Martin's Booklog

Buurman Wat Doet U Nu? — Dick Maas

Published on May 17, 2026Leave a comment

Famous Dutch director Dick Maas has two words of advice for anybody thinking of making movies in Holland: don’t.

Cover of Buurman Wat Doet U Nu?

Buurman Wat Doet U Nu?
Films Maken in Nederland
Dick Maas
360 pages including index and notes
published in 2017

And Dick Maas should know. He has been making commercial movies since 1983, when he debuted with low budget horror classic De Lift, about a murderous elevator eating people. Another of his horro movies, Amsterdamned (1987) I first saw on a movie night at my high school, back in the days when that meant having a screen and projector set up in the main hall. That one gave me nightmares for a while, not so much because of the gruesome murders, but rather through the scene in which the murderer was revealed to be suffering from hexafluoride poisoning and looked like it. He’s made several horror movies since, the most famous one perhaps being Sint (2010), in which he took the beloved Dutch (original) version of Santa Claus and made him into a demon figure.

But his most successful films had nothing to do with horror, but were a fish out of water series of comedy movies: the Flodder series. In the first movie, an antisocial family is moved from the slum house they lived in to a posh suburb to the anger and horror of their new neighbours. Its succes spawned two sequels and a television series. Flodder is where the title of this book comes from, which loosely translates to “oh neighbour, what are you doing now”. In the movie it’s the line said by busty blonde Tatjana Simic as she’s being groped and stripped by the elderly neighbour, who will later be blackmailed for it by her brothers for a new car. It’s one of those lines everybody in the Netherlands of a certain age will recognise.

Apart from directing, Maas also has worked as a producer, writer and even composer and is therefore familiar with most aspects of making a movie. If your interest lies in cinematic theory however this is the wrong book for you. Buurman Wat Doet U Nu is extremely practical and pragmatic. It’s also somewhat cynical about the realities of making movies in the Netherlands, which is most strongly shown in the first chapter, which is about just that, but continues to pop up in later chapters. There just isn’t that much money to go round and to get what money is available you need to jump through a lot of hoops. Increasing bureaucracy also makes the process of movie making once you do have the money much harder, as e.g the chapter on location shooting shows.

Maas structures his book in a roughly chronological order of how a movie project is run and made. He starts with the scenario, then moves onto financing and assembling the crew, cast andplanned locations. He then takes a detour into discussing the decisions a director needs to make before looking at the pre-visualisation and planning needed to make the actual filming a success. That process he divides into four chapters: one general one about shooting a movie, one about shooting action scenes and the challenges they bring and one special effects, before finishing with a look at the montage process. The last chapter of the book is about what to expect and do once the movie is finished and ready for distribution.

All this is told in a very matter of fact, practical way. Reading this book won’t make you a movie maker but it gives you a good idea of the work and challenges involved. Because he garnishes it with a lot of gossip and examples from his own experience it’s also a very readable book, which I finished in two or three lazy afternoons reading in the garden.

Everyone’s in Books about Movies

Published on April 24, 2026Leave a comment

Two books about Hollywood’s Golden Age, two very different approaches.

Cover of The Genius of the System

The Genius of the System
Thomas Schatz
544 pages including index and notes
published in 1988

In the last two to three years, perhaps because I moved house to somewhere I could fit a proper sofa in the living room, one I could sit or lay comfortably on unlike the crappy IKEA two seater in my okld flat, I’ve found myself watching more movies. Furthermore, especially in the last year, I’ve been watching a lot more old Hollywood movies. I’d never been that interested in socalled Golden Age Hollywood before: these were movies made decades before I was born, how interesting could they be? But then I started watching the Universal Monsters movies (Dracula, FrankensteinThe Invisible Man etc) and from there on I branched out to other 1930s and 1940s horror and even other genres. Which of course meant I wanted to read up on thema nd hit my local library, where I found these two books.

The first, by Thomas Schatz, sets out its scope in the subtitle: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. This is a look at the era, roughly from the end of the silent movie in the late twenties to the advent of television in the fifties in which it was the studio, not the director or actor, which called the shots on how a movie was made. Schatz therefore put as his focal point the studio and its “non-creative” personnel, the production staff and producers, especially the latter.

The Genius of the System tells its history by focuses on a handful of players, rather than the entirety of Hollywood, which would’ve been neigh-impossible. As his examples of the Hollywood system Schatz chooses to follow three studios and one particular producer, in rough chronological order. The studios are Universal, the biggest of the “Minors”, MGM, the most prestigious and successful of the “Majors” and Warner Bros, the most interesting and focused. The producer is David Selznick, who was a star producer at MGM, Paramount and RKO before starting his own production company. Through these Schatz examines how Hollywood made movies. As he says in his introduction:

We will examine how these companies “worked” in both a literal and a figurative sense, tracing not only their production operations but also their marketing and sales strategies, their corporate structures and management systems. Our ultimate objective is the filmmaking process itself, which will be pursued primarily through dozens of case studies of the making of individual movies. These case studies as well as our view of the larger industrial context will be based on actual industry documents—interoffice memos, corporate correspondence, and other general records, along with the budgets, schedules, story conference notes, daily production reports, censorship files, and other materials generated for each production. Because of the complexity, cost, and fragmentation of studio filmmaking, Hollywood left its legacy not only on celluloid but also on paper, and that documentation provides a comprehensive and reliable account of the studio system at work.

This is then a book about how the sausage was made and the choice of whose sausage making was examined was in large part also determined by whose primary sources were available (as made very clear in his notes on sources). Thanks to this there’s a lot of detail Schatz has available for how certain movies were made. At times this makes for exhausting reading, to be honest. There’s only so much studio intrigue you can take in one go…

Cover of You Ain't Heard Nothing Yet

You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet
Andrew Sarris
573 pages including index and notes
published in 1998

Andrew Sarris’ look at the same era takes a very different approach as you might’ve guessed from its subtitle: The American Talking Film: History & Memory, 1927-1949. Here the focus is strictly on the directors, actors and the movies themselves, with neither studio nor producer getting much of a look in. For Sarris, it’s all about the art, not the work put in to create the art. Written a decade after Schatz’s book, this one is far more subjective in its treatment. This can be explained by the different backgrounds of the two writers. Thomas Schatz being academic whereas Sarris was a well known film critic, not shy of putting his own personal taste into his history. In this he is self aware enough to know when his own taste is out of step with critical opinion, fortunately.

Rather than Schatz’ chronological approach, Sarris takes a thematic one. Starting with a short overview of the studio system and the most important individual studios he then looks at genres before a deep dive into individual directors. This forms the bulk of the book and is the most accomplished part of it. The next, similar section examining the leading actors of the age is less comprehensive and had me struggling to finish it. The final part, on Sarris’ guilty pleasures is skippable.

There are some notable omissions in Sarris’ listing of important directors. Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Angels with Dirty Faces) for example is nowhere to be seen. Fritz Lang’s omission is perhaps easier to understand, having made his best and most famous movies in Germany before he came to Hollywood and never quite reaching the same heights in America. Of the directors he does name, there are some less deserving (William Wyler, Billy Wilder, who made his best movies after 1949) than others, but most of the Big Names are present, starting with D. W. Griffith. You could do worse than take this list as a starting point for plunging into thirties and forties Hollywood.

What I like about Sarris’ approach is that he’s not shy in acknowledging both the changes in critical judgment as well as his own changing tastes in movies. Sarris wrote this book in the late nineties, after having been a film critic since the late fifties. It’s unsurprising that his tastes have shifted, but I appreciate his honesty about it. Nothing as obnoxious as a critic pretending to have always been right and always been in tune with the prevailing fashions even when they clearly couldn’t have been.

I’ve been lucky with finding these two books from my local library, whose film section is not the largest. Both in their own way offer an illuminating look at Golden Age Hollywood, both offer a good starting point for further explorations. The juxtaposition of Sarris’ auteurist views against Schatz’ defence of the studio system as worthy of respect makes these two books excellent for a paired read and it’s only by accident that I stumbled into it!

Artmic Fan Book (and Other Zines) — Sean O’Mara

Published on November 30, 2025Leave a comment

Artmic is a name you should know if you at all like 80s OVAs. This zine is a good introduction.

Cover of Artmic Fan Book

Artmic Fan Book: The Story of Artmic 1977-1997
Sean O’Mara
56 pages
published in 2025

Sometime in 1989 or 1990 I got that first videotape of Bubblegum Crisis from my local videostore; I must’ve gone looking for something sci-fi I hadn’t seen yet, not even necessarily an anime video. The moment I put that tape in the VHS player and Konya wa Hurricane started I knew that I was watching something special. Here was something new, something I couldn’t get from Hollywood, something that matched the energy of the cyberpunk I was reading. This and Akira had me watching every anime (or as it was called then, “manga” (sic)) tape the store carried. Which means I’m pretty much the target audience for a zine about Artmic, the company behind Bubblegum Crisis, who not only put their stamp on my personal anime history, but were arguably one of the most important companies shaping the OVA boom of the eighties.

Sean O’Mara is the person behind Zimmerit.moe, the now ten year old website that’s a celebration of fandom in its (relative) infancy, of forgotten fads and trends, and the idea that fans can create their own cool shit, too. The fandom that refers to is specifically that of eighties otakudom, from before being an otaku got codified, when the line between pro and fan was not as sharp as it is now. Zimmerit is of course the anti-magnetic paste the Germans put on their tanks during World War II, which accurately shows off the vibe of the site and the corners of fandom it focuses on. The Artmic Fan Book is the logical outflow from this, the latest in a range of zines Sean has published through his site, of which more later.

At only 56 pages, this doesn’t pretend to be any kind of history of Artmic, rather it attempts to give an impression of what Artmic was like, a guided tour taking you past its greatest works if you will. Of which there are quite a few. Bubblegum Crisis is perhaps the best known, but there’s also the science fiction classic Megazone 23, one of the biggest selling products of the OVA era, Genesis Climber Mospaeda, later reworked into part of Robotech, the American action movie-esque Riding Bean, the very Moebius looking Dragon Heaven, the Gall ForceOVA series, Metal Skin Panic MAdox-01 etc. etc. For the best part of a decade Artmic created some of the best looking, interesting OVAs before the end of Japan’s Bubble Economy put an end to it.

The Artmic Fan Book looks at all these shows in roughly chronological order, from the founding of the company in 1977 to its end two decades later. Artmic’s first true production was Techno Police 21C, developed as a television series, which was cancelled before launch so the intended first two episodes were instead made into a movie. Mospeada a year later was more successful in that it did get to air, but at only half the intended run length. (Artmic Fan Book mentions it ran for just a cour, but at 25 episodes it actually managed a full season if not the year Artmic wanted). Their next project, the one that put them on the map was Megazone 23, another failed tv series reworked into a very successful OVA, at a time the OVA market was just getting established, the first real OVA, Dallos having come out just two years before. Everything else Artmic did animewise would be an OVA.

What Artmic Fan Book mainly interests in all this is how Artmic’s relatively small group of key creative personnel like mech designers Shinji Aramaki, Kimitoshi Yamane and Hideki Kakinuma, mangaka and character designer Kenichi Sonoda and producer Satoshi Koizumi meant that most of its output had a similar style and vibe. Most noticeably those (transforming) motorcycles seen in e.g Bubblegum Crisis and Megazone 23. There’s a bit of repetition in the various chapters, as the same people keep getting reintroduced, but this is a minor niggle.

One thing I would’ve liked to have seen some mention of is Artmic’s involvement with The Hakkenden, based on a 106 volume (!) historical novel, set in the Muromachi period. As a historical fantasy it’s very much outside’s Artmic’s normal wheelhouse of hardcore science fiction. It would’ve been interesting to see Sean’s thoughts on this, even if it doesn’t quite fit his or Artmic’s vibe.

I bought the Artmic Fan Book alongside every other zine available from Zimmerit. Hobby Shopping: Japanese Model Shop Ads 1980-89 as its title suggests is a collection of ads for model shops, with added commentary by Sean, the ads focusing on mecha and other sfnal models. Gainazine, “the Secret History of Studio Gainax, looks at that studio’s earlier pre-Evangelion history, focusing on proto-Gainax work for the Daicon science fiction conventions, Gainax’s garage kit producing arm General Products as well as obscure projects related to Gainax most prominent release before Evangelion, Royal Space Force. Koba-Kondoh Document is a look at two mech designers involved with 1980s Gundam series, Makoto Kobayashi & Kazuhisa Kondoh, especially their model figure work, even including a guide on how to kitbash mecha in their style.

The final zine published by Zimmerit is the only one not written by Sean O’Mara, but by Renzo Adler and is also the only one not involved with mecha and model kits one way or the other: Demon Zine Shinjuku, a look at the more outre Japanese horror creations of the Bubble Economy Age. Horror OVAs were of course the second leg of the western anime boom of the late eighties/early nineties, so it’s great to have a zine celebrating them too.

All zines are available from Garagekit Club.

The Show that Never Ends — David Weigel

Published on October 29, 2025Leave a comment

An amusing, chatty exploration of prog rock, but don’t except to learn much new if you’re a fan.

Cover of The Show that Never Ends

The Show that Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock
David Weigel
346 pages including index
Published in 2017

David Weigel is a Slate journalist who mostly covers American politics, from what I remember of his work, not too badly for a Slate journalist. One of his hidden passions however is progressive rock, which he also got to write about for Slate, leading to this book. As Weigel calls it, “this is a narrative history of progressive rock, as told by the people who made it“. Much of it is told in extracts from contemporary interviews with the various artists involved, Weigel providing the connective tissue between them.

Most of the bands and people involved will be familiar even to prog rock haters: Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, King Crimson & Robert Fripp. These are the focus of Weigel’s book, their careers the red thread tying his narrative together. This is both sensible and slightly disappointing. Sensible, because it makes it easier to illustrate the history of prog rock without drowning in a sea of names and dates; disappointing because it inevitably gives short shift to some areas of the genre I’m personally more interested in. The whole Canterbury scene for example gets a look in every now and then, but there was so much interesting music being made there that it really deserves its own back, when here it’s just a side note.

But the most noticeable omission here is that of Pink Floyd, whose career is largely glossed over here in favour of the earlier mentioned focus on ELP, Genesis, Fripp and Yes. I’m not sure why this is, as Pink Floyd is pretty much the archetypical big name prog rock band, of a similar status to any of the bands Weigel does follow. Might just be a question of personal taste. It also might be that Pink Floyd doesn’t quite fit in with the others, having always had a little bit more credibility even after the collapse of prog rock than the other bands had.

These limitations aside, it is interesting to read a sort of ‘first draft’ history of the genre. Even if the focus is on well known bands, the details of what e,.g Robert Fripp was up to post King Crimson and what he thought he was doing were fascinating. It made me want to dive into his solo work and collaborations with Eno and others, which I had mostly ignored until then. Weigel spends as much time on the “fall” as he does on the “rise” of prog rock and honestly reading about the post-fall careers of these bands was actually more interesting than the more well known story of their rise to fame.

In general, The Show that Never Ends stays within familiar territory, not really offering new insights to anybody already a prog rock fan, but that it does so through the artists own words make it worthwhile even to hardcore fans. For people new to the genre it’s a good introduction, even if it doesn’t quite capture the breadth of the genre because of its relentless focus on the big name bands.

Is there life on Mars? is there life in Peckham? — Books on SETI

Published on October 25, 2025Leave a comment

Just like Alexei Sayle, I have always wondered this too. These books try to find an answer.

Cover of The Possibility of Life

The Possibility of Life: Searching for Kinship in the Cosmos
Jaime Green
304 pages including notes and index
published in 2023

If you know anything about SETI, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, you probably know the Drake Equation:

The equation calculates the number of possible civilisations we might be able to talk to based on a number of variables, most of which currently unknown. It starts with the average rate of stars forming in the Galaxy, the fraction of stars having planets, the number of planets that could support life and the actual fraction that do have life on them, the fraction of planets with intelligent life, then with civilisations that actually develop technology that enables them to send messages and finally, their average life span. Because we have no evidence for any of these numbers, except barely the first two, you can reach whatever conclusion you want by plugging in the right numbers. Make them low enough and it’s likely we’re the only civilisation in the Galaxy, make them high and it’s a miracle we haven’t been contacted yet.

But that’s not what the equation is intended to do. It’s not meant to provide an answer, but to get you thinking about the possibilities: what if… Which is exactly what Jaime Green has done in The Possibility of Life: Searching for Kinship in the Cosmos: asking questions, rather than wanting to find answers, using the Drake Equation as a rough guideline. If you are looking fora history of SETI, this is not it, nor is it a guide to what an extraterrestrial intelligence should be like for us to be able to contact it. Rather, this is as much about what asking those questions means for our own life here on Earth as well as for the possibilities of life elsewhere. What I liked about this is that Green did not hesitate to bring science fiction into the subject. And modern science fiction at that, not just the obligatory Clarke or Asimov references. Science fiction after all has more freedom to imagine the possibilities of intelligent life unfettered by concerns about whether or not these aliens e.g. use the same parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as us.

The Possibility of Life is a book that if I had read it age twelve, it would’ve blown m,y mind just like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos did. Taking that freedom to imagine the possibilities of what alien life might be, unencumbered by what we need it to be to be able to communicate with it is liberating. This gave me a genuine sense of wonder few books on SETI manage to.

Cover of Civilizations Beyond Earth

Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society
Douglas A. Vakoch & Albert A. Harrison (editors)
250 pages including notes and index
published in 2011

Civilizations Beyond Earth: Extraterrestrial Life and Society is very different from Jaime Green’s book, far more narrow in its focus on possible Extraterrestrial Intelligences we could communicate with. Its underlying assumption is that it will be a civilisation, a species remarkably like ourselves. Not necessarily because that’s the only sort of intelligence that could be out there, more because it’s the only sort of intelligence we currently could recognise let alone communicate with. This assumption is not explicitly stated in this anthology of course, but it is clear from the assumptions the individual authors make in their essays.

Rather, this anthology is more interested in the actual contact and what this would entail. It tries to provide answers to the following three questions: does extraterrestrial life exists in the first place? If so, how would we react to its discovery? Finally, could we actually communicate with them if an extraterrestrial civilisation was discovered? These are not questions that can be answered by just astronomers or astrobiologists, which is why this is an interdisciplinary study, with participants also including sociologists, archaeologists and even journalists.

Each of these questions has about a third of the book devoted to it, after an introduction that provides a brief history of SETI. Considering the limited room in the book and the individual essays, there are no real answers given to any of these three questions, rather more than indications in which direction an answer may be found. In any case too we have such limited data on even the possibility of extraterrestrial life that answering these questions is neigh-impossible anyway. It’s only been a few decades since we’ve even been able to detect planets outside our own solar system after all; only the last decade or so that we could make any predictions about their habitability. Having this little data on the possibility of extraterrestrial life makes answering the question of how we would react and communicate even more difficult to answer. For the first question the best we can do is look at people’s current attitudes towards the idea and extrapolate from that. For the second we can look at historical examples of two human civilisations coming into contact, but that isn’t quite the same thing either, at best an analogy, not an example.

The combination of lack of space to dive deeper into possibilities together with a lack of hard data to grapple with makes this a more frustrating book than Jaime Green’s one. There are some interesting ideas here, but the need to ground them into something approximating reality when we have no clue if we are actually being realistic meant none of them really captivated me. The one thing that did intrigue me was the idea that we could evolve out of intelligence as a species similar to how we evolved into it. Not a new idea; several classic sf stories are about post-intelligent humans or other species, but here Alan Penny postulates that this evolution into an intelligent species happened much more recently than you’d assume. He argues that this happened somewhere between the Ancient Egyptians, who knew some math but didn’t systemise it and the Ancient Greeks, who did. So if this indeed happened so recently, the idea that we could evolve out of it as suddenly isn’t so farfetched. Colour me sceptical though.

Cover of Alien Oceans

Alien Oceans: The search for Life in the Depths of Space
Kevin Peter Hand
281 pages including notes and index
published in 2020

Alien Oceans looks at the possibility of extraterrestrial life from an entirely different point of view. What if, instead of expecting life on the usual Earth like worlds, we instead look for specific type of moon orbiting gas giants? What if we look at worlds like Europa or Enceladus for life instead? It may sound strange to look for life on moons orbiting gas giants much farther out from our Sun than we are, which are covered in thick ice and, like Europa, exposed to a hell of a lot of radiation from their mother planet, but it actually make sense. Because below those icy surfaces these worlds have worldwide liquid water oceans and an active molten rocky core that could create hydrothermal vents. The same sort of vents that also exist in our oceans and have given rise to life forms not dependent on photosynthesis for their survival.

Alien Oceans then has a much more narrow focus than the first two books; unlike them it’s looking at a question that can be solved. Finding out if there’s life on Europa or Enceladus is bluntly speaking, an engineering problem now. As the book shows, the probability of there being underground oceans on either of these two moons is very high. All the evidence we can get from here on Earth seems to point to it. What’s needed to prove it beyond doubt therefore is ‘just’ getting a probe there with the technology to drill down to them and take samples. This is not an easy problem, but not an unsolvable problem either. A NASA or ESA could do this mission with enough political will and enough budget.

Alien Oceans describes how this point, in parallel looking at the discovery of these alien ecosystems in our own oceans and the possibilities of similar ecosystems elsewhere. It looks at the evidence for the existence of these oceans on Jupiter’s moons and at how life might’ve started there, before discussing what the next steps could be to find a definitive answer. Any real exploration of Europa or Enceladus would be a decades long mission, but finding any answer, even a negative one, would be worthwhile.

Cover of Packing for Mars

Packing for Mars: The curious Science of Life in the Void
Mary Roach
334 pages including notes and index
published in 2010

The last book I want to talk about is not about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but rather the challenges for humans to actually live in space. Space it turns out is not really a place suitable for humans. We tend to be squishy, our bodies are not built for zero gravity and tend to react annoyingly badly to minor irritations like excess radiation. What’s more, the only way to get into space is to stick you on top of what’s basically a big exploding firework and hope it explodes in such a way it launches you into orbit but not explodes you. Finally, once you do reach orbit without being killed you are confronted with the reality that all sorts of everyday activities just became a lot more difficult, up to and including the simple art of defecation.

Packing for Mars is a gleeful, humorous look at all these difficulties and how NASA and other space agencies set out to tackle them. I knew Mary Roach writing already from Stiff, her book on what happens to your body if you’ve donated it to science after you died, which is why I picked up this book in the first place. It doesn’t disappoint and I especially like her use of footnotes to put in irrelevant but interesting asides.

The title is a bit misleading, as the focus is not really on the extra challenges a Mars expedition brings, but rather on the general dangers and discomforts of being in space. The dangers of traveling to space are less discussed; Roach is more interested in what happens to you once you’re there. As an introduction the book therefore starts with a look at what sort of people are selected to be astronauts in the first place, what qualities a space agency looks for, before looking at the psychological aspects of being in space. Because for all its vastness, the reality is that you’re stuck in a tin can with a few other people for days, weeks or months and you can’t get away. You need people who can deal with that. Fortunately the idea that being in space itself could make you crazy has largely been disproven.

Physically though being in space, or rather being in zero gravity is also dangerous. Your inner ear doesn’t like it so you tend to get seasick. Your skeleton really doesn’t like it, so you’ll lose bone mass and density. But these problems are peanuts compared to the real dangers of interplanetary flight. Astronauts in orbit around the Earth are still protected by its magnetic field; venture outside it, on a journey to Mars e.g. and you will be exposed to cosmic radiation and the like, drastically increasing your cancer risk. Get caught in the path of a solar flare and you’re screwed.

Packing for Mars therefore is sobering and eye opening on how difficult crewed space travel truly is. For somebody who grew up on science fiction that took for granted that space travel would’ve become routine once he was an adult it’s rather a bit of a disappointment to be confronted by the realities of it.