randy_byers: (cap)


Since his death by suicide in June, I've become fascinated by F. Gwynplaine "Froggy" MacIntyre, and I'm not the only one. Froggy was a science fiction writer and fan, a film fan famous (or notorious) for writing reviews of lost films on IMDb, and a man who told many outrageous stories about his life, most of which seem to have been as fantastic as his fake film reviews. For example, he claimed to have been born with webbed fingers (he always wore gloves as an adult) and to have served in an orphan labor camp in Australia. Not only are these claims apparently not true, it appears that nobody knows what his real name or history was. The story of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre begins to resemble that of Christian Gerhartsreiter, who amongst other things claimed to be a scion of the Rockefeller family and married the daughter of somebody I used to work with under those false pretenses.

Last weekend the New York Times ran a long piece about MacIntyre by Corey Kilgannon called "Froggy's Last Story" that contained quite a number of new revelations, including horrifying details of his death and of his abduction and tormenting of a neighbor a number of years ago. This prompted a new thread on the silent film discussion group, Nitrateville, which is where I found the above picture. Plenty of interesting anecdotes there, as in the earlier thread that I linked to in my first post about Froggy, and there's also a link to another interesting story about Froggy by Thomas Gladysz on Open Salon. Meanwhile, I mentioned Froggy's story to Scots film critic and director, David Cairns, on his film blog, Shadowplay, and he said that he thought FGM might be a worthy subject for a documentary. He followed up yesterday with a post about an e-mail exchange he had with Froggy, and the comments include a link to further remembrances collected by Corey Kilgannon on the New York Times blog, some of which seem to get us closer to who Froggy really was.

His charred remains were still unclaimed in a NYC morgue as of last weekend, although the NYTimes article indicated that a relative had finally been tracked down. Further revelations to come, I don't doubt. The story continues to fascinate. Froggy's identity seems to have been his greatest work of fiction.
randy_byers: (2009-05-10)
I was more than a little bit startled when news of F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre's recent suicide arrived from fannish quarters and it turned out that he was a science fiction writer and fan who was well-known as "Froggy" to quite a number of my friends and acquaintances in the SF community. I only knew of him as this strange character who wrote long hoax reviews of lost silent films on IMDb, much to the irritation of fans of silent film. Because of the sorrow with which his death was received in the SF community, I am hesitant to share this occasionally harsh thread about his death and life from the silent movie discussion group NitrateVille, and yet it's a fascinating discussion from a different perspective. Putting the link on my LJ rather than on one of the fannish lists also seems safer, because I didn't see much discussion of his death on LJ.

One thing that strikes me once again from reading that thread is how like SF fans silent movie fans are in the way that their obsessions can make them sometimes humorless and unforgiving. I guess nobody likes to be made a monkey of. But I'm also struck by how peevish and obsessive MacIntyre was in playing out his (very elaborate, very fannish) hoax. It's playful and peevish at the same time, and that seems like an intimately familiar combination of traits. The more I read about him, the more layers there seem to be to this particular onion. How many of those layers are deception or delusion?

Profile

randy_byers: (Default)
randy_byers

September 2017

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10 111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 13th, 2025 05:15 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios