Author: DOuG pRATt

A Hard Day’s Write

Richard Lester, who directed the two truly great Beatle films, A Hard Day’s Night and HELP!, has received a Fellowship from the British Film Institute. With the recent death of Davy Jones, I’ve been hearing the old assertion that the Monkees TV show was based on AHDN, but I just don’t see it. HELP! was clearly the model for the series, with producers Raphelson and Schneider drawing inspiration from the fantasy of the boys living together in a quirky, colorful pad, full of groovy stuff.

I have high praise and thanks for author Ray Morton, and his book about the making of A Hard Day’s Night. Besides being a solid and thorough telling of the background and production of the movie, in A Hard Days Night: Music on Film Series, Morton did something no other writer on the subject has done — he gets the facts right about Prue Bury, and for that I am sincerely grateful. Ray Morton can be heard on Reject Radio talking about the movie and his book at this link. He comes in at 40:30 into the podcast.

Back in 2002, Rolling Stone had a piece about the Miramax DVD release of A Hard Day’s Night, and it has one of the classic promotional photos of the Beatles with (l-r) Pattie Boyd, Tina Williams, Prue Bury, and Sue Whitman.

By coincidence, and to my great amusement, that issue also had this item:

So the first time that Doug Pratt had a connection to Prue Bury, it was a different Doug Pratt!

Mixed-up comix memories

I’m getting ready for the New York Comic Book Marketplace show in, you guessed it, New York. Denro and I will be heading down there on Friday. Going through a portfolio of original art, I came across some stuff I did myself, over twenty years ago, when I was an occasional contributor to the Comics Buyer’s Guide. The late Don Thompson bought pretty much everything I submitted, except for a cartoon that made fun of writer Peter David’s barf bag puppets. These are a few cartoons I never submitted.

Here’s my take on what really happened after the Fantastic Four were bombarded by cosmic rays. The caption is “Sue! Where ARE you?? SUE!!”

In this one I wondered, “What if Disney bought Marvel Comics?” At the time the idea was silly, but now it’s reality!

I did bunch of strips paying homage to Calvin & Hobbes, calling them the names of two other philosophers, Carlyle & Hobson. I had Calvin-Carlyle’s parents commit him to a psychiatric institution, where he meets Dennis the Menace.

P.S. This one is from an attempt at doing a comic strip.

From Barnes’ Back Pages

Today on Barnes Newberry’s online radio show, My Back Pages, he played the band Love doing AndMoreAgain, a song I hadn’t heard in, I think, 40 years…

… and he played a song I couldn’t recall ever hearing before — Fleetwood Mac with its founder, Peter Green, shortly before he left the band, doing The Green Manalishi (With The Two Prong Crown). What a great track! To me it sort of sounds like Alice Cooper with Elvis Costello style vocals.

A King deal

Denro tipped me off that Barnes & Noble stores have bargain-priced copies of Mark Evanier’s book Kirby: King of Comics. I bought one for $12.95, so now I can keep my autographed copy on the shelf. This deal is, from what I can see, available only in stores.

As I have said before, Jack “King” Kirby — a title given to him by Stan Lee — was the greatest creative force the comic book biz will ever have. Kirby’s family has, so far, been unsuccessful in getting money out of Disney-Marvel, and that’s wrong, because the corporation owes the man a lot.