a kinder and gentler Valley culture. Whether Netscape’s bottom line can hack that remains to be seen, but Bark believes his company deserves a little breathing room. “It’s not a total win-lose game,” he says. “I don’t think anybody is going to have the dominant position in a network-centric world like they had in a desktop-centric world. I just cannot believe that.” He pauses. “And I will tell you this: it will be a shame if they do.”

Keep the forces concentrated in an overpowering mass. –Clausewitz

Bill Gates had watched Netscape’s explosive growth with a mixture of curiosity and concern. He knew that the Net was important, but for most of the past two years, Microsoft’s resources had been strained as thousands of programmers, marketers and customer-support people slogged through nearly complete overhauls of Windows and Windows NT, the company’s marquee operating systems. Gates knew he needed to get as many bodies as possible onto Net projects as fast as possible, a warp-speed course correction that would require superhuman devotion to the Microsoft mission. Fortunately, Gates knew that was one thing he could count on.

So beginning last fall he started quietly pulling the levers. Hundreds of exhausted programmers streaming back from the front lines of the Windows 95 coding effort found themselves thanked, paid and returned to the front to battle Netscape. Line managers killed million-dollar projects and refocused entire divisions in the space of hours. In one instance, the company decided it needed to jump-start an effort to develop programs in the Java computer language, a key to creating Internet applications. So John Ludwig, a rising Microsoft star who runs the Internet tools group, simply walked into a room of programmers who were working on something else and told them to stop. Microsoft appreciated their efforts, he said, but a bigger challenge had emerged. “We had to get on the stick on Java,” he says. “I told them, ‘Clear that source code off your machine, and start working on Java today.'” Four months later, the complex new coding was done.

The strategy guiding those difficult tactical decisions was something Gates referred to as “embrace and extend.” Rather than invent a whole new service to compete with the Internet, Microsoft would “embrace” current Net standards and then “extend” them. In practical terms, that meant do everything Netscape did and then add the extra functionality that would give Microsoft a winning edge. If Netscape let Web browsers look at pages from around the world, Microsoft would let users look at the same Web pages but from within familiar applications, such as Microsoft Word. If Navigator could play sound, Explorer would play CD-quality sound. It was the sort of one-upmanship that Gates had perfected in dozens of similar software fights. Although frequently second to market with a product, Microsoft always won by outfeaturing and outlasting its competitors.

That put extra pressure on Microsoft to deliver a world-class browser. Explorer 2.0, the browser Microsoft released early this spring, was a poor second cousin to Navigator 2.0. Gates knew Internet Explorer 3.0 had to be far better. So the company began throwing bodies at the problem. From August to November 1995, the browser group grew from eight to 30 employees. By the time Explorer 3.0 was released last month, that number had risen to 800.

The results were phenomenal. Microsoft critics, who had bet that Explorer 3.0 would be no more than too-little, too-late Internet technology, were silenced by the program’s sheer undeniable quality. The browser’s slick interface drew on Microsoft’s years of consumer-products research. And though there were flaws–it has several prominent security holes, and no Macintosh version is in sight–3.0 had brightly colored, easy-to-use buttons, was cleverly designed and ran smoothly with Windows 95. In short, the thing looked like a high-grade consumer product.

The shift in attitudes was immediate. The day Explorer 3.0 hit the streets, Netizens began to create an approving buzz. And from around the Net, where Netscape had long trumpeted its 85% market share, word began to leak back that Microsoft browsers were accounting for 30%, then 40% and by last week 60% of the hits on some servers. Though Netscape still indisputably has the larger proportion of browsers, Microsoft reported that more than a million people downloaded Explorer 3.0 in its first week online, overwhelming the company’s specially beefed-up servers. And while Netscape is starting to charge more aggressively for its browser, Gates insists Explorer will continue to be free or, in his words, “priced to sell.” Don’t mistake that for an act of charity. Netscape’s Department of Justice letter charged that a Microsoft executive told a gathering of developers this spring, “Our intent is to flood the market with free Internet software and squeeze Netscape until they run out of cash.”

And beginning this Christmas, Web surfers will be able to boot up Explorer 4.0. Though the software for the program is still in its infant stage in Redmond, TIME got a sneak preview. The new browser is fully integrated with the computer desktop. Users will turn on their computers and be presented not with an ungainly collection of files and folders but with a lush desktop that includes the latest news, instant access to content from across the Web, and a specialized version of the browser that looks at both local files and data from around the Web. Explorer 4.0, when it ships, will complete the unification of the computer and the Web. It will also make Explorer 3.0, the hot technology of the moment, obsolete.

And that’s where the real struggle in this battle lies. Netscape and Microsoft are competing not against each other so much as against their own obsolescence. The victor will be not the company with the best browser but the team that can run the longest on this insanely fast product-development treadmill.

In fact, the Netscape-Microsoft battle may be our first good look at information-age corporate warfare. Where industrial-age triumph was once measured in steamships built or in miles of rail track laid, victory today means little more than the right to come back and fight again tomorrow.

Nathan Myhrvold, the physics Ph.D. who is one of Gates’ most trusted deputies, told Time a year ago that “no matter how good your product, you are only 18 months away from failure.” He was wrong. That span has been cut to six months. And shrinking.

–Reported by David S. Jackson/Redmond

From Edsullivan.com:

Everyone, including The Rolling Stones, knew that The Ed Sullivan Show brought major exposure, so the group attempted to abide by Ed and CBS’s rules in order to promote their new records. Though continuing to sell the image of rebellious bad boy rockers from London, the band clearly understood the importance of reaching the wide audience provided by the Sullivan show. Later that year, on September 11, 1966 The Ed Sullivan Show opened the new fall season with a “really BIG show,” starring jazz trumpeter/vocalist Louis Armstrong on Ed Sullivan, comedienne Joan Rivers on Ed Sullivan and returning for their fourth appearance, The Rolling Stones. Despite the multiple appearances by the rockers, Ed Sullivan still had his rules. Joan Rivers recalls, “I was in the dressing room next to The Rolling Stones, and I remember he insisted they get their hair washed—and he was right. And they got their hair washed.”

Following dress rehearsal, the group also had been warned not to leave the studio before show time; but they didn’t listen and on their return were chased by a mob of fans who actually broke a glass door trying to follow the band back into CBS’s Studio 50 on Broadway. That evening, The Stones performed “Paint It, Black” from their new album Aftermath. For this rendition, Brian Jones played the song’s signature riff on sitar, sitting Indian style. The crowd loved the performance and even Ed told the crowd, “You’re yelling much better this year.” The band also performed their hits “Lady Jane” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?”

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Brian Jones had a broken hand, but it didn't matter. This has live Jagger vocals over prepared/studio backing tracks, rather than the entire band playing completely live in the studio. The Stones' 1966–69 Sullivan performances increasingly used this sort of arrangement.

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Washington Post: It’s all over now: We found the kid who stole Brian Jones’s dulcimer

Last month, I wrote about how on June 26, 1966, a unique dulcimer was taken from an equipment van parked outside Washington Coliseum after a Rolling Stones concert. News of the theft spread through the local teen community. A letter even appeared in the Washington Evening Star imploring the thief to return it, lest the Stones decide never to return to our fair city.

I had part of the story, the part about how an employee of Empire Music in Bethesda named Mike Burke was surprised when, a week or so later, a kid walked in with an odd instrument that he seemed eager to be rid of. The kid left the dulcimer with him. Mike called the Star’s music columnist, Ron Oberman, who brokered a deal to get the dulcimer — the only electric one in existence, made especially for Brian Jones so he could perform “Lady Jane” onstage — to the British Embassy and on to the touring Rolling Stones.

But who had stolen the dulcimer in the first place? It was a scamp named Eddie Merrigan.

“I can see the whole thing going down,” Eddie’s sister, Rosalie Merrigan Moulton, told me.

She was there that day. And she was meant to be keeping an eye on her younger brother.

“We were out back with a lot of people, waiting to see the Rolling Stones come out,” Rosalie said. Rosalie had already called a cab to take them back home to Chevy Chase, Md.

With them was a friend named Bruce Grant, who had his hand casually resting against a van parked behind the venue.

“This guy came over and smacked [Bruce’s hand] with what looked like a screwdriver or something,” Rosalie said. “That made my brother angry.”

What happened next went by in a flash. Eddie reached through the van’s open window and pulled out a loose bag sitting on the front seat. The cab rolled up. The kids jumped in. The cab took off. Rosalie turned to Eddie and said, “What the hell did you just do?”

Eddie wasn’t quite sure himself. When Rosalie asked what was in the bag, he confessed he didn’t know.

“We get home and he zooms upstairs,” Rosalie said.

Rosalie’s reaction when she saw what was inside? “Oh [bad word].”

Eddie thought he’d taken something that belonged to the van driver. It was Jones’s dulcimer.

“I convinced him he had to return it,” Rosalie said.

But first, they wanted to play it. Rosalie already played piano and guitar.

“I was surprised how fast I could pick up ‘Lady Jane,’” she said. “I didn’t have a way to plug it in, but I figured it out … It was a beautiful, beautiful instrument.”

You know what happened next: Eddie took the dulcimer to Empire Music, and Ron Oberman ushered it back to the Stones.

But there’s another twist: Eddie made Ron promise to do something for him. The Beatles were coming to town in August to play at D.C. Stadium. Eddie and some of his friends already were planning an audacious caper: They would try to sneak backstage by pretending to be the Cyrkle, the opening band.

Eddie would hand over the dulcimer if Ron promised to write about their Beatles prank, if it proved successful.

“Ron said, ‘Okay. I’ll write about that, if you return [the dulcimer] in same condition that you found it,’” said Tom Hinton, who, with Eddie and four others did — and with the help of a rented limousine, a police escort and a lot of chutzpah — get backstage at D.C. Stadium. Tom and Eddie even managed to meet the Beatles in their dressing room.

Said Tom: “Eddie was a very persuasive young man.”

Their goal: Meet the Beatles on tour in 1966. Their solution: Impersonate the opening act.

Oberman was true to his word. His Aug. 20, 1966, review of the show ended with seven paragraphs on the caper. They began: “The success story of last Monday though, has to go to six Montgomery County youths who impersonated the Cyrkle, one of the acts on the bill, to gain admittance to the stadium complete with motorcycle escort.”