This has been a crazy neat month in the world of Phantom material reviews. While I don't have a review for the de Mendes book yet, I did recently finish the nearly 500-page behemoth, so it'll be incoming soon. But instead, other cool stuff!
First of all, a quick correction from an alert reader - in my
review of John Fowles'
The Collector, I drew a parallel between Frederick and Leroux's Erik both being significantly older than the object of their affections. It's been pointed out that I missed the implication elsewhere in the book that Frederick is in his twenties himself, and therefore not that much older than Miranda. I've updated the review with a note!
Then, another awesome reader noticed my wistfulness over the fact that my recording of Ken Hill's 1984 musical did not include "All My Dreams Faded Suddenly", the new number based on Dvorak's
Mesicku na nebi hlubokem that later replaced the original "Love Has Gone, Never Returning". They were kind enough to let me listen to a recording of the song performed live, which was frankly awesome! I can't post it here because it doesn't belong to me, but I added an addendum to my review, so you can check it out
here if you want to.
And finally, and possibly neatest of all, I received an email from Scott Schneid, the original screenwriter for the 1988 movie
Phantom of the Mall. He was incredibly kind about my unimpressed review - in fact, he said that the final movie differed substantially from his original script, and offered me (and now all of you!) a link to
this article in which he offers his perspective on what the movie could have been and a lot of background information on its production. The article's full of cool stuff, from storyboards to Schneid's original ideas to comparisons of the script and the final movie, so if you're in the mood for some insight into the world of 1980s movie production, head on over and take a look!
Back next time with reviews, I hope, so until then...
