Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

Coldheart Canyon: The Revelations Interview

Clive Barker took a break from writing Arabat, his new book for young readers, to speak with Phil and Sarah Stokes, creators of the Clive Barker website, Revelations. An excerpt from that July 10, 2001 interview, "Nips and Tucks, Tits and Fucks":

Revelations: The first time we heard about Coldheart Canyon it was going to be a short novel - when did that turn into a 600-page epic?

Clive Barker: In fact I do say at the beginning that even though I was sort of mourning my Dad, finding it difficult to write, I was at the same time finding the thing I needed to write, really, if I was going to pay respect to it as a subject, as an idea - I was going to need to tell it more fully than I had originally planned. I mean, the original thing had been, I don't know, 50,000, 60,000 words, I suppose and it had been originally told entirely from Todd's point of view. And it was really going to be a very simple book about a rather narcissistic actor in Hollywood who encounters some ghosts and we're not sure at the end of the short story or the novella, whatever it was going to be -novella, I suppose - whether he's really seen them or whether he hasn't. That was the book.

Revelations: A real Twilight Zone.

Clive Barker: Exactly - and as I got into it I realized these ghosts are sort of really interesting and I want to write about them because they represent Old Hollywood and here I have a chance not only to talk about new Hollywood but also to talk about Old Hollywood and to contrast their methodologies and to talk about Hollywood in a much more rounded way than I had originally anticipated. So it was a judgment call made out of ambition, I think, just to tell a better story.

Revelations: When we were looking at the novel again last night, we started talking about similarities to Day of the Locust.

Clive Barker: Well, Day of the Locust was certainly sitting by my side, amongst other things.

Revelations: With Mr. Todd Hackett the protagonist of that one.

Clive Barker: Locust is a completely depressing vision. I wanted to write something which was sort of bittersweet, that both showed the dark side but also showed that it had some life in it yet. So I was trying to get a little bit of both going, really - trying to tell the story of what it is to be an actor who is so beloved that you sort of feel that belovedness....

Revelations: Now that people are starting to read Coldheart Canyon .what sort of reaction are you getting?

Clive Barker: They have a great time. And they have a great time because it's not what they expected. This is a Barker book which people who didn't like Barker books - like! There's people saying "Ooh, I really like this one!" They're very, very surprised. I think the Hollywood setting, I think the relatively small amount of fantastic material in it - sure, when the stuff about the tiles comes in it gets pretty wild, but it's really limited to that area, where you really have to take a big imaginative jump with me.

Revelations: In the prologue where Zeffer goes and gets The Hunt, that part is so beautifully evoked you must have sketches of that all around the house. I would love to see those sketches.

Clive Barker: Hey, hey! I did do sketches, of course.

Revelations: [Phil:] As you can tell, Sarah's a bit of a perv. [Sarah:] Okay, hands up, I liked the sex!

Clive Barker: There's a lot of it in the book and that's the other thing which people are liking about the book - it is a sexy book and it's sexier than anything I've done in a long time, wouldn't you agree?

Revelations: Yeah, we've been anticipating stuff in the Scarlet Gospels, but that's still to come. Certainly anything that's gone before has been much more tamed.

Clive Barker: Right, and there were voices that wished to tame this, but they were silenced, because I said "No, absolutely not! I want to do the scene with the whip and the clitoris. I want to do the orgy scene," and I wanted it to be the wildest stuff I could make it.

Revelations: This was probably more acceptable because it was largely hetero or lesbian, which is an easier sell.

Clive Barker: That's right. The homosexual stuff, although it's there, is much reduced from other books. Even so, you'd be surprised how many people said, "Wow, this is too strong.'"

Revelations: There's always going to be someone who says it's too strong, whatever you write.

Clive Barker: Yes, though these were, in many cases, people who've been taking a journey with me for a long time.

Revelations: They should know better!

Clive Barker: They should know better, I would have thought, yeah, but at the same time, to be fair, when I made the argument "This is the way it needs to be," that's the way it stayed. I mean, the book you're reading, with the exception of those things which were taken out for legal reasons which is perhaps five or six sentences in total, all the rest of the stuff is as I intended. There was one thing - in the orgy scene - when Todd becomes very involved in the orgy scene, physically involved, I had a replay of the S&M stuff that had gone on between him and Katya, and Jane Johnson [Clive Barker's editor], very rightly, said, "You know, this is a bit of an echo of something that we've seen before. Can't you go into something different?" And I said, "You know what? You're exactly right." So I dove into something much more extreme really, which is the three-way sandwich down in the heart of the orgy, as it were.

Revelations: There are always some images that will stay with you after every book - and that's one!

Clive Barker: Then she looked at that and she went, "Oh my god! Okay, maybe we should just go back to the whipping scene?" And I said, "No, no, no, you were absolutely right." And she was. I don't want to repeat something that I've already done once in the book. Let's go with this, so she said, "Okay, I trust your take," and we went with it! You know, one thing is Hollywood is a very sexy town - it sells sex constantly, it sells beauty. Yes, it sells sexuality.

Revelations: And beauty's a prevalent theme. It's a recurrent theme. It's only the beautiful people who get to go to the parties. They need to keep going to stay beautiful. Todd needs to get even more beautiful with the face-lift. But it contrasts with Tammy and the inner beauty coming out; with every new horror she faces you get to know more about her and she goes through a transformation from fat girl to hero. She's the most unlikely heroine...

Clive Barker: She is the most unlikely heroine, and that's what I like about her. I think, I suppose of all the characters in the book, the one I enjoyed writing about most was she because her journey was going to be a big one. She was going to be the fat girl from Sacramento, who was going to end up really saving the soul of her hero, at the same time as realizing that her hero is not worth worshipping.

Revelations: Which is a fascinating twist.

Clive Barker: Yeah - so she saves him in spite of what she discovers about him, or perhaps because of what she discovers about him. And in a way, I think, one of the ways to look at the book is as a kind of elaborate jigsaw in which each of the characters in some way or other presses or impresses themselves upon another. Maxine touches Tammy, Jerry, Todd, and you know, I just take her as an example. And each of the relationships she has is a necessary one for the development of her or the other person. And what I wanted to do was make sure that this kind of jigsaw worked throughout the entire book, so that everybody got some transformation of some kind. Even a relatively minor character like Jerry is saved from his cancer.

Revelations: I think Jerry's a fascinating character - was he based on Roddy McDowall?

Clive Barker: I couldn't say... All I could say would be that that was a very smart guess!

Revelations: The interesting thing about Roddy McDowall is that we read that, after he died, he asked for his diaries and personal effects to be locked up for 100 years before they were read. I'm just wondering whether any of it's going to be like Coldheart Canyon when we get to read it!

Clive Barker: Well, I've read a lot of that stuff and I knew Roddy really well and I don't believe Coldheart Canyon would be what it is without Roddy! But I kept Roddy out of the dedication pages, or the thanks, because he passed away and it just didn't feel appropriate to be talking about that when he had been so very passionate about not... he didn't want a memorial service; we were all ready to go to the memorial service, it was canceled the day of... but I would go to his house...

Revelations: How did you come to know him?

Clive Barker: We met at a Fangoria convention!

Revelations: Of all things.

Clive Barker: And he said he loved what I did, and he was very familiar with the books; I obviously loved what he did. I went to his house dozens of times to dinner and met Gore Vidal, Elizabeth Taylor... and so on and so forth, the list is endless. And a lot of the time, I was just the observer, very quiet, I was easily the least important person in the room and I thought it was just important to do my job as an author and just shut the fuck up!

Revelations: And then report back afterwards from wherever it is -"the furthest reaches of our imagination..." - however the quote goes!

Clive Barker: Hopefully so! The fun thing about this book is that it matches the furthest reaches of our imagination with things that we all know are going on all of the time, and I think if the book has a different kind of chance in the marketplace to previous books it's because Hollywood is fascinating to everybody. Because everybody knows that people are having face-lifts and tummy-tucks and ass-tucks and all kinds of other things all the time and here I am just simply saying what people already know is the case. And there's nothing I think I can say, beyond the outrageously fantastical stuff (of which there is obviously a significant amount, but it doesn't, I think, overwhelm the book) there's nothing amongst the factual stuff which is not supported in some way or other by something I have either personally experienced or personally heard - that is to say, none of this came just from books.

Revelations: Right, it resonates as a real story on those levels.

Clive Barker: Thank you! Thank you - that is the most important thing you could say. Thank you, Phil, I appreciate that, because, obviously the fan part of it I know about. I know a lot of people who work in the "body improvement" business and I got hold, through them, or through one person in particular, of some descriptions of protocols for what happens if things go wrong, which were... chilling isn't the word. And there are so many things I could have had happen to Todd which were so much worse than what actually happened to him. You only have to think of Michael Jackson to see a man who took a journey for which there is no return - so that part, I supported all that. I supported all the stuff with fact and information and interviews. And the stuff about the movies themselves - that's my experience. The stuff about Oscar night, y'know, where he's sitting there at home, wishing he wasn't there, at the same time despising every minute of it - that is completely my experience of Oscar night and, having been there as a guest, as it were, that whole thing of fake smiles and... Yeuch!

Revelations: There is some marketing to do around this book. It's almost in a genre of its own; it's another of those Lord of Illusions crossovers. It's an edgy crossover.

Clive Barker: It is a crossover.

Revelations: And what we saw from Lord of Illusions is that if you don't get the crossover marketing right, you lose the audience.

Clive Barker: Yes, but I think the audience in literary terms, the reading audience, is much more willing to accept crossovers than a cinematic audience - it's a smarter audience - and I have greater faith, I will say, in the reading audience than I do in the movie audience. Maybe that's a misplaced faith but, you know, I've given my readers a whole host of very different kinds of books. Just over the last little while I've given people a lot of different kinds of things - Sacrament and Galilee - and each thing that's come along has been very different and in many cases they've been crossovers in a way, or hybrids: the gay novel with the metaphysical adventure novel in the case of Sacrament; the inter-racial war novel going with a strange romance about the Kennedys in Galilee; and I think in this case, this one is perhaps the easiest of the combinations because everybody knows Hollywood is a weird place. And I think that the suspicion that the occult hangs around Hollywood, that Hollywood has always had an unnatural or an unhealthy ... preoccupation with the occult is something I think that people generally know. You think of the Manson business and you look through the pages of Hollywood Babylon and there's plenty of stuff there. It's an interesting place because Hollywood lives in a dream of itself - half believing itself and half not. Half in fear of losing its own grasp on its sanity.

Revelations: And expecting to be rumbled any day now.

Clive Barker: Exactly, exactly. And so what it does, in terms of where the supernatural enters the world, is how easily... the number of people I know who have private tarot card readers or private astrologers or whatever. Why? Because, exactly right, Phil, people expect to be rumbled tomorrow. People are living from day to day, afraid of what tomorrow will bring. Afraid that tomorrow will bring a complete bomb and that their careers will be over. And so you look to do what you can to keep those horrors at bay, the horrors of failure. And some of things you do are supernatural things. You pray to unhealthy gods, you are overly preoccupied with astrology, with the tarot card readings, with the ouija board.... The other thing that people do here, they use physical means as a means to aid their chances in the world. They get little nips and tucks, they get their teeth taken out so that their cheekbones protrude more, all of these various things. They get collagen injections in their lips and that's a particularly naked one right now which just drives me nuts! .

Revelations: So you're not tempted into any of these beauty parlors yourself?

Clive Barker: No, I'm a writer and I'm allowed to get old and grey and wrinkled and crinkly.

Revelations: You 're still too much of the Brit at heart.

CB: I think I am, but I also think it’s just a different feel if you're a writer. I think if you're a writer, the marks of age are part of the proof that you've been in a battle. A battle with deadlines, a battle with your imagination sometimes.

The interviewers thank Fiona Mcintosh at HarperCollins UK and Joe Daley in Los Angeles, whose help is warmly appreciated.

Revelations : "Oh you hope so - you can only hope and pray so."

CB: "Oh I hope so, my love, you don't know how much I hope so."

Revelations : "I think maybe we do!"

CB: "Yes, exactly! I'm writing his death scene, whether they choose to take account of that in the movies is up to them, but I am writing his death scene and, after which I will have no more literary or cinematic dealings with him whatsoever."

Revelations : "Have we got any TV coming from you?"

CB: "Yes we have - in fact, this afternoon I'm going to talk about the Lord of Illusions series, the Harry D'Amour TV series which is going to come from MGM. We have Saint Sinner which is a show I'm doing for the Sci-Fi Channel - it's not based on the comic. "

Revelations : "Oh, it's not?"

CB: "No, I just love that title! We'll probably start shooting that towards the end of this year. We have a script for a movie called Bloody Mary which will be turned into us next week, which is a story which we found, actually, in the pages of a Miami newspaper and just loved, I don't want to tell too much more about that. It's a pretty hard-core horror story. And then Warner Brothers, as you know, are doing Damnation Game."

Revelations : "Yeah, we started seeing some big names attached to that, some very big names."

CB: "So did I, I don't know where they came from -1 assume those names came from Warner Brothers."

Revelations : "They made us worry for the film, and certainly for the story."

CB: "They worried you? They worried me! I think at one point I saw Paul Newman and I saw Sean Connery, who else did you see?"

Revelations : "Certainly those were the two big ones..."

CB: "Yeah, I don't think either of them are very likely, frankly! We have a $45 million movie here!"

Revelations : "It's just not going to happen, is it. We saw Dame Maggie Smith and Kim Basinger also looking for roles in it."

CB: "I don't know where either of those people could fit in the movie, do you?"

Revelations : "No -1 can't see it, Oh, I guess I can see Kim Basinger if she's gone downhill a bit!"

CB: "Right! But it's really hard to see where these things come from. Obviously somebody's given some thought to this - it isn't just names pulled out of a bag."

Revelations : "Yeah, because this cropped up in a few places"

CB: "I completely agree, it was a weird thing. Weird... We still have high hopes for Weaveworld, but, y'know..."

Revelations : "You've always had high hopes for Weaveworld, but y'know..."

CB: "But, y'know!"

Revelations : "We've had that on the site for so long under a title..."

CB: "...that says 'Pending.' "

Revelations : "..it's got the Monty Python quote from The Search For The Holy Grail which says this is in danger of making Ben Hur look like an epic..."

CB: "Yes, exactly - that's exactly right! But we've got lots going on, as you can hear; we will take Thief of Always out... Oh and Ectokid, the comic, has just been sold to Nickelodeon, the movie - which I will produce, so we have Ectokid, Abarat at Disney..."

Revelations : "What's happened since Peter Schneider's gone? Was he the great champion for that?"

CB: "Which is regrettable - he was a good guy - but there's a lot of good guys there and our... we've had no bad experiences there so far, they've been really super, so I'm cautiously optimistic that it's all going to work out well. And the book I'm incredibly excited about. I am coming within 2 weeks of finishing the book and in a way, the thing it will remind you most of will be Weaveworld, because it has a wild imagination and it has great villains and it has some big ideas floating around in it, you know?"

Revelations : "Is it like Weaveworld would have been if you'd kept Cal as a little boy?"

CB: "Yes! Well, Candy is 15 just going on 16, so she's not little little... There's 300 [Abarat]paintings here, man."

Revelations : "Are they not in Disney's vault yet?"

CB: "No, I'm saving them for you! I guarantee, and I'm not joking about this, I guarantee that when you come in and you see these pictures your view of who I am will change instantly - there will be one big change where you will go, 'Oh. My. God...!'"