#but the farm is underground and entirely made of storage rooms

[monty-glasses-roxy]

What if I made an AU of the Sewerhell stuff that just has everything? Like horses, dinosaurs, more birds, fucking I dunno cows or something and a dragon? Like Roxy just goes into storage one day and every new room is a different type of animal. It's like a fucking petting zoo down there.

Just for the absurdity. I keep thinking 'what if I add more lil guys' as if I don't already have enough so I'm thinking this would get it out if my system lmao

[sharks-n-bones]

Y'all, I'd like to apologize in advance, this is the longest one yet

Without further adue

BRANCH WON THE POLL SO IT'S BRANCH TIME BABY LET'S GO

When the flood hit, Branch was the most prepared troll in all of Pop Village. He was a survivalist, he built an entire underground Bunker with a functional elevator by himself, of course he'd know what to do

When the rivers started overflowing, Branch was suspicious from the get go. It was late summer, the snow already melted from the mountains and flooded the rivers. There hasn't been any rain recently, so there's no reason the rivers would've flooded

Branch’s hunch was soon proved correct when the river just kept flooding over, the water reaching the village in no time, causing them all to have to relocate. They went for higher ground, and when the storms came they hunkered down where they could until they ended, and they began moving again

Once they were finally somewhere safe for the time being, they began building boats. King Peppy advised that families and friends should stick together and travel together, and Branch had to agree with him. There was safety in numbers, especially in cases such as this

Branch helped Poppy, the king and the snackpack (along with Prince D, who was visiting when the water started rising) to build a boat that would fit them all, with room to spare, of course. Branch was nothing if not prepared. He'd drawn up blueprints in his spare time on the journey to higher ground, and designed the boat big enough for them all to have their own rooms and bathrooms, a kitchen, multiple storage rooms, a common room and other such amenities. And of course, he built an area above the main deck for farming

Since Satin and Chenille were pros on working with fabrics, Branch asked them to make the sails. Smidge helped with the heavy lifting, since she was by far the strongest out of the Snackpack. Cooper, Prince D, DJ Suki and Biggie helped with gathering supplies and resources. Poppy and Guy Diamond helped with decorations, but pretty much everyone helped with the actual building of the ship

In no time, their ship was built and stocked with enough provisions to last a couple weeks at least. Branch was proud of the ship and the hard work everyone put into it. They sang and danced and hugged throughout the process, but it seemed to make the building go along quicker, if anything, and it boosted everyone's moods. Once the water has risen enough to be lapping against the bottom of the boat, they worked together to push it into the sea before hopping on and setting sail

Other than now having to work harder on surviving, things stayed much the same. They spent their days singing, dancing and hugging while they tended to their little farm, fished, and gathered resources and food from any island's they came across. Most of the group also enjoyed swimming when they had the chance, and Branch would even join them sometimes, but he was a bit more.. suspicious of the water that flooded the world

He'd been working on theories and gatherings clues as to what caused this great flood. Surely, it wasn't natural. There was no way! The world wouldn't just flood without something to cause it. But what could've been powerful enough to do such a thing..? When he wasn't busy foraging, tending to the garden and making sure the ship was still in peak condition, he was usually pouring over the clue board he'd made about the flood

He'd added some.. other changes he'd noticed to the clue board as well, such as how everyone on the ship was developing rashes on their necks, and how he noticed that their skin seemed to be drying out faster while their hair was all still picture perfect, if not looking better than ever. He added how the webbing between their fingers seemed to be inching up to their knuckles, ever so slowly. He'd thought he'd be the only one to notice that, but he saw some of the others glancing at their hands with odd expressions once in a while. A lot of other trolls they came across were having the same exact effects, so it couldn't just be a freak disease that had taken over the ship. Besides, if it was, they wouldn't have as much energy as they did. Other things would be noticed

He was pouring over his clue board again when a theory suddenly came to his mind. He laughed at himself at first, because there was no way, it would be impossible-

He started taking samples of the water that now covered most of the planet, trying to see if there was anything in it that could be causing these changes. He checked the rainwater they collected, ocean water, rivers and creeks if any islands still had them, but each and every time he came up empty. There were no weird chemicals or anything of the sort he could find

There was nothing he could physically see, but the water was the only thing he could think of that would cause these changes! He even checked the fish they caught and any food they grew or foraged, but there was nothing unusual. At this point, the only thing that could be causing these changes was magic! He chuckled at the thought, and pushed it aside… not before adding it to the clue board with a bunch of question marks, though

Occasionally, techno trolls would approach their ship and ask if they needed any help. The next time one breached the surface, Branch asked if they'd noticed anything in the water since the flood hit. The techno troll's eyes widened, and he winced before sighing and climbing onto the ship

He explained everything he knew. Told them about the legends of sirens, of their history with them, how they locked them away. How the sirens broke free right around the time the water began rising

Then, he explained how they filled the ocean that covered the planet with and ancient and powerful magic. He explained that it would slowly change their bodies to become more siren-like. As he explained, he pointed out the changes they were already experiencing. Explained the rashes on their necks would develop into gills, the webbing between their fingers would reach the last knuckle for better swimming, their bodies would grow scales and that their skin was drying faster because it was becoming dependant on the sea water

Everyone had gathered to listen, and everyone looked shocked. Poppy examined her hands, Satin and Chenille ran fingers through their hair. Biggie and Smidge brought hands to the rashes on their necks, Guy and Tiny looked at their glitter-coated skin, and Cooper and Prince D glanced at each other, seemingly have an entire conversation without words

The techno troll continued, explaining that they'd be able to change into the same forms as siren's could. The troll forms — how they looked now, the half forms — what they were going to look like once the changes were complete, and the siren forms — where their legs would fuse into a tail and they'd take on more characteristics of whatever sea creature the ocean decided to attach to them

He explained that the more time they spent in the water, the faster the changes would happen, but they wouldn't be able to stop it. He said not to fear it, it would only help them out in the long run

Branch asked why they would cause the flood to begin with only to help them survive in the end. The techno troll said that their war was with the technos, not with anyone else. Dubz didn't know what they had planned for techno’s, but said not to worry about it. It was the techno’s fight, not theirs

Branch felt bad for them, and could see the others felt the same. The techno troll bid them farewell after that and left, leaving the group in silence. He could see that familiar gleam in Poppy's eyes, one that meant she wanted to help them, she just didn't know how yet. Branch couldn't help but smile at that. She always wanted to help people, and he loved that about her

For the rest of the day, things were a bit more quiet than usual. Everyone thinking about what they'd just learned. Branch sighed and went to find Poppy, wanting to make sure she was alright

The next day, they reached an island and they all unanimously decided to take a day to completely relax. They deserved a day off, especially after all they'd learned yesterday. So they tossed the idea of work to the wind and spent the day relaxing at the beach

Everyone was having fun. Building sandcastles, playing in the waves, relaxing on the sand, floating around, just generally having a good time. Branch was even relaxing, just sitting in the sand and reading a book for once. He was so lost in the pages, he almost didn't hear Tiny scream

He looked up just in time to see a fish come out of the water and latch onto Tiny Diamond, dragging him under, and Guy Diamond frantically diving after him. Branch immediately tossed his book aside and ran into the water after them. Guy hadn't come up for air yet so Branch dove after him. Guy dove pretty far down, so he was slowing down and running out of air by the time Branch got to him and began dragging him up through the water

The moment they breached the surface, Guy coughed and gasped, taking in a large breath, before immediately elbowing Branch in the face and fighting against his hold

Branch understood why he was fighting so hard. Tiny was Guy's son, he loved Tiny more than anything in the world. But, as much as it hurt admit, Tiny and that fish were long gone by now. Branch held onto Guy tightly until he eventually stopped fighting and just went limp in his hold

Branch sighed sadly and began hauling him to shore while Cooper, Prince D and Smidge dove into the water to keep looking for Tiny, just in case

Guy wouldn't stop looking at the ocean once Branch brought him to shore. He just stood there, frozen like a statue, before he eventually crumpled to his knees. Then, to Branch’s utter horror, he slowly began turning grey. From the tips of his hair, moving downwards until he was completely dull, the glitter that made up his skin now matte and lifeless

Branch’s heart ached for him. He didn't know what it was like to lose a child, thank the stars above, but he knew what it was like to lose a family member and he knew what it was like to turn grey. He heard the others gasping in shock, but Branch only frowned and wrapped an arm around Guy, giving him all the comfort he could. The others soon joined in, all wrapping Guy in one giant hug. Guy never hugged back

They had stayed at the island for a week longer than they'd planned to, just in case Tiny somehow showed up, and Guy waited on the beach every day. Tiny never showed. Eventually, they brought Guy back to the ship and to his room. The others were all concerned for Guy, but Branch tried to tell them not to go overboard or push the poor guy too much. He remembered how much the toxic positivity bothered him when he went grey, and knew it could be smothering and overwhelming

Once in a while, Branch would check in on Guy and bring him some food if he noticed he hasn't been eating. Aside from occasionally checking up on him, he gave him some space

For the next 2-3 months, a melancholy air hung around the ship. They all would still sing and dance, but it wasn't the same now that two voices were missing. Guy didn't come out of his room that much. He usually would for meals or to sometimes help Branch when he was brainstorming safety precautions (presumably to make sure nothing like what happened to Tiny ever happens again, or at least that was Branch’s theory), but most days he stayed cooped up in his room

Branch felt bad for him. He wished he could do more to help, but he didn't know Guy like the others did. He could only think to do what he wished others would do when he turned grey — show he cared, but give him enough space to breathe

A few months passed uneventfully, just going from island to island, gathering resources and taking some time to try and relax before setting sail again. It was another normal day for them, they had just docked at an island when something different finally happened

A ship came up beside their own and set anchor. A lone figure wearing a pair of reflective goggles aboard the ship used their hair to board their own boat, landing with a loud thud on the deck. They pushed their goggles up to their forehead and Branch gasped

This couldn't be happening. 20 years of absolute silence, complete separation. 20 years since he left him behind, and suddenly he shows up right when a flood takes over the planet? Branch couldn't believe his eyes. The troll then spoke, stating he was searching for someone when they suddenly locked eyes, and the newcomer aboard their ship grinned and called him a name he hadn't heard in decades

“Baby Branch!!”

[dirt-piper]

On the origins of Not So Seecret Saturday, and its future

When I first found Minecraft I was roughly 10 years old.

I can’t precisely identify how I found it - through some kid at school, or a friend of my sister, or randomly on the internet - but I remember falling in love with it.

I loved the aesthetic, I loved the dopey Minecraft music parodies, I loved the let’s plays, I loved the classic multiplayer servers, I loved the dumb jokes the community made, but most of all - I loved the game itself. It was weird, beautiful, simple, terrifying, serene, and hilarious, all at the same time.

I spent hours not only playing the game itself, but also watching videos about it, reading forum and blog posts, and poring over the Minecraft wiki - my favorite articles of which were the ones regarding the removed, unused, and planned features - aspects of the game that I could know about but never experience for myself.

Over time the game I fell in love with started to fade away - the aesthetic changed as biomes were added (though not that much, and it still looked nice), the gameplay began to suffer (a fast travel hell dimension with nothing to do in it, beds that let you sidestep the entire challenge of the game), but it was still largely the game I loved.

After Beta 1.8, the game I loved ceased to exist.

Okay, that’s a bit too dramatic. I still played the hell out of the game during the early release era - but I notably stopped playing survival singleplayer altogether after Beta 1.8. Multiplayer in any game is fun, and the newly added creative mode gave me hours of mindless entertainment blowing things up with TNT and making useless redstone contraptions. But to a large extent I stopped playing the game itself - survival singleplayer - and every time I did I found myself having a very hard time enjoying it.

Now, kid me didn’t really know why I suddenly lost all interest in this game I loved - I could kinda grok that stuff like the new hunger system and terrain system were less than stellar (likely helped by the fact that everyone seemed to hate these two things at the time - the massive open letter to Mojang begging them to add beaches back to the terrain generator springs to mind), but the nitty gritty specifics of what exactly made the game less fun for me were not yet apparent.

Luckily for kid me, I managed to find something to help me alleviate the problem - Exalm’s OldDays mod. This mod allowed you to tweak Minecraft’s features to your own preferences, literally undoing changes from various updates on-the-fly to permit you to hand-tune your personal “perfect” version of Minecraft. I used it to tear out all the changes I didn’t like - gone were the biomes, hunger system, nether, sprinting, new terrain generator, stackable food, potions, enchanting system, etc. Now, suddenly, I could play (and enjoy) singleplayer survival again - and this was the ‘default’ way I played Minecraft up until the mod stopped getting updated in 2013, around release 1.6.4.

By this time a brand new Minecraft launcher had released which allowed you to (officially) go back and play previous versions of Minecraft - with OldDays gone, I picked the version of the game closest to my hand-crafted ideal and dove right in. Thus, the primary version of Minecraft that I played became Alpha 1.1.2_01.

Flash-forward 5 years to July 18th 2018, and I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve just graduated high school, and I’m on vacation with my family in Long Beach Island, New Jersey. It’s a rainy day, so I’m playing Minecraft on my laptop. By this point I had a singleplayer world with damn near everything a player could want in 2010 - an automatic cactus farm, a mob grinder, a minecart system, vast underground mines, an automatic boat dispenser, a hulking storage room - you name it. But deep within I felt a twinge, a feeling that something was missing. I don’t remember what originally set me off, whether it was being by the ocean, or the nascient release of the update aquatic, or a memory of Minecraft classic, but somehow I started getting a bit upset that sponges were unobtainable in the version of the game I was playing.

Very conveniently, I had taken a class on Java my junior year of high school.

I dug up an ancient version of the Mod Coder Pack for a1.1.2_01, decompiled Minecraft and started poking around the codebase. After a bit of digging, a realization slowly began to dawn on me - why stop at sponges? Why not fix more things? Like fix axes not breaking workbenches? Or redstone ore taking an eternity to mine? Or boats exploding when you sneeze on them? Or, better yet, fulfill my childhood fantasies by implementing all the removed/unused/unimplemented features I used to spend hours reading about on the minecraft wiki. Realizing I could use some guidance, I asked my friend Vulpovile (creator of Minecraft Classic Creative Revived) if he might like to help me out with my new project.

side note: I planned on adding the ambient loops a full two years before getting around to implementing them... and my method was essentially the same as what I schemed up on the first day. Most NSSS features bounce around my head for a year or two before I finally implement them.

We managed to get sponges done within a day, and banged out the rest of the little QoL fixes I wanted not too long after. Soon we began going haywire - adding singleplayer commands, trying to fix the outrageously janky alpha multiplayer, optimizing the game, making food stack, making trees drop apples, underwater dungeons, whatever we wanted to do, we did it. We had already numbered our new ‘fork’ of Minecraft as ‘Alpha v1.1.3’, but didn’t actually have a name for it - the original working title was “Minecraft Redone” - a very literal description of our goals, but not that catchy. After 4 days I finally coined the name.

By the 28th, our first release was out: Not So Seecret Saturday’s Minecraft Alpha v1.1.3. We ended up released one update every other week straight on into october - in 1.1.4 we tried to beat the server code further into submission, in 1.1.5 I reimplemented the score system from survival test and added floating worlds, in 1.1.6 I tried (and failed) to improve mob AI and made sponges redstone-sensitive, and in 1.1.7 we polished our work a bit and added two more world types. Then September hit and Vulpovile and I were sucked right back into college. During winter break we managed to release some more patches to 1.1.7, as well as 1.1.8 to add McRegion and running... before the first gap.

‘The gap’, as I’m dubbing it now, is a fairly common occurrence in NSSS development - it’s happened roughly 3.5 times now, and each time it’s the same thing:

Development on NSSS is interrupted by something IRL (at first this was always college, but now it’s health conditions and other boring responsibilities of being an adult. And a bit of depression.)

I don’t get right back to working on NSSS.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the then-current state of NSSS. A LOT of time.

The more I think, the more I determine needs to be done to NSSS before I’d be satisfied enough to do a new release.

Every time I open eclipse I either get so overwhelmed by the massive backlog of work that has to be done that I either only manage one tiny portion or I give up and do something else.

Steps 2-5 are repeated ad nauseum, until...

A sudden, miraculous wave of motivation occurs. I get everything I’ve been planning over the past [weeks/months/year(s)] done in the span of 2 weeks, release the update, and finally return to making semi-regular NSSS updates.

This routine is so predictable to me now that I can nearly time my watch to it. But that first gap after 1.1.8 was special - as I sat and thought about NSSS, and what I really wanted to do with it, my goal slowly shifted. At first I had just wanted to ‘fix’ Minecraft alpha by cramming a bunch of shiny toys and knick-knacks into it to satisfy my inner child, but now I wanted something... more. I didn’t just want to make a better alpha than alpha, I wanted to make a better Minecraft than Minecraft.

Let me preface this by divulging that I’m a massive fan of Team Fortress 2.

The development history of TF2 is utterly fascinating, and if you’re at all interested in game development I urge you greatly to play through the entire TF2 developer’s commentary, but the relevant parallel is this:

The original Team Fortress was a mod of quake made by a trio of Australian teenagers who went hog-wild with QuakeC, the super powerful Quake scripting language, to invent the class-based shooter in 1996. At first they were just adding things to have fun, but over time started paying more and more attention to the actual design and balance of the game they had created. Eventually, the entire team was hired by VALVe in ‘98, and after porting Team Fortress to GoldSrc as ‘Team Fortress Classic’, they got right to work on Team Fortress 2.

Team Fortress 2 didn’t release for another 9 years.

During that time, TF2 went through a multitude of totally different designs and ideas, at some points being nearly unrecognizable gameplay-wise to the original Team Fortress, until ultimately VALVe decided to stop trying to invent something wholly new and unknown and instead to improve on what they knew - and so they essentially rebuilt Team Fortress for the third time, now in the Source engine, and with a cartoon-ier art style. And then they started playtesting.

VALVe had learnt from making half-life that playtesting often and early is utterly invaluable as a tool to aide game design. After all - how do you know how something is gonna play until you’ve played it? And how will it play for people who are totally unexposed to it? A developer already knows all the game’s mechanics and how they work - how would a lay-person discover them all for themselves? Which mechanics would a normal player use in ways the developers never intended? There’s no way to find this stuff out until you hand your game off to a stranger and wait to see how they break it.

And so VALVe, through constant playtesting, tweaking, and fiddling, honed TF2′s design and gameplay to a point where, while not totally perfect, was absolutely better than the original Team Fortress. And aside from the new artstyle, the omission of grenades and bhopping, and the medic becoming... well, an actual medic, very little had changed of the core gameplay beyond little tweaks and nudges.

That’s what I wanted NSSS to become.

I wanted to make Minecraft into a better game than it already was through little tweaks and nudges - an adjustment here, a rebalance there, and a few new features where a gap exists to justify them.

During the first gap I did manage to release some moderate patches to 1.1.8, fixes for things like the busted FastRender port and proper textures for all the dye colors, as well as the first release of the NSSS launcher. But all of these were just tide-overs for what I really wanted.

In summer of 2020 the first gap-and-a-half concluded with the release of 1.1.9, which added Creative mode, Sponge Armor, and Ambient loops. All of these features were things I had spent years brainstorming, tweaking, and revising before I was finally happy with them - and when they finally released to the public... they were good. By now NSSS had started to accumulate some following, and the positive feedback to 1.1.9 was notable - it turns out that people like things that are carefully thought-out and designed! Two weeks later I released 1.1.10 to patch over some more things and finalize gold touch, and then I set my aim on the largest hulking problem NSSS has faced since day 1:

Multiplayer.

The original ‘legacy’ NSSS server was accidentally based off of a version of hMod for Alpha 1.1.2_01, but our problems with it would have occurred regardless; the Alpha server SUCKED. Within a day of poking around the code Vulpovile and I came to the conclusion that Notch had taken the Classic server and stapled infinite worlds onto it to create a horrible abomination.

Mobs would randomly turn invisible, Redstone would only work at certain Y levels, Doors would open halfway, you would randomly die of fall damage for no reason, you couldn’t eat food unless you were looking directly at the floor, if you checked a furnace while it was smelting something it’d break the timer and waste fuel, you could dupe items in chests by clicking on them fast enough, tools could be repaired by dropping them on the ground and picking them back up - it was a nightmare.

Vulpovile and I both, quite rightly, came to the conclusion around 1.1.8 that the legacy server was unworkable. We started trying to write our own , new server from scratch, but that went nowhere - too much of an uphill battle. Once 1.1.9 came along, I decided to do it ‘the easy way’ and just take a later version’s server and downgrade it to alpha - the winner was beta 1.7.3. I had hoped to finish by 1.1.10, but found myself in a deeper hole than I expected, so 1.1.10 was shipped with no multiplayer and I made 1.1.11 into the “fix multiplayer” release.

1.1.11 took over a year to finish.

God what a nightmare. It did not take me very much time to get simple interoperability between the NSSS client and the Beta server, but certain bugs quickly emerged as gordion knots: if someone sneaked they would crash all connected clients, opening a chest crashed the game, crafting recipes were one slot to the left, your armor would shift one slot down at random times, and vehicles were possessed by demons. The sheer amount of bugs I had to work through to get this update out was mind-boggling, to a point where I actually opened 1.1.11 up to a limited group of playtesters for several months before full release just for the sake of trying to eliminate every bug possible. Ultimately, the pre-planned release date of September 18th, 2021 (exactly eleven years after Alpha 1.1.1, the first seecret saturday) snuck up on me, and I panickedly released what I hoped was a relatively bug-free 1.1.11: it wasn’t! While multiplayer was far, far better than it had been in 1.1.9 and prior, singleplayer had become riddled with bugs, namely pertaining to inventories and creepers. I quashed most of them in later patches, but the armor shifting bug still isn’t totally fixed in multiplayer - if you die and relog without completely closing and reopening the game, your armor still shifts one slot down. I have no clue why the hell this happens.

Something that started happening during 1.1.11 that would foreshadow the next 2 years of NSSS’s development was a trend wherein I would gradually feel more and more trapped by the feature set of the update I was working on, and would increasingly wish I was working on the next update instead - this sucked for motivation and made 1.1.11 take even longer. That next update was going to be one that would add Seasons and Dynamic Weather to NSSS - an update which has been in progress for almost two years.

1.1.12 is still coming along, don’t worry, but I can guarantee you that once it’s out, I am never doing another massive, year-long-wait update for NSSS every again. Updates will return to being smaller and more frequent - the way it should be! Expect further ranting in a later post.

-DirtPiper

[kilekolache]

Old Solo Survival Multiplayer Base Tour (Part 2)

If you haven’t seen part 1, click here. 

We left off at the storage area and how lets check out my farms. Now because of this server’s ban on most automatic farms and my general noobishness at the time, this place is a bit archaic.

This is the docking bay for the rail system. As you can see I have a monorail there as decoration to make ya think, “hey i’m gunna ride this monorail” still pretty proud of that cheeky detail years later. This room rook me a solid day to dig out, digging out holes is pretty tedious in minecraft if you don’t have beacons with haste. Turned off the shaders because the bottom of the room was pitch black with them.

At this point we reach the farming section of my base.

At one point I got tired of using the minecarts to travel through my base, so I just installed a nether portal instead that connected from one side of the base to the other.

The farming area is divided in half, one for livestock and one for crops.

Those mooshrooms were a pain to get. I didn’t know entities could travel through nether portals at this time, which was a feature that was added last halloween at that point, so I led them across 8,000 blocks in the overworld and only 2 ended up making it out of the 30 or so I started with. Yeah use the nether if transporting mobs over wide distances, it’s actually safer because skeletons and creepers won’t ruin your day Lava and ghasts won’t be a problem if you’re careful. Also as you can see I never actually farmed chickens or pigs but I just wanted farms of them for the sake of having them. 

I have a lot of sheep of every color. I think I mined out 50,000 blocks making these sheep pens. It’s a shame I didn’t do more with my infinite supply of wool. 

This is a train station for a train that was never built. I wanted to have some kind of villager breeder and this station would connect to a train that would go to some underground cave with a village in it where I would store all my villagers. But I just, never made it. Also that’s all the animals I farm so lets slide over to the vegetarian side of my farms.

Most automatic farms were disallowed at the time I started making this base, but they lightened up on those rules and eventually just stopped caring all together so there are a few here, but don’t expect any MumboJumbo factories.

As you can see some of these farms are pretty big for entirely being underground. 

Since my base was so gigantic I just never cared if multiple people were going here just to use my farms, because I had so much I just couldn’t be bothered. I never interacted with the server’s economy and would always give away tons of stuff for free. 

Automatic Melon, Sugarcane, Pumpkin, and Melon farms.

Partially automatic tree farms, one for every variation at the time. 

Mushroom farm.

I don’t know what part of me thought it would be a good idea to make a area big enough to grow 4 jungle trees underground, but I did. I wanted this base to be so epic that I literally would not have an excuse to leave it. And I sort of accomplished that. If I were make a base like this again I would have definitely incorporated more automatic farms because in the last 6 years my play style has improved greatly. 

There’s still more of this base to show but this post is getting too long again so I’ll just save that for another time.

 Aight, until then, see ya. 

[countrymadefoods]

Bold Plan? Replace the Border Wall with an Energy–Water Corridor

Building solar, wind, natural gas and water infrastructure all along the U.S.–Mexico border would create economic opportunity rather than antagonism

“Here’s an idea: Instead of an endless, inert wall along the U.S.–Mexico border, line the boundary with 2,000 miles of natural gas, solar and wind power plants. Use some of the energy to desalinate water from the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean and ship it through pipelines to thirsty towns, businesses and new farms along the entire border zone. Hire hundreds of thousands of people from both countries to build and run it all. Companies would make money and provide security to safeguard their assets. A contentious, costly no-man’s-land would be transformed into a corridor of opportunity.”

“A consortium of 27 engineers and scientists from a dozen U.S. universities has developed a plan...they delivered it to three U.S. representatives and one senator. “Let’s put the best scientists and engineers together to create a new way to deal with migration, trafficking—and access to water.”

The border region receives boundless solar energy, and has significant natural gas and wind resources. It’s also suffering from extreme drought, and water shortages are predicted to get worse. Farming is exceedingly difficult. And jobs are often scarce—in part because of lack of water and power. If an energy and water corridor were built, the facility owners would protect their properties. Transmission, gas and water lines would be monitored by companies, states and federal agencies, as many elsewhere are now. And the plants could be integrated with security walls or fences.

With water and power, farming and manufacturing could flourish...The “future energy, water, industry and education park,” as the white paper calls it, “will create massive opportunities for employment and prosperity... The border industrial park, as I’ll call it, could work politically, too...Democrats want a Green New Deal. Republicans want border security...Both parties could win. It could be a win–win for the U.S. and Mexico, too. This idea could spark a completely new conversation about the border.”

“Desalination of seawater, a linchpin for the park, is expensive and can also foul the ocean. An enormous amount of saltwater would have to be freshened to fill a 2,000-mile pipeline. The consortium says power could come from wind and solar, strong at the Gulf and Pacific ends of the park. A 600-megawatt power plant (equivalent to a sizeable coal plant or modest nuclear plant) at the Gulf could power enough desalination to provide 2.3 million acre-feet of freshwater annually...enough to supply future needs along the Texas–Mexico border. Solar farms would power water pumps for the pipeline.

Building infrastructure is a big priority in the current Congress, despite its endless bickering, so perhaps a border industrial park could rally legislators. “They just have to think differently about how to solve the border issue...Don’t think of it as a barrier. Think of it as an energy corridor, a water corridor. It can create great opportunity for both countries. It can create peace.”

(via Bold Plan? Replace the Border Wall with an Energy–Water Corridor - Scientific American Blog Network)

El Paso to drink treated sewage water due to climate change drought

“One of its prime sources of water is the Rio Grande. Typically the river can supply as much as half of the city's water needs. But climate change is making that increasingly difficult and is pushing the city to look for new sources of water. Now, El Paso is on track to become the first large city in the United States to treat its sewage water and send it directly back into its taps.

Increasing temperatures will make the dry region even more vulnerable to drought, according to the federal government's most recent national climate assessment. Already challenged with balancing the demands of about 700,000 thirsty El Pasoans along with agriculture and industry needs, El Paso must also face the fact that climate change is literally drying up one of its major sources of water.”

(via El Paso to drink treated sewage water due to climate change drought | CNN)

Utah’s Great Salt Lake has lost half its water, thanks to thirsty humans

“The world’s saltwater lakes are drying up and scientists have long suspected climate change was to blame. Now, a study reveals another potential culprit: thirsty humans. According to more than 170 years of water records and a comparison of how much water flows in and out of the lake, consumption of freshwater is likely to blame for the shrinking of Utah’s Great Salt Lake—and of similar lakes around the world.”

(via Utah’s Great Salt Lake has lost half its water, thanks to thirsty humans | Science Magazine)

Why an Unpopular Idea Could Be the Salton Sea’s Best Solution

“A water pipeline plan dismissed years ago may not be an attractive option to save the beleaguered Salton Sea, but it may be the best way to buy the region more time.

TAKE A HIGHLY mineralized, terminal lake that is below sea level and is shrinking because its traditional water sources are being diverted. Add the historic and environmental importance of the lake and decades of jealousy, grievance and distrust between countries in the vicinity. Then figure in the quenchless thirst of nearby agriculture and growing populations.That is the recipe for a problem with no reasonable solution.In the Middle East it is called the Dead Sea. In the Far West it’s the Salton Sea.”

[I]n the California desert about 40 miles (65km) north of the border with Mexico. In its current form it is just over a century old and is actually a giant mistake. It became a monument to engineering arrogance when canal promoters accidentally diverted the Colorado River. They filled an ancient valley and created the “Sea.”...It sounds like a lake no one could love and no one would want to save...What flows into the Salton, stays in the Salton. So, why should anyone care?

Most of California’s wetlands were lost to development or agriculture. Its intermittent lakes (like Tulare in central California) disappeared. And the Salton Sea became an important migratory bird stop along the Pacific Flyway. In addition, were the Salton to dry up, it would set loose clouds of noxious dust on Southern California.”

”Perhaps it is time to revisit what previously appeared to be an unrealistic fantasy. When all else fails, what remains may be the answer. The pluses are the inexhaustible supply of water and tides that would help propel the seawater on its way downhill to the Salton Sea. Since there is a drop of 220 feet, most of the conveyance could be accomplished by gravity or siphon (much like L.A.’s aqueduct from the Owens Valley). With sea levels rising because of climate change, the differential might be even more advantageous later in this century.

Lastly, and most importantly, the salt content of seawater dictates that a simple transfer from sea to lake could only produce a benefit for a portion of this century. True, seawater may initially be sweeter than lake water, but every ton of salt transferred to the Salton Sea will stay there when the water evaporates...Who knows what may change by 2075 or 2100?...The only thing that is clear is that the more attractive proposals appear to be dead in the water, and the water is drying at an alarming rate.”

(via Why an Unpopular Idea Could Be the Salton Sea’s Best Solution | News Deeply)

10 questions about the 11 proposals to save the Salton Sea

“Less than fifteen miles from where [Ariana Grande will take] stage at the Coachella Music Festival, the Salton Sea is in crisis. As evaporation causes the sea's shoreline to recede, more of the toxic chemical matter previously embedded in the water is being exposed and swept up into the atmosphere by desert winds. To combat the sea's shrinkage, and the public health and environmental disasters it is causing, experts over the past thirty years have suggested importing water from elsewhere to raise or maintain the water level. But because of the high potential price tag, "Sea to Sea" projects, as they're called, haven't made much headway. Until now, that is. California's Natural Resource Agency is considering proposals that could revive an idea once thought of as impossible... All the submissions proposed importing water to cover more of the sea's toxic dust-ridden playa, but beyond that, ideas varied on what kind of infrastructure is needed and how it should be funded.”

(via 10 questions about the 11 proposals to save the Salton Sea | The Desert Sun)

Deadline for funding of California water projects

“The California Water Commission, whose eight members are appointed by the governor... — four new dams and four groundwater storage proposals. Among the proposed awards is $1 billion for Sites Reservoir in Northern California. Total project cost is estimated at $5.2 billion...The money comes from Proposition 1, a state water bond approved by voters in November 2014. It is believed to be the largest state commitment to build new dams in California since 1960, when Brown’s father, Pat Brown, was governor.That year, Gov. Pat Brown convinced voters to pass a ballot measure with the same name, Proposition 1, which provided $1.75 billion to construct Oroville Dam and much of the State Water Project.

Underground storage is often cheaper than new above-ground reservoirs and comes without evaporation problems. It also avoids environmental battles that arise when new dams are proposed to block rivers, which can kill salmon and other fish and wildlife... “People think of reservoirs when they think of water storage. You can look at them and see them when they are full or empty...Groundwater is abstract. But there is 25 times as much room in groundwater basins as in all the existing reservoirs in California.”

(via Deadline for funding of California water projects | Daily Democrat)

One border crisis averted? How Juárez and El Paso became sister cities.

“As water scarcity fuels conflicts around the world, sister cities along the US-Mexican border have found mutual success by working together rather than turning against each other...With surface water from the Rio Grande becoming increasingly unreliable – due in large part to climate change...”The aquifer doesn’t recognize borders...so both sides have to come up with solutions to better manage and share the resources.”

“[F]ree water...Water is a human right, but every human right is linked to a responsibility...It is impossible to keep giving away money, because sooner or later we are going to pay the consequences.” Like El Paso, Juárez has seen almost nonstop growth in recent years. JMAS water connections have increased from about 235,000 to 465,000 in 20 years...while El Paso’s groundwater extractions have steadily declined since 1990, they have continued to increase south of the border.”

(via One border crisis averted? How Juárez and El Paso became sister cities. | CS Monitor)

New Pipeline Will Bring Desalinated Water to Israel's Only Freshwater Lake

“A new pipeline and additional desalination plants will introduce fresh water into Lake Kinneret...The desalination plants that have been built along the Mediterranean shore, and those that are slated to be built, should supply the required quantity of water.The infusion of water flowing into the Kinneret will help stabilize the lake’s ecosystem... “Lake Kinneret...will fill up again when there is a rainy year, and then they will open the Degania Dam again,” enabling water to flow into the Jordan River”

(via New Pipeline Will Bring Desalinated Water to Israel's Only Freshwater Lake | Haaretz)

‘Nothing will stand in way of Red Sea-Dead Sea water desalination project’

“The government will "go ahead" with implementing water desalination projects and will "not wait for anyone", Prime Minister Hani Mulki said on Wednesday. Mulki stressed the importance of guaranteeing justice in water distribution to all areas of the Kingdom and of safeguarding water resources...The premier also highlighted the importance of expanding desalination projects to cope with increasing demands on water, citing the successful project implemented in Aqaba...Under the first phase, a total of 300mcm of water will be pumped each year, eventually transferring up to 2 billion cubic metres of seawater per year from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, according to the Ministry of Water and Irrigation...water will be desalinated every year, while the seawater will be pumped out from an intake located in the north of the Gulf of Aqaba. In November last year, Israeli media reports claimed that Israel had told Jordan that a joint agreement for the construction of a pipeline transferring water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea would "not go ahead" until Israel would be allowed to reopen its embassy in Amman.”

(via ‘Nothing will stand in way of Red Sea-Dead Sea water desalination project’ | The Jordan Times)

With increasing population growth comes ever increasing demands for water power and food. These factors as well as climate change and drought have resulted in ecological damage to salt lakes and rivers as water levels decline. The problems faced in the southwestern United States is no unique and many other places face similar challenges, such as the Red Sea and Dead Sea area of the Mediterranean Sea.

I propose the idea that two Energy-Water Corridors could be built in southwestern United States, providing clean water and power for the states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Texas. One hybrid pipeline/wall could be built along the the US-Mexico border stretching from the Pacific Ocean bordering Tijuana, Mexico to the Rio Grande River in El Paso, Texas, (the Salton Sea could be replenished by desalination plants) The second could be built from the Pacific Ocean near San Luis Obispo to LA via Las Vegas ending near the Great Salt Lake, Utah, (Lake Mead and the Great Salt Lake could be replenished by desalination plants.) 

No physical walls would be needed for most of the Rio Grande River, since it is a physical barrier and in most cases would be difficult to build a wall along following the curvy path of the river. Thus the length of the Border Wall could be reduced by half, to approx. 1,100 miles of Hybrid Desalination Pipeline/Wall.

The ocean pipelines and renewable energy plants and desalination plants would provide clean water and power as well as aid in conservation efforts restoring the Great Salt Lake and the Salton Sea as well as provide water for Lake Mead, the Colorado River and the Rio Grande River communities. The Border Pipeline/Wall could also be a project shared by the US and Mexico providing both nations with water and power.

[pyre-prism]

Creepypasta Story - A Circle of Stones

The farmhouse stood as silent as it had for over a hundred years, its walls crawling with vines, every crack and crevice overflowing with moss and trapped leaves. No traces of the ever-expanding town came near the farmstead, almost as if afraid to breach the property line. All around the house, tangles of all manner of plants grew tall and wild, hiding fallen branches and rocks in a blanket of yellow and green.

Sarah’s car had already cooled by the time that she started to slowly pick her way to the front door, a crumpled map in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Hazel eyes stared up at the two-storey building, studying the structure as if it would tell her the secrets of the universe –or at least, the secrets of what she was looking for.

“The Goodfellow farm should be this one… There aren’t any other farmhouses close to town that aren’t, well, this…” she muttered to herself, peering at the map one last time before she folded it back up and stuffed it into a side pocket on her backpack.

Her careful approach had finally brought her all the way to the door, and she inspected the old wooden barrier. The wood was rotten, waterlogged from at least a century of English weather, and hadn’t even been barricaded or locked from the outside. She grinned to herself and pushed at it, letting out a snicker as it shifted just enough to assure her that there wasn’t anything on the other side, either. A series of powerful shoves later, and it had scraped open enough for her to step inside.

Immediately, the smell of mould and mildew hit her nostrils, and she pulled a handkerchief out of her jeans pocket, slamming it quickly over her nose and mouth with her free hand before she could retch more than a few times –there was no way she wanted to lose her meagre breakfast. After a moment of consideration, she bent to set the crowbar on the floor and tied the handkerchief around her face, then grabbed the iron tool back up again. Satisfied, Sarah reached behind her for a flashlight, clicking it on and using the beam to get a better look at the room she was in.

While the smell had been expected and even a little disappointing, the interior seemed to actually be in fairly good condition… perhaps a little too good. Not for the first time since leaving home, Sarah found herself debating whether getting a decent mark on her criminology paper was worth investigating such an old building.

The history of the farmstead was almost completely buried in superstition and local folklore, but the disappearances of the family that last inhabited it was a fact… What she wanted to find out was who they were, to begin with. No-one in the town, even those with families going back to the time of that event, seemed to know –or if they did, they had no intention of telling her…

She shook her head to clear it, and focused her attention back on the here-and-now. “First floor first, then I’ll think about trying the stairs…”

The bottom floor was comprised primarily of a barren living area, a dilapidated kitchen, an empty basement, and what had probably once been servants’ quarters, considering the time period she was stepping through the remains of. Unsurprisingly, her search yielded nothing of interest, although she did wonder whether or not the house had been scavenged through at some point, to explain how empty it felt. With nowhere else to search on that floor of the actual farmhouse, she returned to the stairs in the entrance area, shining her torch beam up them and forcing herself not to envision getting halfway up and then falling back down to the ground.

“Nothing’s creaked or groaned since you got in, so stop being a baby. This is for your career!” Taking a deep breath in an attempt to steady her nerves, Sarah ascended the surprisingly-stable staircase as quickly as she dared, and was instantly met with more than she’d bargained for…

The walls, which were obviously supposed to be a sort of white or creamy colour, had been splattered with something that looked to be a dull maroon –there was barely anywhere that hadn’t been covered in splashes of the substance, and the more she stared at it the more she became certain that the liquid responsible for such stains was blood… ancient and dried, but blood nonetheless.

Her heartrate picked up, and her face felt torn between grinning and grimacing. Something had happened, that much was clear, and she felt closer to the answers than ever before.

Most of the doors on the upper floor were caved-in, splintered and broken as if something had been rammed into each of them. Each of these, she gave up on entering for the time being –unease had started to rear its ugly head the longer she spent on the second floor, as if she was expressly unwelcome in the old building. In fact, there was only one door that looked remotely promising to her, all the way down the hallway, right next to the only portion of the walls that wasn’t completely covered in the old blood.

Sarah slipped through the last door, noting the splintering of the wood in the vicinity of the missing handle with a slight frown. The room itself looked like it had once been some sort of study or library; or rather, that was the only idea that came to mind when she looked at the shelves built into the far wall, each shelf bearing at least ten rotten volumes, coupled with an old writing desk by the grimy window.

“Well, this is something, at least…” she murmured, using the hooked end of her crowbar to open the top flap of the desk, then propped the other end of the tool against the bottom of the storage space underneath. With her now-freed hand, she carefully picked up the only thing hidden there; the leather-bound book was in shockingly-good condition, with barely any signs of damage from its age or how it had been stored for who knew how many years. Sarah shrugged one of the shoulder straps of her backpack off, opened the main pocket, and slid her find into the bag. With that done, she retraced her steps down the hall, down the stairs, and out of the entire house.

A wave of exhaustion hit her suddenly, and she sat down on what had once been a front porch, tugging off the handkerchief and setting her backpack beside her with as much care as she could. The flashlight was turned off and returned to its place hooked to her belt, the crowbar was laid across her lap, and she dug into the back pocket of her bag for a bottle of water and a muesli bar. With a quick refuel taken care of, Sarah pulled out the book she’d found.

Her hands caressed the leather as if the book was actually wet tissue paper instead, and she squinted, trying to read the embossed text on the cover. With a quick motion, she brushed a stray lock of black hair behind her ear, before cautiously unlatching the buckle holding the book shut. “Time to find out something about the family, I hope.”

To her delight, Sarah had found a journal, penned in scratchy text that was surprisingly legible. As she scanned through the entries, however, her excitement started to turn into dread… She flipped back to the start and began to read them thoroughly.

~*~

The family was a small one, with the husband having inherited the farm from his father, and his father before him, and his father before him… He married a local girl, and together, they had a single son. They were strict parents, perhaps a little more than usual for the time and the place, but the father truly believed that that was the lifestyle which would serve their child the best.

Unfortunately, their son was a flighty boy, always with his head off in the clouds and never on the work that he needed to do. This problem grew, like a tainted seed, despite their best efforts.

They kept him on the farm, they made certain that he understood the value of hard work and that he paid the proper deference to his parents. The children of the other families around the town never showed their faces on their farm, and in fact, if their son had been the only child in the entire country, it wouldn’t have made any difference to him.

On their large and lonely farm, there was never time to waste on frivolous things, what with only the three of them and an entire farm to tend. The father, the mother, and the son; all of them up and working from before the break of dawn until far beyond the setting of the sun, every day without fail. The toys he had were the tools he used, but if he dared to use them incorrectly… his father was duty-bound to teach him the error of his ways.

In many respects, it truly was a good thing that the father had married a woman with a witch’s touch, for that dark and twisted knowledge had kept their boy from suffering longer than was truly necessary, each and every time that he dared to step out of line. The fact that she was able to soothe the boy’s pain in such an unholy way… well, it was the secret that belonged to the family, and no-one else.

Their son remained flighty, but instead of growing staid and respectable, he grew vicious and even more unruly than they had ever expected. His father was forced to discipline him more and more, with greater intensity… His mother began to share her darker skills with her husband, all in the hopes of taming their wayward son. The boy, however, fought against these teachings… he fought and fought and fought.

And so, his father, after long debates with both himself and his wife, fought back.

The punishments that the child had endured in the past were repeated, but with a new element…

In the barn, behind the farmhouse, there was an underground room. Usually, it was meant for storing feed for the livestock, but the boy’s parents converted a part of it into the boy’s new bedroom. They left him locked in there for days after his mother had seen it fit to ease his pain slightly, in the middle of winter…

~*~

Sarah slapped the journal shut, holding one hand over her mouth, eyes wide and heart pounding. The journal was written by the father of the small family, and the man’s words made her stomach churn and her gut twist further with each passing second. She could almost hear the man, speaking directly to her, with absolutely no care in his tone for what he did to his own son.

“I know this was written ages ago, but that just sounds sick…” she groaned, reaching for her water bottle before reconsidering and putting it back into her bag. “Well, I wanted to know what the family was like… I guess I got what I wanted. Kinda… sorta… not really…”

Steeling herself, she opened the book again, resuming from where she left off.

~*~

Once freed from the dark confines of his new living quarters, the boy had tearfully latched onto his parents as if he was a mere infant once more. He had become desperate to avoid being returned to the barn’s underground store, leaping at the chance to obey every request and demand made of him. No more did he ask for breaks during a gruelling day of work, no more did he ask to see other children… no more did he ask for anything.

This peace, however, could never last… not when the boy had the tenacity of a fox and the wits of a raven.

Slowly, he began to challenge his parents again. His mother, his poor sweet witch of a mother, started to cave to the boy’s strengthening will… his father did not.

His father pulled the child aside, one night, taking him into the barn with his wife following silently behind them. The boy struggled and cried and begged, but these pleas fell on deaf ears; the child needed to learn his place in the world, and if that meant carving it into his small body so that he could never forget… then so be it.

It was only thanks to his mother’s dark knowledge that the boy lived to see the next sunrise.

They began to keep him in the barn’s underground storeroom whenever he wasn’t working. His father wanted to leave him in there for another stretch of several days, without any contact with either parent, but his mother persuaded her husband that doing so might invite more darkness into their son’s heart. This continued for months… and they began to notice a change in the child, but it wasn’t the one they wanted.

The boy was always tired, yet seemed to dream while he was awake, speaking to and interacting with creatures that weren’t visible to his parents… The dark now terrified him, to such a degree that the boy froze just outside of any shadows, or merely skirted around them in any way that he possibly could… and he became as wild as a raving beast once night fell.

His father believed that his son had become tainted, even more so than the taint that he had carried since his birth –plainly visible every time that they looked into the boy’s mismatched eyes– and wanted to ask the town’s most devoted priest to inspect the child… His wife was hesitant but eventually agreed, and it was while the two of them went to seek holy intervention that their son was lost to the darkness they had locked him within.

~*~

The journal ended with the hastily-scrawled line ‘that thing is not my son’, coupled with another splatter of red-brown –this time a shade closer to the colour expected of dried blood. Sarah felt her entire body shaking with a toxic cocktail of emotions that she couldn’t even clearly identify. Gulping back the rising burn of bile, she slid the book back into her bag. By all rights, she had all she needed… but that room under the barn simply begged for her to investigate.

She sighed, gathering her things and getting to her feet. The barn was behind the house… so that’s where she was headed next.

The trek to the other main structure that remained on the old farm didn’t take long, and she wasn’t as surprised as she thought she should have been when she saw that the double-doors she expected to be there… simply weren’t. She was glad to avoid breaking into the building, though, and made her way into the wide-open space.

Finding the trapdoor to the storeroom didn’t take very long, nor did opening it, thanks to what had probably been the lock to imprison that poor boy being flung off to one side. Sarah grabbed her flashlight, turning it back on, and descended the ladder-like steps.

She swung the beam around, light sweeping over every side of the room, including the ceiling and the floor. One half of the space looked more or less normal, albeit entirely empty of what it had once been used to store, while the other half had Sarah covering her mouth for the third time in an hour…

The splatters of red were almost expected by that point, but the freshness of the colour wasn’t.

“It’s like all that crap just happened…” she hissed, feeling her heartbeat beginning to speed up yet again. A sense of dizziness started to creep up on her, and she tried to force herself to take deep breaths; within minutes, though, her body fell to the dusty floor… completely unconscious.

~*~

When Sarah woke up, she was no longer in that makeshift torture chamber, but was instead in a wide field of flowers, surrounded by a ring of rocks that each looked to be around the same size as her fist. Blinking owlishly, she pushed herself to her feet, swaying a little before regaining her balance completely, and looked around. The air smelled sweet and fresh, the sun looked to be higher than she’d have expected… unless she was dreaming, which seemed more and more likely the longer she thought about it.

Deciding to get a better look at her surroundings, Sarah picked a random direction and started to walk. No longer than a few minutes later, she found herself standing beside a pool of water so still that it resembled a mirror rather than any kind of liquid she knew. She knelt down and reached out a finger to disturb the perfection of the pool’s stillness.

The moment that her finger touched the water, she let out a startled shout; an image had appeared on the pool’s surface, showing a scene that looked far too much like the storeroom for comfort. Another moment passed, and then the image rose up off of the pool and began to play as if she was watching an old movie…

In the scene, a small child sat with their knees up by their chest and arms wrapped tightly around their legs, a messy head of red curls buried in the bony limbs. His arms bore some of the most stomach-turning injuries that Sarah had ever seen, resembling words carved directly into the child’s tender flesh. The red splatters she’d seen for herself were even fresher than they’d been in reality…

A sliver of light appeared, widening rapidly and accompanied by the creaking of iron hinges. Instead of looking up, the child flinched and began to shake. A deep voice sounded, then, making Sarah’s insides clench with dread –it was exactly the same as the one that her mind had connected with the surprisingly-literate father.

“We’re goin’ t’town. You behave y’self, ya hear?”

A doglike whine was the only answer the child gave, but it seemed to be enough for the man, as he grunted and the light disappeared with an echoing slam.

The scene crackled, like static interference with an old television, before resuming. The child had lifted their head, showing a gaunt and terrified face. It had to be the son, Sarah realised in the same breath as she questioned how she was even dreaming something so vividly. Set on the boy’s face, in the midst of what looked to be dark shadowy bags, were a pair of bright eyes… one grey and one light brown.

She frowned, finally realising what the journal might have meant by ‘a visible taint’ on the boy… In a time where witches were still a concern, heterochromia was often met with intense superstition.

Returning her attention to the scene, she saw a ring of glowing orbs materialise in the storeroom. The boy’s stare was locked on the phenomenon, and he watched the orbs turn into… rocks. Like the ones that Sarah had woken up to in this dream. Slowly, the light from the stones faded, and another glow began to appear in the centre of the ring; a humanoid shape that started as the size of a regular action figure but then grew until it was the same size as the boy.

The figure’s head dipped to one side, apparently studying the child for a moment before nodding rapidly and holding out a hand towards him, gesturing for him to come closer, a palpable air of urgency filling the area when the boy didn’t move a muscle.

“I can’t…” the boy whimpered, shaking his head. There was a tense pause before the strange figure repeated its gestures, using both hands instead of just the one. “Y’don’ get it! I wanna, but… No, I don’ wanna stay, don’ be stupi—…” He trailed off, curling back into himself. “…I think they wanna kill me…”

At that, the figure’s shape seemed to glitch for a moment, before it stepped out of the ring. As if it had passed some kind of barrier, the instant a part of it exited the ring, its glowing featureless form was replaced with a beautiful yet naked young girl… coloured from head to toe in pastel colours not found in humans. Her face was set in a pained and fearful grimace, and she crouched in front of the boy, wrapping her arms around him. Sarah could see her mouth moving, but the floating scene didn’t seem able to relay what the girl said.

The boy froze when the girl embraced him, pulling away after she spoke. “Wha’s that s’posed ta mean?! I ain’ givin’ up…!”

She also pulled away, letting go of him and turning back to the stone circle; Sarah saw her face twist into a frightful and greedy visage for a split second before the girl’s mouth started moving again.

“…A castle…? Y’mean it…? No more bloody chores…?” the boy’s voice turned wistful, and he slowly uncurled his thin limbs enough to stand, despite the pain it seemed to cause him. “An’ all I gotta do is go with ya an’ learn from someone?” Another unheard statement from the girl, and his freckled face paled slightly. “King?!”

Sarah’s mouth fell open, wondering why her dream had taken such a strange turn. She watched the girl laugh and turn back to the boy, holding out her hands for him to take and nodding her head at the circle. She watched the boy’s gaze switch between the girl’s pastel face, the ring of stones, and the closed trapdoor… and all at once, she knew what the boy’s decision would be.

“…I can’ jus’ leave ‘em t’do this to someone else… What if I get a li’l brother or sister…? I can’ let ‘em… I won’ let ‘em…”

The girl paused, tilting her head and crossing her eyes, then she nodded vigorously with a face-splitting grin. Her hands began to glow brightly and she put them on his chest; the glow brightened even further and spread, engulfing his entire body. A scream tore from the boy’s throat, making Sarah jump and inch further away from the edge of the pool. The heart-wrenching sound continued for what felt like hours, but eventually faded at the same time that the glowing light did, revealing the boy’s body to be floating slightly…

A confused frown tugged at Sarah’s lips. The boy looked different… the bright red of his hair had intensified beyond what a human could possess without dyes and his ears –now long and pointed– peeked out from behind the unruly strands, his eyes now gleamed silver and gold and appeared to be lit with an internal light… and the carvings that his father had made on his arms had been gouged out, leaving behind horrific scars that trailed from his wrists to his elbows.

The boy took a few seconds to assess the changes wrought upon his body, before hugging the girl tightly and literally flying out of view –although a couple of resounding smashes hinted at what he’d gone to do.

Strangely, the scene didn’t dissipate like Sarah had expected it would…

Instead, the pastel-coloured girl turned to face what Sarah had subconsciously-dubbed ‘the camera’ and grinned widely, baring a set of sharklike teeth. Her mouth moved again, and this time an ethereal and musical voice reached her ears.

“So, now you know the story of our little Robin red-breast… Step back into the circle to return and forget, or touch the water to join us forever. The choice is yours, Sarah Goodfellow, but make it quickly… The king and queen of the Seelie Court have been waiting to meet the blood of their wayward toy.”

[ladyhallen]

Harry Potter - the Farming Mogul part 2

Harrison takes one day to gather information, one day to learn his target, another two hours to plot a course of action. On the third day, he successfully conned the Nott Family Head to sign over four orphanages to him.

It is completely not in his plans, but needs must.

He buys eight other house-elves and bonds them. He sends them to whoever needs it most. An orphanage with a leaky roof and almost no insulation gets two house elves. The orphanage with a flooded basement and almost rotted food stores gets three. The one he had visited gets one and last one orphanage that just straight up pissed him off – because the matron had reported the need for blankets – gets two.

Harrison takes a breather after that just to calm down his nerves. The very state of the magical children had given him flashbacks to his own childhood and it had not been pretty.

His magic is volatile and did not like anything that made him feel that angry. It had whipped his house-elves into agitation. He had never seen so many pastries in his life. (His house-elves stress baked! It made him laugh.)

“Fern,” he says to his personal house-elf. “Report to me the state of the children every month, alright? All their needs must be met. They must be in comfort, not just fine.”

The head house-elf nods seriously.

.

With the orphanage business out of the way, he focuses back on his farms.

Profit is cut back given that he is now supplying the orphanages with food. He is still earning, but not as much.

“We’ll need more land,” he announces to his elves.

They look gleeful at the prospect of more work and he shakes his head ruefully.

“Maybe we can add animals to this operation, though we can’t actually use magic to make them reproduce faster,” he muses. “Unless you guys have a way to make the cows, sheep and goats give birth to twins and triplets?”

The elves exchange looks and they start shifting on their feet.

“Well?”

The more outspoken elf says, “We can do it, but the mother dies faster.”

Of course it would be detrimental to the health of the mother. But he is a wizard and there is a potion for that. Still, he would have to give the mother six months of peacefully grazing and nursing the baby.

“Alright,” he nods. “I can do that. But…it seems I’ll have to hire a potions master for this. Or just buy the Rejuvenation Potion in bulk.”

Harrison does not just buy another farm; he buys the entire stretch of mountain and fifty hectares of the land by the shadow of its feet.

Half of the land is for grazing and the other half is for farming. His elves are ecstatic for more work but are wise enough to admit that more elf-power might be needed.

He hires ten more elves, bond with them, and leaves them at the mercy of Fern who receives them with all the dignity of a seasoned general with new troops.

.

With the appropriate amount, Harrison starts going to work.

His Hogsmeade house has finished with the construction of its underground basement, more of a bunker at this point. He casts the Undetectable Extension Charm and makes it two hundred times larger than its usual size.

Filling it with furniture, non-perishable food, medicine, bandages and potions is the reason for his need of so much money. Magic might smooth things, but if he wants it to last, he will have to do it by hand, and that means hiring professionals.

Muggles are, of course, masters of doing things by hand and Harrison outfits his underground bunker of several dozen beds, hammocks and camping bags. Non-perishable food – grains and what not – is stored in barrels with charms to keep away rodents. Perishable food and things likely to spoil, are preserved by the elves in the cold storage rooms. Muggle and magical medicine are stored in different shelves, with charms to protect them from possible degradation.

It is at this point that Harrison’s permit for his Diagon Alley establishment comes through and he has another thing on his plate.

.

Many, many years into the future, an immense number of muggleborns and half-bloods died because they didn’t know how to survive being hunted down by Death Eaters, Snatchers and Voldemort.

Harry and Ron survived by virtue of Hermione, because she prepared and actually knew what she was getting into. Hermione planned, plotted and was the reason why the Horcrux Hunt survived at all.

A large number of people who ran from the new regime didn’t survive, because they didn’t know the appropriate charms, the spells or the enchantments to hide them from view while giving them comfort. (Wizards are really all about comfort. Voldemort didn’t have to hole up in Malfoy Manor, but really…)

Harrison plans to stop that. He plans to make sure that even if he can’t save them all, he can give them the means to save themselves.

His new shop, Travel Guide, is how he plans to go about it.

It’s a small shop, hardly impressive like the Leaky Cauldron or the Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. There is a modest display with appropriately catchy colors, interactive maps and historical impressive places in the wizarding world. It’s actually quite amusing, given that Harrison is pretending that his store is a travel company when it’s actually a survival guide company.

Still, to be safe, he places a ward on the premises. Only those who need it will find his shop. And it’s also very eye-catching to muggleborns and uninformed half-bloods. After all, navigating through the wizarding world unknowing is like a battlefield all on itself.

Harrison writes pamphlets about the wizarding world, the little things that wizards take for granted but things muggleborns wouldn’t know.

Wizarding Villages and where to find affordable housing

Charms that save money

Potions tips that save your fingers

Wands: Tips and Tricks on how to cast better

Camping made easy

Politics: How the Wizengamot does things and why it will affect your O.W.L.’s and N.E.W.T.’s

And the only book he ever writes is called, “Hogwarts: A Survival Guide”

He includes a scaled down version of the Marauders Map, a version that only shows the user when they activate a pin. He writes how each teacher grades, what they find interesting worth an O and which reference books they like better than the rest. (He might have cheated a bit with foreknowledge, but Fred and George did it first.) He puts in the secret routes, the secret passageways and the hidden rooms that have been forgotten for years sans the Marauders.

Lastly, he makes a survival kit. It has, a collapsible tent, a bag with the Undetectable Extension Charm, a weeks worth of non-perishable food, a Potions set geared towards medicine and a booklet with different chapters on cooking charms, cleaning charms, warding charms and trapping jinxes.

He knows it’s not complete yet, but he has thirty-seven more years to go before he can make a very comprehensive survival kit.

.

Mostly, this is an excuse to world-build. 

Play with my sandbox, suggestions are welcome.

[themastercylinder]

SUMMARY

Set in a post-nuclear war of the year 2024, the main character, Vic (Don Johnson) is an 18-year-old boy, born in and scavenging throughout the wasteland of the former southwestern United States. Vic is most concerned with food and sex; having lost both of his parents, he has no formal education and does not understand ethics or morality. He is accompanied by a well-read, misanthropic, telepathic dog named Blood who helps him locate women in return for food. Blood cannot forage for himself due to the same genetic engineering that granted him telepathy. The two steal for a living, evading bands of marauders, berserk androids, and mutants. Blood and Vic have an occasionally antagonistic relationship (Blood frequently annoys Vic by calling him “Albert” for reasons never made clear) though they realize they need each other. Blood wishes to find the legendary promised land of “Over the Hill” where above ground utopias are said to exist, though Vic believes that they must make the best of what they have.

Searching a bunker for a woman for Vic to rape, they find one, but she has already been severely mutilated and is on the verge of death. Vic displays no pity, and is merely angered by the “wastefulness” of such an act as well as disgusted by the thought of satisfying his urges with a woman in such a condition. They move on, only to find slavers excavating another bunker. Vic steals several cans of their food, later using them to barter for goods in a nearby shantytown settlement.

That evening, while watching old vintage stag films at a local outdoor movie house, Blood claims to smell a woman, and the pair track her to a large underground warehouse. There, they meet Quilla June Holmes (Susanne Benton), a scheming and seductive teenage girl from “Down under”, a society located in a large underground vault. Unknown to the pair, Quilla June’s father, Lou Craddock (Jason Robards), had sent her above ground to “recruit” surface dwellers. Blood takes an instant dislike to her, but Vic ignores him. After Vic saves Quilla June from raiders and mutants, they have repeated sex. Eventually, though, she takes off secretly to return to her underground society. Vic, enticed by the thought of women and sex, follows her, despite Blood’s warnings. Blood remains at the portal on the surface.

  Down under has an artificial biosphere, complete with forests and an underground city, which is named Topeka, after the ruins of the city it lies beneath. The entire city is ruled by a triumvirate known as “The Committee”, who have shaped Topeka into a bizarre caricature of pre-nuclear war America, with all residents wearing whiteface and clothes that harkens back to the rural United States prior to WWII. Vic is told that he has been brought to Topeka to help fertilize the female population and is elated to learn of his value as a “stud.” Then he is told that Topeka meets its need for exogamous reproduction by electro ejaculation and artificial insemination, which will not allow him to feel the pleasure or release that he seeks. Anybody who refuses to comply or otherwise defies the Committee is sent off to “the farm” and never seen again. Vic is then told that when his sperm has been used to impregnate 35 women, he will be sent to “the farm.”

Quilla June helps Vic escape because she wants him to kill the Committee members and destroy their android enforcer, Michael (Hal Baylor), so that she can usurp power. Vic has no interest in politics or remaining underground, only wishing to return to Blood and the wasteland, where he feels at home. The rebellion is quashed by Michael, who crushes the heads of Quilla June’s two co-conspirators before Vic disables him. She proclaims her “love” for Vic and decides to escape to the surface with him, realizing her rebellion has been undone.

On the surface, Vic and Quilla June discover Blood is starving and near death. She pleads with him to abandon Blood, forcing Vic to face his feelings. Vic decides that his loyalties lie with Blood. This results, off-camera, in her being killed and her flesh cooked, so that they can eat and survive. Blood thanks Vic for the food, and they both comment on Quilla June, with Vic stating it was her fault to follow him, and Blood joking that she didn’t have bad ‘taste’. The film ends with the boy and his dog walking off into the wasteland together.

  The production and making of this movie is related in several interviews (with L.Q.Jones and Harlan Ellison) and articles written over the years from various sources.

  DEVELOPMENT

L.Q. Jones is a two-man film production company established by supporting actors L. Q. Jones and Alvy Moore as an outlet for creative energies often untapped in their all but countless film and television roles. Working out of two rooms of disorganized clutter which serve as office, cutting room and miscellaneous storage area, the pair have recently completed their fourth feature film, A BOY AND HIS DOG, based on the award winning novella by science fiction’s most celebrated prodigy, Harlan Ellison.

The two paired together in 1963, and with the slimmest of shoestring budgets, produced THE DEVIL’S BEDROOM, a melodramatic tale of a simple-minded youth accused of murder and hounded by an enraged posse. Jones, who wrote, directed, and acted in the film, admits that technically THE DEVIL’S BEDROOM is probably the worst picture ever, but over a period of time it earned enough to enable them to produce THE WITCHMAKER, a more polished horror shocker involving witchcraft in the Louisiana bayous and parapsychologist Alvy Moore’s attempts to unravel a series of bizarre murders. Then came THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, a film of critical as well as box office, success, in which both Jones and Moore played supporting roles to Strother Martin’s murderous warlock who masquerades as a genial country doctor.

   Why did you and Alvy Moore decide to form the LQ/JAF production company?

LQ: I got tired of doing the crap that we did. No, that’s not true. I enjoyed doing it, but if you want to be creative, you have to do it yourself. And so Alvy Moore and I, we’d been friends for a hundred years it seemed like, so we formed our own company. And whenever things got bad and hideous from doing all those crappy lines you had to do, we’d go out and write some crappy lines of our own and make a picture. So we ended up doing four pictures totally on our own, and that’s why I got very lucky. Because you can work your fanny off, do a marvelous job, and on a scale of 1 to 100 you’ve accomplished about a minus three. Because you have to turn it over to the distributing arm, and it’s completely out of your hands from that point on. But I said, “To hell with that.” And when I was first making my pictures, I started going with them. I was one of the few people in our business that not only made pictures, but sold them. Even people like William Wyler didn’t do that. He made them for someone else. Of course, he had talent and a lot of money. But we’d make ours and then take them out. And we made four pictures, and it’s hard to say this — all four of them ended up on ’10 best films of the year’ lists. It’s amazing. One was The Witchmaker. One was The Devil’s Bedroom, which they booked it into houses where everybody wore raincoats. They thought it was gonna be a sexy to-do. But that was the name of a cave, and the story was about a man who loved the outdoors. And his brother didn’t care for him that much. The father had found oil on his property, and made some money. And when he died, he left it to the two sons. The one that John Lupton played just enjoyed hunting and the land for the land’s sake, and took care of it that way. His brother, played by Dick Jones, wanted the money. And so he and his wife connived and put John in the insane asylum, so that they could control the estate. And John escaped, and the brother and his wife are both killed under suspicious circumstances. John is blamed for it, hunted down and killed, burned alive in the cave. And then they found out a year or so later that he hadn’t killed them at all. He was just loose, and something happened to them. And The Devil’s Bedroom was what they had called the cave for years. It’s a true story. In Texas, there was that very funny thing of the law where if two people in a family swear up a deposition, you can be arrested for insanity. And I think it’s still on the books. They did it to protect something. I forgot what it was. Well, it backfired. And that’s what happened here. Dick Jones has John Lupton committed for lunacy, so he can sell and develop the oil on the land. The place nearby there was “The Devil’s Bedroom,” and that’s where he ends up being killed. And it’s one of the worst pictures God ever made, but I found out people liked it because they thought it was real. Their theory was, “No one can make this bad a picture that wasn’t real.” I mean, there had to be somebody who just went out with a camera and shot it. And so, they thought somebody was making real life. That is pure crap. But it was on a bunch of 10-bests of the year, and it was hideous. And then we made The Witchmaker, Come In, Children, and A Boy and his Dog.

LQ/JAF stands for “L.Q. Jones And Friends.” And we did it a lot to have fun. We just got lucky and things made money. And then it got to where, after doing A Boy and his Dog, I had a whole bunch of offers to direct, and more money than it cost to make the picture for chrissakes. But I couldn’t see working all that time and all that effort to make that. So I just kept saying, “No,” and I finally just said, “To hell with it,” and just stopped and went on with the acting. Because by then, I could pretty well pick and choose what I wanted to do. So, it was fun. It’s always been fun. But it was really fun for me, and the [company] was getting in the way. Although, we’re still distributing A Boy and his Dog 30 some-odd years after the fact. It played in a lot of places a long time. We played in one theater in Seattle for a year, which I thought was pretty good. But we really played in Paris, France in one theater for eight years. So, it’s a fun picture. It’s not made for everybody. I tell people, “I hope you like it when you see it. Because if you don’t, you’re gonna be hag-ridden. Because you can’t forget it. Every time you see a dog, it’ll kind of bring it up.” And so I said, “I really hope that you enjoy it when you see it. Otherwise, you’re gonna hate me.”

  STORY/SCRIPT DEVELOPMENT

HE: I can often tell you how a story I wrote came into being. This is one I can’t. I’ll be damned if I can remember how or why I did this story. I think the whole thing came from the title. I really wanted to parody an Albert Payson Terhune dog story, and so I called it “A Boy and His Dog,” which is, you know, the gentlest kind of title possible. Actually, I was doing it mostly for my dog, Ahbhu: I used to read this story to him. That dog had an enormous influence on me. He was really the closest friend I’ve ever had, and his passing wiped me out for months. This story, I guess, was kind of my way of sharing something with him.

After the story won the Nebula, it got taken for a lot of college textbooks, and it was in the air, people knew it existed. The first call I got was from Warner Bros. and a producer there, whose name I can’t remember, offered me a lot of money. But then he let slip, he said: “Well, explain to me how we’re going to animate the mouth of the dog.” And I just reared back and realized that anybody who would even say that, who even thought of the story in that way, would just …I would have nothing but endless hours of aggravation I’d have to rewrite the script forty two times: eventually they’d bring in another writer on the thing: I’d be screwed out of my own production; and I said, “Thank you, anyhow,” and I motored. The next bid was about six months later, from Universal. And I don’t know who it was over there, either, but it was somebody up in the Tower. And he liked the story, but he wanted me to change the down-under section so that it was not so anti-middle class, patriotic, white America as it was: and I said no, I didn’t think I’d care to do that. But we had a number of meetings and we talked about it, and then he, too, said: “How are we going to do the dog?” I mean, he just didn’t understand about telepathy, at all. Then there was a French company, and they were talking about Antonioni to do it — which really excited me, except that the money was too low and they just seemed like they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. And there were a bunch of independents who wanted it off and on. This went on for about four years. Finally, one day I get a call from this dude, says: “Hi, there. My name is L. Q. Jones.” I recognized the name because I’m a movie buff and he was always the crazed redneck in some movie or other. He said: “You’ve got this story, ‘A Boy and His Dog,’ and I’d like to talk to you about doing it.”

First published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds.

LQ: We had just finished THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, and were looking for another. Normally, when I’m trying to find a property I’ll read twenty-five, thirty, forty scripts a week, if I can get them. But I couldn’t find anything that I liked. Of course, when you don’t have all the money in the world, that precludes, in a lot of cases, doing the thing you want. One day, my cameraman, Johnny Morrill, brought in “A Boy and His Dog” and gave it to Sheila, the secretary, and said: “I think L.Q. might like this. Have him read it. “I read it and I loved it. It was one of those things that by the time I was halfway through, I was holding my breath, because I knew the ass was going to fall off of it, it was too good. But it didn’t. Right down to the last stroke, it was right. But then I began to have negative feelings about it, because I was envisioning it as an X picture, and I didn’t want to do an X picture. “You don’t realize how dumb you are,” my secretary told me. She had read it before handing it over to me. “Go back and read it again,” she said. “It’s a love story, but a true love story having nothing to do with sex.” With that in mind, I read it again, and she was dead right. So we called Harlan.

HE: And I said: “Well, I’m not really interested in selling it, I’ll be very honest.” By that time I was sick and tired of going to moron meetings and being jerked around by a bunch of clowns. And he says: “Well, come on down. I’ll buy you lunch.” As it turned out, I bought the goddamned lunch. That was my first meeting with L.Q. and Alvy. And I liked them immediately. I mean, really, they are so crazed and they are so unlike people in the industry. See, I’ve been out here since ’62, and I’ve done real well, I make a lot of bread. But there are people I won’t work for. I mean, there’s not enough money in the universe that they could offer to get me to work for them because they fucked me over, they lied to me, or they butchered something I wrote. And so I avoid, pretty much, the whole industry. I don’t hang out with producers and I don’t go to clubs, and do that number. And these guys were just like that. But I wasn’t about to give them any damned movie until L.Q. said: “Well, come on, we’ll show you one of our films.” And he showed me COME IN, CHILDREN which came out as THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN. I was really impressed by the film. Some amazingly interesting stuff. It opens with a kid’s wind-up toy tank going across the grass and over a bunch of cars, and it turns into a real tank crushing real cars. It has nothing to do with the picture, but it’s a staggering image! And there was just a load of really good stuff in it. And they said, we want you to do the script, and I asked L.Q.: “How do you plan on doing the dog?” And he said, “We’re just going to do it with a voice-over.” And I smiled. I could have hugged him, because of course that’s the way you do it. And I knew that even if they didn’t bring it off, at least they would try it the right way.

Available @ AMAZON

Vic and Blood: Stories Paperback by Harlan Ellison

LQ: And so we made the deal. Harlan was to write it, and he said he could write it in three weeks because it was his favorite story and he’d written it a hundred times in his head. I was going to be gone for three weeks on a picture, so I figured after about ten days I’d have half the script sent to me and I could read it while I was working on the other film. When I didn’t get anything after about two weeks, I called Alvy and asked him why he wasn’t sending me the script, and he said he wasn’t sending it to me because it didn’t exist. When I got back, Harlan still didn’t have an inch written. Three months later we still hadn’t gotten any script. Four months- same thing. Finally, I called him up, and I said: ‘I’ve got the ultimate threat, Harlan, if you don’t do the fucking script, I’m going to write it!” Well, that spurred him into unbelievable action, and I’II bet it wasn’t three days and he showed up with eighteen pages. And then we waited around another two months or so. Finally, I wrote the script. Whipped it out in only a year.

HE: I had been writing for something like 15 years without a vacation. I’d never had a day off, and I’d written every day of that fifteen years. And what I did not know was that I was just coming to a point where the machine was starting to freeze up. It was going to seize up on me, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I started to write the script, and I got about fourteen pages into it, and I couldn’t get any further. I couldn’t write another word. I couldn’t write anything! I was going crazy. It’s a terrifying thing, man. I write, that’s what I do. No matter what I’m doing, getting laid, going to a movie, having dinner. I know that where I should be is behind that typewriter. It’s a terrible cross, man. It’s like being doomed. If you go away on vacation, you can take off and go. I can’t go without a typewriter. I carry a portable with me everywhere I go. And to one day realize that you can’t write is really crushing. I love writing. It’s hard, there’s nothing easy about it. You know, that self-indulgent thing: “It’s a lonely, proud life to be a writer,” it’s true: it really is. You’re there absolutely all by yourself in front of a machine, and you’re locked inside your own head. And after a while, the people you’re writing about start to be more real to you than the people you hang out with: and the people that you meet are always so much shallower and less interesting than the people you’ve dreamed up: and you say, “What do I want to hang out with these people for when I can go back and be with those?” It’s a very strange life to be a writer or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m weird.

Well, you know, L.Q. has a budget operation. Mine was the only project he was working on, and I was running the poor son of a bitch into the poorhouse, because all of the money that should have been going into getting the production started he was wasting, waiting for me to get off my ass. And I messed him around for almost six or eight months. Which was terrible! And I kept telling him: “I’m doing it, I’m doing it,” lied left and right. And I was getting more and more frantic because I didn’t know what was happening. Finally, when I was able to admit to myself that I just could not write for a while, everything started to ease up. But it took me almost a year to get back to writing. It was the only block I’ve ever had, the only period in twenty years of writing when I couldn’t do any work. Well, L.Q. went ahead and did the script. You can imagine my horror. But he did a good script. He took it literally and directly right out of the book. The dialog is the same, almost virtually line for line; and the situations are the same, altered only in the respect that certain things were too expensive to film. And the ways in which he altered them are staggeringly, incredibly intelligent I mean, they really were. He’s a consummate filmmaker.

LQ: I love to write, but God, it’s brutal. If I wasn’t doing a picture or something else, I’d start working at 10 o’clock in the morning and I’d finish the next morning at 2 or 3 o’clock. Just hanging over a typewriter and banging it out. I rewrote the entire script maybe thirty-five or forty times; and I read his story maybe twenty five times a day. Even now, if I’ve got forty-five minutes, I’ll pull it off the shelf and read it again. To begin with, it’s a fascinating story, and gorgeously written, not a wasted word in it. And I find that each time I read it again, there’s one word which I’ve missed in context and it’ll shed light on what he tried to say about the other things. The picture is a picture of sensation.

What’s it like to be really dirty? What’s it like to be really lonely? You’ve got to learn to hate, and you’ve got to learn to love a little bit, and you’ve got to learn to fight all this is built into it. It’s the way he wrote it. Harlan writes more visually than he does with words. So what I was trying to do was find out what he meant, or what he saw, and then translate it into something. That’s why it took me a year to write it. I’d like to go back and work another year on it. The story is really brilliant. I wish I could say it was mine. But there are a number of things I found dead wrong in the book. His whole down under is wrong. And Harlan will now admit it to a few people, not many. He’ll even admit it to me every now and then. Now, mine could have been better, but I’m closer to the truth than he is. For example, there’s no way they’re going to bring Vic down under, with the lack of regard they have for him, and put him in with their girls. It’d be like taking the Methodist preacher’s daughter and putting her in a cage with an ape. It’s the same thing, Vic’s an animal. So they’re not going to allow that. The second thing is the green metal robot sentry, which of course, in the film, is Michael. Here are people who are agrarian. They would not tolerate a machine that was superior to them that looked like a machine. Small thing, but I think they would not allow it. Third, he tells me in the book that a boy who has barely managed to stay alive and free, and who gets laid once every six months, is put in the midst of all these females and all this food, and at the end of a week, he’s bored? You might tell me he’s wrung out, but you’re not going to tell me he’s bored. But that’s what he put forth in his story and I didn’t believe that. The big, big flaw in it, besides the thing about putting him in with the girls is… do you realize that once he goes below, he never thinks of Blood once? Now, that’s dead wrong. No matter what. Because it is a love story, even from Harlan’s point of view. You do not ignore that goddamned dog and that’s what he did, because he is never mentioned down below. Nor referred to. And that’s wrong. Then I thought it was wrong the way he had people chasing them. That society wouldn’t do that. They didn’t care. You know, “Let Michael take care of them, or let the green metal box take care of them we don’t do it! “I changed those things just slightly, and Harlan tends to agree and disagree.

  PRE-PRODUCTION

Though early treatments of Jones’ screenplay retained the bombed out urban locale of Ellison’s novella, a switch was made as production options jelled. With limited funds at their disposal, LQ/Jaf was in no position to construct such a setting. Pacific Ocean Park, a condemned amusement park in the process of being torn down, captured something of the feeling they sought, with the only other prospect being some urban ruins in Yugoslavia, unrestored since World War II. However, in poring over research theses and reports on atomic warfare, Jones came across theoretical indications that a massive and simultaneous discharge of nuclear firepower could literally halt the rotation of the earth on its axis for a fraction of a second, but long enough for momentum to sweep the oceans of the planet over the great land masses, engulfing everything in mountains of mud. Jones decided to pursue this option and as scripted, the bulk of the film takes place over the post-holocaust remains of Phoenix, Arizona. Art director Ray Boyle designed a section of old Phoenix as it would appear from the surface if buried under twenty feet of mud. Then he and Alvy Moore drove out to a dry lake bed twenty miles outside Barstow, California, and staked out the streets and locations for the buildings.

Every board, nail, tool, and drop of water had to be brought in by truck, and a fleet of heavy construction equipment was assembled from around Southern California. One hundred and sixty three holes, ranging from ten to fifty feet across, were gouged into the lake bed. More than forty million pounds of earth were moved. Parts of houses and other buildings were built, covered with dirt, and flooded: then covered again, and re-flooded. A condemned hospital was dismantled and its lumber foundation, roofs, floors, and hardware were used. House trailers were ripped apart and fitted into the city underground. Automobiles were driven or towed in, then buried. Tops of telephone poles and television antennae were wrestled into the ground. Neon signs, furniture and appliances, statues, traffic lights, tree trunks, benches, and thousands of other items were trucked in and strategically positioned. Above ground, six hundred tires were used to construct a Spartan dwelling of the future. An open air theatre, providing personal services of all kinds, was completely encircled by a ten-foot mound of junk 480 feet long. In all, four and a half square miles of the lake bed were covered with sets.

Authorities at a nearby Army base gave the company access to their gymnasium to film the gun battle between Vic and Blood and a rover pack set upon abducting Quilla June. To make it appear as though the facility had been converted to an emergency hospital during the brief world war, three hundred bunk beds and two hundred mat – tresses were hauled in, and medical records from the condemned hospital were strewn about. Five tons of mud and several gallons of spider web material completed the setting. Two weeks later, not a trace remained, and GIs were once again playing basketball on the courts.

LQ: We literally had to lease the land for mining: then some government people showed up. and said: “What are you doing?” We told them we were making a picture, and they said: “You can’t do that. You leased it for mining, and you’ve got to dig holes.” So we said: “Look at all the holes!” But every time we saw a plume of dust coming twenty miles away. we were a little bit worried that they were coming to shut us down.

Then we had some difficulties with our director a director whom I respect very much, and who’s very big in television, and reasonably so in pictures. And yet, we got down to a few weeks, and he had a weak fluttering of the heart. He and I, we had a little caravan of three or four cars were running around looking at locations. And he says: “I’ve got to talk to you.” Okay. We stopped, right in the middle of this dumb camp in the desert, and we got out of the car and walked over thirty-five or forty feet, and he stood there and shuffled his feet for a few minutes and looked down at the ground, and said: ‘I have an overpowering sense of doom” that was his opening line. Something about it just scared him to death. Probably a combination of everything, not all the money in the world; trying to work on an hellacious set… He just didn’t believe it could be pulled together. Now, from there, I can’t go very many places. So I said: “I think what you’d better do is go gome and get a hold of yourself. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” After he left. Alvy and I conversed. and I said: “I don’t think we have much choice we’re going to have to replace him. With that attitude, I don’t want him to be a burden to the picture.” Any my three crew chiefs came by, one at a time and none of the three knew the others were coming to see me and each one of them said: “We will not do the picture if he is to be the director. The only way we’ll do it is if you’ll direct it. ” Which was quite a vote of confidence for me. And at that stage of the game, I said: “Well, I don’t really have any choice. I can’t bring another director in, because it would take too long to try and have him understand what we’re trying to do.” So there I was. But I’m kind of tickled that it worked out the way it did, because I’m glad I got to direct it I never would have otherwise. And I know I’d have chewed my heart out, standing back figuring out how I would have done a shot. But his experience would have been very valuable and very welcomed, because my inexperience hurt us. I was not that good at writing scripts, and I left things in that I did not need and would not use, but couldn’t recognize at any given moment. So, I wasted time and money, unfortunately.

Jason Robards

Don Johnson & Susanne Benton

  CASTING

More than five hundred young actors and actresses had been screened for the lead roles before Don Johnson and Susanne Benton were selected to play Vic and Quilla June. Jason Robards was signed to portray Lew, the most prominent of the three Committee chieftains. Alvy Moore had to fight for his part, since Jones, who recalled having to read for his part in THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN, insisted he did not have Moore in mind for the role of his namesake, Doctor Moore. Selection of the Committee triumvirate was completed with Helene Winston as Mez. Providing admirable support at least when he wasn’t busy stealing scenes was a shaggy veteran of THE BRADY BUNCH television series, named Tiger.

  James Cagney’s voice was considered as the voice of Blood, but was dropped because it would have been too recognizable and prove to be a distraction. Eventually, after going through approximately six hundred auditions, they settled on Tim McIntire, a veteran voice actor.

  Tim McIntire

LQ: I was expecting to look at every dog in town. Now, how many that would be, I don’t know, but it’s got to be two or three hundred. And the second dog they brought in was Tiger. And it was one of those funny things. Tiger didn’t come in like the rest of the dogs and sit on the floor. He came in and jumped up on the chair and sat down. I took Alvy and Tiger in the other office, and I put two of the chairs side by side and we went through the theatre scene. And when it came time for him to say, “There’s a female in here.” he turned and put his muzzle right in Alvy’s ear. Then it was just a question of signing the papers, because there was no doubt that he was the animal for the part. Joe Hornak, his trainer, worked with him, I guess off and on, about six months maybe longer. He had the script that we had then and he had the book. Then, about three weeks before we started shooting, we took Tiger, Don Johnson, and Joe, and went out to Magnolia Park, and they spent like four or five hours every day –and Joe transferred the commands to the boy. You can almost always spot a movie dog. because he’s looking for his handler, but by the time we did the picture, Tiger was taking his commands from Don rather than from the handler. And that’s tough to do.

When I start talking about the dog, the superlatives just come I can’t stop. To me, it is the finest performance ever put on film by an animal just one of those little bits of magic that worked. With one dog. What if he steps on a nail? Or what if he gets sick? That’s the only animal we had, and he did it all. And it would be difficult to match him. For one thing, he’s got two different color eyes. And he walks funny. To me, he walks like Jimmy Stewart talks in groups. He had distemper when he was a pup and almost died, and it did something to his bone structure, so he walks with a funny gait. The dog was treated with unbelievable respect. It got to the point where everything on the set revolved around the dog. We had to set up a very special schedule for him, and he had to be handled a certain way. Otherwise, like any person with a short attention span, he’d begin to wander. So, we’d do all our work first, and then bring him in right at the last, and we’d just turn it over to Joe, and he’d work with him, and when Tiger was ready, we’d start shooting. It didn’t take him very long to understand what you wanted. And he’d do it time and time again. In fact, it got to the point where I accused Joe of reading the script to the dog at night and having him understand it. It was really phenomenal. After a couple of days, I completely forget he was an animal. And when I was on the set, I’d say: “Now, Don, on that walkthrough you’re taking, it’s about ten percent too slow – you’ve got to pick it up. Tiger, you stay a little bit to his left, and don’t lag too far behind.” And nobody’s laughing. You can’t train a dog to do what he did. He began to feel what was going on in any given scene. Look at the farewell scene outside the drop shaft. There’s no way in the world you could teach that dog to do what he did. The look in his face I swear he’s crying. I’ll sit here and take an oath the damned dog’s crying. And you just can’t do that with an animal. So, somewhere along the line, he felt what was going on, and he did it.

We must have recorded seven hundred people for the voice of the dog. We recorded people who make in excess of a million dollars a year with their voices. One guy did forty or fifty some odd voices for us. We did them like John Wayne: we had them doing it like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart. We tried everything in the world. I was looking for a quality. I knew what I wanted, but I didn’t know how to get there. I wanted a touch of the professor in him; I wanted a touch of the father in him: I wanted a touch of the scientist in him. It finally came down to the time when we just had to choose a voice, and it turned out the one I liked most was Tim McIntire. I had met him once. We did a KUNG FU together. And really, he is an unbelievably talented man. He writes fantastic music, is a good actor, and a great person all around. Of course, I didn’t know that when I first worked with him, since all I had to do was shoot him in the back. So Tim came in, and we worked through God knows how many voices trying to get the right one that had everything we wanted in it. When we finally decided, he and I sat down at the Moviola and went over it and over it and over it and over it, we rewrote all the stuff for the dog, because I wanted to play off the expressions and situations to bring it up to date. And boy, that’s brutal. If you’re really good at it, really experienced, I’m sure it would be a little easier, but for us it was like pulling teeth.

  How did you cast Don Johnson?

LQ: I thought it would take forever to find the dog, but I found the dog quickly. But for the boy, we did over 600 tests with men for the part, before we found Don. It was a tough role—as an actor you don’t want to get into a scene with a child or a dog. He had to act with a dog that talked that was smarter than him. There’s no doubt in my mind that’s the best thing he ever did and he ever will do.

How old was Don Johnson in the movie?

LQ: At that point in time — he looks like, does he not, 17, 18? — he was twenty-seven, I think. He’s one of those people that looks very young. It’s the best thing Don has ever done. And I’ve told him that.

What was his career like before A Boy and His Dog?

LQ: He did three big pictures, each one of them worse than the previous one. People probably don’t know it, but he had tried to do six or seven pilots that he couldn’t get. After he started doing A Boy and His Dog, he got eleven pilot offers. And the only good one was Miami Vice. So it got him Miami Vice; the dog was responsible for it. And Don’s smart enough to know that. He wouldn’t tell it to you or anybody else but me, and I’m not even sure he’d tell it to me, but the dog forced him to be a hell of an actor.

How did casting Tiger the dog as Blood affect Don Johnson’s performance?

LQ: Don did a marvelous job. I mean, folks, don’t work against kids, don’t work against animals, and sure as hell don’t work against a talking dog. But that’s what he did, and he did a marvelous job. But Don was full of Don. That’s fine. We got along fine the first couple of days. And then we were working at the boiler room, and Don decided that he was going to direct the scene. And I said, “Hey, that’s fine. And we’re really gonna miss ya, Don. Because I’m gonna put your ass on the bus, and I’ll finish the picture.” He knew I meant exactly what I said. And after that, he made a bunch of suggestions, which you want people to do. But whatever I said, went. I tell this, and nobody believes it, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. We’re doing the scene where the dog is chasing the boy across the desert. The boy is going down under, and the dog is chasing after him, and he’s limping. Well, limping is no trick. All you do is put a little blood on his foot, and put a rubber band on it. And every time he steps down, the band pinches, so he limps. You don’t have to teach him anything. We did the scene the first time, and I said, “Cut,” and I went over and I said, “Listen, this is just not right. Let’s do it again. Don, pick it up a little bit. A little bit. Don’t give me the actor’s revenge and run in, but pick it up a little bit. Tiger, God damn it, you’re on the wrong side of the boy.” I’m not talking to the dog. The trainer is seated over 50 feet away reading a magazine. My crew is not laughing. This is like the second week. They’re used to this. I’m saying, “Get over on this side. That way, I can see you. Now, let’s try it again.” Watch the picture. He is on the camera side of Don when he is chasing him. When he finally gets the kid to stop, his nose is even with Don’s leg. They stop. I started to stop the camera, but the dog moved ahead towards the drop shaft. He didn’t know where the drop shaft was, but he limped forward about six feet, turned around, sat down, faced the boy, did his dialogue, looked over his correct right shoulder at where he was going, moved back to the boy, and finally at the end put his head in the boy’s lap. Now, that is about seven sequential tricks. You cannot teach an animal to do sequential tricks. Maybe you can teach him two. Seven or eight? Well, as a matter of fact, Jason Robards did his stuff, and asked me what I thought. I said, “Jason, if you can just hit your marks and say your lines like Tiger, I’ll make a star out of you.” He understood exactly what I meant. The dog was brilliant. Joe Hornok was the man who trained him, and I suggested to him that he was reading the script to him at night and telling him what to do. The dog was marvelous. For instance, if you watch him, he doesn’t wag his tail. He does for balance. They have to. But the first day, we had a device, and we didn’t want him wagging his tail. Makes you think of him as a dog, so we put this device on him. The second day, we forgot it, and we didn’t have it. We had to shoot, and we realized he didn’t wag his tail. He realized that’s what we wanted. That’s what he did. The scene at the drop shaft, the damn dog sat there and cried. I mean, you could see tears coming out of his eyes. I can blow stuff in his eyes and make him cry, but we didn’t do it. The dog truly was brilliant. He was so good, that here in town there was a movement afoot to nominate him for an Oscar. Not the Patsy, which he won, but an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in a motion picture. The dog was brilliant. I think he was on The Brady Bunch before he did A Boy and his Dog. I tried to buy him when the thing was over. They wouldn’t sell him. And I said, “He won’t be competition. I’ll just use him if I’m gonna make another Boy. Other than that, he’s retired.” They wouldn’t sell him to me. People didn’t realize he’d had distemper, which will 99% of the time kill a dog or kill a horse. It’s a form of pneumonia I believe, and they very seldom get over it. They’d found him. He was in a dog pound. Nursed him back to health, and off he went. So he was not healthy, but he was as healthy as he ever was before he got sick. But he was marvelous. When you work with an animal like a dog that you can train, the dog is always looking for the trainer. It looks like he’s looking at the person who’s talking, but if you’ll notice, he’s looking slightly to one side or the other. He’s looking at his trainer, because his trainer’s giving him hand signals.

For a fight with another dog, we waited until the very last day, because I was petrified that something was gonna happen to him. Both of them had muzzles on, and they were good friends. So I’m asking Joe, “What do we do?” He said, “Don’t worry about it. Just get ready.” And I said, “I don’t want him hurt.” He said, “No way he’s gonna get hurt. If he gets hurt, you can hurt me. But he’s not gonna get hurt. But be ready.” All he did was take one plate, put food on it, put it in front of Tiger. He starts to eat it, and Joe took it away, and put it in front of the other dog — and the shit hit the fan. They were really out to kill each other, and they were friends. But nothing phony about the fight. I was afraid something was gonna happen. We had trimmed their nails. They couldn’t open their mouth to bite, but you don’t see it. We’ve got it well-hidden. Both of them did a marvelous job, but I thought we were gonna have two dead dogs. So, hell, they did it better than humans do it.

For a small, independent film, you were able to get Jason Robards, who was a big star at the time. I mean, he did All The President’s Men soon after this.

LQ: At the time we made A Boy and His Dog, Jason was maybe the best actor in our business. He wasn’t the biggest star, but he was perhaps the best actor.  The truth is, Robert Ryan was going to do A Boy and His Dog. We had done Men In War and The Wild Bunch together. He wanted to do it, and I would have been tickled to death if he had. But Bob came down with cancer and he could not do it. So I talked to Jason and he said send it to me. He was not money driven at all, he was interested in doing good work. He read it and said, ‘When do we start?’

Given his animal nature, do you think Vic care more about sex than he does food?

LQ: Good heavens, yes. I mean, no doubt about it. He’s always eating, or else getting enough food, because he’s there and he’s alive. Well, it’s because of Blood that he’s finding the food. But female companionship, which to him doesn’t exist  he uses a female strictly for sex. I mean, what we have to understand about Vic, he’s not very smart. You listen to Blood talk with him, and you realize Blood is trying to teach him to grow up a little bit. Now, he’s not having too much success, but that’s what he’s doing. As a matter of fact, a couple of times through the picture, the boy is saying in effect, “Leave me alone, for chrissakes! I can read ‘beets’ on the can.” He couldn’t, but neither could the guy he gave it to. Vic is an animal. Let’s put it down where it really belongs. He is an animal. The only intelligent being in the whole picture that he’s in contact with is Blood. Blood teaches him to think, teaches him to talk, teaches him history, teaches him to spell. The whole thing. Blood’s trying to bring him around. He’s dealing with, in effect, a not-very-intelligent high school student. Why would he be anything else? He knows nothing else. So misogyny to you or me, doesn’t mean a damn thing to him. He wants to get laid. The dog says, “I’m hungry.” So there’s the trade-off. “Find me a broad, and I’ll get some food.” Everybody gets what they want. And again, we’re nearly down to that anyway now. I’m trying to get people to understand a little bit that, “Folks, if you don’t get your head out of your ass, this is exactly what’s going to be happening.” And that’s a fact of life. If all of us continue to be uneducated and greedy, that’s where we’re gonna end up. And you’re not gonna have a Blood, probably, to make things any easier or funnier, surely. So the picture is full of that message. Again, I found a long time ago that you can’t get an audience’s attention by talking to them. You have to first entertain them. And then, if you can slip it by them, you’re OK. I’m not saying that’s the way it should be, but that’s the way it is.

“I was lucky to work with two of the finest. Jason Robards, to me, the best actor. I directed him in A Boy and His Dog. He did not miss one trick. –  L. Q. Jones “

I took a chance, and I almost went too far, but I don’t explain anything. A lot of people say, “I have trouble understanding it.” Of course you do. Because I’m giving you something in a context you have never seen before. There’s no sheriff. There are no patrol cars. There are no grocery stores. You can’t pick up a telephone. So everything you see is, in effect, brand new. George Miller was the guy who directed Mad Max. I didn’t like it that much, but I liked the next one better, The Road Warrior. But they asked him, “How did you come up with the idea for The Road Warrior?” And he said, “It’s very simple. I just picked up A Boy and his Dog, and went commercial.” I mean, he didn’t hesitate a second. I haven’t gotten the chance to talk with him, but I will one of these days. But he was right and I’m wrong. That’s what he did. Now, consider this. Can you think of a story that’s better fitted for sex and violence than A Boy and his Dog? The original that Harlan did, that’s all it is: sex and violence. But I said, “I want to go at it another way.” And I figured the best way to get there is humor, so that’s the way I went. Well, Miller didn’t have this constraint with The Road Warrior. I probably cost myself 20 or 30 million dollars by going the way that I went. But I said, “I don’t care. This is what I’m spending five years doing. I’m gonna do it the way I want it.”

Available @ AMAZON

A Boy And His Dog Collectors’s Edition, Collector’s Edition DVD + Blu-ray

  PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY & LOCATIONS

Convinced A BOY AND HIS DOG was an unmarketable title, Jones settled upon ROVER BLOOD, and it was under that title that the film went before the cameras for twenty-seven days in April and May 1973.

The opening scenes of nuclear explosions weren’t in the original film but were instead added in 1982 in an effort to clarify the film’s post apocalyptic setting. The film itself was mostly shot outside Barstow, CA. near Coyote Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert.

Though dismal and depressing, the topside sequences are more finely drawn and visually interesting than their down under counterparts. But it is in the down under sequences that Ellison and Jones insert their strongest barbs. For here is a vision of conservative middle America exaggerated, but not sufficiently far removed from reality so as to appear totally alien. Topeka is an artificial world with artificial people. All actions transpire in an emotional vacuum: all words, however strong. are passionless. With totalitarian unforgivingness, the Committee, pledged with preserving the status quo at all cost, blithely sends offenders to “the farm” an amusingly euphemistic term for execution, considering the agrarian nature of the society. But life goes on in its sugary sweet fashion in Topeka, as ever present loudspeakers bleat out never-ending bits of folksy news, household hints, prize recipes, and other “helpful hints for living from the Committee’s Almanac.” For nothing is ever really unpleasant in Topeka.

   How did you go about choosing the locations and sets for the film?

LQ: We had spent so much time and so much money, we had to find what we considered the right place. How many trees did you see in the picture above ground? Zero. How many blades of grass did you see? None. So this is what I wanted, because I sat down and tried to figure out  there’d been a number of pictures made about that subject, and what do you do? On the Beach was a huge one MGM did. I didn’t have their kind of money for goodness sakes, so I sat for quite literally months trying to figure out how do you shoot it. What do you do to make the picture different? And finally, after months  and I would go over that probably 10 times a day, every day trying to figure out what you do  it occurred to me. So to check, I went to UCLA and SC to the scientific department. I said, “If these things happened, if World War III occurs and we trigger hundreds of devices, X number of them are going to go off at exactly the same time, probably. That being the case, what’s gonna happen?” He said, “We don’t know, of course, but the balance of opinion is that there could be a stutter in the movement of the Earth. It might be one-thousandth, one-millionth of a second. But there could be one if it all occurs at the same time.” That being the case, what’s gonna happen? All of the water on the planet starts to move. It’s lost the arrest. Once it starts, it’s going to go inland just as far as it needs to. And when it retreats, what’s gonna be left? A mess and mud  mud being the operating phrase. So if it is now X number of years later, the mud has dried. Therefore, I have desert. So I went to a place where it had at one time been a huge lake, and we used that.

  What was the inspiration for the film’s below-ground Topeka, Kansas society?

LQ: That was part of Harlan’s theory. We diverged, but he saw that sort of an operation bucolic, but people who were tired of the world being run the way it was run, and taking it unto themselves. And most of them that had done that were farmers, so he figured they would come up that way. So all I did was show it in the way they talked, and the way you could hear them reason. My robot was like the one in The Day the Earth Stood Still: totally powerful, nothing you can do, unless you find the way to get him of course. Harlan’s was called the “Green Metal Motherfucker.” Mine was called “Michael”, because I didn’t want to come out with the other in a theater. But we’re working from the same theory. When I travel with the picture over, good heavens, hundreds of thousands of miles I guess, I go around to colleges. Because it’s one of the most-shown, most-taught pictures. They invite me, and I go around and talk while I’m out with the picture. So I ask people, “Where would you rather live? Above ground or below ground?” And I know pretty much what you’re like when you tell me what frightens you the most, or what you find the most repulsive. I myself, I’d rather be dead than live down in Topeka. But that’s my division. You may come at it another way. But I know generally what you feel when you tell me where you would prefer to live. You want to be controlled — cared for, of course, but controlled — or do you want to do it yourself? That’s your division. I don’t know whether Harlan intended it that way, but that’s the way I saw it.

Some things will even happen by accident. We were shooting the big downunder scene in a park in Ventura. We had three hundred and some odd extras–the band, all the picknikers and we started making them up at four o’clock in the afternoon. The makeup was very slow to put on, and some people have said they don’t like it, but one scientific fact that everyone will agree to is that if you live underground, away from the sun, you will lose color. So, I said: “Okay, what’s going to happen?” They can either stay white, or they could build sunlamps and everybody would be berry brown. But I didn’t like that. So, what if neither of these took place? What would happen?

Well, the first year they’d probably stay about the way they were; the second year, because they were losing color, they would add a bit of color; and the third year, they’d add a bit more. So, as the years passed, because they were a society where everybody wanted to look alike and everybody wanted to smile, the makeup just sort of evolved and became the thing to do. Anyway, it was eleven o’clock before we had everybody madeup. It was our last night, and the reason the chase is so beautifully misty is because the fog was setting in, and it was nearly daybreak. The sun was coming up, and we had to shoot that mother because we didn’t have any choice. And it came out as the prettiest shot in the whole picture. I would love to say I planned it that way, but it was just one of those things. It really is just candy cane sweet and the perfect Never-Never Land feeling. I had hoped people would ask, somewhere along the line: “Is downunder really supposed to be happening? Are those people real? The whole thing is it a dream? And something about the fog said it for me. I realize at times the downunder sequence bogs down. But it was not an accident. I bogged it down on purpose, hoping to be able to get it back on its feet. I wanted to project boredom, but not bore the audience. Everything downunder is abnormally slow. The only things down below that move with any rapidity are the band, Vic and Quilla June. Everybody moves in a very slow strolling pace. Even the kids stumbling over each other trying to get away move slowly. Nobody listens to anybody else. They hear, more or less, but they use it only as a frame of reference to start their next sentence. And that gave our actors some trouble, at first, because it’s a weird way to play things and they weren’t quite comfortable with it. Even Jason couldn’t quite get his pieces together, and Jason is, to me, the finest technician in the business today. So, even with rehearsing, it took us an hour or so the first night, but once they understood how we wanted it to fit into the whole fabric, then he and Alvy and Helene worked like an unbelievable team.

I should have taken Blood down below. The picture would not have sagged had that happened. It might have suffered in other ways, but it would not have sagged. See, we did what they say you cannot do, and that is, you cannot change a story right in the middle. Well, this is not in the middle, but even worse, it’s toward the end-the last third of it. And look at what we do. There are only two constant characters—the boy and the girl. Everything else is changed, even the locations. And that’s one of the reasons we suffer. If I’d had more experience, maybe I could have made the transition better.

  The novella’s description of Topeka seems wistful—

HE: Bradburian….

Yes, exactly! Whereas the film brings the satire to the surface, and is much harsher about Topeka. L.Q. Jones says he was making the movie you meant when you wrote the novella. Did he capture your intent there?

HE: The Down Under in “A Boy And His Dog” the novella, it’s the Midwest I grew up in. I was born in Ohio and ran away when I was 13, and spent a lot of time working farms, and working in small towns, and riding the rails. Learning the street when it really was a street and the farms, the country. It was a reflection of the 1950s, and that hidebound America we had to live in. Where Playboy was a great scandal, and the sight of a woman’s nipple was considered wildly captivating and salacious. So the people down below were kind of salt-of-the-earth, common-clay people that I had known and lived beside through most of my younger life. When L.Q. did it, he went a little further and did something very clever, I think. He’s got the people wearing that strange makeup. I thought, “Well, that’s very clever,” because if you were to go back to the equivalent culture, you’ll see the court of Louis XIV, men and women were all wearing powder and rouge and flounces and ruffles. I thought, “Well, yeah. Every culture has its own fads.” Today, people dye their hair green and have rings in their noses, and tattoos. L.Q. decided to give them their own particular outstanding cultural fad. Could have been hula hoops. But I think that was very clever of him. Very foresightful.

I think the downunder section is much weaker than the above-ground stuff. I don’t chalk that up to an inadequacy on L.Q. ‘s part, or the film’s part. It’s my fault. Because I was being dishonest when I wrote that section of the story. I didn’t really create a downunder section that was realistic. I did a kind of papier-mâché Disneyland, because I wanted to poke fun at the middle class and you know, all of Agnew’s people. When I started writing the story, I had no idea what I was going to write. None whatsoever. The plot just sort of evolved it’s really an organic story which maybe is why the downunder part doesn’t hang together as well as the other because I changed my tune in the middle. As the story progressed, it became, in the downunder sections, a vehicle for my fury at the common man during that whole period of repression of Agnew and Mitchell and Nixon which really just about drove me crazy. I mean, I could not believe what was happening to this country. I would stand in the middle of the room and scream- just primal therapy. If I were doing the story over again, now, I would probably rewrite the downunder section completely. But L.Q. was saddled with that. When he came to write the script, here was this whole chunk that fell apart like tissue paper. I think, for what I gave him in that section, he turned it into some very solid material. And I have enormous respect for him, because L.Q. and I, at that point in time, did not have the same political viewpoints I mean, we were diametrically opposed. But even so, in the downunder sections of the movie, which is where I got my rocks off about that kind of thing, he maintained the same attitude. And I think that was a great gesture of respect for my work. The writer of the original material can ask for nothing more than that.

  POST PRODUCTION

LQ: After we got the picture shot , Harlan tried to come in and write Blood for me. But his Blood would not fit with my Blood. Harlan’s concept of Blood, and mine, were entirely different and yet, exactly the same. And Harlan wanted to do the voice of the dog. He rehearsed and wrote lines, and we went over it time and time again. But he was so far into Blood that Blood had to be a certain way for him. I figured that there’s only one person in that picture you’re going to like there’s only one norm in the entire picture-and that’s Blood. And for that dog to be smart-mouthed, he’ll turn you off very quickly. So, I very consciously built the dog to be liked. Blood in the story is much more bitter than he is in the picture. The only line which Harlan wrote that I did not take out of the book was when the dog says: “Let the seven dwarfs have Snow White, and we can get out of here with all our parts.” That’s obviously a Harlan Ellison line. But otherwise, he couldn’t write the dog, because he was too bitter and too smart-mouthed with him, and it didn’t fit.

In the book, Harlan went to very great lengths to explain why the dog talks. And you know what a disaster it would be if the dog talking bothered you. But I say that’s wrong, because as soon as I tell the audience. “Now, the reason the dog talks is…,” I’m really saying to you: “You will not believe it, and so I’m going to shore up my argument.” So I say: “Pass the dog talks. “Like every picture, it’s a compromise between just gut out gambles and trying to hedge your bet. And we hedged our bet in a few places.

Look at our opening scene. The normal approach to the thing would be, the first time the dog talks you go to a tight close up and you really punch it, so they know the dog’s talking. But look how we did it we’re on a wide shot. And some of the reactions are very funny. A lot of people think Vic and Blood are under observation by another unseen life force and you’re hearing discussions by them. Others think it may be somebody off camera and you just haven’t seen him yet. A lot of people think the boy is talking to himself. And it is only when you get to that final part, when Vic says: “I can’t see a thing in there. Smell it !”” and you cut to the dog, and he says: “I thought you were doing all the scouting today.” The voice is different, and they finally realize what I’m saying the dog is talking. And by that time. we’re off and running.

LQ: Our first picture, a small independent distributor handled: the second, one of the biggest independent distributors: the third, one of the big majors. So, we’ve seen what’s involved with all of them. This one we’re doing ourselves. This picture needs very special attention. Now, I don’t think it’s a small picture, but by every definition of commercialism, it is a small picture-there is no name star or director: it doesn’t have big studio backing: and it’s not from a big book. Small picture. So, we’re very carefully hand-picking our situations, and tailoring our advertising campaign-we’re trying all our pieces to see how they fit together. Normally, a major won’t do this. And I’m not about to work four and a half years and that’s what I spent on this picture and then turn it over to some ding-dong who doesn’t care because it’s not a $22 million picture. What I was most petrified about, really, was the fear of not having a style. But I really surprised myself, because the style is there. And it’s my style, my way of saying things. I also found that I was visually stronger than I thought I could be. I can perfect it a hell of a lot — pacing should be better; selection of shots could be better; also, manipulation of actors, and the ability to recognize a dead spot in the script. I guess the only place you learn these things is in the cutting room. That’s where all the chickens come home to roost. And the only thing that saves you, when you’re like myself, is the flexibility of the film. It’s like writing music. There’s a beat that you establish. And you can do it right in there at the Moviola. That’s where you’re really brought to your knees a couple times a day.

Our picture’s changed a lot since we shot it. The first assemblage was petrifying to look at. It didn’t work at all. Alvy turned pea green after he saw it. And rightly so. Because we knew where we wanted to go with it, and thought we knew how to get there, but you’ve got to look at what you have, first. We tried slides at first to do certain things. We tried a different kind of pacing. We had whole sequences which, except in little bitty pieces, didn’t make it in. One sequence we had to cut was where Vic and Blood are huddled together in the rain, bitching at each other, and the dog’s explaining why he treats Vic like he does. And, of course, it’s a putdown. That’s where we brought out the thing about why Blood calls him Albert. It’s unfortunate that allusions to Albert Payson Terhune had to go. I really wish I could have worked it in, because it’s a dear point to the story—and that’s the thing that Harlan misses the most. But it was one of those things where I just couldn’t get it cut in. Sometimes, if pieces are left out, it can help a picture, because you get so attentive to detail, explaining everything that you really don’t have to explain at all.

  By the end of the film, Blood the dog is the most heroic character — but is he your film’s hero?

LQ: The hero in this particular case, which we had to be very touchy with — the hero is a dog. And lest anybody make a mistake, that is the way it is. Blood’s our hero. Now, you’re dealing with an animal. Normally you love an animal, which the boy does. But if you can recall the beginning of the picture, you are introduced to a place with no grass, no trees, no nothing, but the mood is rather jocular for a second. And then a voice sounds a warning. Now at the beginning, the voice is warm, fuzzy — could be your father, could be your teacher, could your brother — and then it shifts, and it becomes a military voice. Not only in what it says, but in the way it’s barked out. Here’s a voice that’s used to being listened to. And not only that, but we proved to you that he is worth listening to, because that which he  has laid out as a danger is now in front of you. So you’re seeing that this guy knows what he’s talking about, and knows how to handle it. Incidentally, he’s a dog. Now, that may not sound like much. But if I start off telling you that it’s a dog, you’re gonna say, “Aw, cut the crap. What is this?” But it’s so built that you accept him not only that he’s warm and fuzzy, but that he’s intelligent, he knows what he’s doing, he cares about Vic — and he’s also a dog. So I’ve already put you in my pocket, before you realize that I’m talking about a dog. And if you don’t do it that way, the picture will not work.

The end is as delicate and as structured as the beginning, if not more so. Because if you watch it, you can see that when he escapes from down below, he comes up above, and they find Blood dying. And she is saying, “Don’t worry about it. We can go on. If you love me, you’ll leave him.” Well, Don does it gorgeously. You can see running through his mind, “What happens if I go with what she wants to go with?” And in the very end, I expect you to put it together. He is figuring, “OK, she and I try to make it. We can’t make it. We’re just not gonna make it. Blood is the brains of the outfit. She and Blood can go and live, but both detest the other. Therefore, that’s not gonna work. I have only one option.” And the option is to do what he did. It’s not accidental. That’s the way the ending is reinforcing what we started out to prove: who’s an animal, and who takes care of whom? It’s not a message. It’s just there. If you see it, great. If you don’t see it… I’ve seen the picture 500 times. And I have been in audiences as little as one person. I have been in audiences as big as 7,000 people who are watching the picture at the same time. About 25% of the audience catches what is going to happen when we switch from his first coming up, and we hear fire crackling, and fat is dripping into the fire. But that’s so subliminal, probably 75% of people never hear it. But we have already told you what’s happened right there. About 25% of the people will get it when the boy looks at the girl. You know what’s going to happen. About 25% of the people get it when the dog at the end says, “Well, at least she had good taste.” About 25% of the people never understand what took place. And that’s what I wanted. Harlan wanted to beat them over the head with it. There was only two times in the whole picture that we disagreed. That was the second one. I said, “Harlan, unfortunately for you, I’m the one that put up the money and wrote the script. When you do that, you can change it the way you want it. But now, guess who gets to make that choice?” So that’s it, and for me it worked.

The first change was in the “putz scene” — the scene where the dog is lecturing him, trying to figure out what they’re gonna do. And Blood makes a comment about a cow and the girl. Harlan’s thought was, “One animal would not put down another animal.” It was the wrong thing to say, and he was right. I said I agreed. We would take it out, but I’m out of money. So we showed the picture to the group that gets together once a year. And when they were there, I think I was here working on another picture, so Harlan and my partner Alvy went. And they sold at the showing, which started I think at 8 o’clock at night, and ended up at around four in the morning, because the machine kept breaking down. We were in separate sound and picture, and they weren’t fixed to handle it, so it kept breaking down. But they sold enough, which I think was about $2,000 they raised selling the picture in color clips. And we went and shot the thing that he wanted changed, which was about the cow. We took it out and did another line. The other disagreement was my last line. Harlan’s last is, “A boy loves his dog.” My last line wasn’t. I told him, “Harlan, yeah I understand what you’re saying. I’m pushing the same thing visually. But yours will not work, because in your short story he repeats that phrase several times — ‘A boy loves his dog’ is the reason for the ending.” But I said, “That won’t work for the picture.” And it took me over six months to write the new line. It’s a matter of choice. And it works. But a lot of times when I go out with the picture, I go down the street to get a drink, pick up a cup of coffee or something — I can be two or three blocks away, and I know when the picture ends, because the reaction is such that I know what it is. I mean, I’ve seen people who’ve fainted. People have gotten mad and torn up furniture. It just doesn’t leave you much. You realize you’ve been hung out to dry, because you don’t expect it. Who would expect that ending? So it works, and the whole thing works. My line works. If you go back and then redo it, Harlan’s line would work. And those are the two that we just could not agree on. And I still think I’m right. He’s right for his. I’m right for mine.

HE: The only time I really got annoyed, and annoyed enough to raise hell, was after I saw the rough cut, and realized that there were about a half a dozen genuinely sexist lines that came out of the dog’s mouth. And I said: “No, the dog would not say that! These lines are offensive to me. The boy would say it, because it’s that kind of society and he would think of women in that way. The dog would not! The dog is above that. The dog is the goddamned hero. You may not do that you’ve got to redub!” And L. Q. said: “How the hell are we going to redub ? There ain’t no goddamned money!” And I said “If I get you the money, will you take it over to the sound studios and put it back on the board?” And he said, “Yeah.” And I said: “How much do you need?” And he said something like four or five hundred dollars. Well, I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington last Labor Day, and I took along little three frame outtakes from the film, and I sold them for ten dollars apiece, and got that money. Then L.Q. went back into the studio and redid it. And that was the only beef I had. Although, the last line is really, I think, just a cheap shot. But audiences love it, and I can’t fight that.

LQ: The last line of the picture took me 3 months to write. A lot of people don’t like it; but a lot of people do. To me, that line says what the whole picture is about, and what the philosophy of their lives is. They’re immoral. They have no scruples, whatsoever. See, most pictures are passive. You don’t have to do anything but sit there and suck it up like a sponge. And that’s fine. There should be a lot of stuff in which we do nothing but that. But I want you to get involved. And it’s rather like a mystery in that respect. I give you clues; I give you false clues; I give you no clues–and see if you can put it together and move on to the next point. That’s what it’s about. I want you to supply something. I don’t want to work you to death, but I want you to supply something. That’s why the ending is the way it is. I could very easily have painted the picture so as nobody would miss it. And if I’m proud of anything—and I am proud of this picture, I guess you may have noticed that –I am so unbelievably proud of the way the end works. I sat down when I started writing my first draft, and I said: “Now, what do I want ? I want twenty-five percent of the people to catch it at a certain point,” and so on. And if you sit in an audience, you can almost feel that working for you. About twenty-five percent will catch it when Vic turns to Quilla June, and they’ll know instinctively what’s going to happen. Another twenty-five percent catch it when Blood says: “You haven’t eaten a bite,” or “I really appreciate this,'”-either one. The third twenty-five percent catches it with, “… if not particularly good taste.” But twenty-five percent never catch it at all. And you don’t know how I worried about that. Because without that, I’ve got a real problem. It’s my upbeat ending, and the laughs and the applause, and everything I need. And boy, we took that apart and put it together, and took it apart, and rewrote it, and recut it, and still, we’re petrified with the way it is now, that people won’t understand it. And we were rather gut less in this respect. I shot the ending twice. Right on the spot. I shot it for the ending that is on there, and I shot it for the sweetness-and-light ending with Vic, Blood, and Quilla June off into the sunrise. But that one scene would destroy the entire ending if you put it on now. The ending is right —it is dictated by the picture. I tried to make it a different ending to see what would happen, but the film will not allow it. That’s the flexibility and inflexibility of film it’s so flexible you can’t believe it, but it said no. That is the ending that has to go on the picture. Fortunately, it’s the right ending.

Alvy Moore and Harlan Ellison at the 1974 World SF Convention

The film was in post production for more than a year before it was previewed, still in rough cut, before the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington D.C. on August 31, 1974. Still dissatisfied with the title, Jones literally went through a dictionary page by page looking for words that would spark a title. Finally, he reverted to Ellison’s original, and in March 1975. the film opened in Austin, Texas, with an advertising campaign geared toward the apparent incongruity of an R-rated film named A BOY AND HIS DOG.

  DISTRIBUTION-RELEASE

The world in which Vic and Blood live is very male-dominated; above ground, women are hunted for sex, below ground they are subjugated (as is everyone else) by a warped, Puritanical society. How did women react?

LQ: It’s very strange because many ladies when we first came out in 1975 got upset. But why would you get upset? I bought a story, and I was very true to the story. Now we’ve always wanted to go back and do another picture, but I don’t want to redo A Boy and His Dog. We want to redo it about a girl named Spike. And she’s twice as tough as Vic is. So we wanted to go back and do the girl’s side. So what if the dog ate the boy? [Ladies said] Oh, that’s ok. Well that’s crap! That was in the ”70s. In the ’80s it was starting to change, just a little. By now it’s changed where I think probably women will either like it as much as men do or will hate it as much as men do. But I guess the thing I’m happiest with is when I talk to people, the most said thing is that it’s so real. I said, you’re telling me that I’m dealing with the year 2024, I have a talking dog, and before your very eyes humans have become animals and animals become human and it’s because it’s so real you like it!

  What sort of complaints did feminist groups have about the film?

LQ: Well, they just thought it was misogynist. Hell, if you look at just the bare bones, yes it is. And by the same token, no it isn’t, because it’s a story. And I actually got tired of trying to explain it to them. Like at Boston University, it was a big to-do there. And so I said, “Hey, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we all get together, and we can talk? Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re saying.” So, I was there for three or four days. And along somewhere, we got together and we must have had, hell, 50 or 60 ladies in the audience and just myself. So I said, “Tell me what is bothering you about it.” And they explained it, and I said, “OK.” You gotta remember now, I’m talking 30-some odd years ago, so it gets out of memory a little bit. But roughly what I’m saying is, “That’s the story that I bought.” Now, I can understand that you would react to what happens to Quilla June. You also could react to the fact that it happened to any female all the way through the piece. All of the stuff that we’re seeing down below, yeah, I could understand why you would pay special attention to it. But that was the story I bought. So I said, “Let me ask you a question. Let me change everything 180 degrees. When the picture is over, Vic is gone. We don’t know where he is. Well, we do know if you think about it. But off into the sunset go Quilla June and Blood. How about that?” They said, “Oh, that’s OK.” Well, I said, “Stick it in your ear. Because this is the story that I bought, and it was the story I was telling.” Now somewhere along the line, and I probably still will do it, I’m going to go in and do it from the female point of view. But you can’t do both points of view in the same story, the way it’s set up. Actually, Harlan and I talked about it, and we came up with a character named “Spike,” who is a female. And the picture, if you’ll recall, ends with the kid walking into the distance, and we freeze. So he’s standing there, and the dog’s by his side. I’m gonna start the next one with the boy still standing there, and we turn the action on, and it starts to move. There’s the crack of a rifle, and Vic is laid out on the tundra, and up comes Spike. She has followed him for months, because she wants Blood. So the only way she knows to get him, is to kill Vic and take Blood. And that’s what she does. She goes sailing off into the sunset, and I stay with her and see how she reacts to everything — how she runs Blood, how he helps her. Aha, we now have the female side of the story. But I can’t go back and change A Boy and his Dog. I will change it when I put the other picture out. Well, that seemed to placate them a little bit. Not much, because they wanted to be professional howlers. That’s OK. Everybody’s entitled to their own point of view. But I finally got across to them that what I was doing was making this picture. Now, I also made it work. And we didn’t release the picture like they do now. I wasn’t bright enough for that. We did it where we’d go to Oklahoma City. We’d go to Kansas City. We went to New York. We went to all the keys, and a lot of the smaller ones. And of course, we went to Canada. And as normally happens when I go out with the picture, I do it because I get a chance to A) see the audience and talk with them, and B) I get to go to colleges and explain A Boy and his Dog. So I get a chance to say, “What questions do you have? What do you see, or don’t see? How can I help you in any way?” That’s what I’m doing. But I’ll also do, as I was doing it in Canada, three or four newspapers, five or six magazines, five or six radio stations, and a couple of TV programs. And I had lunch with the PR man who was working with me for months all around the country, and he was acting kind of strange. I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was, so I asked him. He said, “Oh, nothing.” And I said, “Should we put this [program] off?” He said, “Oh no, you’ve gotta do it, because it’s one of the biggest [TV] shows in town.” I think it was Toronto, and with a lady host. I said, “OK.” And we went up, and she and I sat and talked for 10 or 15 minutes, and then we flipped the cameras on. And the instant they flipped the cameras on, I realized why he didn’t say anything. She lit into me. She was practically screaming after about five minutes, “This is the filthiest show I’ve ever seen! It’s pornographic, misogynist…” And she’d slow down, and I’d ask a question or make a comment, and she’d sail off again. I kept prodding her, and we went through the whole 30 minutes. I was the only person on. We went through the whole 30 minutes, and she’s still screaming at the end of it. When it wrapped up, I said, “Thank you very much. You just made me a fortune.” And she said, “There’s no need to be cute.” And I said, “Honey, I’m not being cute. If you had just said, ‘I don’t agree with this picture. I find it crude, unattractive, and I’m not gonna go, and I recommend nobody else go,’ I would’ve had a tough time. But now, I’m gonna be flooded with customers who want to see the dirtiest picture ever made.” And it’s right. We set records for two or three weeks, because she went off on it. But like I said, if she had put one nail in it and shut up, she would have been fine. I don’t agree with 75% of what takes place. If I were Vic, I’d work another way. But I didn’t buy the story of me. I bought the story of Vic. And he is in a spot, because look at what you’re dealing with. And a couple of reviewers were quick enough to pick something up, which I’m very proud of. It’s probably the only picture you’ll ever see in your life where, when it’s over, the animal turns into the only “human” you’ve got in the whole damn piece, and people turn into animals. Everybody, right in front of your eyes. Not with makeup. Just what they’re doing. So, the picture in that particular vein is brilliant. It truly is. I wish I had nothing to do with making the picture, then I could say something and people wouldn’t say, “Well, you’re trying to make money.”

We opened in LA in 26 theaters, but it was nine months or a year after we first opened the picture. And I would find out what time Boy lets out over in Beverly Hills and Westwood. And then I’d wait fifteen minutes, and I’d go to Westwood and park the car, and I’d drift from a bar to a hamburger stand  to buying clothes. I just wandered through. And it was amazing, as I’m going along I’d hear, “I’m telling you, that dog is the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.” Go a little bit further and, “Did you notice what was happening with the makeup?” Go to another store, “Why was ‘down under’ this way?” Well, if you’ve not been in the business, it doesn’t mean much to you. But 99% of the shows you see, and I’ve done a few of them, you’ve forgotten what the story is by the time you’ve hit the popcorn machine on your way out. I mean, they’ve done their job. They’ve entertained you. They’ve taken care of you for an hour-and-a-half, two hours, and got your mind on something else. But then that’s the end of it, and you go back to your normal problems. But with A Boy and his Dog, it was marvelous, they were talking about what the picture showed them. So, it was handy that I could do it. I also did it in other cities, but here it was easier.

  A BOY AND HIS DOG, – The Abandoned Television Series and Sequel

A BOY AND HIS DOG, which won a Nebula for its writer Harlan Ellison, and a Hugo for its cinematic adapter L. Q. Jones, may soon find its way onto network television, as a series! “We’ve been fiddling around with it for a year,” reports Jones. “At NBC, one of the producers liked the picture, and I say that because had it come from a lower level, it probably would have been snuffed out. But his 11-year-old son saw it and adored it, and told his dad it was a super picture and they should have it. So he called for it to take a look. The bottom line really was that TV’s not ready for it yet – they were afraid of the violence. But they thought there was a possible series there.”

NBC took an option on the project and Ellison went to work on the script for a 90-minute pilot. (Jones had written the film script.) At 113 pages, the first script was submitted in June. “The network looked at it and said, ‘It’s brilliant!’ I didn’t quite agree with them, for a number of reasons that are known to Harlan and myself. My Blood and Vic are completely different from Harlan’s Blood and Vic. That doesn’t make him right and me wrong, or vice versa. It’s just that I would not have made a picture about Harlan ‘s Vic and Blood.

“Anyway, we sat down with the people at NBC, and they said, The problem here is there’s too much to put into 90 minutes, so a) we would like it expanded to 120 minutes, and b) we would like a subplot.’ So Harlan rewrote the script to 131 pages, and they came back and said: “We don’t like it at all. It won’t hold up for two hours. Reduce it to 82 pages.’ Now, at first blush, that doesn’t sound too bad, but when something is brilliant at 113 pages, and no good whatsoever at 131 pages, why not just reduce it back to the 113 pages of brilliance? But it’s their money, and you either do business with them or you don’t; and if I want to work with them, it behooves me to adapt to their framework, not the other way around.”

Ellison, who was about to leave the country anyway, was disinclined to tackle another rewrite, so Jones did it-in 82 days to meet NBC’s deadline. “Harlan won’t think so, but my scripts about the same as his. It develops the same way to the same climax points, and it follows the same steps basically – just changed the interior of each step. I didn’t have time to do anything more extensive.” That version is now awaiting a decision by NBC.

Although the project was initially envisioned as a mid-season fill-in, it is now unlikely that it can be readied before next fall. If NBC goes with it, Jones plans to produce and direct the pilot independent of studio involvement, as he did the film. Then, if A BOY AND HIS DOG goes into a series, he plans to act as executive producer, as well as occasional writer and director. Not much thought has been given toward casting the human roles, but Tiger, who won the Patsy Award for best animal actor in the feature is at the top of Jones’ list for Blood.

“But Tiger is nearly twelve years old now. We’re going to try to use him but we’ll probably have to back him up with three or four does to do the fights and jumping and stuff.”

  What’s the status of the screenplay segment of Blood’s A Rover? Do you still hope to see it made into a movie?

HE: A Boy And His Dog, the original film L.Q. Jones made, has been under option [to be remade] since 1975, and there’s even a version—somebody wants to do it as a rotoscope. I hold all the other rights. I haven’t done anything with the screenplay, but if we don’t eventually do it as a film, I will do it as part of the Brain Movies series of my books. Brain Movies are my screenplays and teleplays, and they’ve done four of them. The last one features a two-hour movie that’s never been released or made, called Cutter’s World. We may do Blood’s A Rover. If not, I may do the novel. I mean, who knows what tomorrow brings?

  L.Q. Jones has been talking for decades about the possibility of a direct sequel to the film Boy And His Dog, but with a female protagonist. Would you want to be involved in that?

HE: Well, I own the rights to it. How it will be done, I do not know. L.Q. owns the original film. I made very little money off it, although it continues to be and has been, for decades, one of the top five rentals for film societies and colleges—they show it constantly. And it’s been ripped off, and reissued, and on DVDs, though nothing like this incredible Blu-ray Shout! Factory has done, which restores its original, vivid, stark, adept original incarnation. So this becomes a question of who offers us the most money, because like all storytellers, I sit around the campfire with my turban out and say, “Here’s Vic and Blood and the third leg of this love triangle, a female rover called Spike, the dominant figure in the two-thirds of the book that make up Blood’s A Rover.” When someone comes along, the storyteller says, “And the hero is hanging by his fingertips from the rotting edge of the chasm, and below him, the snakes and vipers and crocodiles are all snapping. You want to know what happened to him, put a few drachma in my turban.” And when someone crosses my palm with the right amount of silver, I will release the screenplay, which is already written and ready to go, and they may either remake A Boy And His Dog, which would involve L.Q., or just make the sequel. This all is up in the air. It’s all ready to go and everything that can be made is under option and everything that I own that’s ready to go, is waiting here for the right golden mouth to open.

  When he’s described the film sequel, he’s also mentioned Spike, so it sounds like you’re talking about the same thing, except he’s positioning it as his sequel.

HE: I adore L.Q., make no mistake, I adore L.Q., but he is like a cold you get in May and you don’t get rid of until the following January. He’s a good old Texas boy, and he and I fight each other like Cain and Abel. But I have enormous respects for his talents—and that was what killed the deal with CBS. They loved the script and were ready to go with it, for a two-hour movie, followed by a series about the adventures of Vic and Blood. And I would have brought in Spike, so it would have been three of them, so it’s a love triangle. That’s what the story basically is, in personal terms. But CBS didn’t want to go with L.Q. as the director. They didn’t have the faith in him, although he had produced this wonderful work that has lasted for nearly half a century, and is as popular now as the day it was released. The suits went above the head of network film, who had green-lighted it, and they said, “We want a—in air quotes—“big director.” God knows who they would have gotten. And L.Q. got his dander up and became the thorn under their saddle, and the whole project fell between the stools. So let L.Q. think that it’s his sequel, but in fact, it’s 100 percent out of my fecund imagination.

  He has described Boy And His Dog as really a story about a boy and his father, which doesn’t really fit your description of a story about partnership, or about love.

HE: Well, I think I’m right and he’s wrong. Vic and Blood have a relationship that’s quite clear in the story, and I think quite clear in the movie. That’s the amazing quality of the film, that it is obvious the dog is far more intelligent than the boy. The boy, as written, is about 14, 15 years old. They cast Don Johnson, who was older at the time, and he’s supposed to be just emerging into that stage of adolescence when he’s feeling the stirrings of his penis. And the dog and the boy have a symbiotic relationship—the dog needs the boy to seek out food, and the boy needs the dog to seek out women. I used history as my model for the condition of the country in “A Boy And His Dog,” where, after a decimating war, like the Wars Of The Roses, for instance, the things that become most valuable are weapons, food, and women. Women were traded and treated like chattel. I tried to make it clear in the stories and the novel that I found this distasteful, but it’s the reality of what humanity’s like when it’s gone through this kind of apocalyptic inconvenience, if you will.

  There’s a lengthy feature on the Blu-ray where you and Jones discuss your differences of opinion about the film’s sexism, particularly the final line of the film, which you’ve taken a lot of flak for over the years. Why did you object so strenuously? For me, it plays like the usual kind of grim, black joke that people use to make sense of tragedy, to take the edge off things that horrify them.

HE: Your perception is very good and correct.

  But why are you so uncomfortable with it?

HE: Frat boys leap to their feet and applaud and love it to this day. People batten on that line. They love it. I’m still uncomfortable with it, as I would be with, say, the N-bomb word, although I’ve used it many times, because it was what was necessary for a story. Or the F-word. I don’t think that line, in these times, is any more comfortable for me than when it first came out. I had terrible trouble with I would go to colleges, and women’s groups would rise and scream at me from the audience, and I’d have to sit down with them and explain to them that this was not I, but L.Q. speaking. And I don’t make apologies for L.Q. He knew what he was doing for his audience. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I’m right and if not, he’s right.

  With the film coming about again for a new audience, do you have any thoughts or theories about how differently it will play now than it did back then?

HE: That’s one thing I have absolutely no worries about. Years would go by between the time I first saw it and the next time I saw it on a big screen. They had it here in Hollywood at the Egyptian Theater last year, where they premiered the new, clean Blu-ray version onscreen, and it was standing room only. And I sat there and I said, “This is a goddamn terrific movie.” It is a movie that reflects its times, and yet speaks to current intelligence. So I have absolutely no fear about how well this film will do, and how much people will love it. I think it’s an all-time film.

  The most surprising thing in the Blu-ray package is the trailer, which presents the film as “a kinky tale of survival.” That makes it sound like a cute sex romp, which doesn’t seem like Jones’ intention or yours.

HE: Well, I’ll tell you, the people who marketed it… I remember when the film first came out, and it was not a huge Hollywood blockbuster. It was made on a budget, and it opened at a lot of drive-ins. I got a letter, a furious letter, from a very old woman who had taken her grandson to see it, thinking it was a Disney film, with a title like A Boy And His Dog. And she was outraged. Her jaw broke off from her face in indignation at the salacious and violent nature of this film she’d taken an innocent grandson to. I think, to offset the title A Boy And His Dog, the people who originally marketed this—I had no hand in it, but they thought they ought to do something that made it look a little more barren, a little more stark. So, as it is on the cover of the Blu-ray, you see Quilla June lying there with her clothing in disarray and her belly button showing, and Don Johnson and the dog and the underground doorway above it, and the phrase, “The year is 2024, a future you’ll probably live to see.” And here we are not many years away from 2024, a lot more than I thought we would be when I wrote this story. I thought 2024 was really kicking it ahead, and that the Cold War was going to destroy us at any minute. It’s a marketing ploy that I think works well now. “An R-rated, rather kinky tale of survival.” I don’t think anyone today is going to be misled by the packaging. I think it’s absolutely apropos at the moment.

  The film does have a more playful feel than the story.

HE: Well, L.Q.’s a funny guy! And everybody who was playing in it knew what they were doing. They understood that it was in the grand tradition of Cyrano De Bergerac, which is a very serious piece of work, and yet it’s got an incredibly playful tone.

  Do you see “A Boy And His Dog” as having more in common with older works like Cyrano than with the dystopian films of its era, like Soylent Green or Planet Of The Apes?

HE: Oh yeah. Yeah. Clearly now, in retrospect, this film was 20 years ahead of its time. The fact that it’s been ripped off so many times to do this kind of dystopian future, both in novels and film, shows that it was… [Laughs.] I’m trying my best to be humble, which is an act I don’t play very well. Shows that it was done right the first time, and that this film was a landmark. I had George Miller call me from Australia to tell me The Road Warrior was ripped off—and he used the phrase “ripped off”—from A Boy And His Dog, and that he wanted to thank me. But Road Warrior is a great movie. Many of the people who have done films like A Boy And His Dog have done homages whether they care to admit it or not, and I’m down with that. It’s part of being a great silver-maned icon of 20th-century culture.

  Cast

Don Johnson as Vic

Tim McIntire (voice) as Blood

Susanne Benton as Quilla June Holmes

Jason Robards as Lou Craddock

Alvy Moore as Doctor Moore

Helene Winston as Mez Smith

Charles McGraw as Preacher

Hal Baylor as Michael

Ron Feinberg as Fellini

Michael Rupert as Gery

Don Carter as Ken

Michael Hershman as Richard

Directed by   LQ. Jones

Produced by   L.Q. Jones  Alvy Moore

Written by   L.Q. Jones Alvy Moore (uncredited) Wayne Cruseturner (uncredited)

Based on  A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison

Cinematography    John Arthur Morrill

REFERENCES and SOURCES

http://www.diablomag.com/D-blog/Petes-Popcorn-Picks/January-2008/Awesome-Exclusive-Interview-with-A-Boy-and-His-Dog-director/

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/lq-jones-on-a-boy-and-his-dog-the-rt-interview/

http://camerainthesun.com/?p=15011

https://thedissolve.com/features/interview/73-harlan-ellison-on-taking-flak-for-but-admiring-a-b/

Cinefantastique v05n01 (1976)

Cinefantastique v06n03 (1977)

    A Boy and His Dog (1975) Retrospective SUMMARY Set in a post-nuclear war of the year 2024, the main character, Vic (Don Johnson) is an 18-year-old boy, born in and scavenging throughout the wasteland of the former southwestern United States.

[joesbrownusa]

Houses For Sale in Charleston, IL

1351 Davis St, Charleston, IL

Price: $81900

This two bedroom home offers many possibilities for a remodel with over 1,630′ of living area to work with. You also have a covered patio and a raised deck for entertaining as well as a fenced backyard and storage building. Located on Charleston’s west side close to schools & shopping.

215 Vine Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $34500

Move in ready two bedroom one bath house with one car detached garage and fenced in yard. The kitchen was completely redone with new cabinets, flooring, dishwasher micro hood. There is new carpet in the living room and bedrooms. This property could be a starter home or a good investment property. Located close to ball fields, the city park and Jefferson School. This property is ready to move in now. Other improvements, new roof with in the last three years, new water service this fall, newer furnace and central air in the last three years. Seller also has paint for the siding but could not get it painted before winter.

1415 11th St, Charleston, IL

Price: $58000

Call the movers!! This cute 3 bed/1.5 bath home features an enclosed glass front porch, original hardwood floors, fireplace in the living room and formal dining room. The open staircase and original woodwork add to the vintage charm of this affordable home! Don’t miss out on this centrally located sweet deal!

1306 Monroe Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $79500

Meticulously maintained and recently remodeled, including gorgeous hardwood throughout entire home! Beautiful rustic open-floorplan cottage in the heart of historical downtown Charleston! This home has been completely remodeled inside and out with original oak woodwork! Victorian style landscaping includes beautiful fenced-in walk-through garden that transforms the exterior, providing tranquil outdoor living space and unique curb appeal. New Roof: 2012 New Front Porch:2012 New Front and Back Doors: 2012 All New Windows: 2003 Remodeled Kitchen: 20 08 Remodeled Bathroom: 2012 Complete Updated Plumming: 2012 New Water Heater: 2012 All New Electrical System: 2012 New Furnace: 2003 New A/C: 2012 Fully Re-Insulated: 2004 Brand New Hardwood Flooring: 2016

E Cr 150n, Charleston, IL

Price: $550000

The ultimate hunting farm set up and ready to hunt with food plots, CRP, blinds and tree stands in place, and numerous building sites for your country home.

1003 Jefferson Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $128500

AMERICAN CLASSIC Colonial Home, One of Charleston’s Finest HISTORICAL Homes and Built In 1891. You Will Step back in Time but Enjoy Many Updated and Modernized Comforts. Allot Of Hardwood Flooring. 4x Bedrooms, 2x Full Baths, Large Porch Areas, Spectacular and Meticulous Wood Craftsmanship Shows in the Foyer & Staircase & Most Rooms, Pocket Doors, Era Windows Mixed with Modern Replacements, Large-LARGE Formal & Sitting Rooms, KITCHEN Custom Made Cabinetry and Counter-tops, Two Islands, 2x Copper Sinks, Radiant Heated Tile Floor, Thermador Double-Ovens & cooktop, 2x Sub-Z ero Refrigerator Drawers, 2x Fisher/Pickel Dishwashers. Extra Closet Space, and Large Bathrooms.(I can’t stop, Many Many Nooks & Crannies, and Additional SF to Deal With).MAKE THIS YOUR MUST-SEE PROPERTY.. Note Fireplace condition is unknown. Call for an appointment.

719 Suffolk Pl, Charleston, IL

Price: $138500

LOCATED ON A PLEASANT, NEIGHBOR-FRIENDLY CUL-DE-SAC … This meticulous, spacious ranch with covered front porch and terrific floor plan is conveniently located on Charleston's southwest side. This move-in ready home features a great kitchen with beautiful cherry cabinetry with under cabinet task lighting, granite counter tops including breakfast bar and warm bamboo wood flooring, split bedrooms with master suite w/large walk-in closet and remodeled bath with separate tub and shower. Other bedrooms and bath are located at opposite wing and family room has with fireplace; slid er to large screened porch overlooking expansive fenced yard and storage building. Theres a large pantry and laundry room with upper cabinetry. Youll love the sunny bay window in the living room and the dining room opens to the screened porch as well. RECENT IMPROVEMENTS LIST PER SELLERS: During 2016: New roof shingles in October; 2011: Custom designed electric fireplace w/granite inlay & blower, 2009: Beautiful kitchen w/new cherry wood cabinetry, new granite counter tops, under cabinetry task lighting, newly installed Bamboo hardwood flooring in entry, hallway & kitchen, new guest bath vanity with granite counter top, lighting, custom mirror, new master bath vanity with granite counter top, cabinetry, lighting, custom mirror, new exterior lighting, new lighting & ceiling fans throughout, freshly painted interior, crown molding, new patio, widened concrete driveway, walk way & front porch, carpeted front porch; 2008: New front door, master bedroom walk-in closet build-ins, new pantry built-ins, new patio sliding door, bay window in living room; 2007: New kitchen window, new garage window, new exterior garage door. Note: Behind the framed print above the fireplace is an opening with shelving for seasonal decor. Call today to view this fabulous home while its still available!

743 18th St, Charleston, IL

Price: $22500

Great location on this commercial corner lot located at 18th (Rt130) and Harrison St. Put your “own your own business dreams” in action on this high visibility lot. 165 x 102 gives ample space for a wide range of businesses. Call for more specific details and get the construction equipment moving!Underground tanks have been removed.

2108 Edgewood Dr, Charleston, IL

Price: $159900

COOK, EAT and RELAX TOGETHER all in ONE ROOM! Honey oak cabinets and hardwood floors lend a feeling of warmth and continuity to the open concept kitchen/dining/family room. French doors easily flow to the spectacular sun room highlighted with soaring cathedral ceilings. In the living room, a wall of shelves is the perfect place to display your favorite collections. The spacious master suite includes a walk-in closet and updated bath (with walk-in shower and dual sinks). The fourth bedroom, complete with full bath and walk-in shower, would make an ideal home office. There is plenty of st orage in the laundry room to keep an organized and functional house. Recent features include: new interior paint, carpet, Pergo floors in the hallway and water heater. All appliances including Culligan Goodwater Machine Drinking Water System and Automatic Water Conditioner stay with property. Don’t let this one get away!

115 Heather Dr, Charleston, IL

Price: $131000

MORE SPACE THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE!!! You will be amazed at the size of the living/dining room and fireplaced great room with new flooring. The great room has windows across the back so you have a nice view of the large screened porch. Great room also has nice built-in cabinets and shelving along part of the east wall. Convenient fully applianced kitchen with loads of cabinets and counter space. Three generously sized bedrooms, two have hardwood floors and the master may but has carpet now. The backyard is fenced and has a large storage area and another storage building. DO NOT LOCK DOOR KNOB!!!!

1419 7th St, Charleston, IL

Price: $39000

sold as is.

715 W Coolidge Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $324900

Elegance meets function with this quality built executive home. Located in the always desirable Quail Run subdivision, this peaceful water front setting will have you forgetting that youre in town! Meticulous landscaping and a traditional brick exterior greet you. Two story foyer with an open staircase, gleaming hardwood flooring, and statement chandelier leads to the formal living room with beautiful crown moulding and large picture window. Dining room is accented by an elegant tray ceiling and opens to the well-appointed chefs style kitchen. Granite countertops, undermount sink, stain less steel appliances, built in desk/coffee bar, and counter height island offer practicality and style. Kitchen is open to the sunny breakfast area, providing access to the screened in porch and oversized deck – perfect for taking in the view of the idyllic pond with your morning coffee or for entertaining family and friends! Comfortable family room features built in cabinetry and shelves and a cozy gas fireplace. The finished basement offers a casual second family room/rec room, plus a recently added office with French doors and a bonus room, both of which could function as a fifth bedroom. The spacious second story Master Suite with cathedral ceiling features a private en suite bath with dual vanities, skylight, jetted tub, separate shower, and walk-in closet. Three more sizable bedrooms and a second full bath complete the upper level. Looking for something with the convenience of town, but long for a peaceful and scenic atmosphere? Call today for a private viewing!

959 Briarwood Ct, Charleston, IL

Price: $147500

Whether you like to entertain or prefer your quiet time this home has what you are looking for! A desirable open floor plan with split bedrooms and easy access to back decks, patio and fenced-in yard. The great room has a gas fireplace, vaulted ceiling, and nice natural lighting. Prefer shade? Check out the automatic awning over the decks. Beautiful hardwood floors in great room and master bedrooms give this home a nice clean feel. You’ll feel safe with the 24 hour remote security system. The 2 car garage is oversized with plenty of extra storage space and the backyard overlooks quiet w ooded area. The home is conveniently located on a quiet cul-de-sac on the west side of town. A lot of nice features for this price range!

15118 E Cir #150N, Charleston, IL

Price: $1950000

A well cared for and highly managed hunting property with food plots, blinds, trails. The beautiful custom cedar sided home has many high end features.

330 W Harrison Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $44500

Convenient and affordable 3 bedroom home with over 1,200′ of living area. Spacious kitchen with breakfast area and formal dining. Unfinished basement with loads of storage area. Fenced backyard and 2 car detached garage.West Basement wall was just replaced and new gutter added.

914 Jackson Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $40500

Bring your hammer and your tool belt.this fixer upper is just what you may be looking for. Either as an investment or your new home, it is ready to be customized. Notice the high ceilings, wonderful hardwood floors and natural lighting that welcomes you into the home. With the right tools, the additional attic space could make for additional bedrooms or a master suite. Call today and set up your personal showing.

1314 Jefferson Ave, Charleston, IL

Price: $39900

Take a look today at this affordable low maintenance home with over 1,200 sq. ft. Bonus room could easily be converted into a 3rd bedroom, partially fenced back yard. Updates include newer kitchen, vinyl siding and some replacement windows. **Eligible for FreddieMac First Look Initiative through February 17, 2017**

731 4th St, Charleston, IL

Price: $43900

Solid brick three bedroom two bath home. Walking distance to the square or EIU. Hardwood floors on main level and big basement with lots of possible uses (and a hidden bonus room). Large private second floor bedroom with 2 closets. Den or family room is over 200 sq ft and lined with windows Newer electric, bath vanity and water heater. Priced far below county assessment. Call for a showing today!

2503 Woodlawn Dr, Charleston, IL

Price: $138000

This 1 ½ story home will impress you as soon as you walk into the spacious great room with vaulted ceiling and a fire place with new vent less gas log! The open kitchen and dining area features new appliances, new laminate flooring, and new light fixtures to complete the white cabinetry and updated counter top. Other added features include a large pantry, breakfast bar, and patio door to the bricked patio and fenced back yard. Upstairs you find 3 nicely sized bedrooms, 2 with vaulted ceilings ~ including the master suite ~ and a 3rd with walk in closet. An area at the top of the stair s provides a multiple use space.

11 Fairfield Ln, Charleston, IL

Price: $146500

COMFORTABLE & AFFORDABLE RANCH WITH OPEN CONCEPT FLOOR PLAN … Now offered is this well-designed, traditional ranch home in the much sought-after Fields subdivision; conveniently located close to schools, shopping and restaurants. Features include nicely-sized foyer with ceramic tile flooring, large great room with cathedral ceiling & fireplace with gas log. The sunny kitchen with under cabinetry task lighting has a large breakfast bar open to dining area. Breakfast/dining has sliders to back patio measuring 12 x 147, water scape with solar lighting creating pleasant ambiance ; a perfect place for entertaining family and friends. The storage building will remain and the yard is fenced for privacy. The master suite has private bath with jetted tub and walk-in closet; second bedroom has double window and arched top; shares hall bath with the third bedroom. An added plus is the second entrance from the foyer to the garage. (Reserved to homeowners: Refrigerator, washer, dryer & Sony speakers in great room) PARTIAL LIST OF RECENT IMPROVEMENTS PROVIDED BY HOMEOWNERS: 2015 ~ Newly installed cedar privacy fence by Brooks Creek Fencing, new light fixtures in hall w/LED, new ceiling fan in kitchen and new garage lights, added lights and flooring in attic, added cabinets in garage; 2016 ~ New garbage disposal, installed water scape, added landscape beds in front and back yards; 2014 ~ New roof shingles; 2013 ~ New gas, forced air furnace; 2011 ~ New water heater. Call today for your private viewing before this one gets away!

from Houses For Sale – The OC Home Search http://www.theochomesearch.com/houses-for-sale-in-charleston-il/ from OC Home Search https://theochomesearch.tumblr.com/post/158099199055

[joesbrownusa]

Houses For Sale in New London, MO

56183 Penny Ln, New London, MO

Price: $300000

Full Brick Ranch on 5 Acres. This home offers ¾ Bedrooms, 3.5 Baths with a Full Walkout Basement. This home features approx 3345 sq ft of Living Space. Split Bedroom Floor Plan. Main Level Laundry. Master Bath offers Double Vanity with Walk In Shower and 120 gallon soaking tub. Recently updated Kitchen with Center Island and Granite Coutertops. Eat-In Kitchen along with Formal Dining Room. Gorgeous Wood Floors. Fuego Fireplace in the Living Room. Lower Level features a Family Room, Sleeping Area and Full Bath. Utility Garage runs the entire depth of the home. Large Covered Back Porch offers privacy and gorgeous views. This home has been well maintained and ready to move in to. Call for your appointment today.

19708 Highway Ff, New London, MO

Price: $384900

If you are searching for a brick home on 46.99 wooded acres overlooking a beautiful, stocked lake, then look no further. This 3 bedroom, 3.5 bath ranch style home is waiting for you. From the front door, enter into a large foyer that easily accesses the living areas. Beautiful Amish custom made cabinets are plentiful in the kitchen. Just inside the garage door is an efficient den (office area). Main level laundry. There are 3 wood burning fireplaces (dining room, living room, family room). You may access the covered deck, with built in seating, from both the master bedroom and the dinin g area. The dining area is large enough to add a sitting area at one end. The lower level offers another kitchen and there is an indoor barbecue grill with easy access to the patio area. Plus, there is a 100 x 60 pole barn, with 10 inch concrete floor, half bath and sliding doors on both ends. The home is heated by forced air propane and the 1000 gallon tank will convey. The outside water comes from the lake for watering the lawn and flowers. High speed Ralls Tech internet is at the road ready to hook up, if desired. Rock Creek runs through the property. Aside from the beautiful wooded acres, there are areas that may be planted for hay, or food plots.

55200 Highway M, New London, MO

Price: $559000

Spectacular two story brick/stone/vinyl home on 3.6 acres in Ralls County, just south of Hannibal offers many custom features including crown molding, 2 wood burning fireplaces, Prodigy security system, Culligan soft water system. The custom kitchen offers both granite and quartz countertops with cherry cabinets and a large walk in pantry. The electric range is an induction range and the microwave is under the island. Double ovens are built in. Two sets of washers and dryers convey, one in the laundry room and one in the upper bath area. A library/office is just off the front foyer. Two 50 gallon water heaters and geothermal heating adds to the energy efficiency of this fine home. Call today for your appointment.

12622 Walnut Hills Cir, New London, MO

Price: $259900

3 Bedroom, 2 Full Bath & 2 Half Bath home offering more than 4800 Sq. Ft of Finished Living Space situated on 4.64 Acres. Custom home has a magnificent view from the wrap – around deck. This home features custom millwork and cabinets. Beautiful Hardwood Floors and immaculately kept. Main Level offers a Living Room w/ Fireplace, Kitchen, Formal Dining Room, Library, Large Master Bathroom Suite w/ Office. There are 2 Bedrooms & a Full Bath Upstairs. The Lower Level is a partially finished Walk Out basement w/ a Family Room, Storage, Half Bath that could have a Shower added & a Large Works hop Area. Property also offers a detached shop with 640 Sq Ft, Heated and Cooled, Sliding Door and Overhead Door. Oversized drive allows for approx 4 additional cars to be parked at the house. You must see to appreciate how beautifully crafted this home is all the way down to the View. Call for your appointment today!!

13286 Potter Dr, New London, MO

Price: $118900

Ideal location on the outskirts of town nestled on just under 1 acre. Over the last four years the owners have made many valuable updates. They have added insulated vinyl siding, 30 year architectural shingled roof, new furnace, new vinyl windows throughout as well as updated garage doors. The home offers two bedrooms on the main level and a finished lower level family room with potential of being finished in to additional bedrooms and adding a bathroom. The outside of the home has so much to offer as well. Large two stall mental shed great for storage plus a 34×32 metal garage and a ut ility shed. An abundance of fruit trees, a strawberry patch, and a nice garden spot will be ready for you when spring rolls around. Call today to see this well priced property!

56354 Thatcher Dr, New London, MO

Price: $115000

Home located in Ralls County School District with numerous exterior updates. Interior is spacious with four bedrooms and one bathroom. Large living room with woodburning fireplace and laundry area. Backyard is flat and has above ground pool. Low maintenance exterior due to new siding, windows, gutters, exterior doors, and insulation. All main level living located on approximately 1.15 acres m/l.

16240 Centenary Rd, New London, MO

Price: $199999

PRICED WELL UNDER APPRAISED VALUE!! Constructed in 2003 this property offers the best amenities with rural privacy. Nestled on approximately 3 acres m/l surrounded by woods and farm ground this home has 5 bedrooms and 3.5 baths. Solid surface counter tops in the kitchen with all of the appliances conveying, eating bar and dining area just off the kitchen. Open living room with plenty of windows to all for the natural light. Master bedroom on the main level with full bath and double sinks. Laundry room near the master bedrooms offers convenience of its own room with a spacious wash sink. Two bedrooms upstairs with a bath in between and a full basement, partially finished with a bedroom, family room, full bath and plenty of storage. Basement also walks out. Bonus room above the garage is currently being used for a bedroom. You will enjoy the wrap around porch with composite decking for maintenance ease. 12.6 Miles to town, 9.8 Miles to New London. Closer than you think!

55864 Highway M, New London, MO

Price: $385000

4 Bedroom 2.5 Baths, Over 5600 square foot of living space on 3.8 Acres. Hannibal School District and close to town. You will not believe the quality in this home. Bamboo Flooring throughout. Kitchen has Solid Surface Counter Tops and Quality Cabinets. Large Open Living and Dining Room space with Gas Fireplace. Access to the wraparound deck with a gorgeous park like view. Separate Family Room offer the Foyer features a Wet/Coffee Bar. Master Bedroom Suite feature a Fireplace, Sitting Room and Upscale Bathroom. Large Jetted Tub, Exquisite Vanity and Walk In Glass Shower with Tile Surroun d. Lower Level offer an additional 3 Bedrooms, Full Bath and Family Area. An added Bonus in the Underground room that would make a great Storm Shelter. Home is zoned and features Heat Pump and GeoThermal Heating and Cooling. Home also features a separate Apartment/MIL Quarters adding an additional 920 square foot, 2 Bedroom, 1 Bath, Living Room, Kitchen and Laundry facilities. Too many extras to name. You must see this home to appreciate all the amenities it provides.

56423 Gibbons Pl, New London, MO

Price: $95000

Three bedroom and two bathroom home located in Ralls County School District. Split level home with three living areas. Basement has large family room and storage space. Main level has living room, dining room, kitchen, and sitting room or smaller family room. Upstairs has the three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. Laundry is off the main level attached to the two car garage. Home has small storage shed. Home is being sold as is.

12417 Saverton West Dr, New London, MO

Price: $131500

Extremely well cared for and move in ready home on 3 acres.car Three bedroom, 2 baths. Big living room. Large walk in closets and lots of storage. Large laundry room off Kitchen. Dining room next to kitchen. Large oversized two car garage with plenty of storage space. Landscaped with several fruit, pecan, and ornamental trees. Out building with cement floor and electric wired. New line just installed up to house for now available ralls tech cable/internet. Nice lighted ceiling fan in every room. All kitchen appliances stay consisting of electric glass top range, over the range vented mi crowave, dishwasher and including brand new side by side refrigerator. Call 573-406-2255 if interested in viewing.

13605 Orchard Hill Pl, New London, MO

Price: $279900

Breath taking views of Mississippi from this all one level custom home. Home boasts a 180 inch screen Entertainment Theater System in the Great room! Custom Kitchen ,with granite counters, Bar area and breakfast nook, at the heart of the home. Warmth and comforting color and decor throughout. Formal dining with split fireplace. Tasteful open floor plan with sunken great room. High ceilings and dramatic entree give an elegant feel as you enter. The Master bedroom sits on one side of the home with a large bathroom and extra deep closet. Two additional ample sized bedrooms with a full bath and separate laundry room sit on the opposite side of the home. Outside a huge 30×60 garage and work shop. Men can appreciate the oil changing pit for the do it yourself er. Roll up doors on both sides of Detached garage .Main home has attached 2 car garage with an insulated hobby room. If that’s not enough, the landscaped yard has a greenhouse, multiple raised garden beds and fruit trees.

12923 Green Meadows Pl, New London, MO

Price: $219900

SIX acres with outbuildings, garden spot, fenced pasture and small pond is your Mini-farm dream. Wonderful property offers something for everyone to enjoy and appreciate. The well- maintained split foyer style home has four large bedrooms and two full baths. The open floor plan includes a spacious living room, bright and cheerful kitchen and dining area, and two bedrooms and a full bath on the main level. Lower level includes family room with gas log fireplace, office area, two large bedrooms and a full bath. All four bedrooms have walk in closets. The kitchen with pretty oak cabinets, newer counter tops & sink. The dining area opens to a large Trek system deck, an above ground pool, and an inviting back yard. The over-sized, detached two car garage has workshop. Family room has just been freshened with neutral color paint. Geo thermal furnace and AC is just 3 years old with a 10 year warranty. 80 Gallon Electric water heater new in 2015.

104 N Ralls St, New London, MO

Price: $95000

This is quite a packagewell-maintained three bedroom bungalow, plus super large garage (36’x30′, two-car plus workshop complete with furnace and air, 200 amp electric service and even cable T.V. availability), PLUS a two-car carport. Enjoy grilling and summertime fun on the extra large deck located just a few steps from the kitchen. Kitchen has corner booth and table for four and lots of extra room for more eating area, if needed. Plenty of cabinets and nice pantry. You’ll be delighted at the closet space since EACH bedroom has two or three large closets! Bath is nicely situated w ith access near kitchen and also access from master bedroom. Full unfinished basement with walkout. Unfinished attic could later be finished, if desired. Roof was new in ’08.

from Houses For Sale – The OC Home Search http://www.theochomesearch.com/houses-for-sale-in-new-london-mo/ from OC Home Search https://theochomesearch.tumblr.com/post/158072885215