(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: pulsing waves)
Luigi Cozzi background
JM:
Hello, this is "Chrononauts." I'm JM, here with Gretchen and Nate, and we're talking about "Galaxy" magazine going international, basically. So we've done a whole series on "Galaxy," and we started this recording block, this April 20th recording date, where we're talking about basically international authors: in this case, mostly Italy and Argentina and Russia.
In our last episode, we talked about the history of this international work. We also discussed the story "Wanderers and Travelers," by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, so do listen to that.
Now we're talking about a writer from Italy, and his name is Luigi Cozzi. I guess we'll just start by talking about him, because I think there's probably more to say about him in general than about the story in particular that we're going to talk about. That's a bit unfortunate, but I mean, yeah, we'll talk about it. It's fine.
Luigi Cozzi was born on September 7, 1947, in Busto Arsizio in Italy, near Milan, and he's something of a luminary in the Italian science fiction, fantasy, and horror culture scene. He's known pretty well internationally, too, especially in France. His first love always seems to be science fiction. He's talked about it to great extent. He's definitely more known for movies than anything else, and he said if he could get more science fiction financed in the cinema, he would have done more. But he's mostly retired from filmmaking now, although he had a brief resurgence in the 2010s with a couple of pictures.
He says he was especially into science fiction when he was a kid in the 1950s, and he would hunt down books and try his best to watch all the movies. Although I think it's probably the same in a lot of locales, Cozzi said it was particularly true in Italy that it was difficult to see science fiction in the cinemas because it was considered, "worse than pornography," and only, "idiots and stupid people want to see movies like that".
The story of this guy is pretty entertaining, and I think your main takeaway from this is going to be: the guy's around. Check him out. This guy's not necessarily known for always the highest-quality film products, but he's very passionate, and that's what we like to see, right? The films are interesting, and they're all right. So I want to talk a lot about that kind of stuff and avoid the story a little bit until the end. Then I'm just going to splurge on what happens briefly, and we'll mostly be talking about the setting and stuff like that.
As a nine-year-old, Luigi would draw comic strips with stories that he imagined as movies in his head and show them to his friends. He signed some of those with the pen name Lewis Coates, which I thought was interesting, because that was a pen name which came back for his most famous film, "Starcrash." He used it at the request of American distributors, and I don't know, this is what they're always saying: that you can't sell a film in America with a foreign name as a director. These Italians especially always say that when it comes to giving themselves Anglicized pen names for their films.
I just can't wrap my head around that. I'm not saying that their experience is untrue, but they're saying it's mostly the American distributors who told them this, so I presume that they would know what they were talking about. The kind of people who would even notice who the director of a, begging your pardon, schlocky science fiction movie is, is not the kind of person that would freak out if it wasn't an American's name on the title card. You know what I mean?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. The Italians had a pretty big penetration into the Western and horror market especially during this time, and a lot of the pseudonyms that the directors use for themselves can get pretty ridiculous sometimes.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
Lewis Coates is at least kind of close to Cozzi's actual name.
JM:
I'm not saying it's a universal perception. It's just a weird thing, because I can't really wrap my head around that being true. Even though I know people are prejudiced, I understand that, and people probably don't understand why I feel in my head that that's absurd. But like I said, I feel like the kind of people that would notice who the director was in a movie like this and even care about it in the slightest would not be the ones that would be offended. You know what I mean?
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some odd choices, to say the least, made with "Starcrash" and how it all comes together.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. So when Luigi was about fourteen, he bought his first 8mm film camera, and he and his sister and their classmates made home movies, like Luigi's own version of Corman's "The Pit and the Pendulum," which I'm sure would have been really, really entertaining to see. He started experimenting with editing and stop-motion around this time, and it's where he cut his teeth on filmmaking.
Meanwhile, he was reading the magazines, and he says he had correspondence with Frederik Pohl and Ray Bradbury. He said "Galaxy" was the greatest of the magazines.
In '64 or '65, he became the Italian correspondent for "Famous Monsters of Filmland," and Cozzi started selling science fiction stories when he was in secondary school.
Like Pohl himself, Luigi seems to have been a person who could make a lot of connections. He found jobs through the people that he met at magazines, editors, and people who worked in film. He got more experience synchronizing Italian dubs to English films.
In 1969, Cozzi made a film version of Frederik Pohl's story "The Tunnel Under the World." When we were doing the "Galaxy" episode, when we were preparing for that, that is, I had considered that being a story that we should cover. It's something we may come back to because it's a pretty cool story, and it feels important, especially in its time period in the early 1950s. The movie's from much later, and apparently it's a little different.
Cozzi said that Pohl had come to Italy, and they met and got on really well. Cozzi mentioned that he'd like to make a version of Pohl's story, and Pohl, who said that a lot of his friends were selling their stories to the movies but nobody had asked him, decided to give him the rights to do it without asking for money. So the film was shot over four days, and apparently it has a pretty experimental style. I haven't seen it, but I think it's available online. Hey, you found it, right? Did you actually get a chance to...?
Nate:
Yeah, I didn't watch it, but I kind of skimmed around it just to take a look at the production value. It definitely looks like a student film. Pretty, pretty low-budget, and I can definitely believe it was shot in four days. But yeah, it'd be interesting to check out and compare and contrast. I haven't read the Pohl story.
JM:
Yeah. He said he was happy when the movie "The Truman Show" came out, because he said finally people understood what my movie was actually about.
Cozzi kind of reminds me of a less annoying, more charming, more disingenuously disarming de Camp, in a way. Like, he's a funny guy. He seems really cool, though, actually. He doesn't have that nasty streak that de Camp has, maybe, but they seem self-effacing while aggrandizing themselves a little bit at the same time. There's actually a lot of interviews with him that you can watch online, and he's still doing it to this day.
Apparently the film is very reminiscent of Godard, because he said he loved "Alphaville." It was shown at the Trieste Film Festival, so a little bit of cachet, I guess, and apparently you could still see it in underground cinemas for some time.
Stuff started happening pretty fast for Cozzi around then, and he was really into the pop and rock music scenes of the time and stuff. He interviewed a bunch of musicians at the time, and he did his freelance work for one of Italy's premier music-press magazines.
He says he got a steady job in music journalism because he used shocking titles for articles to sell them. When he read some stupid article in some U.S. paper that had John Lennon badmouthing Paul McCartney, he decided to write an article with a lurid title, "The Beatles Breakup!" Then, a few days later, it actually happened.
It was after that that Luigi Cozzi moved to Rome, and this was in 1969, too. He immediately set out to make the acquaintance of the Italian filmmakers of the time, and he respected Mario Bava, Antonio Margheriti, and Riccardo Freda, all of whom had made science fiction films.
These guys said to Luigi that no other Italian journalist expressed even the slightest interest in meeting them because they were considered cheap hacks, and so they were all very happy to see Luigi Cozzi actually wanting to talk to them.
He went to the theater and saw the debut film from a young, up-and-coming director, Dario Argento: "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage." He said, I want to meet this guy. I'm interviewing him. The interview actually was arranged by Dario's dad, and he apparently was also really thrilled that somebody wanted to talk to his son about making movies.
A couple of years later, they ended up working together on "Four Flies on Grey Velvet," which Luigi says was his real introduction to professional filmmaking. Argento told him to write and direct an episode of his short-lived TV series "Door into Darkness." I don't know much about this series, but some people say it's pretty cool. Have either of you seen any of that?
Nate:
No.
JM:
No? Okay. Well, apparently Luigi's episode was regarded by many to be the best of the series. So he says that. Yeah, again, I'm not sure, right?
But at the time, on TV, you couldn't show a knife or blood in Italy, apparently, so I'm sure you could show lots of other things. My dad certainly had a lot of comments about Italian television from when he visited, but that was well after 1969 or the 1970s. But Cozzi had to make his story really scary without any gore, which he says he was successful in doing. Some of his other movies are known as being a little bit on the gory side or the sleazy side.
Luigi did make a couple of thrillers, or gialli, in the first half of the '70s, and I've seen one of these, "The Killer Must Kill Again," which I think is a really solid example of the genre. It's also maybe got a little bit of a better story than a lot of them, with more fun twists. It is a little on the sleazy side, so if you want to watch it, be warned, I guess. Some of those films are like that.
So he really wanted to make science fiction, though, of course, and my introduction to him, and I suspect most people's, was the film "Starcrash." Now we're going to take a few minutes out of the "Chrononauts" regular schedule to talk about this outrageous film. Nate, I think you've seen it. Gretchen, you haven't?
Gretchen:
I have not seen this film yet.
JM:
It's ridiculous. It's definitely ridiculous. It's one of these movies where, I don't know, Cozzi said he didn't set out to write a "Star Wars" ripoff, but there are scenes that are completely shamelessly ripping off "Star Wars," in particular the very opening scene. It's just a completely obvious ripoff of the opening scene of "Star Wars" in such a blatant way.
Then there's other things here and there, despite the fact that the plot is kind of, well, not kind of, it is pretty incoherent. It's one of these movies where it's like fifteen different movies kind of all crammed into one, and you have a complete story arc of a film go by in like five minutes.
Cozzi said he had very different ideas about the movie and how it should be, and I guess I believe this part. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be true. Also, I did see at one point there's a storyboard that you can get, I guess of the original conception, and it is a little different. I think that basically the film, as many films do, changed a lot in the production stages.
I think there are certain universal elements that you can identify as saying, okay, that's similar to "Star Wars," but it doesn't rip off "Star Wars." It's totally conceivable that Luigi Cozzi, a fan of pulp science fiction, would have come up with something like this without "Star Wars." But then there's other things that are like, okay, obviously because "Star Wars" exists, that exists, right?
Not to overanalyze this incredibly silly movie too much, but I think that this is an interesting sort of dichotomy between those two things. I think that the film was compromised, right? The producers saw that "Star Wars" came out, and they were like, well, make it more like this, right? We have to have a lightsaber battle.
Cozzi himself said he was more influenced by Ray Harryhausen and the "Sinbad" films and stuff like that, and he saw it as a fantasy film. Even though he had a great interest in science fiction, and he said "Galaxy" was his favorite, that's not really the kind of story that probably "Galaxy" would have published, right?
Nate:
No. It's kind of interesting how "Star Wars" kicked off this wave of schlocky space opera that you would see published in "Amazing Stories" and "Astounding" in the late '20s and the '30s.
JM:
Yeah, exactly.
Nate:
Where that stuff had been kind of out of vogue for a while with "Galaxy." Then in the late 1960s, around the time that Cozzi starts his science fiction writing career, Ellison publishes "Dangerous Visions," which again takes a further step away from the schlocky space opera stuff. Then "Star Wars" just brings it back in a huge, huge way.
I mean, "Star Wars" was massively popular. It wouldn't surprise me if it's still the most popular science fiction film of all time. It just really can't be overstated how big of an effect it did have on the entire world of science fiction. This is not the only blatant ripoff of "Star Wars" out there. There's certainly more than one.
JM:
There's quite a few. Yeah. The directors usually, most of them, claimed they were more influenced by something else, right? I can see that compromise at work. Cozzi says, "Oh, Ray Harryhausen." And is it Corman? "Battle Beyond the Stars"?
Nate:
Yeah, Corman was like an executive producer on this.
JM:
Yeah, he said, oh, "Seven Samurai," but all that, right?
Yeah. Which, of course, influenced a whole shitload of movies.
Nate:
Right, right. But yeah, you can definitely see those Harryhausen effects being used in some of the robot scenes, where you have the stop-motion. It does look very similar.
JM:
The soundtrack is by John Barry, who did all the James Bond films, so yeah, the soundtrack definitely makes the film seem probably more epic than it otherwise would, I'm guessing.
Nate:
So yeah, I mean, it doesn't really look bad. It's just the execution is ridiculous.
JM:
The dialogue is really bad.
Nate:
Yeah. Caroline Munro being overdubbed in an American accent, and the robot with the cowboy accent, like, they definitely made some interesting choices in the production, for sure.
JM:
So apparently the French have the nicest dubbing, though. Yeah. You listen to the French dub. It's really calming and nice, or something like that. It still probably doesn't sound like Caroline Munro, though.
My funny experience with "Starcrash," actually: I've been looking around the net a lot about Luigi Cozzi in the last little while, and the general consensus, I believe even one site said something like, he's certainly not among the first or even the second tier of Italian film directors. While that may be true, when I was about ten or eleven years old, we didn't have a VCR at my house.
That seems maybe a little weird, but for me at that time, even still, it seemed uncommon that people had them, and it was a treat to go to somebody's house where you could just watch whatever movie you wanted. But every now and then, my mother would rent a VCR or borrow one from somebody, so we'd have one for a couple weeks and we'd just go and rent movies.
She was like, oh, he's crazy about science fiction, so she would just grab whatever sci-fi movie looked sci-fi-ish and bring it over. So I ended up watching all these kind of weird movies, and "Starcrash" was one. This was the first Italian movie that I ever watched. I wasn't even aware that it was Italian at that time. But yeah, Luigi, you may not be of the first rank, but your passion wins through in the end, right?
So this film was panned at the time, and everybody said it was just a "Star Wars" ripoff, and it had a really hard time. But it's become one of those "bad" movies that people love. I don't want to be too harsh on it. I do think it's entertaining, and I do think the work and passion behind it is certainly sincere. I think there are some unfortunate touches, and I don't know, again, how much of that is due to Cozzi and how much to other people. One of the producers is also the second screenwriter, right? So I feel like the things that are really bad about it are probably compromises.
Yeah. Some of the dubbing choices are weird. I really enjoy, I don't know if that's Joe Spinell's voice for real, playing the bad guy, but he's just so very casual in the way he talks and everything. Some guy tells him something and he's like, "mmm", "oh, I forgot to tell you, the Emperor's on the way." He's just so, I don't know.
Yeah. The Emperor of the First Circle of the Universe was played by Christopher Plummer, who said, "I accepted it because it let me go to Rome. I would have done a porno if they'd asked me to. Rome was the best thing that ever happened to me."
It sounds like people had a really great time making the movie, so it's a movie you just can't dislike that much, in my opinion. It just sounds like they were having so much fun by the end.
One story goes that they didn't really know how they were going to end it. A bunch of the people were just sitting around drinking champagne, including Christopher Plummer and stuff, and they were just shouting ideas at each other. I don't know if that's true or not. Like I said, there was an original story. I feel like it maybe was compromised a little bit.
The pains of filmmaking in the decades past, which Luigi does talk a lot about in recent interviews, talking about how different it is now and how disconnected he feels from all of it. It's not necessarily like sad old man rambling, but it's a little bit, yeah, like, "the age of making films the way I used to understand it is long gone, and you can't hold back progress", and all this stuff. It's a little sad to hear him talking about all the cinemas in Rome closing down and stuff like that.
But yeah, he was saying that he took a lot of inspiration from fantasy movies, especially the "Sinbad" films from Harryhausen. He made the kind of story that he wanted to make with the budget he had. It was much less, obviously, than that of "Star Wars," and apparently it kept getting reduced further and further as they were making the film. It's a tough thing to work on, but it's certainly his most well-recognized film now.
It's important to note that he was active in fan-related culture all throughout, organizing festivals and events. In the late '80s, with Dario Argento, he created the "Profondo Rosso" shop, which is a landmark now in Rome. It's been around for quite a while, and they specialize in fantasy, horror, and science fiction culture stuff. I guess it's probably a pretty cool place to wander around in. Nate, you actually visited there, right?
Nate:
I did, yeah. It's not that big of a shop. There's definitely tons of "Starcrash" merchandise in there. There's a lot more Cozzi stuff than Argento stuff. But there's a wax museum in the basement that has some props from Argento movies, and it's pretty fun.
JM:
Yeah. Again, it's hard to say how much it's changed since the '90s and stuff like that, too, right?
Nate:
Yeah. But definitely a lot of really cool books, science-fiction-related, that have been translated into Italian, like a lot of Italian editions of "Weird Tales," a lot of classic science fiction stuff that's been translated into Italian, as well as Luigi Cozzi's own multi-volume science fiction history in Italian, in Italy, which it's cool that he gets into that kind of work, too, that nonfiction historical writing.
JM:
Yeah, yeah. That aspect I think is really cool. I guess some of these filmmakers, even the legendary ones like Bava, right, he had a particular kind of story that he liked, and I think it was more like the Gothic mode. If he made a science fiction film, it's not necessarily that he lacked passion for it or something, but it wasn't really something that he was terribly interested in, right?
This is, again, one of our writers, I think, who's really, I guess, for the fans. That sounds not great now, almost, because of the way certain things have progressed, maybe, but still, it's cool to see that. They also have the publishing house. That's where all the books come out, I guess. There's quite a lot of them. They've put out almost 200 books or something like that, on various subjects from Italian genre movies to American cinema, and yeah, the history of science fiction series in Italy that you mentioned.
So, his other movies in the '80s are all science-fiction- and fantasy-related. "Contamination" is science-fiction horror. I don't really like that movie very much.
Nate:
I don't know. I thought it was fun. It's definitely less on-the-surface ripoff of "Alien," but there's definitely some heavy borrowing from "Alien" in certain scenes, for sure.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's definitely way more gory than "Starcrash," for sure.
JM:
I've seen some "Alien" ripoffs that I like, but this is just, they don't even impregnate anybody. They just make them explode. That's, I don't know. It's literally just the chestburster just makes you explode. There's no alien. It's just that, right?
I don't know. The beginning kind of rips off "Zombi 2," which had literally just come out not that long before, right?
And Ian McCulloch is in both movies, too, right?
I don't know. There's a scene of the main female character. It's not even a scene, because it's broken up between other scenes in the movie, and it just keeps coming back to it. She's in a bathroom or something like that, and she's being menaced by this alien egg that's about to explode, and she knows if it does, she'll die, right? The scene just goes on and on and on, and she's screaming and crying and nothing is happening. It's just like, oh, please. I'm not normally that hard on shit like this, but yeah, I don't know.
It has a Goblin soundtrack, which is cool, but it's definitely not one of their best soundtracks either. So yeah, I don't know. I didn't enjoy that.
I actually enjoyed "Hercules" a lot more because it's more ridiculous, like "Starcrash." It opens with Hercules wrestling a bear and throwing it into space. You just can't beat that. It's got a cool cast, and it's really ridiculous. Lou Ferrigno plays Hercules, as he does in the sequel, "The Adventures of Hercules," which Cozzi himself said was just an excuse to try out all kinds of special effects that he knew about and stuff like that.
But yeah, again, very influenced by Harryhausen, but also the 1960s peplum films that were very popular in Italy, always with this American football player stomping around as Hercules or whatever they decided to call him that day. Sometimes it was Hercules. Sometimes it was something else, but they usually dubbed in the word Hercules just so you knew, especially if you were watching the film not in Italy, what classical hero you were dealing with.
But it's fair to say that Cozzi's reputation as a filmmaker is mixed.
So yeah, the YouTube channel "The Overlook Hotel" observes that he's more noteworthy for his enthusiasm than talent. Maybe that's true, but I still really enjoy "The Killer Must Kill Again" and "Starcrash." And yeah, that first "Hercules" movie is pretty good.
One of the most notorious things Cozzi did, which is never mentioned anywhere—apparently it's considered taboo to mention it at Toho Studios—was a recut and reworked version of the 1954 masterpiece "Gojira." They were pretty lax with the rights for this at the time, and now Cozzi's cut is pretty much viewed as an abomination. He colorized the movie in a really weird way, apparently. It sounds like it took a lot of work. Now they can do this with AI in a matter of hours, probably, frame by frame. But they went through this laborious process of colorizing the film, and apparently it just looks really, really strange and off-putting.
They tried to use this sound gimmick that would supposedly make you feel subsonic vibrations in the theater and stuff like that. They added to the running time, ostensibly to please, once again, distributors, by just stealing stuff from other movies, including the Hiroshima documentary footage. Nobody was pleased with this, apparently.
So again, sounds like a project that had some work put into it. Apparently you can still find this in a few places. Maybe it's available online somewhere. But yeah, I mean, if you're a fan of the original "Gojira" movie, and you just want to see this odd Italian cut-up curiosity, maybe it would be a thing to look for. But yeah, I don't know.
(music: derailing synth trains)
"Rainy Day Revolution No. 39" discussion
JM:
But he did write some stories, and that's what we're here to talk about. Actually, the story in question is very short, and it's, I think, more interesting for the setting than anything else. I don't think it really comes together. It's some interesting sort of weird dystopian ideas that could have been explored as something, but it just feels like he decided he was bored with it and wanted to end it, so he just brought out all the gore and ended the story.
It didn't make a lot of sense to me. Again, I don't know if I was missing something in the translation, but I don't think so. It just seemed like the main character had some kind of plan, and he was trying to do something, and we never got to learn what that was. It certainly wasn't to end up killing himself. So I don't know. But then again, maybe it was. Maybe it was. I don't know.
You can tell that he really likes Pohl a lot, because it starts with this quote: "The world is our oyster. We've made it come true. But we've eaten that oyster. Like Alexander, we weep for new worlds to conquer." That's supposedly a quote from Fowler Schocken, who is a character in "The Space Merchants." Actually, I didn't check to see whether, in the book, he actually says that. I'm assuming it might be a quote from the book itself. It does sound more like that, though, like it comes from the actual book and is not a made-up thing about that character that Cozzi did. But yeah, he's like the head of the weird advertising company that wants to send people to Venus.
So the story is basically an advertising satire, and we know that that's Pohl's thing. That's his thing in "The Tunnel Under the World," and that's Luigi Cozzi's first movie, too.
This is also working in bits of pop culture and stuff like that. I was thinking earlier: the title doesn't even mean anything, right? Like, "Rainy Day Revolution No. 39." What is that? I was just realizing, oh, he just took a couple of pop songs. I guess "The White Album" might not have come out yet, probably. I don't know.
Gretchen:
I want to say, was it '68?
Nate:
'68, yeah. So this was a bit before that, and it was published a year or two earlier in "Galassia" under a different title.
JM:
Okay. Well, the Beatles still get a mention here anyway.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
JM:
And in '66, I do think there's a "Revolution." The song had come out. But anyway, it seems to be an excuse to do some cool grim dystopia and also drop in a lot of pop culture references. It's fine for what it is, but yeah, it doesn't really come together.
So let's just run through quickly what happens, and we can kind of wrap it up. But I do think talking about Cozzi's history is more interesting.
Yeah. We start with a bunch of advertising slogans for mouthwash and cigarettes, and Sexy-X, the Sexy-X cigarettes. It's a weird kind of classist dystopia of some kind, and people can't afford to use the roads or the skyways, so they take the Underground trains instead, which are dangerous because there are robots down there who sacrifice passengers to the God of the Line. The gates also have blades on them that slice up slowly moving passengers into bits. It's sort of hilariously gory. Surely there's more efficient ways you could do population control.
It's like, oh yeah, we'll just have the doors on the subways have blades on them so that if people can't get through fast enough—
Gretchen:
Yeah, but it looks cool.
JM:
Clean-up on aisle four.
Gretchen:
I think Cozzi was just like, it looks really cool. We'll throw this in. We're going to decapitate a woman. It's going to look awesome.
Nate:
It does remind me of those Fulci movies from the late '70s where they just make no sense at all, but really weird, gory stuff happens. I can totally see, if they made this into a movie, it would have a weird cult following behind it, because yeah, it gets really violent and it just kind of makes no sense, and it's ridiculous on its face. But you could just see the train deaths through the blades on the door being really overdone in a film setting.
Gretchen:
I could see it being done like a scene from "The Beyond."
JM:
I don't know. I like most of those movies.
Gretchen:
They're fun. They're really fun movies.
That would be a fun scene from the movie.
JM:
Yeah, it's true. I mean, he's probably imagining in his head how this would look in the movies or something like that, right? They're like, well, we can't make them that gory yet, but maybe one day we'll be able to.
People have names like Lester Aharddaysnight and Judas Imabeliever, and they belong to political parties like the Party of the Melancholy of the Good Old Time, which are, of course, Fascists. I kind of thought this was ridiculous but really fun. Actually, I enjoyed the weird political stuff. There wasn't a lot of it, because yeah, the story is over just like that, but it was kind of funny. It did seem different than Pohl and "The Space Merchants," and probably influenced by the craziness that was Italian politics after the Second World War, I think.
Lester is our main character, and yeah, like I said, he has some kind of plan. It's said he's not a member of a Party anymore, so I was thinking he would go into that. But no, there's not really a story behind it or anything like that, and there's no telling what he's actually planning to do.
He meets Judas on the train after the latter loses his hand while boarding. You would think that would cause a lot of problems, but they also have medical robot things that walk around the cars bandaging up people who have been injured but not killed, I guess. They exchange friendly party slogans at one another. Lester's party did pretty well on the last Revolution Day, scoring fourth.
Now, again, I was confused by this because the name of the story is "Rainy Day Revolution No. 39," and this doesn't seem to be a Revolution Day, though, from what the story says. So again, I don't know. Is it just a reason to get in another pop-culture reference? I guess so.
But Lester is not officially in a Party. Like I said, apparently he was, though. Judas contemplates staying on the train forever now that he's wounded, but decides he'd rather die. I also feel like it's obvious that he was influenced by being on the subway in Rome, for example. I mean, I don't know, just thinking one day like, well, what if this was some weird dog-eat-dog dystopia or something like that, and people were stuck down here, living here forever? Oh, look, I saw that guy sleeping on the seat last week. It's the same guy. Maybe he's been here this whole time. Things like that cross your mind when you're on the subways late at night, sometimes especially.
But yeah, after seven days of absence, the Party would declare him officially dead. Lester is going to get off at the next stop, but he doesn't make it. The gates close on him, presumably cutting him into bits and spitting gore everywhere. And that's it.
It's kind of funny, because last time, when we talked about "The Marching Morons," the Kornbluth story, we were wondering who the targets were, exactly. We were just kind of like, well, I guess it's everybody, right? And that was fine. That worked in that story. But here, it's all too vague to really have any point or overarching reason for it to exist, except this young Italian guy wanted to write this cool scene that he had in his head, pretty much. He added a little bit of fun Pohl-esque background detail and some knowledge of his own politics and pop culture, and then we have the story.
So yeah, I mean, I'm kind of surprised it made it into "International Science Fiction," to be honest. But Pohl must have recognized something in Luigi and his work. Luigi said when they met, they had quite a connection over stuff, and he talks a lot about that kind of thing with people that he worked with and stuff like that.
So it was cool. I enjoyed getting into his background and watching "Starcrash" again. That was fun. Not really a workable story for me. I don't know.
Gretchen:
Yeah. But it's interesting, because I know, JM, you had said that the Strugatsky story felt a bit like you're coming into something where it feels like it's maybe something grander, or you've missed something when you come into it a little bit. This is definitely the same feeling.
This one especially. So I kind of agree with this idea where you do think that Lester is going to have this big plan, and perhaps being influenced by some of the other things that will be coming up later in this episode, I'm thinking some revolutionary action, something that's like guerrilla warfare, or some kind of thing, is at least being planned by Lester. And then it goes completely the opposite direction of that.
But I still think the imagery in this story and some of the kernels of details that we get are really interesting, even though I don't think, in the end, it pans out very well. You don't get a full sense of a story. I think it is Cozzi writing a scene and wanting to write out this vision that he had about something. I think that is what it feels like. It feels almost like someone writing a dream that they had, or something like that.
JM:
Yeah, maybe you're right.
Gretchen:
But it's all these disconnected ideas and details. They're very evocative, but yeah, it doesn't all come together in a very logical sense.
JM:
It's definitely something I can imagine, like I was saying, just having an experience on the train or something like that, or maybe being overwhelmed and sort of turned off by being exposed to all this advertising and stuff like that. I don't know, there's lots of things, right? Cozzi was trying to synthesize a lot of his experiences that he'd had up to that point, and the story was published before he was twenty years old. So it feels even so more than the Kornblth, I guess. It's just not given the development it would need to give it a sharp point that it could possibly use to be more memorable. The setting was cool.
Sometimes looking at things written by people who are really into role-playing games or something like that, and they're just writing a scene to establish a character or a setting or something like that, you're like, oh, that's pretty cool, but it's not really a story, right? It doesn't feel like a story. It just feels kind of like, I don't know, some daydream on a subway train, almost. That's kind of what it feels like.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of just what "Starcrash" almost feels like, too. It's a fever dream, and I guess "Contamination" in some ways, too. But yeah, I don't know. It's a silly and ridiculous setting, and ridiculous gore.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
I don't know. It's kind of hard to hate because it is so short, even though, yeah, it isn't really that much of a story and doesn't really do much aside from the ridiculous scene and the gore.
Gretchen:
I think the vibes are fun, and I think that's kind of what you get. Mostly, it tries to invoke an atmosphere of the place that we're in, and these really outlandish and bizarre ideas and people, and all this happening. I think it does a pretty good job at that. I didn't hate reading it, and I thought there were some fun little bits in there. But yeah, as an overall story, it's not a very cohesive one.
I also would like to add that I read this Cozzi story while getting off of a very crowded bus and waiting for the next one I was taking, so I think I did get a pretty optimal reading setting for this.
JM:
Yeah, I can definitely relate to that. If this had been more fleshed out as a story, I think I would have liked this a lot more. The potential is definitely there. It has a mood to it. It has a cool setting and everything like that, in a way. But yeah, it feels exactly like what it is. You could almost kind of see it as being a movie scene in some weird '80s cult movie or something like that.
Gretchen:
It feels like if you were to wake up in the middle of the night and some cult movie was playing on your TV, and you saw it in between going back to sleep, that's kind of what it feels like.
JM:
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Again, it's a mood thing, right? I do think there's a place for, I guess, flash fiction, where the idea isn't necessarily to tell a complete story, but just to establish maybe a feeling or something like that, or have one small event happen. I don't know, even though I think this doesn't entirely work as that, because yeah, it seems like there's a lot of leading up to something that's not there. It's several times brought up that Lester has something in mind that he wants to do, and Cozzi doesn't even tell us what that is. I think that's really frustrating.
So it just kind of leads me into a question, because I don't think there's a lot else to say about this. But how many issues of "International Science Fiction" were there?
Nate:
Just two.
JM:
Okay. And who are some of the other authors in those that we haven't talked about, that we're not going to talk about?
Nate:
Yeah, so for "International Science Fiction," the other authors that appeared in issue number one, at least for the short stories, are Helmuth W. Mommers and Ernst Vlcek, co-writing this story "The Epsilon Problem," from Germany. There's Michel Ehrwein, also from Germany, who wrote the story "Uranus." Damien Broderick, who is Australian, who I don't actually think we've covered an Australian author on "Chrononauts" yet. He wrote the story "The Disposal Man."
JM:
No. There's a couple of books that I had in the potential for a future lineup, but I think we've kind of passed some of those. Not that we can't return to these time periods, but some of these types of stories maybe we'll have to be in a certain mood if we want to revisit them.
Yeah, like 1800s lost-race stuff.
Nate:
Right. Yeah, yeah. There's one by Robert Presslie, who is Scottish. One by Ilya Varshavsky, from the Soviet Union. J. L. Mahe, from the Netherlands. "Witchcraft for Beginners," by F. C. Gozzini, also from Italy. Then another Ilya Varshavsky story, then another short story again by Helmuth W. Mommers and Ernst Vlcek. And then "The Big Tin God," by Philip E. High, who is British.
Then issue number two of "International Science Fiction" has a more varied set of authors. So there's a novelette by Mikhail Yemtsev and Yeremey Parnov from the Soviet Union, "The Last Door." A story by Gust Gils. He's Dutch. There is Juliette Raabe, who is French.
JM:
Yeah, I think I recognize one or two of these names, but most of these are unknown to me. But yeah, I was just curious. Definitely lots of anthologies. For example, French science fiction from the '50s and '60s that I actually want to take a look at at some point later on the podcast.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. There's also "The Island of the Crabs," by Anatoly Dneprov, which I actually have read in another anthology, and which is actually a pretty awesome story. It's been translated a couple of times, so I'm not sure which translation version is here. A couple other Soviet authors, Genrikh Altov; another Italian, Alessandro Mussi; one from India by B. Sridhar Rao; another Anatoly Dneprov story. There's also a J. U. Giesy and Junius B. Smith story. I just have to say they're from the United States, so this might have been the Esperanto story. I'm not entirely sure. Then Claus Felber, Hugo Correa, who is from Chile, Romain Yarov, another Soviet author, and then Nathalie Henneberg, who is from Georgia, which was at the time part of the Soviet Union, but she wrote in French. But yeah, it's a wide variety of authors from a lot of places, for sure.
JM:
It should have made it longer than two issues. It's unfortunate. I imagine it was kind of difficult to get them together. And yeah, if the distribution just wasn't good, like Pohl said, it didn't last very long.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, working with half a dozen different languages, you have to find decent translators to be able to work with all the material. At the end of the day, sales are what drive the magazine, and if it's not selling well enough to justify the upfront production costs, which are certainly greater than just having stories natively written in English, then the magazine is just going to die on the vine, which is definitely unfortunate because there are a lot of really cool stories out there that are published in languages that are not English, for sure.
Yeah, yeah. We'll take a quick break and we'll move on to Sandro Sandrelli.
Bibliography:
Bałaga, Marta, interview with Luigi Cozzi (2024) https://cineuropa.org/es/interview/470204/
Frau, Fabio Secchi "Il principe della fantascienza italiana" https://www.mymovies.it/persone/luigi-cozzi/52276/
DeSentis, John "Talking COZZILLA: An Interview with Italian GODZILLA Director Luigi Cozzi", (2009) https://www.scifijapan.com/godzilla-toho/talking-cozzilla-an-interview-with-italian-godzilla-director-luigi-cozzi
de Voogd, Barend, interview with Luigi Cozzi (2011) https://www.flashbackfiles.com/luigi-cozzi-interview
Torretti, Barbara, interview with Luigi Cozzi (2006) https://www.darkveins.com/en/interview-with-luigi-cozzi/
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