Thinking of fan films.

Most folks would probably guess that fan films, fan fiction, and the like are a recent phenomenon, traceable to the rise of Pop Culture as the most important Kind of culture (if there's a Robert Wilson or Philip Glass fan club, I don't want to know about it). Certainly the art of the Fan has reached its high-water mark, what with all the geeks like myself doing films, other geeks doing short stories, and so on... all creating art based on someone else's characters. Purely a twentieth and twenty-first century thing, yeah?

Well, no. I just finished reading Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, by William S. Baring-Gould. It purports to be a biography of "the world's first consulting detective," and it could be called a whimsical exercise in textual analysis, done as though the characters within actually existed, but let's not mince words: it's fan fiction.

Not that I think Sherlock Holmes was the first character to inspire fan fiction, as such. It's probably not accurate to call it fan fiction, but even Don Quixote inspired an "illegal" second part, which in fact drove Cervantes to write what became the true second part. (Cervantes himself may have inspired those who say Holmes was a real historical figure, since he always wrote as though Don Quixote was real.) Still, it's amazing how much STUFF Sherlock Holmes has inspired. K and I are unabashed fans. And, of course, there's my own tiny addition to the Canon (or, as I like to think of it, Conan's Canon).

The point being? When I made that film which has been called "a true laugh-out-loud piece," among other things, I wasn't just a geek. I was a geek partaking in a Grand Literary Tradition.

By the way, if you're a Holmes fan and you can get a hold of the Baring-Gould book mentioned above, don't hesitate. It's out of print, but I found a first-edition copy at a local used book store (a convenient birthday present for K). You may disagree with much of his chronology, but his inventions are quite entertaining.