Who owns the rights to geek love
Dressed all in white on the day of a recent interview, Dunn was quick to offer a generous, toothy smile and immediately set to rest any fears that she might be as strange a person as the world view her novel might suggest.
She likes to roll her own cigarettes while talking sports or swapping stories. That precarious existence is over for Dunn since Knopf has paid her a substantial advance on her next novel.
She is also a boxing columnist for the Associated Press. Her office is furnished with the requisite jammed bookshelves. There are entire rows devoted to boxing, with volume after volume of the boxing yearbook, The Ring. The bathroom is adorned with framed black-and-white boxing stills; and Dunn keeps a portrait of the young Joe Louis propped on her typewriter. Admiring the hybrid roses, she conceived Papa Al and his hybrid children. At first, Dunn was shocked by her own terrifying characters.
Gradually, however, the Binewski carnival family no longer seemed bizarre to Dunn. At no time, however, did Dunn worry about what the world would think of her vision. Bogdan, who has written a book on freak shows, said such revues were common in this country until about , but mostly died out in recent decades because they were seen as being demeaning to the disabled. Yes indeed, what a daring subject matter to tackle. Very gutsy of the writer. Kudos for that. Yeah, I know life is not fair and all but still.
Totally deserved. It has been the backdrop for a big top full of films. Everything from silents Chaplin doing his thing on the midway … animation Dumbo … Elvis Roustabout … to the still playing in the theaters at this very moment The Greatest Showman. Winner of Best Picture back in its day. I thought it really captured the air of excitement that kids often feel when a carnival comes to a small town setting. Of course, this tale takes a very dark turn. It provided leading man Tyrone Power with one of his best roles in his career.
Lancaster worked as part of a real acrobat duo in the circus as a young man. Directed by Carol Reed. Thanks largely to Mr. King, clowns are just another type of monster now. Like vampires or witches. I have a vague memory of going to the circus and a clown… invading my personal space.
I was scared. I could feel his breath, that was how close he was. I just read where another short horror film is being developed into a full-length feature. This time by Amblin. Thanks, Poe! Always nice to see someone break in with an original horror concept. Be interesting to see how Amblin handles this. Was more the issues of animal treatment.
And maybe just because this essentially nineteenth form of entertainment had finally had its day. The setting for Nightmare Alley is a carnival not a circus. Carnivals were traditionally a lot farther down on the seediness scale. Though forgotten today Circus World from the early sixties.
No particular reason to search it out, though it does contain one very impressive scene where a full size ferry carrying all the circus gear capsizes. Growing up, it was definitely a carnival that showed up ever summer in my neck of the woods and set up shop in the open field near the center of town.
To this day, I still vividly recall one sideshow. It involved a young woman being transformed into a giant gorilla. Never made that connection but can really see that. Just a really effective use of make-up and lighting and music.
It always reminded me a bit of the classic episode The Hitch-Hiker, which aired almost two years before the COS flick hit the theaters. This is a guy born with a parasitic twin — a second head growing out of the side of his head, linked to his normal brain.
When he smiles, the second head also smiles. You can see this about two minutes in. He was the inspiration for one of the characters in Corridor — named Two Heads, of course. Others came from Medical Curiosities , a British book from about on the subject of teratology — the study of human monsters.
Using fanfic as a writing exercise CAN make you some money, or at least a living. A world of shadowy lives beyond the greasepaint; beyond the sawdust and tinsel. Half-lives we the audience were never meant to see. Only ever seen some of it, but it looks to be the epitome of that whole backstage thing. My apologies to Scott S. No apologies necessary, compadre. OT: Looking to trade script notes for script notes.
Anyone in the market for doing a trade? Sounds cool! Is someone else trying to locate it for nefarious purposes? What exactly is this lost city? What makes it special? Probably why the genre has become stale, or at the very least, out of fashion. Fewer and fewer virgin territories left to explore in the real world means an equally diminishing sense of wonder with each new advances in science and understanding of history….
Freelance work has taken my career into the unscripted realm I have worked with several producers and large production companies , but my ultimate goal is scripted. Logline: Offering closure for the loss of a slain loved one, a secretive program at a remote island psychiatric prison encourages vengeance against cold-blooded killers, but when the nightmarish inmates are mysteriously set free, the avengers become the hunted.
But regarding your logline — I think it could use some serious rewording. Contests Submit About Contact. Screenplay Review — Geek Love. Posted on February 12, by admin. But I Geek Liked it. Script link: Geek Love [ ] What the hell did I just read? Posted in Uncategorized. Feb 27, Zoeytron rated it really liked it Shelves: new-fangled-e-reader , public-library. This is a horrifying look between the tent flaps of a traveling carnival known as Binewski's Fabulon. Al and Crystal Lil Binewski have a grotesque way of growing your own.
Freaks, that is. A horrific premise and disturbing ideas make for a very different read. Be forewarned, this one is way dark. Spoilers A fucked up, incestuous, surreal carnival story filled with horrible characters who have little to no redeeming qualities. I spent most of my time cringing and shuddering in revulsion whilst reading Geek Love , but in a can't-look-away-car-crash-what's-going-to-happen-next-these-characters-make-me-sick-but-every-disturbing-thing-they-do-is-oh-so-engrossing kind of way.
It was utterly absorbing in its WTFery and uniqueness. Hmm, not really sure where to start with the story so I'll just ta Spoilers A fucked up, incestuous, surreal carnival story filled with horrible characters who have little to no redeeming qualities. Hmm, not really sure where to start with the story so I'll just talk about the characters first: Al and Lil Binewski the parents : Both of them were absolutely despicable, the pair of them were so obsessed with running a successful carnival that they happily took drugs and all sorts of chemical concoctions whilst pregnant so their children would turn out deformed enough that people would buy tickets to see them.
The fact some of their children died didn't stop them from poisoning future babies, it only made them more determined. They had no shame or guilt for what they did, so much so they still put their dead children to good use by displaying them in cases so their customers could gawk at them. It only gets worse, if they thought their child was 'normal' they were so devastated by it that they no longer wanted them and were cool with abandoning them.
Not only that, they gave their living children all sorts of issues by favouring and loving best the child who was 'freakiest' and most popular. I hated them at the beginning for what they did to their kids, they grew up having fucked up views and relationships, they didn't have normal childhoods or a proper education, they had to work straight away and happily be gawked at from a very early age. Bizarrely, even though they pissed me off with all their selfishness and craziness by the end I kind of liked them, what they did to their kids was unforgivable but they almost seemed normal, kind, and loving in comparison to other characters.
However, by the end of the book I hated her the most. The only thing I liked about her was her being content with her physical appearance and not wanting to be 'normal'. Other than that she was worse than terrible for so many different reasons. She made doormat people everywhere look strong and stubborn. She had less than zero self-respect and dignity when it came to Arty. Her pathetic loser personality made me want to punch things. Secondly, the way she conceived her daughter, Miranda, was sickening.
She made her eleven year old brother Chick telekinetically steal their older brother's sperm and implant it in her. Arty didn't give his consent, he had no idea what was happening but that didn't matter to Oly, she wanted her brother's baby and that was that.
She basically raped him of his sperm. I was glad Arty didn't end up wanting baby Miranda and forced Oly to get rid of her, it deserved her right not being able to raise Miranda, the psycho didn't deserve to have a daughter. Thirdly, Oly was a cruel, selfish bitch when it came to Miranda's childhood.
Miranda was born with a tail and when she was given to some nuns to raise, they wanted to have her tail removed so she wouldn't feel different and she'd fit in with the rest of the kids and not be teased or bullied. But oh no, Oly refused. She wanted her daughter to grow up with a tail because Miranda being normal was shameful to Oly and her family even though said family would never see Miranda again.
She didn't give a fuck about Miranda and doing what was best for her, everything was about making Arty and her family proud or some bullshit. Ugh, then there was Olympia's reaction to finding out Miranda hated having to grow up with a tail, Oly thought Miranda was a selfish and ungrateful bitch for not being happy to grow up different and deformed. Maybe Miranda would have seen her tail as something good if she grew up in carnival full of 'freaks' but she grew up in the real world and had no idea where she came from, so why would she like having something that made others see her as weird and abnormal?!
Oly was deluded to think Miranda would be pleased by it all. The last straw was when Oly blamed Miranda for being targeted by that psycho Miss Lick, it wasn't Miranda's fault that Miss Lick was so jealous and bitter that she paid for beautiful women to be mutilated! Ugh, Miranda was lucky not to have been raised by Oly. As much as I hated Oly for all her faults and WTFery she still managed to be an extremely entertaining character.
Even though he was far worse than Oly in everything he did, I didn't detest him nearly as much, probably because he wasn't narrating the story. He did so many fucked up things, the ones that enraged me most was him basically pimping out his sisters, creating his Arturism cult which required people to cut of their limbs, and slowly taking control of the carnival away from his parents.
Also, killing off his defenceless siblings out of pettiness and jealousy. He was a prick and a half but an utterly entertaining one. I did like that even though he was pure evil, he wasn't one dimensional, he had all kinds of weird and messed up emotions and layers when it came to his family.
I do wish he'd been written as more charismatic and more of an enigma though, I just didn't get why everyone was drawn to him and worshipped him with such intensity.
I preferred Elly from the two, unlike Iphy she wasn't enamoured of Arty. It was sad when Elly was basically lobotomised by Arty, I was happy he felt some guilt but it was disappointing that the guilt he felt was more down to him upsetting Iphy than him hurting Elly.
It really wasn't her fault. Iphy got on my nerves, she was timid and weak and almost as bad as Oly when it came to loving Arty. I was cheering him on when he finally stood up to Arty's manipulations and killed him. Although, I would have preferred if Arty hadn't died instantly and had instead suffered greatly for years before his death, he needed a taste of his own medicine, he got off way too easy.
I think her growing up an orphan away from the Binweski's was good for her, she would have ended up fucked up and with lots of issues if she was raised with Oly and co.
She was a spiteful, jealous, hard woman. She deserved a far more painful death than the one she got - I don't know why Oly felt so guilty about killing her when she was planning on hurting her daughter. Also, it was weird how Oly seemed to care more about Miss Lick's welfare than she did about Elly.
She showed no emotion when Elly was more or less destroyed by Arty, it was like she was happy about what happened to Elly. Yet she had lots of compassion and sympathy for the horrible Miss Lick - another reason as to why I hated Oly. Other random thoughts: -Why did Oly love Arty so much?
He treated her like crap Her adoration of him made no sense, it wasn't like she only had him in her life, she had Chick, the twins and her parents and they didn't constantly treat her like crap. Oly's devotion to him was based on jack all. Sure, he was entertaining but that didn't account for the level of love he received. His personality wasn't that endearing and he didn't say anything all that profound, he wasn't inspiring in any way, he was just a hateful bastard. I didn't get it.
It was bonkers. I could see vulnerable and hopeless people being manipulated to join a cult and escape reality, but I couldn't buy thousands of them eagerly and permanently destroying their bodies.
It was too far fetched for me. Surely, it wasn't legal. Iphy and Oly were so hot for Arty they wanted to marry him despite him being their brother, it was like it was normal for them to have sexual feelings for each other. Then there was Oly's obsession with her daughter, the way she described and followed and watched her daughter was messed up.
It was like she fancied her or something. In a weird sort of way they started off strong and loving, then they just crashed and burned, which was mostly down to Arty's ambitions and narcissism. Recommended for anyone interested in a not so typical carnival story featuring grotesque characters who do all kinds of vile things. Dec 07, Jim rated it it was amazing Shelves: This book has been sitting on my shelf for 20 years. I don't know what that means but she died of cancer not long afterwards so it and the book have acquired a kind of totemic power over my imagination.
I understood that Geek Love would be dark because all books about the circus are dark, but This book has been sitting on my shelf for 20 years. I imagined that the darkness of a story of a family of freaks would be leavened by their familial bond.
Once I started to read the book I understood the opposite to be true. These characters are shockingly cruel and that cruelty carries over to prose that revels in places many would be repulsed. To tell this story in this way requires a great deal of courage and it's gratifying to see, even though I've come to the novel late, that it's found so many readers. And I can't help but wonder what my aunt, who was no stranger to cruelty herself, meant by giving me this book.
Once, while riding as a passenger in her car, I watched as she veered out of the lane to hit a giant puddle and soak the people waiting at the bus stop. That's what reading Geek Love is like: a ride that takes perverse pleasure in the pain of others. Apr 07, Paul Bryant rated it liked it Shelves: novels. Lightly strummed guitar. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects.
And now I have. And also you find the author likes to describe the simplest things in oblique prose. And also the most complicated things in oblique prose. And also I felt jerked around more than somewhat. I will explain. This novel is has a couple of Real Big Themes. Arty the Aqua Boy : We have this advantage, that the norms expect us to be wise.
Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. The norms figure our contact with their brand of life is shaky. They see us as cut off from temptation and pettiness. Even our hate is grand by their feeble lights. And the more deformed we are, the higher our supposed sanctity.
So Arty gradually starts a cult. The hicks who patronize the freak show begin to see him as a guru. He preaches a message of P. The idea is for people to be like Arty in order to achieve this.
The Arturans therefore snip off increasing bits of themselves to denormalise, starting with toes and fingers — because the normal world is so overburdened with expectations get a good job, have great sex, go on fabulous holidays, you know you can never find P I P there, so you have to make a radical incremental voluntary rejection of it. Snip snip snip. Similarly in the great movie City of Lost Children the cult of self-blinded people preach that rejecting diurnal sight liberates the mind to spiritual sight.
The carnival acquires a very conveniently unethical surgeon who travels with them and performs the amputations. And it was characters like this doctor who, alas, rang too hollow for me — bong bong , the telling sound of a character made up by the author because she had to make that part of the story work, and to hell with any considerations like plausibility.
Plausibility in a story about generically damaged freaks in a freak show which includes a boy with seemingly infinite telekinetic powers? A great deal of what goes on in this book, and a lot goes on, seemed to be series of contrivances towards another ratchetting up of delicious grotesqueness. The Bag Man! The maggot factory from human parts!
The freaks are humanized and dehumanized co-terminously. This author has her cake and eats it. Anyhow, the cult of Arty, takes up the majority of the story. This is another Big Theme. This is also about liberation. Arty wants to liberate you from normality, and Miss Lick wants to liberate women from male attention. This then allows them to become molecular pharmacologists or top UN interpreters. These two stories drag the book like a supermarket trolley with wonky wheels towards metaphor and polemic and away from the living breathing world which us readers want from fiction.
Fiction has to be true. I must say that most readers of Geek Love completely disagree with this, they have no problem with these characters and they love the world Katherine Dunn creates. But they can go and write their own review, and many have. And CGI makes the rest of it a stroll in the park.
I say do it now, and Ellie and Dakota Fanning are shoo-ins for the parts of the Siamese twins. I had Geek Love sitting on my shelf for three years. I got it on May 30th of when the library of the university I've been attending was having a clearance. This book was among the pile I took home with me. I could understand the library casting it slept on the shelf for nine years, but it wouldn't stop me from givin I had Geek Love sitting on my shelf for three years.
I could understand the library casting it slept on the shelf for nine years, but it wouldn't stop me from giving it a chance - and getting a free book! Geek Love was received with applause, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel tells the story of the Biniewskis, a family of carnies who make their living by travelling across the backwoods of the U. The Biniewskis aren't your ordinary carnies: papa Al Biniewski was a practitioner of some crazy Hunter S.
Thompson style eugenics and gave mama Biniewski a ton of different drugs and experimented on her with radioactive materials, so that their children would be born with as many physical deformities as possible.
The result is a pair of Siamese twins, Electra and Iphigenia; Arty, a boy without arms and legs and with flippers for hands and feet; Fortunato, also known as Chick, a kid who looks normal but who has amazing telekinetic powers; and Olympia, a hunchbacked albino dwarf who is also the narrator of the story. The protagonists of Geek Love are all despicable, and none more than the Biniewski seniors, Al and Lily.
They value their children only by their deformities, and how strange and exotic they would appear to the outsiders and how much profit they would generate. The Biniewskis treat "normal" people with contempt; Biniewski children who are miraculously born undeformed are abandoned after birth at stores, gas stations and other places where people would find them. Despite the old Biniewskis pretending that the business is a family run affair there's little family there besides business: business and making a profit is the entire rock the carnival is built upon.
Olympia, the main character of the novel, is obsessed with her brother, Arty the Aquaman. Throughout the novel Arty is shown to grow into a self-obsessed megalomaniac: he develops a cult of himself which he calls Arturism, and encourages his followers to mutilate themselves by cutting of parts of their body - starting with fingers and toes, and progressing from there.
Arty sees the human body as a burden and believes that only in deformity such as his one can achieve true peace and freedom. Olympia is just an hunchbacked albino dwarf; by the Biniewski standard she has no real exotic deformity, and because of this she was almost abandoned at birth. She is well aware that she is judged by her parents and feels inferior to her siblings, whom she feels they consider to be of much more worth. Olympia knows that she cannot change her genetics, and this makes her feel weak and worthless.
She clings to Arty because he is the only person to give her any attention - even though most if not all of it consists of abuse and exploitation - she feels that she deserves the abuse, as it comes from Arty who is obviously much more valued by her parents than she is they even make her attend to his needs and basically become his servant. Olympia is almost a sympathetic character, but her utter indifference to Arty's Machiavellianism and narcissism makes it hard for the reader to feel sympathy for her as well.
Because of this, they do terrible things and end up being miserable. However, I felt that Katherine Dunn simply did not know what to do with her characters, and never created a compelling enough story to carry them through the novel. I was simply Bored as I went on, and felt that the novel did not fulfill its initial potential.
It's a great carnival story of human greed, made immortal by the director's brave choice of casting real people with deformities to play the eponymous "Freaks" instead of actors in make up and costume.
The film shocked both the critics and the audience and his career derailed, making it next to impossible to get his next project accepted, but today is considered a cult classic and is preserved in the U.
National Film Registry for its significance. I will never forget the culminating scene of Freaks , and the film has left a lasting impact on me.
I'm afraid I can't say the same about Geek Love : it culminates when view spoiler [a female albino hunchbacked dwarf gets impregnated through telekinesis, and a fish boy becomes her babydaddy hide spoiler ]. I did read all the way to the end, but lost interest way before that.
View all 11 comments. Dec 23, Nomy rated it did not like it. A crazy ride through human insanity. A story somewhat like a much later issued 'Glass Castle' but unlike the latter this one is completely divorsed from any resemblance of reason.
A horrible, horrifying and darkly disturbing book. I picked it up at random decades ago and am still disliking it with passion.
I'll rant at it some more at some later time. I was expecting something strange, weird and wonderful and that is what I got with GL. This novel should not work-- the premise is too bizarre-- but yet, yet, it does. GL is largely narrated by Olympia Binewski Oly , a three foot tall bald dwarf with a hunchback. Her parents were carnies always on the move from place to place. While the show had various rides and such, the 'heart' if you will were freaks and freak shows.
Her parents, Al and 'Crystal Lil', decided one day to breed their own frea I was expecting something strange, weird and wonderful and that is what I got with GL.
Her parents, Al and 'Crystal Lil', decided one day to breed their own freaks for the show and experimented with drugs, insecticides, radioisotopes, you name it to produce a brood of freaks. Not all were successful several died before birth or shortly afterward, and of course are on display preserved in jars , but they in the end produced some interesting offspring: the oldest is 'Aqua man' Arty, with flippers instead of arms and legs, the second oldest are the Siamese twin girls sharing one lower body, but independent torsos , Oly, and finally Chick, who looked like a 'norm', but had crazy ESP powers moving objects, empathy, and probably more talents.
Dunn switches back and forth between Oly at a young age in the carnival and 'now', when she is in her late thirties and living in a boarding house in Portland, Oregon. With her in the house is 'Crystal Lil' her mom, who is basically blind, deaf and recalls nothing of her past, and Oly's daughter Miranda, now aged about Miranda is basically a 'norm', but she does have a little tail.
This starts off largely with the 'now', and then Dunn backtracks and the novel tells us how the present came about. Dunn does an excellent job imbuing you in the carnie atmosphere-- constantly moving here and there, the roadies, the Red Heads long story who sell tickets, candy and such, and of course the performances. Oly's brother 'Aqua man' is a hit from the get go, swimming around in a tank on stage. The twins are taught piano and with four arms and 20 fingers, create a sensation of their own.
Hence, we have one tent for Arty the Aqua man and one for the twins. Oly is relegated to basically being a barker to stoke up ticket sales for the shows she has a great voice.
Of course there are other acts-- various tigers and such, trapeze artists, sword swallowers, but the bit hits are the freak brood. As the freak children who call themselves 'specials' grow older, Arty starts becoming more and more competitive with the others, especially the twins. Finally, Chick is born, and managing his ESP talents when he is a baby is a real challenge they almost gave him up for adoption at first what use is a 'norm' until his talents became apparent.
What then, is the story really about? Sure, Dunn takes us on a wild ride with the carnival, but really, GL explores the meaning of life and the human condition. Even though the Binewskis and their offspring cannot be considered normal by any means, the sibling rivalries and family dynamics are easily recognizable as 'normal'. Things start to get touchy, however, when Arty, in his teens, invents a new attraction featuring himself.
Arty first experimented with being something of an oracle people in the crowd would ask questions and such with Arty giving pithy answers but this transformed itself into something of cult. One day, a despondent, 'heavy' woman in the audience was confronted by Arty, who basically told her she has no reason to be depressed-- she is whole and normal after all, and hey, look at me!
A torso with flippers! And, Arty added, I am happy! My life has meaning! I will stop with the plot-- it is way too much fun reading it unfold. Just depicting the bizarre Binewski family going through the motions would have been great fun all by itself. Nonetheless, Dunn does something that makes this novel really special. First, we have Oly, now 'old' at least by dwarf standards contemplating her daughter's fate. The Binewski's dumped Miranda at a Catholic school at age one, endowing her with a trust fund.
Oly only caught up to Miranda later, with an odd gift of a rent free apartment in the boarding house she owned; yet, she never told Miranda that she is her daughter. Oly somewhat vicariously lives through Miranda an art student in college who gets extra money in a sleazy strip club, where women freaks are the highlight of the show Miranda for example doing a sexy tease and ending with her ass to the club wagging her tail!
Despite the odd characters and situations, you almost have to root for Oly. As a young child, Oly is the 'go-between' between Arty and twins no love lost there. Oly is the one trying to hold the family together as her father takes more and more to the bottle and her mom to pills and such.
She is such an empathetic little gal! On the one hand, this is uplifting, on the other tragic, seldom to books manage to hit both emotions with the power of a roller coaster at full speed. You can taste the popcorn and cotton candy, feel the rides on the midway, and get your heart all tied in a knot at the same time. Readers also enjoyed. Literary Fiction. Adult Fiction.
About Katherine Dunn. The Binewskis, these incredible freaks, and their demented familial struggles helped me feel better about my own family problems, my own powerlessness.
The book inverted the cold adolescent truth that what makes you different curses you. The novelist Karen Russell whose Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soft, rained-out afternoon midway always hits my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.
Freaks are like owls, mythed into blinking, bloodless objectivity. As a teenager, I thought I was the only person who revered Geek Love. But then I started to meet others who were in on the secret. Dunn was as brilliant and warmly hilarious being herself as in print. Last year, I saw a paperback copy of Geek Love on the newsstand at an airport.
How, I wondered, did travelers feel about this strange, demented masterpiece when they cracked it open on their flights to Waikiki or Warsaw? How does a book as wild and dark as Geek Love endure for decades?
And who, really, is this wonder-writer, this magician of worlds? Her mother, an artist, was from a farming clan in North Dakota. She was happy as long as she was making something. When she was happy the world was a gorgeous place. They were a family of storytellers, her mother and her older brother Spike being especially good at making the family laugh.
Later my stepdad managed gas stations in a small town near Portland. At Reed College, she started out as a philosophy major. I went in thinking, yeah, art, beauty—my meat, drink, and air. Dunn in , Bob Peterson. She began writing her first novel, Attic , while she was still at Reed. Finishing college now seemed beside the point. The couple headed for Seville, Spain, where she completed Attic. By the time she finished her second novel, Truck , they were living on the Greek island of Karpathos, and Dunn was pregnant.
Attic was published in , Truck in Worried about the Vietnam War, they decided not to head home but instead set out for Dublin. Friends who lived there told me about it, and my son loved it.
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