 Neal Romanek writes for and about The Pictures - movies, tv, comics, games, web content, and even cave paintings. 
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We are very sorry to hear about the death of one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, game designer, Gary Gygax. Gary Gygax created “Dungeons & Dragons” in the 1970’s. This week when you turn on the tv, go to the movies, play video games, take a moment to pause and note that without Gary Gygax and the RPG juggernaut that he launched, your entertainments might look very, very different. There’d be fewer half-orcs, for one. I reprint here, in full, a post from April 2006, called “No Neal. Gary Gygax Is Your Father”: …to which I replied: And so then Gary Gygax said to me: “Search your feelings, Neal. You know it to be true.” And then I squealed like a little piggy: “Noooo! Noooo! …” And then coming to my senses: “… Oh, no. Wait. Yes! Yes! Of course! That explains a lot.” Yes, Gary Gygax is my father. Yet, he did not sleep with my mother – or so my parents insist. So how did this immaculate conception (“I.C.”, for those who played on/against Catholic schools in high school sports teams) come to pass?
D&D was my baptism by fire into the world of gaming. The first time I ever played this greatest role playing game of all role playing games was in a bastardized version which employed only percentile dice rolls (by rolling 2xd20’s – for you civilians) and required approximately 30 attributes for each character, also determined by percentile roll.
No stealing of the Special Mace of Healing from the band of Gnolls in a trap door-plagued tunnel complex here! No! No, my Lord! My Dungeons & Dragons campaigns involved world-rending events, orcs with cannons, demons unleashed, an army of Drow Elves, and armadas of dragons of all conceivable colors locked in epic battle. My players weren’t trying to get rich and move up to the next level – or if they were, I was stone deaf to their pleas. My players were responsible for the entire fate of the Universe(s)! And my ambitions today are – to the chagrin of my agents/managers/wife – not much less grandiose. But creating a world, building every part of it, breathing my own life into it, and then forcing you – as role player/audience – to endure – er, I mean INHABIT that world was my dream – and still is. I moved on from Dungeons & Dragons and by high school I was creating my own role playing games, cribbing notes and weaponry and character attributes and matrices from all sorts of other games. My favorite – and it had a long run with my role playing friends – who, I realize in hindsight, were very indulgent with me – was a space opera/sci-fi adventure role playing game which featured – again – everything but the kitchen sink. I called the game “GalaxStar”. I do not know why. I do not know what a “GalaxStar” is. I did not know then, and I do not know now. But that is what I called it. I was kid, okay. A friend and I even embarked upon a comic book of the adventures that had taken place in the game play, but the steam left that idea quickly when I began to understand the majesty of girls and alcohol. But even during my precocious and hair-raising transition into the fields of alcoholism and sex addiction, I was always trying to create a new role playing game – set in all kinds of bizarre milieu. I tried insects. I tried secret agents. I attempted a completely generic (or maybe utterly all-encompassing and universal?) gaming system which could be adapted to any scenario. I was briefly in a rock band when I was a kid. The band didn’t keep me around long because I was much more interested in creating a mythology, a design, and a conceptual system for the band to dwell in than I was in making music. Ah, wasted youth! What precious energy I spent on utterly useless creations! What a great and bounteous talent I frittered away on nothing! What a disappointment for my parents to know that I wasn’t just masturbating all night behind those closed doors! How would I ever make it up to myself? And to all those other teens whose lives I helped to ruin? How would I ever make good? Out of high school, I moved to Los Angeles, because that’s where they made the movies …
Next week Neal learns: Ralph Bakshi is his father. Roy Scheider died. I feel sad.
Surprised to say, sad. When major movie stars and media personalities perish, I don’t generally feel too much one way or another about it. I feel some curiosity, possibly some sympathy for the person’s family. But generally, after the short shock of the initial news, it all feels to me like just one more sequence in their public drama. I liked … that guy who just died … I literally just forgot his name – either because I am old, or I am dangerously out of touch with the very industry I work in, or – most likely – the coffee hasn’t taken effect yet. Heath Ledger. I liked Heath Ledger a lot. His “Brokeback Mountain” (2005) performance was superb. He managed a character of deeply strangled emotion without giving a strangled performance. Paul Newman pulled that off in some of his early roles. It’s not easy. I regret that I won’t be able to see Heath Ledger’s career. We always wonder, when a promising talent dies, what spectacular heights they might have scaled, had they been allowed to conttinue and to develop. James Dean, River Phoenix, Jimi Hendrix. But more often than not, promising talents fade away and do not last a lifetime. If a performer stays in the game and takes care of his body & soul, often the best that can be expected is a cycle of hits and misses, missteps and lucky breaks and missed opportunities and minor successes leveraged to great advantage. We like success and excellence and we like more of it and more of it and more of it. We like to see it played out on our screens. We like to imagine such a thing would be possible in our own lives, and pocketbooks. I do anyway. But I have come to believe that such an expectation is not only childish – or, at least, something born out of childish fears – but that it’s also undesireable. Very much the equivalent of wanting the season to be summer all year long.(people relocate thousands of miles to bask in this fantasy). The best of Heath Ledger’s career may have already been behind him. Not likely. But not without precedent. But Roy Scheider. I loved watching him. His image may very well have imprinted on my soft young brain when I first saw him, as Martin Brody, in “Jaws” (1975). I enjoyed every performance of his I ever saw. I saw “Jaws 2″ (1978) on opening day with my friend John Horvath and though, even as a little kid, I knew the movie was crap, I was excited to be able to watch Roy Scheider again. I suppose Scheider – along with Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw – must have been among the very first actors whose names I knew. Roy Scheider missed out on playing the lead in “The Deer Hunter” (1978) because of his obligation to do the “Jaws” sequel. And here we see the flaw in revering ever-expanding, ever-increasing successes. Had he done the role, we would have been robbed of one of Robert De Niro’s great performances, and that film – one of the greatest American films ever made – would have suffered incalculably. So the Big Picture is working out well and one missed opportunity also means another opportunity somewhere else. The end of one career means the beginning of something else. Thanks, Heath Ledger. Thanks, Roy Scheider.
So that was Kurt Vonnegut. All done. I’m glad we got him. He was good. My wife wrote a paper on Kurt Vonnegut when she was at Boston College. The faculty resisted heavily because Kurt Vonnegut was considered a “popular” author – and a writer of science fiction, heavens forbid – and so beneath academic study. But she won out. I haven’t read as much Kurt Vonnegut as I should – another peculiar result of my tendency toward avoiding things that I know will make me happier. But I will. I will read more. I will read “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), for example. I remember “Slaughterhouse Five” sitting on desks of friends in high school. I think they must have been reading it for a class. Very enlightened high school I went to. I read “Cat’s Cradle” (1963) and “The Sirens Of Titan” (1959) a couple years back. They were fascinating and very, very funny. Reading them, I had the suspicion I was being distracted by a first-rate entertainment, so the writer could, in the meantime, perform some fine-tuning of my mental and spiritual state. Certainly, Vonnegut’s service during WWII, and his first-hand experience of the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, are key influences in any study of his work and absurist point of view. Perhaps experiencing such horror first-hand produces an understanding that the most vital things must never be approached with an attitude of gravity: “Who am I to shade this staggering moment with so light and shallow brow!”
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Copyright © 2010 Neal Romanek – words/pictures - All Rights Reserved |
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