10 Lessons Star Wars Taught Me About Life and Storytelling

“I remember when I saw STAR WARS back in 1977. To this day it’s the closest I’ve ever come to a religious epiphany.” That quote is from a recent Facebook post by my friend, the writer Derrick Ferguson. I think it perfectly expresses how many of us feel about the effect that movie and its sequels had on us.

I am a member of the Star Wars generation. I was born in March, 1977, a few months before the release of the first movie. I never got to see Star Wars in the theater during its original run, of course, but, three years later, my very first moviegoing experience was The Empire Strikes Back (thanks, Dad!). Regardless of being born a bit too close to the release of the first film to see it first run, you can bet all your smuggled credits I knew the story backwards and forwards. How could I not when, because of when I happened to come into this world, I was absolutely surrounded by the action figures, comic books, records that told the story, and all the other merchandising that avalanched down upon the world after the success of George Lucas’s magnificent space opera?  

Now, at the age of 38, with the newest Star Wars movie just having been released (no, I haven’t seen it yet, but I will as soon as I can), I’m pondering just what a tremendous impact the original trilogy (I really dislike the prequels) had not only on my childhood, but on my imagination as I grew to be a man and a writer.

Before I encountered all the other films, literature, comics, and other forms of art and entertainment that influenced me, there was Star Wars. My exposure to it even predates my other favorite universes, like the fictional future of Star Trek, the Victorian-era mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, the horror-laden concepts of H.P. Lovecraft, and the wonderful stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. Before all that, and all the stories in all their formats that I read or saw in later years, there was Star Wars, and it’s had an effect on my life that I cannot even calculate the depth of.   

Here are ten things I now realize I initially learned from those three amazing movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.  

I suspect that if I look back on this list in ten or twenty or thirty years, these points will still be informing the way I think, the way I dream, the way I write, and the way I view the world around me.

1. It can be more fun to root for the underdog.

That where the drama comes from! Seeing a small group of rebels face the mighty Empire is what makes Star Wars work. And the same could be said of Gandalf and his band of hobbits, elves, and dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, or of so many other great adventure stories. The joy of adventure fiction comes from betting on the side that the odds are against. And this bleeds over into other aspects of life too. Even when it comes to sports, I find victory means more when your team isn’t expected to win. I got more satisfaction out of the Yankees just managing to make the playoffs this past season (and, unfortunately, losing in the first round) than I did in some of the years when they were sure to win the World Series and did.  

   

2. The mentor is just as important as the hero.

As a kid, Star Wars was, to me, all about Luke. That’s who I wanted to be. But, looking back, I realize the importance of Obi-Wan (and Yoda, too) and how indispensable those guiding teachers are to our hero’s success. Gandalf, Professor Charles Xavier, Burgess Meredith in Clash of the Titans, and Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix: those characters are essential to the stories and their presence should not be too overshadowed by the younger heroes we are more likely to identify with.    

3. The monster in the backyard can be just as scary as the big villain.

One of the things that add such wonderful texture to the Star Wars universe is how danger lurks around every corner and on every planet and how those threats don’t always come from the Empire. Sand people on Tattooine, the creature that hangs Luke upside down (presumably to eat later) on Hoth, and the asteroid that turns out to be a living creature are all examples of how a world with many small dangers scattered about is more interesting than one with only a single main villain or set of villains.

4. Women can be kickass heroes.

As a little boy, I, of course, wanted to be Luke Skywalker. And I thought of heroes as usually being men because that’s how it was in most of the fiction I was exposed to. Even today, I see fans of Luke debating fans of Han about who was better. But we can’t forget Leia! Princess Leia was the glue that held that story together and was just as important as the boys. She sets the whole story in motion by drawing Obi-Wan back into action. She gets captured by two of the most feared members of the Empire, Darth Vader and his boss, Grand Moff Tarkin, and then (while Luke is still a naïve farm boy on Tattooine) proceeds not to cower in fear but instead threatens Vader with political ramifications and tells Tarkin he smells bad! And, something I realized only recently: the only time in the original trilogy that a major hero kills a major villain up close and personally is when Leia strangles Jabba with a chain! Tarkin died in the Death Star explosion, Vader and the Emperor killed each other, and I don’t think Greedo or Boba Fett (despite the latter's popularity, which comes from the fact that he looks cool) qualify as major villains on the level of the others I’ve just mentioned. Leia was, I think, the first female character I encountered who was just as tough (and maybe more so) as her male co-adventurers.   

  

5. Comedy has a place in even the most serious stories.

Star Wars is a dark story at times, certainly an exciting one, and full of suspense (especially when you’re a kid), and those wonderful little exchanges between R2-D2 and C3P0 nicely break up the tension and give the films a rhythm that’s just right for the rousing adventure series it is. I find that now, as a writer, I often find a way to sneak something I hope will induce a laugh or smile in the reader into even the darkest of my stories.   

6. You don’t have to know everything about every character.

Han Solo was a smuggler, a rascal, a greedy son-of-a-bitch with an “interesting” past, and that’s all we needed to know when we met him. Some characters work best that way. Marvel Comics’ Wolverine used to be one of my favorite superheroes, until Marvel decided to reveal way too much about his previously mysterious past, and that ruined the character. With James Bond, we were told everything we needed to know about him in the first 10 minutes of DR. NO: he works for the British government, he’s been on dangerous assignments before, he’s armed, he gambles, he seduces women, he drinks, and he smokes. The essence of Bond was boiled down and we, the viewers, were expected to take it from there, and we did, for 19 more movies! Contrast that with the recent, rebooted Bond movie series featuring Daniel Craig as 007. Those movies range from great to very mediocre, but if they commit one major sin it’s going too deeply into over explaining who Bond is and how he got that way. We don’t need fully detailed origins and histories for every single character!  

7. Sword fights are awesome!

There’s something about sword fighting that’s just so much fun! It’s better than watching people shoot at each other. It’s up close and personal, fast-paced, can go on for a long time or end with a single, deadly thrust. As much as I love the sword fights in Errol Flynn movies and Zorro and other such classics, my love of that sort of action began with the lightsaber duels in Star Wars.   

8. Injury can be scarier than death.

Seeing the Death Star blow up or even watching Obi-Wan struck down by Vader didn’t get to me nearly as much as that moment in The Empire Strike Back when Vader cuts off Luke’s hand. That scene horrified me when I was a kid, probably because it was something I hadn’t considered before, the idea that a heroic character could suffer a permanent injury like that.

9. Good stories mean different things to us at different times.

I must have seen each of the three films in the original Star Wars trilogy several dozen times, and I still haven’t gotten tired of them. This is because they mean different things to me at different times. I’ve identified with Luke on some viewings, Han on others. I’ve had times when my attention was focused on the brilliant performances of the first film’s two legendary supporting actors, Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing. In fact, Star Wars took on a whole new dimension a few years back when I watched it for the first time after seeing many more of Cushing’s films in the interim and having him become one of my favorite actors. Suddenly, Tarkin wasn’t just that old man who bossed Darth Vader around. Instead, he was the main villain of the first movie, and a frightening one at that. I’ve seen Star Wars as the great entertainment experience of my childhood, as a sentimental favorite of my adult life, and as a fascinating example of how certain threads of myth and archetype runs through modern films just as much as they ran through the various religions and epics of our ancestors from nations and cultures all across the world. Every time I watch the Star Wars movies, I find a new angle from which to consider them, a new way to enjoy them.   

10. Tell that story! Write that book! You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

As a writer, it’s easy to discard an idea or a story, because it often seems overwhelmingly unlikely that it could ever mean much to anybody else. “Who would want to read that?” we say to ourselves in moments of doubt. It certainly wasn’t easy for George Lucas to have Star Wars made. To studio executives, seeing the idea on paper, it must have looked to some of them like a silly little space opera more fit for a B-movie than a “real film.” And here we are, 38 years after its release, and it’s not only a story beloved by millions of people who had their entire childhoods shaped by it; it’s also a piece of storytelling and cultural mythology that’s been permanently etched into the consciousness of the human race. That’s not an exaggeration. We quote it constantly in all sorts of situations. People are flocking to theaters as I type this because they can’t wait to see the next part of the ongoing epic of Star Wars. That little story by George Lucas caught hold of the imagination of a generation and has yet to let go, almost four decades later. That story was an underdog. And it won. Now it’s immortal. Don’t let your imagination be discouraged. 

To Bond or Not to Bond

One of the big stories in the news this past week has been the leaked Sony emails. Among this leaked info has been the idea that actor Idris Elba has been suggested as a candidate to someday play the part of James Bond. This has caused a lot of differing opinions in various places online, including some controversial statements regarding Elba’s race, among other things. 

            As a writer of spy novels, and a lifelong fan of the Bond novels and films, I thought I’d chime in and offer my view on the subject.

            So, the question is, should Idris Elba be cast in the role of James Bond?

            My answer is no, but the answer has nothing to do with the color of Elba’s skin.

            Do I think Idris Elba is capable of playing Bond? Absolutely. At least if we’re talking about one version of Bond.

            Let me explain that last statement.

            James Bond has always been among my favorite fictional characters. He’s right up there on the list along with Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Captain Kirk, Batman, and Indiana Jones. But Bond is different from all those others. 007, you see, would probably appear twice on the list if there really was an official list. Yes, sometimes you do live twice. I love the literary Bond, and I love the cinematic Bond, and those two are no longer really the same character.

            Ian Fleming’s Bond novels were all written in the 1950s and 60s. That Bond is a World War II veteran turned British agent, very much a Cold War character. The movies, however, really only featured Fleming’s Bond for the first fifth or so of the film franchise’s history. The early Sean Connery movies came pretty damn close to being faithful adaptations of the books. But then, something changed. James Bond became a cinematic archetype and began to adapt and change according to the time in which each individual movie was produced. The Bond of the Roger Moore era was very different than that of Connery (and George Lazenby), and he underwent yet another metamorphosis when Timothy Dalton (the great, underrated, truly awesome Bond) took over the role, and shifted personality and attitude again when the part fell to Pierce Brosnan. Then, in the early 2000s, the current Bond, Daniel Craig, started his term of office and the series underwent a complete reboot, starting over with a fresh continuity. So we have, on one hand, the set-in-stone original James Bond, loved by those who have read the novels, and forever preserved in words as his creator, Ian Fleming, intended. And then, on the other hand, we have the cultural phenomena of the Bond film franchise, experienced by far more people than have ever read the books, immensely successful for half a century, and capable of adapting to the changing times without losing (most of the time) the essential elements of what made the character so popular to begin with.

            I happen to be a big fan of the novels’ James Bond, and also of the movies’ Bond, and, honestly, I’m unwilling to commit to liking one more than the other.

            Now here’s the key to the question of whether or not Idris Elba could play James Bond. If we were talking about straight adaptations of Fleming’s novels, period pieces set in the 50s and 60s, there’s no way Elba could portray the character. The social and political conditions of the world at that time would not have made it possible for a black man to do the things that Bond had to do in those books. In that time, his interactions with the other characters would have been totally altered by his race. He could not have gone to the same places, dealt with situations in the same way, or done his job the same way a white agent could have. Sad, perhaps, but history nonetheless.

            But we’re not talking about the Bond movies being period pieces. They never really have been and they probably never will be again, which is fine, because, as I said earlier, Movie Bond is not Book Bond. He’s grown into something else, a franchise of his own. And the world now is different than it was in the 50s and 60s, in mostly good ways. Could a man with the skills to be a competent British secret agent do his job well in the 21^st century regardless of whether he’s a black Englishman or a white Englishman? Yes.

            I think Idris Elba would make a fantastic James Bond. He’s an amazing actor. I’ve binge-watched all of LUTHER and enjoyed everything else I’ve seen Elba in and I think he’s one of the best actors working today. I don’t care what color he is, I can absolutely imagine him walking into M’s office after a quick, “Hello, Moneypenny,” and standing in front of his supervisor listening to the details of his latest mission while inserting the occasional wisecrack into the conversation, then flying off to some exotic city to face a nasty megalomaniac villain, seduce a few beautiful women, and fire a few dozen rounds of ammunition and cause a handful of explosions before the movie ends.

            So why, then, did I just say I don’t think Idris Elba should be cast as Bond?

            It’s simple. The clock is ticking and it can’t be reversed.

            The next Bond movie, SPECTRE, is being made right now. It’s not coming out for a year. From everything I’ve heard or read, Daniel Craig is going to do at least one more after that. That will take three years. If Craig quit after that one and another actor (hypothetically, Idris Elba) was cast in the part, it would probably be three more years before that actor’s first Bond movie was released. So, best case scenario, we’re talking about 7 years before we’d see Idris Elba acquire his license to kill.

            Elba is 42 right now. In 7 years he’ll be 49. Do the math. He’d be pushing 50 when he became Bond. Sorry, but that just doesn’t work.

            How old should James Bond be? Old enough, I think, to have been a military officer, lived some life, gained some scars, and learned how to best use his specific skills, yet young enough to be physically capable of the dangerous grind of risking his life over and over again (not to mention “keeping the British end up,” as Roger Moore quipped in one of his finer moments). His is not an easy or safe job. Maturity and fitness is the necessary combination to make a successful Double-O agent. I’d say that means at least in his thirties but not far past fifty. With that in mind, thinking of the actors who have portrayed Bond, we have this: Connery and Craig both started in their thirties. Dalton and Brosnan were in their early forties. Roger Moore, the latest starter, was 45 (and stayed too long, into his late fifties). Brosnan left the role at 50. Connery came back for one last movie at 53, but the story included the theme of him being an older agent who had to prove he still had what it took to do his job. An actor still playing Bond at 49 is okay if he can still make it work, but 49 is no age to do your first Bond movie. I don’t want a talented actor who would be so good in the part just coming into it when he’s on the edge of being too old for it.

            I also don’t want to wait those 7 years now that I’ve had to think about Elba in such a role!

            So I say we forget him as Bond and come up with something better than sitting around waiting for the Daniel Craig era to end so Elba can take his place behind the wheel of the Astin-Martin, because thinking that way is an insult to both actors.

            Hollywood, if you’re listening, let Idris Elba have his own espionage/action franchise now. I mean, right now, while he’s in his prime and at the peak of his career and the height of his popularity. If it’s written right, it’ll be as good as Bond. Maybe it will be better than Bond. And there’s no reason we can’t have multiple successful spy franchises running at the same time. Bond is not the only spy in town, and hasn’t been for a long time. We’ve got Mission: Impossible, the Bourne Franchise, and Liam Neeson’s TAKEN movies, all of which are very, very successful.

            So, no, I don’t think Idris Ebla should play James Bond. He’d be great, but the timing’s not good. He’s the right age now, but somebody else is standing in the famous gun barrel at the moment. So, rather than wait for a chance that may or may not come half a decade or more down the road, somebody please give this fine actor his own spy game to play? I’m pretty sure he’ll win.

And if anyone reading this wants to check out my take on the spy genre, here’s a link to my novel NOBODY DIES FOR FREE.

If Your Children are Dreamers, Let Them Dream

My father has become a big fan of my writing, especially my spy novel, Nobody Dies forFree. My grandparents read my books too. My grandfather loves my pulp work, especially my Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes stories. My grandmother is, like Dad, a fan of my espionage agent character, Richard Monroe.  

 Like any writer, I’m always happy to hear that any reader has enjoyed my work. But I have to admit to feeling a special sense of victorious satisfaction when I hear my older relatives talking positively about the fact that I’ve grown up to be a published (and sometimes paid!) author. This is because there was a time when the same personality traits that enable me to pursue this art form made those same relatives of mine suspect that something might be wrong with me. I know there were times when they worried, when they wished I was what they expected me to be, wanted me to be what they defined as a “normal kid.”

            I don’t hold it against them. It’s the job of parents and grandparents to worry about their offspring. But I do find it ironic now that the eccentricities of my boyhood, the things that made them upset (and no, they never treated me cruelly, but I know they wondered), are the same things that led me to write the words they seem very much to enjoy reading now, several decades later.

            In every generation of children, there are those that shun the usual social activities of their peers, or that would rather sit inside and read no matter how sunny the Saturday afternoon is, or would prefer to sit with Grandpa in his basement workshop and listen to his war stories. These are the kids with powerful imaginations, who spend more mental energy wondering what grand adventures the future might hold than they do worrying about the baseball game in the park or their homework or who’s wearing the most fashionable sneakers.

            I know my parents worried that I had my nose stuck in a comic book when I should have been playing football with the rowdy brothers from down the block. I overheard my grandmother complain to my mother after  she babysat us one day, concerned that I sat in the cellar for hours staring into the little black and white TV we kept as a spare. Little did she know that I was busy discovering—with rapt amazement, I might add—how thrilling it was to witness the havoc unleashed on Tokyo when Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan rampaged.

             I’m sure Mom and Dad also heard me sneaking around the house at 3 A.M. some mornings, long before an 8-year old should have been up. I’ll let everybody in on the secret of what I was doing, since it’s safe now that 29 years have gone by. The local public TV station used to show old silent movies in the wee hours. I was sneaking out of bed to get my education in things like the fantastic set designs of Metropolis, the ahead-of-their-time dinosaur effects of The Lost World, and what might still be the single greatest shocker in horror movie history: the unmasking of the Phantom of the Opera! 

            Yes, that strange little boy who didn’t want to run around and get dirty every summer afternoon, who wanted instead to spend his time falling merrily into the worlds created by JRR Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, Gene Roddenberry, George Lucas, Ian Fleming, Roger Zelazny, Stan Lee, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and so many other wonderful creators, was doing something much more important than getting skinned knees and hitting doubles past the shortstop’s frustrated reach. He was working, though he didn’t realize it at the time. He was a writer in training, absorbing the wonderful products of the minds of those who came before, the scribes of fantastic worlds who would exert a lifelong influence on him and make him dream and ask the eternally perfect, vitally important question of, “What If?” until one day, years later, the dreams and ideas in his head, the trees of imagination that came from the seeds planted there in childhood, would burst up and out of that mind and become stories in and of themselves.

            I knew I was different when I was a kid, knew the other kids thought I was weird, and realized that even my family found me a little odd and probably wondered why I couldn’t be like the other kids (or maybe more like they’d been when they were my age). But I was who I was and today I am who I am. I like the way the story of my life has gone so far. As that unusual little boy, I loved stories. As an adult who’s still strange, but (I hope) not in a bad way, I still love stories, and I feel lucky that others enjoy the stories I now contribute to the world.

            When I was a toddler and it became apparent that my left hand was the dominant one, my great-grandmother suggested that the hand be tied behind my back to force me to become right-handed, but my mother and grandmother refused. I’m glad that when I grew into a slightly older kid and the eccentricities that came from my imagination and interest in fiction became obvious, nobody did anything similar to try to strangle my developing sense of wonder and love of storytelling. My parents may not have understood why I did the things I did, but they never actively discouraged me.

            And I hope that the parents out there now won’t worry too much if their kids seem to spend a little too much time reading or drawing or watching movies. As long as they don’t have any serious problems, as long as their schoolwork doesn’t suffer and they get some kind of exercise and they seem happy, be proud of them and encourage their interests. They just might grow up to make the books you like to read or the movies you like to watch. Every generation needs its dreamers. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t have had Ray Bradbury or Alfred Hitchcock or HP Lovecraft or so many other creators of the stories that have shaped the imaginations of millions of human beings.

            If your children are dreamers, please let them dream. 

More Blood!

It's no secret that I'm a fan of vampires. I've written 2 vampire novels, 100,000 MIDNIGHTS and ACROSS THE MIDNIGHT SEA. I've mentioned vampires on this blog quite often too, reviewing other writers' vampire books, listing my favorite Dracula films, and praising the horror artwork of Gene Colan, who drew Marvel Comics' great series Tomb of Dracula in the 1970s.

It occurred to me today that I've viewed 3 vampire films in recent months, and that all 3 are very different types of movies, so I thought I'd share my opinions of those today.

Let the Right One In is a Swedish film from 2008 and just might be the most beautiful vampire movie ever made. It's the story of a young, lonely, bullied boy named Oskar who meets a young girl who's moved into a nearby apartment. She appears to be about the same age as Oskar and the two slowly develop a friendship. In reality, she's much older, and a vampire. I don't want to give away the rest of the plot, as this is a movie that should be experienced rather than read about. It's that good! It alternates between being emotionally moving and breathtakingly horrific. The cinematography is superb, the direction excellent. It's a beautiful film from start to finish and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's absolutely mesmerizing. There's also an American remake, Let Me In, which was released in 2010. This version is also very, very good, but I'd rank the original as being the better of the two.

Fright Night (1985) is a mix of horror and comedy that also shares stylistic similarities with 80s teenage movies. Like Let the Right One In, the plot revolves around a teenager who discovers that his new neighbor is a vampire, but in this case it's an adult vampire of the truly evil variety. To deal with this threat, the young man enlists the help of horror movie actor "vampire killer" Peter Vincent (played by Roddy McDowall), who has to find away to summon the courage that was previously just part of an act. This is a fun film, worth watching once. It's entertaining enough, and the look and tone of it will make anyone who was a kid in the 80s a little sentimental, but of course not nearly the same sort of masterpiece as the first movie I talked about today.    

The third movie is one I've seen before, though it had been, I'd guess, at least fifteen years between viewings. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) is a film about which I have very mixed feelings.
This movie features wonderful visual designs, an excellent cast including some of the best actors working today, including Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman, and, unlike many Dracula movies, manages to keep all the novel's main characters without cutting any big roles or combining characters to save room. It also has most of the novel's key scenes. Taking all that into consideration, this should have been one of the best Dracula movies of all time.
So what went wrong? For some reason, it was decided that making a faithful adaptation of the world's most famous horror novel, which is about a group of people whose mission is to put a stop to a creature who is perhaps horror fiction's greatest villain, just wasn't good enough.
Instead, the decision was made to insert a love story into the movie, and, even worse, make it the core of the film, turning the evil Dracula into a sympathetic, tragic, misunderstood semi-hero, thus staining the whole plot, turning what could have been a great horror movie into a sort of grandfather to Twilight.
All the ingredients were there: beautiful sets, brilliant use of colors, excellent special effects, Tom Waits' maniacal performance as Renfield, Anthony Hopkins' interesting, eccentric portrayal of Van Helsing, and most of the elements that made Stoker's novel so great. But that extra, unneeded thing just had to be thrown into the pot to ruin the recipe and make the story into something it was never meant to be.
Is the movie worth seeing? Yes, it is. It's visually glorious and has much to enjoy. Yet it could have been so much more. In there are the bones of a faithful version of one of the classic horror stories, but, much like Peter Jackson did with his Tolkein adaptations, the makers of this film couldn't just go with what the author intended. They added themes and events that shouldn't have been there and ruined what came so close to being right.   

When Good and Evil Wear the Same Face

A few hours from now, it will be May 26, 2013, a date I feel I should commemorate here because it happens to be the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of my favorite actors, the great Peter Cushing.

Those of us who love movies in the genres of horror, mystery, and science fiction should all be grateful to Cushing for his incredible body of work. Perhaps the most amazing thing about his work as an actor was his ability to play both sides of the game, switching from hero to villain and back again from film to film with what looked to viewers like flawless ease, though it was more likely hard-earned skill. While actors who usually play heroic characters, like Harrison Ford, for example, occasionally have a turn as an evil swine, and those who most often portray villains, like Bela Lugosi, have had some sympathetic roles, I have a hard time thinking of another actor who played both sides as well and as often as Peter Cushing.

To think about this in terms of just his most well-known roles, Cushing's version of Van Helsing was one of the best and most famous. He played Sherlock Holmes too, both in the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and later in a BBC television series. He is among my favorite Holmes actors, right up there alongside Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone. And he also portrayed The Doctor in two Doctor Who movies. That's three massively important heroic characters.

On the evil side, who could forget his Dr. Frankenstein and, perhaps even more famously, his important role in a film that defined the childhoods of so many of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, Star Wars? As far as I'm concerned, Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin was the main villain in Star Wars. Looking back with hindsight after all the movies, people tend to think of Darth Vader as the big bad guy in George Lucas's trilogy, but Vader wasn't much more than a henchman in the first one, while Tarkin was obviously in control. He barked, "Vader, release him!" and Vader did.

Peter Cushing is one of a handful of actors whose work I always enjoy, whether in a classic like Star Wars or Horror of Dracula or The Hound of the Baskervilles, or in any of the lesser films he did over his long career. Like any prolific actor, Cushing was in his share of lousy movies too, but I don't think his performances were ever bad. He could rise above bad scripts, bad directing, and bad cinematography to shine even when the movie was covered in mud.

I wasn't always a big fan of Cushing. For years I thought of him as a minor character from Star Wars, but as I got older and saw more of his films, I grew to appreciate his work a lot more deeply. His Grand Moff Tarkin was incredibly important to that first Star Wars movie. His Van Helsing was a fit match for Christopher Lee's Dracula, and his Holmes, as I said before, is right up there with many other fine actors who sat in the rooms at Baker Street puffing that pipe while deep in thought.

Peter Cushing appeared in over 90 movies. Some of them are now among my favorite films of all time, while there are others I haven't yet seen. I'm glad I haven't seen them all. It gives me something to look forward to. Cushing's long, distinguished career on film lasted from 1939 to shortly before his death. He died in 1994 at the age of 81.

So it's been a hundred years since his birth. I suspect that in another century, the work of this fine actor will still be appreciated and those who love horror, mystery, and science fiction will still marvel at the work of a man who played both good and evil with so much skill.

Now comes the hard part. I have to decide which of his movies to watch for the the occasion!