I saw RealityChuck mentioned his death last month, but I’ll post this here.
If you’ve ever researched obscure movies on IMDb, you might have come across the name F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre as a reviewer. How many of these movies he actually saw is a mystery, much like the man himself. For instance, although the review is no longer there, he had posted a review for years for the movie *Fall of a Nation (1916), and mentioned that a copy of it was in some university library in Virginia. I wish I had copied his message years ago when I read it. I actually had some correspondence with him based on one obscurata that I had seen (which contradicted some of the stuff in his review), and he pretty much admitted that his review had been based on a press kit.
*Sequel in name only to “Birth of a Nation” by the same writer. It’s actually a futuristic, and has nothing to do with the Civil War or the aftermath.
Fascinating story. Thanks for sharing it.
I read that story on the Times’ website when it happened, and dug back through the Metropolis reviews at IMDB when it was announced that the restored version with added footage was being re-released, but other than that I’d never heard of the guy. Eccentric fellow to the end.
His specialty was reviewing obscure movies, often movies that have been considered lost for 30 years or more. So, if you went looking to IMDb for info on something obscure, chances were you would find that he had reviewed it. I had always wondered how we got access to all these lost or permanently vaulted movies, and later it became a little clearer: He just made them up. In any case, his reviews, those that remain, are often entertaining reads.
Well, I’d known Froggy both in person and online for quite a few years and was on sff.net when he posted his “suicide note” there – as well as his angry reply when someone dared to care about him.
I liked him – he was always clever and entertaining. My last actual conversation with him was about identifying a story he was trying to recall. He was a well-liked member of the sff.net community (which in a large part is made up of pro SF writers).
The thing that were most bothersome was his “note.” He put up a message saying “I am just going outside and I may be some time” and talking about a trip to visit Australia. Someone identified the quote (the last words of Lawrence Oates of the Scott expedition just before he went out into the snow to die) and called the police. The next day, Froggy posted an angry note about how someone meddled in his life and upset the “housesitter” who was in his apartment. Most upsetting is that he basically said, “by calling the police, you’re responsible for what happens next.”
The next day, he was dead and the suspicion was that the housesitter was Froggy himself. The message putting the blame on the person who called the cops appalled a lot of people.
People were also upset that he set fire to his apartment, which could have killed the other tenants.
After the NY Times article, sff.net had a series of postings from Froggy’s brother, who billed himself as “P Toad Macintyre.” There was some skepticism about this, but he produced some proof to other members, and he was the one who eventually identified the body. His post can be found here.. He also thanked the person who called the police for making the attempt.
It’s a very sad ending.
While working as a slush pile reader at Terminus Publishing, I had the pleasure to read the submitted manuscript The Lesbian Man by MacIntyre. It’s a post apocalyptic tale in which a wandering man finds a place where the men are unintelligent brutes called Crogs but the women are normal humans. He ends up a slave to a woman who disguises him as a dog. It was oddly compelling, not unlike an Ed Wood film. Unfortunately, I never got to finish it.
Interesting that the post by FGM’s anonymous brother almost sounds as though it could have been written by Froggy himself.