Bill: Besides the 8mm movies you made in high school, you also
made some 16mm films as a young adult. Could you tell me about
those films?
James: Most of these films were sponsored efforts celebrating the
Philadelphia Cooperative Schools Summer Program, which ran for
four successive summers between 1966 and 1969. The idea was to
bring together adolescents and pre-adolescents from the public,
private, and parochial schools - students, in other words, whose
formal educations had heretofore allowed them to interact only
with people from similar backgrounds. Nobody was claiming that
the racial, economic, and religious diversity of the PCSSP students
would prove enlightening per se, but the program's directors did
believe that if you led such a heterogeneous group through a
carefully structured humanistic curriculum, they would learn as
much from each other as from the formal lessons. I would describe
the movies as poetic documentaries that attempted to show how
the students grew in self-knowledge over the course of each
summer. You'll find vestiges of my PCSSP experience in The
Philosopher's Apprentice.
But I also made my own independent films during and after this
period. The one that springs to mind is a comedy called A Political
Cartoon, which I produced with two of my best friends from high
school, Joe Adamson and Dave Stone. I suppose this 16mm short
foreshadows some of the more outrageous social satire found in
This Is the Way the World Ends and The Philosopher's Apprentice,
though it's a much gentler, less sardonic endeavor than those
novels. A Political Cartoon combines live action with animation to
tell the story of Peter President, a cartoon character who gets
elected to the highest office in the land. It was ultimately
released on a VHS anthology from Kino on Video called
Cartoongate!, and it's easily available via various dealers at
Amazon.com. By the way, both Joe Adamson and Dave Stone
went on to success in Hollywood. Joe won an Emmy for his PBS
documentary called W.C. Fields Straight Up, and Dave received an
Oscar for cutting the sound on Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.
Bill: Do you think The Philosopher's Apprentice fits into the
"cyberpunk" category? Do any of your other books fit into the
cyberpunk category?
made some 16mm films as a young adult. Could you tell me about
those films?
James: Most of these films were sponsored efforts celebrating the
Philadelphia Cooperative Schools Summer Program, which ran for
four successive summers between 1966 and 1969. The idea was to
bring together adolescents and pre-adolescents from the public,
private, and parochial schools - students, in other words, whose
formal educations had heretofore allowed them to interact only
with people from similar backgrounds. Nobody was claiming that
the racial, economic, and religious diversity of the PCSSP students
would prove enlightening per se, but the program's directors did
believe that if you led such a heterogeneous group through a
carefully structured humanistic curriculum, they would learn as
much from each other as from the formal lessons. I would describe
the movies as poetic documentaries that attempted to show how
the students grew in self-knowledge over the course of each
summer. You'll find vestiges of my PCSSP experience in The
Philosopher's Apprentice.
But I also made my own independent films during and after this
period. The one that springs to mind is a comedy called A Political
Cartoon, which I produced with two of my best friends from high
school, Joe Adamson and Dave Stone. I suppose this 16mm short
foreshadows some of the more outrageous social satire found in
This Is the Way the World Ends and The Philosopher's Apprentice,
though it's a much gentler, less sardonic endeavor than those
novels. A Political Cartoon combines live action with animation to
tell the story of Peter President, a cartoon character who gets
elected to the highest office in the land. It was ultimately
released on a VHS anthology from Kino on Video called
Cartoongate!, and it's easily available via various dealers at
Amazon.com. By the way, both Joe Adamson and Dave Stone
went on to success in Hollywood. Joe won an Emmy for his PBS
documentary called W.C. Fields Straight Up, and Dave received an
Oscar for cutting the sound on Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula.
Bill: Do you think The Philosopher's Apprentice fits into the
"cyberpunk" category? Do any of your other books fit into the
cyberpunk category?
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