First Blade Runner Dies

Morgan Paull, who played Blade Runner's Holden, has died. Holden is the Blade Runner initially assigned to track down escaped replicants in the film of the same name.

While doing a Voight-Kampf test on new employees at the Tyrell Corporation, Holden interviews Leon (Brion James). Too slow in pulling his own gun, Holden is blasted through the wall by the replicant Leon. He ends up in the hospital on life support. Deckard (Harrison Ford) is called in to replace him.

   

Morgan Paull died Tuesday, July 17, 2012, in Ashland, Oregon, after having been diagnosed with stomach cancer. He was 67.

The actor had previously been a candidate for president of the Screen Actors Guild in 1981, but came in third, with Ed Asner winning the post.

Paull appears in the gripping opening scene of Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, where as a detective he confronts a job applicant to make sure he is not a replicant, or genetically engineered human.

A filmed, but deleted, scene has Deckard visiting Holden in the hospital. At the end of the scene Gaff says "Yes, you idiot" in Japanese.

   

For more on Blade Runner, see also,

Blade Runner: 30 Years of Synchromysticism - Part 1 (Tyrell 2019 + Weyland 2023)
and
Blade Runner: 30 Years of Synchromysticism - Part 2 (Aztec-Mayan Symbolism)

Gemstones Are Forever: Bond, Elrod House, Onassis, Hughes & JFK

What is the most synchromystic, conspiracy-laden James Bond film?

The answer is an obvious one. It happens to be the cinematic expression that revealed Ian Fleming's leaking of the Gemstone Files, in one of the 23 Bond films that have been made through 2012: Diamonds Are Forever (1971).

The visual and design legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright is to be found prominently in this movie. FLW-trained architect John Lautner's Elron House is one of the important filming locations, serving as the Howard Hughes-clone character Willard Whyte's "winter home."

Before learning from FLW in the 1930s, John Lautner's background was in Michigan, and he got his start in building at 12 years old. His family built a rural residence together, a cabin they named Midgaard, "a word from Norse mythology that described the home of mankind, situated between the land of ice and the land of fire."

Considering Lautner's Elrod (Old English for "noble counsel") House was built on client interior designer Arthur Elrod's 23 acre property in Palm Springs, California, in 1968, and the film was released in 1971, the shooting occurred soon after the house was constructed. 

The following three images are from the Elrod House in Diamonds Are Forever. The House is the focus of Bond's meeting with the two female guards – Thumper and Bambi – who are the precursor characters for future acrobatic sci-fi fight sequences (including those seen in Blade Runner and Kill Bill). It is also the location of Bond's release of the "real" Willard Whyte character.

The Internet has many recent photos, including the following, of Lautner's masterpiece, as well as the floor plans, because the Elrod House has been up for sale for a bit under 14 million dollars for a few years.

The Elrod House is a "gem" and thus a metaphor for the entire underlying, less than subtle theme, so apparent in the title of this film, Diamonds Are Forever. But do not fool yourself, these are hardly ordinary gemstones.

A detailed analysis of Diamonds Are Forever is included in David Hatcher Childress' chapter, "James Bond & The Gemstone File" (pages 69-90), contained in Inside the Gemstone File: Howard Hughes, Onassis & JFK by Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress (Kempton, Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999). Here is one short selection from the greater chapter [with a few comments added by me]:

In the filmed story of Diamonds Are Forever, the plot remarkably parallels The Gemstone File years before the Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File was ever circulated. The plot begins in the diamond fields of South Africa, as in Fleming's original book [1956], but soon diverges from the book to bring in elements of The Gemstone File and the Mafia/Las Vegas/Area 51 entanglement.

Bond is assigned to follow a trail of diamonds from South Africa to Amsterdam and then to Las Vegas where he is confronted by the Mafia. In one scene, James Bond sneaks into a secret facility in the Nevada desert outside of Las Vegas. This facility is the location of Mercury, the exit off that interstate highway leading to Area 51, the top secret space facility in south central Nevada rumored to house flying saucers and alien technology. 

 

Once inside the facility, Bond pretends to be a worker in a lab coat and walks into a room where a German engineer is in charge. The man is clearly meant to be Werner von Braun. After witnessing the faking of the Apollo Moon missions, Bond steals the lunar rover and escapes into the desert. Does Diamonds Are Forever mirror the truth about NASA being part of a secret conspiracy? In the movie, the space facility and the Mafia are working together.

The movie, however, turns out to be the story of a kidnapped billionaire named Williard Whyte (played by Jimmy Dean of pork sausage fame), who is held in seclusion by [Ernst Stavro] Blofeld, exactly as [Bruce] Roberts claimed [American billionaire Howard] Hughes [sharing the double initials HH, just like Williard Whyte, WW ~ LC] was held captive by [Greek-born billionaire Aristotle Sokratis] Onassis.
Bond frees the kidnapped Willard Whyte and proceeds, with the help of Tiffany Case (played by Jill St. John), to attack Blofeld at his secret base: an oil platform either off the coast of Texas or California, the movie does not indicate which. [Yes, it does. The secret oil platform is shown off Baja California on a global map of Blofeld's empire, which matches the Onassis reach, btw ~ LC.] Bond destroys the oil platform but Blofeld escapes to reappear briefly in the 1981 film For Your Eyes Only when he is finally dispatched permanently. By this time, Onassis was dead as well.
Indeed, the parallels between Diamonds Are Forever and The Gemstone File are many:
*Willard Whyte is held captive in Las Vegas by Blofeld and the Mafia.
*Howard Hughes is held captive in Las Vegas and elsewhere by Onassis and the Mafia.
*Blofeld owns a casino named Casino Royale in Monte Carlo and has various "doubles."
*Onassis owns a casino named Casino Royale in Monte Carlo and Onassis has various "doubles" concocted by Onassis and Maheu.
*Blofeld owns oil fields and oil platforms. He is protected by foreign countries.
*Onassis owns oil tankers and has an exclusive deal with Saudi Arabia. He is protected by foreign countries such as Greece and Monaco.
*Blofeld owns his own island, high-tech yacht fleet, and private army.
*Onassis owns his own island (Skorpios), has a high-tech yacht fleet (Onassis owned many, many ships), and controlled a private army that allegedly went beyond the Mafia to the Marseille underground and the CIA and FBI.
*Diamonds Are Forever was about the secret NASA base outside of Las Vegas, and the use of diamonds to make a space-based laser system, one that could project holographic images into the sky.
*The Gemstone File is about synthetic rubies and their use by Hughes in laser research and Roberts' later use of these synthetic rubies as "gifts" with an attached "Gemstone Letter" that revealed certain behind-the-scenes activities of Onassis, the Mafia and the CIA to important and wealthy individuals. Las Vegas was the scene of Hughes' kidnapping and imprisonment, a city well known to be owned and run by the Mafia and their overt partners.

As Kenn Thomas and David Hatcher Childress theorize in their book, Inside the Gemstone File, Ian Fleming, a former British intelligence agent, used his books to unfold the secrets that he had discovered about Onassis and others through material that would someday be called the Gemstone File. Considering that several of the Bond books were published long before many of the events were exposed in the dots that have since been connected and then shown in the films, Fleming walked a narrow, dangerous path.

The Gemstone File is a conspiracy theory document attributed to Bruce Porter Roberts. In 1975, "A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File" appeared and is generally attributed to Stephanie Caruana. The "Key" is purportedly a synopsis of Roberts' documents that presents a chronicle of interlocking conspiracies, including claims that world events since the 1950s were shaped by suppressed information, the names of supposed shooters of President John F. Kennedy, and suggested connections between a number of political assassinations which occurred within a relatively short time frame. Many of these show up in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, and thus in the movies that followed.

The Gemstone File proposes that Aristotle Onassis, JFK's father Joseph P. Kennedy, and other prominent figures were involved in various schemes to forward a vast global conspiracy, involving the Mafia and corrupt politicians, brutal oil and drug cartels, rogue military operations, and more. It also posits that early in 1957, Aristotle Onassis had Howard Hughes kidnapped from his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow; that Hughes suffered a massive brain injury during the forcible kidnapping, and that Hughes was subsequently a virtual prisoner of Onassis on his private island Skorpios and injected regularly with morphine, while Onassis took over the operation of Hughes's considerable financial affairs, including airlines and U.S. defense contracting. Post-Fleming author John Gardner would overtly title one of his James Bond books, Scorpius (1988).

Aristotle Onassis and Jacqueline "Jackie" Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

The Gemstone File portrays Onassis as the main force behind the election of John F. Kennedy as President, and subsequently, Kennedy's assassination in 1963. According to the documents, Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy in the JFK assassination plan and was linked to the Central Intelligence Agency, and to Mafia connections in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, with Jimmy Fratianno, Johnny Roselli, and Eugene Brading as the real shooters. The Gemstone papers claim that John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy were involved with the Mafia and Onassis, and when the Kennedy brothers attempted to break away, they were murdered. We know too what happened between Onassis and Jackie O, after the death of JFK. Wild theories and thoughts, perhaps, indeed, but then when connecting dots in conspiracy speculations, when are such not radical, raging, and rough?

"On December 20, 1947, Jacob Rubenstein changed his name to Jack L. Ruby by decree of the 68th Judicial Court of Dallas, Texas. The etymology of the term 'Ruby': (French) rubis; (Spanish) rubi; (Latin) rubinus, carbuncle….The term 'Jack Ruby' was once used by pawnbrokers to indicated a fake ruby. In iconography a ruby or carbuncle symbolizes blood, suffering and death." ~ from King-Kill 33 by James Shelby Downard.

Childress writes further in his Bond analysis: "Ian Fleming [at the age of 56] died of mysterious circumstances in Jamaica on August 12, 1964, of a 'heart attack.' According to Bruce Roberts, the 'sodium morphate' used by Onassis and the Mafia made the victim appear to have died from a massive heart attack….In August of 1964…Fleming was planning to fly from Jamaica to New Jersey to meet with Ivan T. Sanderson, a biologist and former British Intelligence agent. As a zoologist, Sanderson had written a number of books, including one on Bigfoot and Yeti, and appeared frequently on radio shows and even Johnny Carson's Tonight Show."

The late Ivan T. Sanderson (a friend of mine) was a Fortean researcher and author on topics including the Philadelphia Experiment, as well, a subject about which Sanderson appears to have been corresponding with Fleming.

Childress continues, "Fleming never made it to his rendezvous with Sanderson. He died of a sudden heart attack on August 12th, 1964 at his home in Jamaica…[on] the 21st anniversary of The Philadelphia Experiment (August 12, 1943)….Was Ian Fleming killed because he knew too much about such things as the Kennedy assassination, The Philadelphia Experiment and the genesis of UFO technology?"

We perhaps shall never know, but awareness of the world may be revealed, frighteningly, more through watching Diamonds Are Forever than turning in to the nightly news, where the selling of automobiles and drive-through-hamburgers is the goal.

There has been fifty years of James Bond movies. Much is unfolded in fiction worth our attention. The 23rd Bond film, Skyfall, will be released in November 2012.

 

Blade Runner: 30 Years of Synchromysticism - Part 2 (Aztec-Mayan Symbolism)

Blade Runner: 30 Years of Synchromysticism - Part 2 (Aztec-Mayan Symbolism)
by Loren Coleman ©2012

Set in November 2019, director Ridley Scott's Blade Runner celebrates its 30th anniversary on June 25, 2012. Director Scott's immediate previous film was Alien (1979) and his most recent film, of course, is Prometheus (2012). These two films share with Blade Runner a look at our future worlds impacted by genetic engineers. Scott's 1982 American science fiction film is based on a Philip K. Dick short story, and stars Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. For three decades, synchos (see definition at bottom) have found cinematic and real world coincidences, synchronicities, and linkages within this highly textured movie.

Ridley Scott has always maintained that Blade Runner is merely a piece of entertainment, nothing more, yet it is his "most complete and personal film." When Scott met Philip K. Dick during the post-production process, he specifically told Dick that he was not interested in "making an esoteric film."

Despite plans that did not include a journey to the "esoteric," Blade Runner's director seems to have not understood that synchronicity, as Carl Jung might observe, is something that Ridley Scott may have not seen coming his way. It just happens.

Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers. 

~ Carl G. Jung

Over the weekend, I watched the anniversary showings of the original 1982 Blade Runner and the 2007 "Final Cut" of Blade Runner on the Encore cable channel (repeat screenings are scheduled). Considering that the movie was set in 2019, it was intriguing to see how unimaginative the film's producers were only three decades ago about telephones, pay telephones, computers, and such. Everything was shown as retaining their then-contemporary bulkiness. Some innovative science fiction thinking was released in the flying urban vehicles and fashion, most of which has not really happened, and through grand corporate architecture, which has. In general, the film does hold up well, and is filled with synchromystic connections. It is one of my personal favorites.

Aztec Sawfish Rostrum

In Blade Runner, this time, one seemingly small item did jump out at me (I'd never noticed it in previous viewings), as seemingly out-of-place but symbolic. It was found in the apartment of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). What I saw, momentarily, and identified quickly was a large-toothed sawfish (a type of ray, genus Pristis) rostrum (snout) mounted on Deckard's wall, below some glyphs.

I once noticed Fortean researcher, cryptozoologist and author Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973) had been pictured with a sawfish rostrum at his New Jersey's SITU headquarters. Above is Sanderson's conversation/living room area in his so-called "mansion house," with the sawfish rostrum, photos by Richard Grigonis.

When I saw one, decades ago, I obtained it. That sawfish rostrum is now displayed in the International Cryptozoology Museum today (seen in the middle of the midcentury installation, above).

What is a sawfish rostrum doing in Blade Runner? I did a little research, and quickly found a link that may explain its placement.

The most frequently found large animal artifacts interred beneath the center of the Aztec universe were sawfish rostra. Above is pictured a rostrum of the sawfish Pristis pectinata in Offering 58 of the Great Temple, photo courtesy of CNCA-INAH-MEX. Used as tools of sacrifice, these rostra symbolized the blood-spilling swords that fed Cipactli. The ruins of the Aztec Great Temple was discovered in 1978 beneath the central plaza of Mexico City. This pyramid was the center of the Aztec cosmic order and used to sustain the gods. Among the offerings were the sawfish rostra. Among the codices art, there were the stylized sawfish rosta (directly below).

The Aztec-designed sword was made in imitation of the sawfish's rostrum. Matthew T. McDavitt wrote in the Florida Museum of Natural History Ichthyology Department's Shark News (March 2002), on their significance:

In Aztec belief, the world had been founded on the premise of divine sacrifice. The gods had drained all their life-force into creation and no longer had the power to sustain themselves. In a kind of cosmic conservation of energy, the Aztecs believed that the sun could not rise, crops could not grow, and rain would not fall without the regular release of life energy back to their creators. To keep the gods alive, humans were obligated to feed them their blood and hearts, the most potent source of life energy. Although the Aztecs recognized hundreds of gods, these diverse deities were just manifestations of the primary forces of the universe such as sun and earth. The sun was a giver of life and a protector of the Aztec people. The earth however, was considerably more hostile....In reality, sawfish rostra appear commonly in the Aztec codices....In Aztec language, the sawfish rostrum was known as imacuauh "its sword"....Sawfish rostra are most often depicted as symbolic 'swords' in the shield / spear bundles which symbolize warfare in Aztec iconography. There is even a structural similarity between the Aztec glass-edged swords and the sawfishes' toothy appendage.

Tyrell Corporation Buildings/Aztec-Mayan Pyramids

In the Blade Runner, the twin towers of the Tyrell Corporation dominate the landscape. They are pyramids. 

Blade Runner

Aztec

Mayan

The pyramids appear to have been based specifically on Aztec-Mayan temple pyramids, on top of which were made human sacrifices (using sawfish rosta and rostra-modeled swords by the Aztecs). In general, Aztecs, which came after the Mayas, had the simpler top on their pyramids, as did the Tyrell/Blade Runner pyramids. The movie's structures are clearly not Egyptian (below) in nature.

Behind the scenes, we do know that one pyramid model was apparently used for the illusion of two.

The model of Tyrell's pyramid was 9 feet at the base and 2½ feet high. This was a ratio of 1:750. The model ultimately caught fire and melted.

You may have noticed a Tyrell pyramid in a three-part 2009 TV British miniseries, Red Dwarf: Back to Earth. On the right, a very Blade Runner-like pyramid, appears rising out of the landscape of London (visible with Big Ben and the House of Parliament).

One other thing about some Mesoamerican pyramids is worthy of noting. At the equinoxes, the shadow of a Great Feathered Serpent (e.g. Quetzalcoatl) appears on the side of the pyramids, as seen here on the Mayan Chichen-Itza. Snake symbolism, overtly (as in Zhora and her snake) and covertly, is part of Blade Runner.

Blade Runner Insight mentions the Mayan influences and beyond:

Blade Runner's...architecture reveals several different styles. The first few shots of the film show futuristic looking refineries, but then concentrate on a futuristic building that is a pastiche of Mayan architecture. The interiors of the Tyrell Corporation that are shown, however, are designed in an Establishment Gothic look. The police headquarters of the film was designed to echo the Art Deco look of the Chrysler Building, in New York City, and the Bradbury Building, in which the final chase scene of the film is set, is an architectural anomaly, built in 1883 by an architect heavily influenced by a utopian book he had read about the year 2000. Animoid Row, where Deckard goes to discover the origins of the snake scale, seems to resemble a Middle Eastern bazaar. Blade Runner’s presentation of Los Angeles in 2019 as a postmodern architectural entrepot accentuates the ahistorical nature of postmodernist art.

Deckard's Mayan Apartment 

Los Angeles' Ennis-Brown House was used in one drive up scene, and as the studio inspiration for shooting in Rick Deckard's apartment. The style used is called Mayan Revival, and the Mayan influence is undeniably strong in the employment of the glyphs throughout.

Deckard's apartment, drawn by set designer Charles William Breen and built on stage at Warner Brothers, was inspired by the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Ennis-Brown House. Breen actually had plaster casts taken from the textile blocks of the Wright-designed house and used them for the walls in the stage set. 

Governor's Palace at Uxmal

Wright designed the house in 1923, and built it in 1924. He based the relief ornamentation on its textile blocks, inspired by the symmetrical reliefs of Mayan buildings in Uxmal.

The Ennis-Brown House was in shambles before the 2007 restoration began.

Newly restored.

Bradbury Moments

Blade Runner in the Bradbury Building

The Bradbury Building is an architectural landmark in downtown Los Angeles, California. Built in 1893, the building was commissioned by LA mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury and designed by local draftsman George Wyman.

Wyman at first refused the offer, but then supposedly had a ghostly talk with his brother Mark Wyman (who had died six years previously), while using a planchette board with his wife. The ghost's message supposedly said "Mark Wyman / take the / Bradbury building / and you will be / successful" with the word "successful" written upside down. 

After the episode, Wyman took the job, and is now regarded as the architect of the Bradbury Building. Wyman's grandson, the science fiction publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, owned the original document containing the message until his death. Coincidentally, Ackerman was a close friend of science fiction author Ray Bradbury.

Wyman was especially influenced in constructing the building by the 1887 science fiction book Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, which described a utopian society in 2000.

In Bellamy's book, the average commercial building was described as a "vast hall full of light, received not alone from the windows on all sides, but from the dome, the point of which was a hundred feet above ... The walls and ceiling were frescoed in mellow tints, calculated to soften without absorbing the light which flooded the interior." This description greatly influenced the Bradbury Building.

In 1979, William S. Burroughs wrote Blade Runner (a movie), the rights of which Ridley Scott bought for the title of his Blade Runner. In the novel/screenplay, Burroughs and then Scott in 1982 film, both of them use, as Todd Campbell writes,

The Bradbury Building (which serves as home to Toymaker/Replicant designer J.F. Sebastien), and eerily acts as a character in the film...directly across the street in downtown Los Angeles is the Million Dollar Theater which is also featured prominently in the film. And now, we take a detour down "The Street With No Name" or 5th and Main St. downtown Los Angeles to be precise...just around the corner from Blade Runner central we find the curious Rosslyn "Million Dollar" Hotel. Those of you up on your Templar lore will surely be tempted by the significance of Rosslyn (or Rose Line).

"Rose Line," of course, is "red line." 

Campbell shares various intriguing synchromystic links, and continues:

The Rosslyn (built in and owned by the Hart Brothers) was once the largest building in downtown L.A., and had a rather odd feature...it actually consisted of two buildings joined only by an underground tunnel which connected the two.

Adam Parfrey (coauthor of 2012's Ritual America), Bill Grimstad (author of 1978's Weird America) and I were recently talking about Blade Runner. They were reminded of the long ago plans of a LA subway system, and the bygone days of the old red line (humm, "Rosslyn") that was dismantled in 1961. Parfrey points out that the current subway downtown, called the Red Line (one of six color coded lines), is the "indirect descendant of the Pacific Electric Red Car."

In Blade Runner, the frequently used Bradbury Building, located at 3rd and S. Broadway, was a character, indeed, as was the 2nd Street tunnel that appears in the movie too.

One last Bradbury coincidence during this Blade Runner 30th anniversary month. The Red Planet author (The Martian Chronicles), Ray Bradbury, died on June 5, 2012. 

To read Part 1, click here.

Sources on linkages and symbolic connections in Blade Runner are to be found in the hundreds throughout the Internet, and specifically include, but are not limited to such good resources as Gary Willoughby's important article on Deckard's apartment, Blake Runner Insight, an essay at "Everything2," and Todd Campbell's two-parter (here and here).

Glossary ~

Synchromystic = from Late Latin synchronus, from Greek sunkhronos, from syn- + khronos time + Middle English mistik, from Latin mysticus of mysteries, from Greek mystikos, from mystēs initiate

Synchromysticism was first coined by Jake Kotze in August 2006, on his website-at-the-time, Brave New World Order. Kotze defined the concept as: "The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance."

Synchromysticism is defined as the drawing of connections in modern culture (movies, music lyrics, historical happenings and esoteric knowledge); and finding connections that could be coming from the "collective unconscious mind"; and finding connections between occult knowledge (i.e. esoteric fraternities, cults and secret rituals), politics and mass media, according to Wiktionary.

The term synchros (short for synchromystic practitioners) was coined by Loren Coleman at the Twilight Language blog to capture the spirit of the researchers, chroniclers, and bloggers who employ active synchromystic analysis, in the tradition of James Shelby Downard and other twilight language intellectuals (as noted here).

Synchros examine the world through a variety of methodologies, including the following:

Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The word is Greek: ὀνοματολογία [from ὄνομα (ónoma) "name"].

Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of onomastics.

Anthroponomastics or anthroponymy, a branch of onomastics, is the study of anthroponyms (anthropos, "man," + onuma, "name"), the names of human beings.

Etymology is the study of the history of words — when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. In languages with a long detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. The word "etymology" itself comes from the Ancient Athens ἐτυμολογία (etumologia) < ἔτυμον (etumon), “‘true sense’” + -λογία (-logia), “‘study of’”, from λόγος (logos), "speech, oration, discourse, word."

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. ~ Carl G. Jung.