Lon Chaney is Dead: Watching the Inner Sanctum Movies Drunk: The Library of Disposable Art, #5

By David Macpherson

Sometimes a book about a film can be a comprehensive and diligent study of the movie. Other times, a book about film is no more than a dumb dare. This is one of those. David Macpherson, writer of obscure old pop culture, got a box set of the Inner Sanctum movies. He decided to watch them and write a book about the process. Just to make it more interesting, he decided to do the whole thing while drinking. Didn't we call this dumb? We weren't lying.

 

The Inner Sanctum films are six movies made by Universal in the mid-1940s. They all star Lon Chaney, Jr. They all are mysteries with a dash of the macabre. Some of them are good and watchable. Some of them are the longest one-hour films ever made.

 

David writes with wit, sarcasm and thoughtfulness about these mostly forgotten movies. He delves into issues of plot and the personal history of Lon Chaney. He loses himself and writes tiny little memoirs inspired by the movies spooling out in front of him. He gets through all six and only has this book and a major hangover to show for it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Macpherson
• Release date: Jul 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393824817

Book preview

Welcome to the Inner Workings

Look what I did with the chapter title, I made a pun derived joke about Inner Sanctum, while still saying that this is an introduction. Don’t you love it when your introductions (and even your forewords) can multitask?

This started when I was away in Vermont and went into an old media store. You know the type, they have records, CDs, DVDs and other neglected forms of media. No one used these things anymore, which is why there was so much variety in the store’s stock.

After a little bit of browsing, I came across a 2 DVD set of Inner Sanctum movies. I never heard of them. I kind of knew of the Inner Sanctum radio show, but that was about it. I looked at the ad copy on the DVD box to discover that Lon Chaney, Jr. was the star of all six of these movies. He was a different character every film, but he was just so lovable, you had to have him in all of them.

I bought it.

I looked at it on the hotel room bed, wondering why I bought it.

I know, I said to myself. Actually, I said it out loud. I tend to do that kind of thing. I said, I will write a book about watching these obscure movies.

This is kind of a thing I do. There is a pattern of behavior. I buy some useless piece of old pop culture at a dusty old shop and then I have to justify the purchase by writing about it.

Is there an intervention for such a thing?

I was on board with this, but then it seemed a little thin in concept. Why do I want to write about it, outside of because I bought it?

Why don’t I watch and write about the movies drunk?

Great idea! I’m in.

There is nothing like a middle-aged writer getting a little buzzed and watching seventy five year old movies. This is the kind of book we all want to read. For those of you who are reading this chapter as an e-book preview, Come on in, buy the damned thing, I’m sure this idea will work out just fine. Come, let’s find out together.

The plan is, I will watch all six of these movies while drinking and write while still in my cups. I have to say this now, this is a bad idea and I don’t know if I will continue with the drinking plan. You are reading the book, so I finished it. The question is, did he do it sober or as part of a black out drunk?

Oh, the suspense is palpable.

The Thing About Drinking and Writing

It always seems like a good idea at the time. However.

What About the Title? What About Watching the Movies Drunk?

Yes, we see your concern. Everyone can watch a movie drunk and then right about it sober. Where is the fun in that? Where is the challenge?

For this book, we swear (and we know that most teachers are against swearing) that I will be watching the movies with a noticeable blood alcohol percentage. But we also promise that there will be some booze in the blood as this is written. Just like now,. This sentence was created by talent, a laptop, and two nips of cinnamon vodka. I am sure you can tell that it was a cinnamon booze that made this, because this paragraph is very spicy.

In Praise of Short

These movies, all six of them, are short. They are wee little things. They are no more than sixty five minutes in length. They are almost done by the time you realize you are watching a movie.

And I love it.

I am too young to remember really short movies. Movies that were meant to be part of a bill of entertainment. In some houses you had two feature films, a newsreel, a few short subjects and a cartoon or two. You paid for your ticket and you walked in. You rarely got to watch the movie from the beginning. The movies just played and played all night. You would enter in the middle of the second feature and it was your job to figure what the hell was going on. Or better yet, don’t worry about, it’s only Chinatown, Jake. It’s just a movie. You watched it until you got to the part you started at and then leave. The old expression, This is where I came in, was about that practice of starting a movie whenever you sat down in the theater.

What is This Thing Called DeeVeeDee?

I am writing this in the early part of 2020. I do not know when I actually will finish the book, so you will have to flip to the end to find out. One of the reasons that it took two years to start this silly project is that it wasn’t easy to find a working DVD player. The hotel in Vermont, where I was when I bought this DVD set, didn’t have a player in the room. You had cable. You had Netflix and YouTube on your computer. If you have a decent wifi connection, why do you need a DVD player?

Because this is the easiest way to watch these old movies.

Now here is the odd thing about the new world of streaming that we have found ourselves in, if it is not easy to find and view, then it is almost like that movie or that show or that piece of art does not exist. Are you telling me that I have to open up a jewel box, use finger manipulation to get the disk out and then walk it all the way over to the DVD player and get it in the machine, making sure I put it in right side up? Then you expect me to find the TV remote and press the right sequence of buttons to get to the DVD function and then and only then I can watch the movie?

There is like two or three whole minutes of actual activity before you can watch a movie on disk. That is just too fucking long, let’s face it. We want our movie right the hell now. We want it to be playing on our screen even before we knew we wanted to watch the damned thing. We have faith in the streaming service algorithms more than we have in our ability to get up and find something on our own.

We have always wanted things now now now. We have always worshipped at the Church