Peter Beagle on the sound of writing · 3:10am Oct 17th, 2022
From the comments audio track on The Last Unicorn movie DVD, by (in order of the audio equivalent of "appearance"):
- Connor Cochrane (Peter's business manager at the time)
- Peter S. Beagle (author of the book and screenwriter for the movie)
- Michael Chase Walker (associate producer of The Last Unicorn movie)
- Terry Kempton (from Connor's Last Unicorn marketing team, I think)
- Travis Ashmore (manager of The Last Unicorn road show, which for a minute I thought must be that thing that my lifelong sense of having missed out on something important was in fact about, but on listening again I realized it was just a guy travelling around giving screenings of the movie)
Starting at 25 minutes, 14 seconds:
Terry: So I have a question related to what we're seeing on the screen, which is, Peter, how did you write the words of the spells that Schmendrik gives?
Peter: Actually, they came, they came very easily. I just walked around mumbling to myself what sounded like a spell. I go very much by sound. Whether it's music.... And, I think of, I think of passages in… my books, or in my fiction, very much as musical, as musical themes. I think of this, or that, as a woodwind passage, or this as a string quartet. Or here, we absolutely bring up the brasses. I do think like that. And… but the Spells, I don't remember them taking very long. But I was conscious of… I was conscious of getting them right. Until they sounded right, I dunno, in my throat, in my head. I did pay attention to them. I didn't want them to be simple gibberish.
Connor: They're, they're actually very complicated realistic-sounding gibberish. They're very compelling.
Peter: Complicated gibberish. That's, that's what I do.
Connor: The story of your life.
Peter: In many ways. In very many ways.
I like the description of fiction as "complicated gibberish". The kind of fiction I like best is that which is midway between the analytic (that which you understand clearly) and the mysterious (that which you know nothing about). This "complicated gibberish domain" is the place where you can begin to see order emerge from the mysterious. This is to me one of the most-important things you can do with fiction.
I should probably write another blog post on that.
Fun facts from the comments:
- When Connor began trying to sell the movie rights in 1978, the one studio neither Peter nor Connor wanted to sell it to was Rankin/Bass.
- When they eventually sold the rights to Rankin/Bass, Peter did a rewrite of the script, trying to make it into a Rankin/Bass movie. He didn't like Rankin/Bass movies, and figured that he should ruin his script pre-emptively, so they wouldn't ruin it even more. Jules Bass took him to task for it and made him revert the script back to being more like the book.
- When Peter saw the movie for the first time, he didn't react. He'd spent the entire time not watching so much as just steeling himself against cringing. He'd assumed they would ruin it. He had to watch it several times before he could believe it was good.
- Everybody was surprised that Jimmy Webb and "America" did such a great job with the music.
- Peter Beagle never liked having the unicorn whinny.
- The 1982 theater release cut out 6 minutes of the movie, in many small chunks.
- The Unicorn Tapestry was hanging in the Met Cloisters (NYC) when Peter Beagle was a kid, and he'd go to see it whenever he could, even though because of his asthma, breathing the dust from it would make him lose his voice.
The Red Bull comes out of a painting that Peter Beagle's favorite cousin's ex-husband gave him. He was a Spanish painter who got a job putting a fashion show together in 1956, and "hired" Peter to help, but couldn't pay him. So he gave him that painting he'd made, of unicorns fighting bulls. One of the bulls is red.
- No word on whether Peter gets royalties from Red Bull.
- The Red Hulk is red because the person who designed it was terrified by the Red Bull in The Last Unicorn movie.
- Mommy Fortuna's raven wasn't in the script. The Japanese animators added it throughout the movie.
- The most-often-asked question at screenings is, "How does Captain Tully know about tacos?" [Beagle likes to use anachronism gags.]
- Connor (or maybe it was Michael) said The Last Unicorn was the first instance in Western literature of a female unicorn. [That's because female unicorns don't have horns. Come at me.]
- IMDB is wrong. Robert Klein (or maybe it was Paul Frees) voiced the butterfly, tree, and cat.
- The name "Amalthea" comes from Greek mythology. Zeus' father Cronus had the bad habit of eating all of his children when they were born, because a prophecy said one of his children would kill him. Zeus' mother, Rhea, tricked Cronus when Zeus was born by giving Cronus a boulder wrapped in a baby's cloths, and hid Zeus on the isle of Lemnos, where he was nursed by a goat, Amalthea. Zeus, growing stronger and stronger, accidentally broke off one of Amalthea's horns one day, and felt very bad about it. So he turned that broken horn into the Cornucopia, the horn of plenty. But also, Peter Beagle said (and I think this is his personal mythology), by breaking off her horn, he made her the first unicorn.
- The Last Unicorn was Jeff Bridges' favorite book, and he begged repeatedly to be part of it somehow, which is how he ended up playing Prince Lir.
- The editors meant to replace Mia Farrow's singing voice with someone else's, but forgot to do that for the song "Now that I'm a woman". Peter, Terry, and I are glad they forgot, because her imperfections make the song more sincere.
- Terry liked Jeff Bridges' awkward recording of Lir's song, "That's all I've got to say", for the same reason.
- Terry also pointed out that both the animation, and Mia Farrow's voice, showed Amalthea the human being much less sure and smooth than when she was a unicorn.
- Someone pointed out that the faces in the castle walls change during Amalthea's stay, from the faces of monsters, to unicorns--so that, while the castle changed her, she also changed the castle.
- Michael later brought Peter Beagle, Jimmy Webb, and some of the voice actors together again for a TV show for Warner Brothers called "Wildfire", which had characters from fairy tales. None of the commentators knew whether a single episode had ever been aired.
- Christopher Lee also recorded the German dub for King Haggard, and had to rush through his monologue because the German translation had many more syllables than the English that the animation had been fit to.
- Peter Beagle and Christopher Lee once spontaneously recited the entire GK Chesterton poem "The Rolling English Road" together while peeing in a men's room.
- Most of the animation is "on twos", meaning each frame is duplicated, so you're only getting 12 frames/second. Some action scenes are on ones (24 fps), and sometimes they mixed ones and twos together, like in the foggy scenes underneath the castle, in which the characters are on twos but the fog (which wasn't drawn, but is CGI or something; it's unclear) is on ones.
- Shimmering and twinkling was usually achieved not by animation, but by making filters that let light through only the thing that's supposed to shimmer, then over-exposing the already-exposed film behind the filter (presumably with a tiny bit of distance between filter & film).
- Terry pointed out that Amalthea's hair has a life of its own--making me wonder whether it was the inspiration for Celestia's G4 hair.
Actually former business manager. Mr. Beagle is currently being managed by Tachyon Publications out of San Francisco. Just FYI
I actually saw The Last Unicorn during the Roadshow tour several years ago, and met Mr. Beagle there, and during WorldCon 2018 in San Jose, CA. A wonderful person and storyteller
Dope, I love learning fun facts about my favorite movie.
5692909
You'd better check this post again next week, then, because I'm only halfway through the comment track. In fact, I just added more right now (at the beginning, bcoz they had to do with the beginning of making the movie).
this is actually pretty darn interesting :O who knew there was a link between The Last Unicorn and the Hulk?
5692963
Probably fewer people than the number who know about the ties between Batman and Cthulhu.
5692966
Cthulhu ate Batman's parents?
Dead cthulhu waits dreaming of Batman?
Cthulhu IS Batman?
None of that, it's just that Arkham Asylum is named after a place from the Mythos.
Also, I tried to find the painting you mentioned to see if Beagel ever posted it online, and while I have so far failed, I did find this, which is pretty rad:
i.etsystatic.com/5150206/r/il/14b023/1218071607/il_fullxfull.1218071607_s8fk.jpg
5692973
Ah, that's Vincent van Gogh's "Bully Night".
5692898
And in fact:
Beagle ended up suing Cochran in an ugly and protracted legal suit.
Because it wouldn't be a story about writing if it didn't involve an ugly and protracted legal suit...
Mike
5692984 Probably a mixture of artists (both graphical and word-based) being far more touchy than ordinary people, plus the tendency of any large pool of money attracting lawyers much like a pool of blood attracts vultures⁽*⁾. You get much the same with any actor who reaches a certain level of fame and cash when nubile young women come out of the woodwork to claim they were viscously abused, and only a certain sum of money and a non-disclosure agreement will keep them from running to the media. The estimates I've seen is every million dollars worth of film advance gets at least one (fill in adjective here) seeking a cheap payday, and for every one who gets their story in the papers instead of being paid off, ten more will ooze out of the shadows with their hands out.
(*) No offense to vultures here.
5693009
I was viscously abused once. It was messy.
I actually liked the tacos line because it made it seem like it was a story being told by a grandpa at bedtime who got distracted craving tacos and forgot to keep things consistent.
5693009
Pretty such Cochran was the slimy one here, as someone who followed that case over the years. I was on the mailing list back when he was managing TLU-related stuff and like...I didn't think a ton at the time, but looking at it through my knowledge of Events Management, there's a lot of red flags given how old Beagle was.
The schedules made were the sort of tour schedules you would have an author doing when they are trying to breakout and are in their 20s-30s and can basically handle a band tour schedule.
As for Beagle himself, the vibe I have always gotten is far more 'He is not great at business and so gets easily fucked over'.
Came back to this post as a couple weeks later as recommended and I do love the detail of the "animating on the ones vs twos" bit. It was something I was familiar with from other sources, but it does absolutely make the scenes with the Red Bull pop.