A Fortean known for his post-Fortean work—to such an extent his early life has been obscured, or, as Fort would say, damned.
Milton Subotsky was born 17 September 1921 in Brooklyn, NY, to a family of immigrant Jews. His exact parentage is difficult to pin down because, as it happens, two people with versions of that name were born in Brooklyn around the same time. (Did the Ambrose-Collector also deposit Milton Subotskys?) Most likely, he was born to Abraham and Celia, immigrants from an area on the shifting boundaries between Poland and Russia. Abraham, according to the 1940 census, was an operator of some time. According to the same census, Milton had an older brother—Jack or Jacob—and a grandmother. (Less likely, he was born to Louis and Rose Subodky [sic]). Biographical sources have him graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art with a degree in engineering. He may have started out at P.S. 52 in Brooklyn.
Subotsky would go into movie-making, of course—that’s what everyone knows about him—and supposedly he started with television in 1938—although, again, this is from a biographical source and I can find no corroboration. He served during World War II in the Army Signal Corps where, other sources have it, he worked on writing and editing technical videos. (The military would provide a boost to other creative Forteans, notably John Keel.) Subotsky reported that he spent 42 months at Ft. Dix, in New Jersey. Army records have him enlisting 2 June 1943 and released 29 March 1946, which is a little shorter than 42 months.
After the war, he would become more deeply involved in making television and movies. In 1946, he copyrighted a screen play, “John Paul Jones.” The following year, he was working with Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario who had turned to column-writing. A September column was written by Subotsky, poking gentle fun at the Veteran’s Administration. Also in the late 1940s, Subotsky worked for the television show “Lights Out.” By 1950, he was president of his own company, Olio Video television, based in Brooklyn. Later, Harvey Cort would join as president and Subotsky would write and produce a series of shorts called “Junior Science” which eventually went on the air in 1953, after some hustling by Cort to sell the fifteen-minute programs. The management of Olio seemed to presage some of Subotsky’s later, more well-known working relationships, although in this case the show was a realistic look at science, meant to engage children with simple experiments that they could do at home.
Milton Subotsky was born 17 September 1921 in Brooklyn, NY, to a family of immigrant Jews. His exact parentage is difficult to pin down because, as it happens, two people with versions of that name were born in Brooklyn around the same time. (Did the Ambrose-Collector also deposit Milton Subotskys?) Most likely, he was born to Abraham and Celia, immigrants from an area on the shifting boundaries between Poland and Russia. Abraham, according to the 1940 census, was an operator of some time. According to the same census, Milton had an older brother—Jack or Jacob—and a grandmother. (Less likely, he was born to Louis and Rose Subodky [sic]). Biographical sources have him graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art with a degree in engineering. He may have started out at P.S. 52 in Brooklyn.
Subotsky would go into movie-making, of course—that’s what everyone knows about him—and supposedly he started with television in 1938—although, again, this is from a biographical source and I can find no corroboration. He served during World War II in the Army Signal Corps where, other sources have it, he worked on writing and editing technical videos. (The military would provide a boost to other creative Forteans, notably John Keel.) Subotsky reported that he spent 42 months at Ft. Dix, in New Jersey. Army records have him enlisting 2 June 1943 and released 29 March 1946, which is a little shorter than 42 months.
After the war, he would become more deeply involved in making television and movies. In 1946, he copyrighted a screen play, “John Paul Jones.” The following year, he was working with Billy Rose, the Broadway impresario who had turned to column-writing. A September column was written by Subotsky, poking gentle fun at the Veteran’s Administration. Also in the late 1940s, Subotsky worked for the television show “Lights Out.” By 1950, he was president of his own company, Olio Video television, based in Brooklyn. Later, Harvey Cort would join as president and Subotsky would write and produce a series of shorts called “Junior Science” which eventually went on the air in 1953, after some hustling by Cort to sell the fifteen-minute programs. The management of Olio seemed to presage some of Subotsky’s later, more well-known working relationships, although in this case the show was a realistic look at science, meant to engage children with simple experiments that they could do at home.
Later in the decade, Subotsky teamed up with another New York son of Jewish immigrants, Max J. Rosenberg. In 1956, they produced the musical film “Rock, Rock, Rock.” Subotsky wrote the original songs for the film. Their working relationship continued into the 1960s, when they formed Amicus Productions, in 1962. That company was based on London, and made Rosenberg and Subotsky cult figures in movie history. They tapped into generous government grants—that were supposed to stimulate a sluggish post-War economy and restore Britain’s culture—to produce a series of cheap supernatural and horror films. The company was a productive source of low-budget films into the 1970s, when the partnership fell apart.
While in England, Subotsky married Fiona McCarthy, much his junior, and had at least one child. Fiona’s mother was a poet and a doctor, and she went into psychiatry. Subostky practiced new filming techniques on his baby, inventing a form of 3-D filming that used sunglasses with one lens removed—on the theory it would take light longer to reached the shaded eye, and as long as the action did not stop, and moved in the same direction. Supposedly, Fiona’s psychiatric interests found their way into the 1971 film “I, Monster,” an update of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. After the break up of Amicus—an unamicable break up, as it happened— Subotsky went on to have a hand in a number of other films, especially those based on the work of Stephen King. He died in 1991.
Friends and acquaintances remember Subotsky as sweet but nerdish. He was a science fiction fan from early on, and collected horror comics in the 1950s. He read the kind of scary stories featured in Weird Tales, and a number of his films were based on the genre, especially short stories by Robert Bloch, most famous for the story that became Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a Fortean himself, at least for a time. Amicus’s films were marked by being compilations—portmanteau films, is the term of art—loosely held together by a narrator or setting, which would seem rooted both in 1950s’ era E.C. Comics—with its tales of the cryptkeeper—but the traditions of weird tales more generally, which tended to be short stories though the early part of the 20th century. (That would change with Stephen King.) These interests put him squarely in the science fiction and weird tale camp of Forteans: not so interested in reforming science, finding transcendence, or critiquing society—although those too may have motivated him, and the last certainly did—but (also) finding in Fort some of the same thrills one received from a scary story—the wonder, the awe.
How Subotsky came to Forteanism is not clear. Already in 1944 he was listed as a member. Likely, he had come to Fort as many science fiction fans had, through Astounding’s serialization of Lo! in 1938—when Subotsky was 17—perhaps, or the frequent mentions of him in other science fiction magazines. Maybe he had been drawn in by Thayer’s republication of Fort’s books in 1941, which received a fair amount of press. It is clear that Subotsky had been reading Thayer’s output for a while by the time he first made his appearance in the pages of Doubt. Subotsky sent Thayer a copy of Jay J. M. Scandrett’s pamphlet What Goes On, which, politically and socially, was right in Thayer’s wheelhouse. Sharing the pamphlet suggested that Subotsky, too, might have been interested in left-libertarianism and anarchic thought—not surprising, given that he was a Jew and those traditions stood against the growth of Fascism.
Subotsky appeared twice more in the pages of Doubt—but that was not the extent of his Fortean activities. He was among those drawn to the Society in the 1940s who continued his association deep into the 1950s, and while his interest in weird tales pointed toward an appreciation of Forteanism as science fiction, his submissions also pointed toward an appreciation of Forteanism as social critique. His third submission, from Doubt 50 (Nov. 1955) was about the Olean NY Board of Education voting to recognize golf as a sport and hire a coach even as it cut the budget for books: more fodder for Thayer’s contention that the schools were purposefully producing dolts, all the better to keep the powerful in power.
His second contribution is more interesting in terms of Fortean history. In light of the atomic bombs used to end World War II, Thayer staked out a position that there was no such animal: atoms were entirely mental constructs, and there were many ideas about them, so an atom bomb could not exist. That didn’t mean he didn’t think there was some deadly explosion in Japan—just that it was as described in the press. He called the explosion a ‘semantic bomb.’ At the same time, though, Thayer expressed worry about radioactive fall out—without ever really resolving the contradictions in his stance—and a clipping by Subotsky pushed him toward this second point—“We had resolved not to give their semantic bomb another line of free publicity, but this bit from the Motion Picture Herald, 11-10-45 old style, sent in by MFS Subotsky, is too good to pass up.”
The story was a follow up on a report that cardboard had fogged film—because the cardboard was radioactive. Now researchers had determined that the radioactivity came from straw in Illinois. Fallout came down with the rain and was incorporated into the plants. Thayer was not so sure of the story—it seemed too extemporaneous for him, the active ingredients of the bomb not being smashed, carried high into the altitude, blown east by the winds, and then carried down. When the journalist concluded, “If this keeps up, it won’t be only the film that’s fogged,” Thayer took it to mean that people’s minds were being fogged by scientists and their speculative stories. Later, he would come to think of radioactive fall out as more sinister.
But Subotsky’s contributions to Forteanism went beyond the clippings he sent in to the Society. His films were not specifically Fortean—no falling frogs—but their sensibility—the weirdness—was akin to the sensibility of some Forteans. Evidence of this can be seen, for example, in Subotsky approaching the Fortean science fiction writer—and head of the Fortean Society in England—Eric Frank Russell to adapt a book to the screen. Subotsky kept this sentiment alive in popular culture with his films, giving them a gravity that was missing in his direct competition: the other British horror film production company of the time was Hammer Films, which made more campy cinema. Subotsky took his horror seriously, even if he allowed humorous moments in the movies.
The most direct Subotsky (probably) had on the spread of Forteanism came in 1947. At the time, he was on Billy Rose’s staff, and also a member of the Society. It is most likely that Subotsky introduced Rose to Fort’s books. On 23 December, Rose mentioned Fort in his column, which was syndicated nationwide:
“After reading about the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London, I’m thinking of joining the Fortean Society. This is an organization dedicated to the snicker and the sneer. Its members maintain that it rains frogs; that interplanetary cargo ships whiz through space and sprinkle the earth with three-legged midgets; that 1,000-foot monsters play tic-tac-toe on our ocean beds, and that people occasionally burst into flame for no reason at all.
Am I talking about a nutsy-dopey-crazy outfit? Hardly. Its charter members include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Dreiser, Havelock Ellis, Clarence Darrow, Ben Hecht and Alexander Woollcott. It was forme din 1931 and novelist Tiffany Thayer has been its president since it started. It publishes a monthly magazine called Doubt. Its symbol is a big question mark. The fraternal salute of the members is five fingers in front of the nose.
This society of myth-makers was formed to popularize the teachings of an intellectual spit-ball artist named Charles Fort. Fort, who died in 1932, devoted most of his 68 years to poking holes in popular beliefs. He insisted that the brain cells were entitled to a New Look each year. ‘I can conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘that is more than the proper thing to wear for awhile.’
Charles Fort wrote four books—‘The Book of the Damned,’ ‘New Lands,’ Lo!,’ and ‘Wild Talents.’ Theodore Dreiser thought Fort ‘the most fascinating literary figure since Poe.’ Ben Hecht called him ‘the Apostle of the Exception,’ and ‘the Jocular Priest of the Improbable.’ He commended the writings of this dogma dynamiter for their ‘onslaught on the accumulated lunacies of fifty centuries.’
Membership in the Fortean Society is open to all. On its roster you will find Democrats, poets, Republicans, astrologers, chiropractors and FBI agents. It fronts for lost and unpopular causes, adherents of the flat-earth theory, anti-vaccinationists, and people who believe it snows upside down. The Fortean Society rates Einstein’s Law of Relativity with the Volstead Act.
Each year the society confers an award on ‘the individual who most effectively assails the currently ascendant dogmas.’ The award is a small replica of a famous fountain which stands in a square in Brussels and represents the Fortean attitude toward the world. The recipients have included such tradition ticklers as H.G. wells, Carl Van Doren, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.
The society occasionally distributes books to elevate the mass mind. The one I’m buying myself for Christmas is entitled, ‘Rabelais for Children.’
Now, why should the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London lead me to join a society dedicated to the exception, rather than the rule? Very simple. If I’m going to go down the drain, I may as well go down laughing. In 1945 the clear thinkers finished killing 30,000,000 people. If that’s all our clear thinkers can show me, I might as well join up with the loonies. At least their jokes are better.
I’m sending in my application to Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York City. I don’t know where the society holds its meetings. My guess would be the top branches of a tree in Central Park. But wherever it meets, I hope to be there the next time the members convene.
It’s a chinch the chit-chat will be one a higher plane than [Tehran], Yalta and Potsdam.”
While in England, Subotsky married Fiona McCarthy, much his junior, and had at least one child. Fiona’s mother was a poet and a doctor, and she went into psychiatry. Subostky practiced new filming techniques on his baby, inventing a form of 3-D filming that used sunglasses with one lens removed—on the theory it would take light longer to reached the shaded eye, and as long as the action did not stop, and moved in the same direction. Supposedly, Fiona’s psychiatric interests found their way into the 1971 film “I, Monster,” an update of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde. After the break up of Amicus—an unamicable break up, as it happened— Subotsky went on to have a hand in a number of other films, especially those based on the work of Stephen King. He died in 1991.
Friends and acquaintances remember Subotsky as sweet but nerdish. He was a science fiction fan from early on, and collected horror comics in the 1950s. He read the kind of scary stories featured in Weird Tales, and a number of his films were based on the genre, especially short stories by Robert Bloch, most famous for the story that became Hitchcock’s Psycho, and a Fortean himself, at least for a time. Amicus’s films were marked by being compilations—portmanteau films, is the term of art—loosely held together by a narrator or setting, which would seem rooted both in 1950s’ era E.C. Comics—with its tales of the cryptkeeper—but the traditions of weird tales more generally, which tended to be short stories though the early part of the 20th century. (That would change with Stephen King.) These interests put him squarely in the science fiction and weird tale camp of Forteans: not so interested in reforming science, finding transcendence, or critiquing society—although those too may have motivated him, and the last certainly did—but (also) finding in Fort some of the same thrills one received from a scary story—the wonder, the awe.
How Subotsky came to Forteanism is not clear. Already in 1944 he was listed as a member. Likely, he had come to Fort as many science fiction fans had, through Astounding’s serialization of Lo! in 1938—when Subotsky was 17—perhaps, or the frequent mentions of him in other science fiction magazines. Maybe he had been drawn in by Thayer’s republication of Fort’s books in 1941, which received a fair amount of press. It is clear that Subotsky had been reading Thayer’s output for a while by the time he first made his appearance in the pages of Doubt. Subotsky sent Thayer a copy of Jay J. M. Scandrett’s pamphlet What Goes On, which, politically and socially, was right in Thayer’s wheelhouse. Sharing the pamphlet suggested that Subotsky, too, might have been interested in left-libertarianism and anarchic thought—not surprising, given that he was a Jew and those traditions stood against the growth of Fascism.
Subotsky appeared twice more in the pages of Doubt—but that was not the extent of his Fortean activities. He was among those drawn to the Society in the 1940s who continued his association deep into the 1950s, and while his interest in weird tales pointed toward an appreciation of Forteanism as science fiction, his submissions also pointed toward an appreciation of Forteanism as social critique. His third submission, from Doubt 50 (Nov. 1955) was about the Olean NY Board of Education voting to recognize golf as a sport and hire a coach even as it cut the budget for books: more fodder for Thayer’s contention that the schools were purposefully producing dolts, all the better to keep the powerful in power.
His second contribution is more interesting in terms of Fortean history. In light of the atomic bombs used to end World War II, Thayer staked out a position that there was no such animal: atoms were entirely mental constructs, and there were many ideas about them, so an atom bomb could not exist. That didn’t mean he didn’t think there was some deadly explosion in Japan—just that it was as described in the press. He called the explosion a ‘semantic bomb.’ At the same time, though, Thayer expressed worry about radioactive fall out—without ever really resolving the contradictions in his stance—and a clipping by Subotsky pushed him toward this second point—“We had resolved not to give their semantic bomb another line of free publicity, but this bit from the Motion Picture Herald, 11-10-45 old style, sent in by MFS Subotsky, is too good to pass up.”
The story was a follow up on a report that cardboard had fogged film—because the cardboard was radioactive. Now researchers had determined that the radioactivity came from straw in Illinois. Fallout came down with the rain and was incorporated into the plants. Thayer was not so sure of the story—it seemed too extemporaneous for him, the active ingredients of the bomb not being smashed, carried high into the altitude, blown east by the winds, and then carried down. When the journalist concluded, “If this keeps up, it won’t be only the film that’s fogged,” Thayer took it to mean that people’s minds were being fogged by scientists and their speculative stories. Later, he would come to think of radioactive fall out as more sinister.
But Subotsky’s contributions to Forteanism went beyond the clippings he sent in to the Society. His films were not specifically Fortean—no falling frogs—but their sensibility—the weirdness—was akin to the sensibility of some Forteans. Evidence of this can be seen, for example, in Subotsky approaching the Fortean science fiction writer—and head of the Fortean Society in England—Eric Frank Russell to adapt a book to the screen. Subotsky kept this sentiment alive in popular culture with his films, giving them a gravity that was missing in his direct competition: the other British horror film production company of the time was Hammer Films, which made more campy cinema. Subotsky took his horror seriously, even if he allowed humorous moments in the movies.
The most direct Subotsky (probably) had on the spread of Forteanism came in 1947. At the time, he was on Billy Rose’s staff, and also a member of the Society. It is most likely that Subotsky introduced Rose to Fort’s books. On 23 December, Rose mentioned Fort in his column, which was syndicated nationwide:
“After reading about the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London, I’m thinking of joining the Fortean Society. This is an organization dedicated to the snicker and the sneer. Its members maintain that it rains frogs; that interplanetary cargo ships whiz through space and sprinkle the earth with three-legged midgets; that 1,000-foot monsters play tic-tac-toe on our ocean beds, and that people occasionally burst into flame for no reason at all.
Am I talking about a nutsy-dopey-crazy outfit? Hardly. Its charter members include Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theodore Dreiser, Havelock Ellis, Clarence Darrow, Ben Hecht and Alexander Woollcott. It was forme din 1931 and novelist Tiffany Thayer has been its president since it started. It publishes a monthly magazine called Doubt. Its symbol is a big question mark. The fraternal salute of the members is five fingers in front of the nose.
This society of myth-makers was formed to popularize the teachings of an intellectual spit-ball artist named Charles Fort. Fort, who died in 1932, devoted most of his 68 years to poking holes in popular beliefs. He insisted that the brain cells were entitled to a New Look each year. ‘I can conceive of nothing in religion, science or philosophy,’ he wrote, ‘that is more than the proper thing to wear for awhile.’
Charles Fort wrote four books—‘The Book of the Damned,’ ‘New Lands,’ Lo!,’ and ‘Wild Talents.’ Theodore Dreiser thought Fort ‘the most fascinating literary figure since Poe.’ Ben Hecht called him ‘the Apostle of the Exception,’ and ‘the Jocular Priest of the Improbable.’ He commended the writings of this dogma dynamiter for their ‘onslaught on the accumulated lunacies of fifty centuries.’
Membership in the Fortean Society is open to all. On its roster you will find Democrats, poets, Republicans, astrologers, chiropractors and FBI agents. It fronts for lost and unpopular causes, adherents of the flat-earth theory, anti-vaccinationists, and people who believe it snows upside down. The Fortean Society rates Einstein’s Law of Relativity with the Volstead Act.
Each year the society confers an award on ‘the individual who most effectively assails the currently ascendant dogmas.’ The award is a small replica of a famous fountain which stands in a square in Brussels and represents the Fortean attitude toward the world. The recipients have included such tradition ticklers as H.G. wells, Carl Van Doren, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.
The society occasionally distributes books to elevate the mass mind. The one I’m buying myself for Christmas is entitled, ‘Rabelais for Children.’
Now, why should the break-up of the Big Four Conference in London lead me to join a society dedicated to the exception, rather than the rule? Very simple. If I’m going to go down the drain, I may as well go down laughing. In 1945 the clear thinkers finished killing 30,000,000 people. If that’s all our clear thinkers can show me, I might as well join up with the loonies. At least their jokes are better.
I’m sending in my application to Box 192, Grand Central Annex, New York City. I don’t know where the society holds its meetings. My guess would be the top branches of a tree in Central Park. But wherever it meets, I hope to be there the next time the members convene.
It’s a chinch the chit-chat will be one a higher plane than [Tehran], Yalta and Potsdam.”
