Versions of Alice – Guest Post by DeAnna Knippling

I met DeAnna at a writing workshop on the Oregon Coast a few years ago. We read each other’s short stories for one assignment, and hers was so well done I got all the way to the end before I remembered what I was supposed to be doing and had to start over.

DeAnna recently published Alice’s Adventures in Underland: The Queen of Stilled Hearts, a delightful retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in which Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is a zombie. DeAnna’s love for the classic tale comes through in her story … as does her love of zombies!

DeAnna’s guest post is about different film versions of Alice. I had no idea there were so many, and am looking forward to watching a few. I’m very happy to have DeAnna as my first guest!

You can find out more about DeAnna at Wonderland Press.

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Versions of Alice

The best film version of Alice in Wonderland is not up for argument, and it isn’t Tim Burton’s version.

Johnny Depp may be a handsome, slightly-mad devil, and I really have no issues with the non-canonical plot, but it’s a story for a well-mannered young woman who isn’t sure she wants to be married, not a perfectly bratty little girl who hasn’t the slightest desire to do what she’s told. Alice of Oxford and Wonderland has more in common with Sarah in Labyrinth than she does with the knightly Alice of Tim Burton’s vision.

Walt Disney’s cartoon is charming and iconographic and has more famous comedic actors than you can shake a stick at—but was made in 1951, so most of us don’t remember the actors we’re laughing at, and most of the actors sound perfectly polished and rehearsed.

The 1985 version has the same problems—comic actors, stiff performances, and a main character who looks as though she wanders over to the director after every shot in order to be praised. Even though Carol Channing sings an excellent version of “Jam Tomorrow Jam Yesterday” that spans octaves and does the shimmy shake, I can’t get past the way Alice woodenly raises her arms and throws herself down the rabbit hole, screaming.

The 1933 version tries to be an early The Wizard of Oz, but lacks magic—even if it does have W.C. Fields.

The 1915 silent movie version has a good-girl Alice, poor puppetry, few special effects, and an eerie lack of sound.

There’s a porno version from the 1970s, a trippy black and white version from the 1960s with a soundtrack by Ravi Shankar, a short version from the 1980s that uses sexual symbolism, contemporary remakes, surreal remakes, ballet remakes, remakes in Paris, remakes that run through dives in the North East of England. A version with Peter Sellers; a version starring Kate Beckinsale.

Everyone seems to have their own stamp to put on the story, as though it were something to be stamped upon, rather than told.

No, the best version is Nick Willing’s Alice in Wonderland from 1999, part of a Hallmark Entertainment miniseries that showed on NBC.

Hallmark Entertainment productions included excellent versions of Arabian Nights, Don Quixote, Animal Farm (who else would have made a family-friendly version of George Orwell?), and more. They even produced the Farscape series. Jim Henson’s Creature Shop did the special effects, and laid down some of the tricks that were later used in the Tim Burton version (the enormous head on the Mad Hatter, for example, which became the Red Queen’s enormous head in the Burton version).

The director, Nick Willing, came from Photographing Fairies, an elegant movie about faith and magic, and went on to direct Jason and the Argonauts, Tin Man (based on the Oz books), another Alice version, Alice, in 2009, featuring another grown-up Alice, a version of Peter Pan, a version of the Odyssey.

The main thing, though, is the performances.

Miranda Richardson shrieks “Off with her head!” with such force that the rest of the cast flinches visibly. Hagrid and Norm (Robbie Coltraene and George Wendt) crack up as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Martin Short tapdances through his role as the Hatter, Ben Kingsley does a lot of drugs and keeps a stiff upper lip, and Gene Wilder coos his way through “Beautiful Soup.”

The actors are at the top of their games—as in a lot of the other versions—but it’s the fourteen-year-old actress who plays Alice, Tina Majorino, who brings them all together. She doesn’t just move woodenly through her lines the way most of the child-Alices do, but reacts so charmingly to the other actors that they can’t seem to help stretching just a little bit further to try to make her smile.

In the end, even beyond the fact that I can recognize and appreciate the actors, and that the story is a retelling rather than a stamped version of a director’s artistic version, it’s the way the actors seem to be having fun and trying to amuse an actual, responsive kid that makes the difference for me: you can see them watching Tina Majorino out of the corners of their eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of her delight.

Jasper can't read, but likes Alice nonetheless.
Jasper can’t read, but likes Alice nonetheless.

Caring for your choppers

One of the fun parts about working on a story set in a different time and place is learning how people lived then. For example, a few years ago I wrote a short story about a stagecoach robbery, and I learned that in some coaches strips of leather (called ‘thorough braces’) supported the body of the coach and allowed it to swing, providing a form of shock absorption. I didn’t explicitly mention that in my story, but reading about how this worked helped me to write a more realistic description of riding in the stagecoach.

My most recent educational experience was about teeth. I’d never thought much about dental hygiene in the late 1800s, but now I know quite a bit – and I’m very relieved to have grown up after toothpaste became more commonly used. Apparently most Americans didn’t brush their teeth until after World War II, when soldiers returned from the military with that habit engrained. The first toothbrush patent in the United States was issued in 1857, and the first toothbrush with nylon bristles – Dr. West’s Miracle-Tuft Toothbrush – came out in 1938.

It wasn’t that toothbrushes didn’t exist before then. Here’s a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte’s toothbrush; the bristles were made from horsehair.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s toothbrush, c 1795
Napoleon Bonaparte’s toothbrush, c 1795
Source: Wikipedia

It took a while for people to switch from chewing sticks to bristle toothbrushes. Part of the problem was that it was more difficult to mass-produce things back then. Even though the first mass-produced toothbrush came out in 1780 – made with handles from cow bones, and cow tail hair for the bristles – it wasn’t available everywhere. Plus people were used to the way they’d always done things. Some probably preferred using a dirty cloth with a combination of soot and salt. Which leads us to the topic of toothpaste…

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Ingredients used in toothpastes and dentifrices (toothpowders) of the past included brick dust, cuttlefish, sugar, Borax powder, bicarbonate of soda, chalk, and glycerin. Some of these substances, as you might imagine, were abrasive and/or unsafe. Toothpaste was mass-produced for the first time in 1873, and started being sold in a collapsible tube in 1892.

So … does this mean the characters in my story, which is tentatively set in Leadville, Colorado in the 1880s, had toothbrushes and toothpaste? Possibly, but not certainly. Leadville was a booming town back then, and at one time was in the running against Denver for the capital of Colorado. (If you’re not familiar with Leadville, it’s at an elevation of 10,152 feet, and started as a mining town.) Chances are some people had toothbrushes and some used chewing sticks, or perhaps didn’t bother cleaning their teeth at all. If you had a toothbrush and it broke, you might be out of luck for a while. The main character in the scene I was writing was an actress at one of the many theaters and opera houses Leadville had at the time (yes, I said many – although that’s a topic for another day). She would have wanted to have clean teeth, so she’d have some variant of a toothbrush (in her case, probably one she brought with her when she moved from the east coast), and she’d also have something to rinse out her mouth to make sure her breath smelled pleasant. Here’s a sentence from the first draft:

Stella had rinsed out her mouth with mint and vinegar, but hadn’t been able to remove the lingering taste of whiskey.

And so all my research on dental hygiene has been boiled down to a single sentence …

Rosie and Jasper do not enjoy having their teeth brushed.
Rosie and Jasper do not enjoy having their teeth brushed.

Dog vacation 2016

I’ve finished my last writing class until the anthology workshop in Oregon in February, and am working hard on the current novel. And: I’m on vacation!!! I realize it must seem odd that I’m working on the novel on vacation, but writing is fun for me, so this has been really great.

One of the questions often posed to new writers in classes, books, etc. is some variant of: do you want to be a writer, or do you want to have written? The point is that writing is not always easy. Sometimes the words practically throw themselves on the page; sometimes it’s a brutal slog. For me, I want both. I love writing, and will tough out the slogging because even that is rewarding in a way – but I also love having written because when I’ve finished something I feel a sense of accomplishment.

I have a few writing goals on my vacation, the most important of which is to find a way to look at my writing differently so that I can start being more productive. When my head is in the game, I can write a lot very quickly – but when I’m distracted, or unfocused, or being lazy, etc., I can drag out a project like there’s no tomorrow. Since I only have so much time to write each week, I want to be as efficient and effective as possible. Sure, I’ll have bouts of laziness … but as long as they’re small and temporary, that’s fine. The point is to be so determined to finish a project that I stay focused. I’ve done this many times before, so clearly it’s doable, but I have also lost my focus before. So: this is my biggest goal on vacation.

Well, my biggest goal is to make sure the dogs have a good time 🙂 so I guess figuring out how to improve my focus is number two.

Jasper and Rosie did their biggest hike ever! Nine miles to the summit of Gold Hill in New Mexico - 12,711 feet.
Jasper and Rosie did their biggest hike ever! Nine miles to the summit of Gold Hill in New Mexico – 12,711 feet.