Terry Southern: Blue, Blew, Blu

Getting yourself on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonley Hearts Club Band wasn’t on the mind of anyone who wound up there. But it’s a good thing Terry Southern did, otherwise it’d be just that much more difficult to explain who he is and or was. Yea, he helped write some Hollywood scripts of films that you’ve probably seen, but he was a novelist, not just a story teller. Of course the stories he told have at least one foot in reality, but that’s really what makes each of his works – filmic or in book form - all the more interesting.

Southern began his career of penning novels in the late fifties, and for whatever reason, he ceased working in the form much beyond the early ‘70s. But his last long form work, Blue Movie, is perhaps not just his best effort, but one of the greatest satirical works of the 20^th century. By the late date of which the novel was penned, Southern had been privy to the ins and outs of the film industry and the hip crowd around it for over a decade. No doubt as tired of the ‘artists’ as he was the executive types that languished in that tougher than tough profession, Southern sought not portray each principal in the making of a film as not only self serving, but pretty damned funny – intentionally or not.

Using the frame of a lauded director wanting to create a work of film that merged the carnal portions of stag films with the artifice of bohemian cinema, the novel’s main character Boris has to traverse a Hollywood landscape littered with talentless, yet beautiful, actors and actresses. Some happen to be taken with the then current counter culture, making all of this more amusing. But it’s in the director’s manipulations of not just these farcical personages, but the studio folks as well as a few managers and producers that the book finds itself working best.

Playing one individual off of the next, Boris needs a distraction for each member of his crew as well as the honchos that descend on his set. Whether it’s sex – someone even diddles a corpse – or drugs, some arrangement is struck. Most of the time, there’s at least one person in any situation that has absolutely no idea what’s actually going on. At one point some starlet even winds up phelatiating an African extra - but that’s not a heavy plot point.

Probably the most notable aspect of Southern’s writing, here or elsewhere, is the fact that it’s intelligent and well constructed while being easy to get through and hilarious. There aren’t too many writers that can claim all of those things and certainly not in each of his or her works. Southern isn’t for everyone as he frequently gets mired in various subculture tropes of the time. And in Blue Movie, especially, things can get graphic, pretty quickly. But that’s part of the story and without those inclusions none of this would work too well. It did though. And even if this writer’s a relatively ignored character in American Literature, he deserves a better future.