Category: Movies and Television

The Prisoner of Splenda

The Prisoner of Zenda is an adventure novel written by Anthony Hope in 1894 which became a theatrical warhorse in the early 20th century and was adapted into many movie versions, the best of which is a 1937 film starring Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and directed by John Cromwell (father of Babe star James Cromwell). It has an insane plot in which an Englishman on a Ruritarian holiday discovers that he is the exact double for the country’s prince, a charming fellow but a desperate alcoholic who is kidnapped on the eve of his coronation as part of a coup by his evil brother, so the Englishman must step in to save the day. We’ve all seen ripoffs of the concept in movies from The Great Dictator to Dave (and a marvelous satire in a large section of The Great Race) but this is what started it all, and it’s still highly enjoyable.

Hack wrote this version when he ordered coffee at a diner and threw a tantrum to end all tantrums when the only sweetener they had was Splenda. The wild thing is that even though it has almost the exact same plot of The Prisoner of Zenda, he had never heard of the story before and was greatly surprised when he was the subject of a plagiarism suit by the Halliburton Corporation, which had somehow become the owner of Hope’s copyright.

The Eye of the Beholder

This is one of Hack’s more esoteric novels, inspired by a holiday called Beautiful Day, which celebrates all things of beauty. Hack had an idea for a story in which the hero seeks out “true beauty” but he and his cover artist Jonny M. discussed what was beautiful to them and they could only think of hot chicks, to which their male friends agreed. Jonny’s pug Boris suggested pug food, so that was thrown into the mix but the resulting story was only seven pages long. Fortunately, Hack started getting suggestions from female acquaintances along the lines of painting, music and natural phenomenons like sunrises, inspiring faces, and the white plastic bag from American Beauty, which gave Hack enough material (padded by a bunch of his signature anal sex scenes) for a full-length novel (and one of his better ones).

Murder on the Super Chief

The Super Chief was the express train between New York and Los Angeles that was favored by the Hollywood elite in the 1930s and 1940s. Hack had long wanted to write a murder mystery set on the train but when he discovered that Agatha Christie had already written Murder on the Orient Express using precisely the plot that he planned to use, he sued her for plagiarism even though her book had been written 45 years before and he had yet to commit a word to paper. After losing the case in court, he wrote his version anyway which is almost a word-for-word rewrite of Christie’s book except that the characters are classic Hollywood stars and the murderer turns out to be Groucho Marx. Both Christie and Marx sued and were victorious in court, even though Hack was so destitute that they never collected a penny.

The Estranged Bride of Frankenstein

Hack wrote this autobiographical piece about the time he went home with a chick he met at a bar and her husband walked in just as the ‘shrooms they took kicked in.

The book opening:

“For many people, the holidays are hard. For me, the holidays make me hard. Especially halloween.

Every halloween, I find myself in a bar looking for companionship. By itself, that doesn’t make Halloween any different than any other day of the year. Except on halloween, I’m wearing a slutty costume.

I was three whiskeys into the evening when she walked into the bar. I instantly thought, that’s a woman with potential, that’s a woman I could put a ring on. I didn’t mean a wedding ring. I meant the ring attached to a belt that you put a strap on through.

Little did I know when I started that evening, the evening would end with me getting the shit beat out of me, in a hospital room, not sure if I would live. If I had known that, I would have started the evening much earlier, so it would have lasted that much longer.

Ultimately, this is a story about the redemptive Spirit of Christmas and how it can change our lives and enrich our souls. That may be the shrooms talking since the story took place entirely on Halloween and had nothing at all to do with Christmas whatsoever. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start again, at a more appropriate moment, with the gag ball.”