Affectionately known as 4E, 4SJ, Dr Ackula, and Forry, Forrest J Ackerman was the ultimate science fiction and horror fan. He gathered a collection of 300,000 movie photos, posters, original props, masks, books, magazines, and paintings that filled a 17-room mans­ion and three-car garage (“that you couldn’t fit a toothpick in”). Fellow fan Bjo Trimble once found a stack of Thrilling Wonder magazines in Forry’s fridge – between a box of chocolate éclairs and a quart of milk that had gone sour!

Many of the rare original movie props Forry owned had fortean, crypto­zoological or UFO connect­ions. They included Martian war-machine models from George Pal’s The War Of The Worlds, the foot of the Creature From the Black Lagoon, model submarines from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Atlantis The Lost Continent, original dinosaur models from the 1933 King Kong, a piranha from Piranha, and an alien head from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent classic Metropolis was Forry’s favourite film – he had seen it nearly 100 times – and he had a life-size recreat­ion of the Maria robotrix spec­ially made (he would surely have acquired the original if only it hadn’t been destroyed during the bombing of Berlin in WWII).

Many would covet such an amazing collection for themselves, but every weekend that he was in town Forry opened it, and his home, to visitors from around the world. Tens of thousands of people from astronauts to street cleaners visited over the decades.

In 2002, facing large medical bills, Forry was forced to sell off much of his collection and move into a smaller mini-Ackermansion. Following his death, the remaining prize items are being auctioned, starting this April in the Profiles in History’s 36th auction of Hollywood memorabilia (see www.profilesinhistory.com).

But Forry was much more than the world’s ultimate collector. He started the tradition of the science fiction convention masquerade when he wore a futuristic costume at the first WorldCon (World Science Fiction Convention) held in New York in 1939. In 1954, he coined the term sci-fi (copied from hi-fi), never guessing it would become a derogatory nickname for the genre he loved. He wrote the world’s shortest SF story (entitled “Cosmic Report Card: Earth” it consisted of a single letter: F). He also named the sexy character Vampirella and wrote her origin story. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Forry was also a proponent of nudism and a fluent speaker of Esperanto. He was also the literary agent for many writers, including AE Van Vogt and Ray Bradbury.

In addition to writing and editing numerous books, Forry wrote and edited (1958–83) 190 issues of the influential, pun-filled Famous Monsters Of Filmland, the magazine which inspired directors Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, and Jon Landis. The young Stephen King’s first story was published in an early issue.

Forry made cameo appearances in more than 50 horror and sci-fi films: he was the Earth president in Amazon Women On The Moon, a fidgety juror in Kentucky Fried Movie, a judge in Nudist Colony of the Dead, was told off by bookshop owner Dick Miller in The Howling, and even sat behind Michael Jackson and his girlfriend in the cinema scene at the beginning of the “Thriller” music video.

In 1991, when he was guest of honour at the New Zealand National Science Fiction convent­ion, I introduced Forry to director Peter Jackson, who was working on his gory horror-comedy Braindead. Scenes with Forry were shot at Well­ington zoo and seamlessly edited into the footage of the Sumatran rat monkey attack filmed a year later during the main shoot. (Forry played a photographer gleefully taking pictures.)

Forry’s persona – and generosity – is illustrated by his bringing a suitcase full of free badges and key rings to hand out; he also hand-washed his socks to save the convention organisers money on the hotel laundry charges!

A dozen fans saw Forry off from Auckland airport for his return trip. When the woman attendant comm­ented on the large number of people, Forry majestically swept an arm at us and laconically remarked, “They’re all my illegitimate children”, grinning his trademark Cheshire Cat smile.
And, in a way, we really were all Forry’s children.

Forrest James Ackerman, collector/writer/editor/literary agent/actor, born Los Angeles 24 Nov 1916; died Los Angeles 4 Dec 2008, aged 92. (He survived his wife, Wendayne, née Wahrman, who passed away in 1990 after a year of ill health as a result of being mugged in Italy).

Additional notes
Ackerman, the son of a statistic­ian for an oil company, saw his first science fiction film in 1922: One Glorious Day, the story of a disembodied spirit that takes over the soul of a tired professor, played by Will Rogers. During World War II, he edited an army newspaper at Fort MacArthur, near Los Angeles, and afterwards started a literary agency that eventually represented, by his count, 200 writers, including (besides Van Vogt and Bradbury) HP Lovecraft, Hugo Gernsback, Isaac Asimov, and L Ron Hubbard. At Ackerman’s induction into the Horror Hall of Fame in 1990, the actor Robert Englund (aka the serial killer Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street films) introduced him as “the Hugh Hefner of Horror”.

The exhibits in the Ackermansion (in “Horrorwood, Karloffornia”) included a monocle worn by Fritz Lang and the ring worn by Bela Lugosi playing Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). A prop casket from a Franken­stein film served as a coffin table and the pterodactyl from King Kong hung from a ceiling. He wrote soft porn and bad pulp under many pseudonyms; calling himself Laurajean Ermayne, he produced stories for an under-the-counter lesbian magazine called Vice Versa.

His middle initial J always appeared without a full stop, which inspired Homer Simpson’s creators; Homer’s middle initial J stands for nothing.

Many thanks to Joe Graziano for sending us this link to his video of Forry at a comics convention, talking about seeing Frankenstein in the theatre for the first time and about one of his road trips to visit fans of Famous Monsters of Filmland.