William Horberg

Happy Valentine's Day

My sweetheart and I are going on a rare night out to see a live comedy show. 

I'm taking my cue from Michael Caine in "Alfie" who memorably said: "Get a bird laughing and you're half way there."

Have a great day!

william

Joe Bonomo

Charles Atlas was more of a household name, but Joe Bonomo was my favorite of the 20th century physical fitness, life guru types. In many ways they were ahead of their time, and pre-saged the mainstreaming of our obsession with self. 

Self-improvement. Self-achievement. This guy lived the talk. 

The son of a Coney Island salt-water taffy maker, he won a "Modern Apollo" contest at a young age with his physique, and parlayed that into a career as a movie stuntman and stongman, and later a publisher of a series of How To books. Too bad he didn't live long enough to become the Governor of California!

I found an original box set of these tiny books in their golden case at a flea market years ago.

This one has come in handy in my middle age. My "golden forties", soon history, have been "rich years" indeed.

There are thousands of books and diets designed to help you lose weight, but Bonomo had a novel idea in his time: a guide to gaining weight. 

I guess he never saw "SuperSize Me"!!

I'm still working my way through this last one. I was hoping to have it read before Valentine's Day, but you know how it goes.

Bonomo's program is not for everyone, but I might as well give it a try. At this point, what have I got to lose?!?

I guess you'll let me know if it's working!!

william

Anything Can Happen

I love the conceptual cartoon art of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of Nancy and Sluggo.

This cartoon almost seems like his manifesto, one that applies to LIFE as much as to comic strips.

There is a surreal quality to how he literally breaks the frame in these 4 panel gags.

It's amazing what someone with imagination can do with circles and lines in a black and white frame. Especially when they think outside the box!

william

Puppets

Do you ever feel like a puppet, with some mysterious hand above pulling the strings and guiding the events in your life?

Last Friday night Elsa and I took Natalie to see the new stop-motion animation movie "Coraline" from Henry Selick, the director of the classic "The Nightmare Before Christmas."

And then, at Natalie's request, we went back and saw it again on Sunday!

We marveled at the handmade artistry of the magical world created by Selick from Neil Gaiman's story, and especially at his ability to infuse his puppets with so much personality and human emotion.

By sheer coincidence, that afternoon I was reading a screenplay called "The Muppet Man" about the life and times of creator and puppeteer Jim Henson, who died tragically and suddenly of a rare airborne viral illness back in 1990.

Also that same day, we went to the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, and I picked up this vintage paperback book called "Love of Seven Dolls" by Paul Gallico. It looked like a classic noir pulp story from Avon books, adorned with this great cover art of the good girl with her dolls and the brooding thug in purplish hues hovering behind her.

Lo and behold, the title page of Gallico's 1954 novel carries a dedication to Burr Tillstrom and Fran Allison, creators of the puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie, one of the first "children's" television series to also appeal to adults during its 10 year run on network television from 1947-1957.

According to "The Muppet Man", one of the younger adults inspired by Tillstorm's show was a teenage Jim Henson, who watched it avidly growing up in Washington in the 1950's, and drew inspiration from it as he forged his own illustrious path bringing his puppet creations to life, and into the lives of millions of children through his show Sesame Street.

So who's the puppeteer who orchestrated this odd confluence of events, and put Henry Selick, Burr Tillstrom and Jim Henson at the center of my amazing Puppet weekend?

"The invisible hand writes", as they say.

william

Pokertown

Coming back to Chicago from the 1984 World Series of Poker tournament at Binion's Horsehoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas was like watching The Wizard of Oz in reverse. 

The technicolor hyperbole of the Strip giving way to the slate gray skies and brick tenements of the Milwaukee Avenue neighborhood where I then lived.

We had a lot of great footage in the can, but we were as busted flat as one of the poor-luck gamblers we had been filming, so we had few resources to complete our documentary. Our cameraman, Jean de Segonzac, who went on to cement his reputation as "the human steadicam" on pioneering shows like "Homicide: Life on the Streets" and "Oz" for HBO, had studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and his teacher there was a Polish emigre named Marion Marzynski.

"Marz" as he was affectionately known to his students, (including Gus Van Sant the director of "Milk") took us under his wing and became our editor, post production supervisor, sound mixer and godfather to get us to an answer print. 

In hindsight, the 30 minute documentary we came up with to fit the format we thought we needed to sell the program to television, probably left too much blood on the cutting room floor. I wish I still had all of the original footage of the interviews we conducted with these Poker Legends, as so many of them are no longer with us, and their way of life and world view and insights into the game would be fascinating to revisit for a new generation of fans.

"Pokertown" did air on Public Television in most of the country, and on a few cable networks, but our big gamble did not really pay off, as the investors who backed the project did not recoup their money from these few broadcasts. We were just too far ahead of our time.

But, unlike the high stakes gamblers who use money and chips as a means to "keep score", for me the measure of success of any project also comes with the experience of doing it, the people you meet along the way, in front of and behind the camera, and the lessons learned, relationships formed, and experiences earned. 

The journey truly IS the destination, and I'll never forget when my road took me through Fremont Street in Las Vegas, Nevada back in the spring of 1984.

william

$1,300,000

Before the technology of hidden cameras showing hole cards and without the format and conventions of television coverage, filming a documentary about hundreds of players at dozens of tables engaged in a poker tournament over the course of a week with a single 16mm camera and on a shoestring budget proved quite challenging for us.

The big action tends to come at random times, after long slow periods of 'poker-faced' stares and the nervous shuffling of chips and other tics, when suddenly a player will go "all-in" and a competitor may match his wager, and then the "flop" when the final two cards are revealed by the dealer will mean a massive accumulation of chips for the winner or an untimely exit from the game for the loser.

As the week wore on and our tiny crew wore down from the all-night action in the casino and all day action chasing down the players for interviews, more and more players were forced out, including almost all of the old-timers whom we had come to know and cover during the competition.

As a visual stunt designed to elicit the maximum oohs and aahs from the crowd, on the final day when the field had narrowed to one table of players, the chips were removed and the players were given bundles of cash to wager instead. Like bales of alfalfa, they were stacked up in front of the finalists until it was almost hard to see them behind their walls of greenbacks.

Here is an image that I captured with my polaroid camera, but which we failed to film in our documentary, as our cameraman tragically ran out of film just at the moment when the last remaining players on the final table burst into sudden action and the whole thing was over in an instant.

Jack Keller, a heretofore unheralded player, walked off with $1,300,000 in winnings. I had never seen so much money in person, and I couldn't imagine how I would not be totally unnerved to make massive bets without the symbolism of the chip, knowing that the bundle in front of me could support a normal family for years. 

But as Al Alverez explained it, "money was just a means of keeping score" to the high-stakes poker champion; or as Sam Fuller wrote in his classic noir "Underworld U.S.A.": "money. what is it? its just green paper with germs on it."

william

The Poker Economy

With my colleagues, director Jeffrey Pohn and cinematographer Jean deSegonzac and soundman Mike Cristillo, I set out to film a documentary of the 1984 World Series of Poker.

Along with celebrities like Gabe Kaplan who had become something of a Vegas regular, watching the tournament that year were film director Sam Peckinpah, and British author Al Alvarez, whose articles in The New Yorker which became the basis for his classic book "The Biggest Game In Town" were what had inspired me to go on this wild adventure.

Although at that time there were only roughly one hundred or more contestants who ponied up the $10,000 "buy-in" to enter the tournament, Binion's was packed and there were too many characters to keep track of, both at the table and in the stands, as one by one many of the more well-known players dropped out and joined a kind of unofficial peanut gallery in the bleachers to observe the draws, and to kibbitz about the players.

One of my favorite kibbitzers was the incredibly fast-talking "Irish" Terry Rogers, whose thick brogue gave added color to his color commentary.

"Irish" Terry Rogers

Rogers described for us a kind of zero-sum game which he dubbed "the poker economy" in which there were winners and losers, but basically the same top players were perpetually taking from and giving back huge sums of money to each other, which was why their desperation for a "new fish" with fresh cash from outside this eco-system would often drive them to handicap themselves with more and more outlandish bets.

Many players found it hard to find opponents after their skills became notorious, and even the casinos would often turn them away from the action. Maurice Zolotow told us how top poker players were inveterate gamblers who would make any wager, like "if two guys stood next to each other at the urinal they would bet on who pissed the longest." Stu Ungar described to us the night of the famous MGM Grand fire. While sirens blared and panicked guests were jumping out of windows, he and his fellow players stayed firmly at the table, glued to their hands and their piles of chips. "We couldn't give a damn" he laughed with typical gallows humor.

Benny Binion had built a golden horseshoe in the lobby of his casino with $1,000,000 in hundred dollar bills encased within its thick plexiglass enclosure as a lure to his customers. "This could be yours", it seemed to shout.

Today he and "Irish" Terry Rogers and others look like geniuses or Cassandras who foresaw that someday the whole United States Economy would resemble their own "poker economy"!!

william

Tomorrow: More on the documentary "Pokertown" and the WSOP!

It Takes All Kinds

25 years ago, in the spring of 1984, I flew to Las Vegas to make a documentary film of the World Poker Championships at Binion's Horsehoe Casino.

Old Benny Binion was still alive then, and there were still echoes of his Las Vegas to be found if you looked hard enough, the carved-out-of-the-desert, mobbed-up watering hole for gamblers, not the corporate, family-friendly tourist mecca it has become today. 

maurice zolotow

Every story needs its teller, and we found ours in another old-timer who we stumbled across at the tournament, Hollywood author and journalist Maurice Zolotow, who was such an animated, hilarious and insightful character that he quickly took over and became the unofficial narrative voice of our film.

In Zolotow's manichean view of the poker universe, the world divided itself into two distinct camps.

First, there were the mostly Texas-born, depression-era Baptists who had little education within the four walls of a schoolhouse, but were masters of human psychology and bluffing, skills honed on the long dusty road hustling poker games and staying one step ahead of the law or the strong-arm men looking to roll a big game.

Pitted against them were a newer generation of young, mainly East-coast math whiz card counters and computer-heads who could calculate the odds to within .001 percent on drawing the card to complete the straight or flush, but had never seen into a man's soul to tell if he was lying.

A reductive view? 

Perhaps, but it made a great narrative for our film as we followed old-school legends like Moss and Brunson and Strauss go up against The Kid from Brooklyn Stu Ungar, or David "Chip" Reese.

With help from Zolotow and Henri Bollinger, the public relations director for the tournament, we got access to film the floor at Binion's, and also to get some candid, one-on-one interviews with the poker stars. 

One of my favorite interviews was with a rather wistful and nostalgic "Amarillo Slim", who from underneath his white ten-gallon cowboy hat and in-between smoke-curling exhalations of his long, brown cigarette mused about the killer instinct necessary to be a top poker player: 

"It used to be I'd put a rattlesnake in your pocket and ask you for a match, but now I've kind of lost that....desire, whatever you want to call it."

TOMORROW: More on filming the 1984 World Series of Poker

william

The Biggest Game In Town

Recognize these men?

"Treetop" Jack Strauss. Johnny Moss. "Amarillo Slim" Preston. "Pug" Pearson. Dewey Tomko. Doyle "Texas Dolly" Brunson.

I met them all in 1984 when they participated in what was already known as "The Biggest Game In Town."

British author Al Alvarez wrote a book of that same title, which actually first started out as a series of articles in The New Yorker, and it was through reading one of those articles that I was first introduced to the exotic world of No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker players and the annual World Series of Poker tournament, which at that time was held at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in downtown Las Vegas.

Inspired by Alvarez' book, I was able to raise some independent backing in Chicago and on the spur of the moment put a crew together to head out to Binion's to film a documentary on the World Series and interview these incredible personalities.

In the early '80's. the event was just starting to take off and gain popularity, but it was inconceivable to anyone involved back then to imagine what has happened over the ensuing decades, as this back room disreputable game of a few hundred participants became a "sport" that went super nova, gaining national television coverage, a mainstream audience, and now includes feeder tournaments and online poker, and the World Series itself, no longer held at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, spans 57 events involving 10,000 contestants over most of the calendar year.

Even back then, the old-timers were bemoaning the size of the tournament and the influx of amateurs into what had heretofore been a clubby circle of professionals. The fact that the rules had recently changed from a "winner-take-all" competition to a split of the top prize money between the top tier of players was seem by some old-school purists as already the end of the era.

Tomorrow: More on the 1984 World Series of Poker.

william

3-D

3-D is all the rage in Hollywood these days.

In the Cinema of Spectacle that is our mainstream entertainment, this old technology from the 1950's has been dusted off and turbocharged with modern digital techniques, to once again try to "put asses in seats" by giving the audience an experience they cannot get at home or on their iPhone or Tivo.

In our house, as part of our ongoing effort to engage the kids in activities that are no-batteries-required, we have discovered the magic of another kind of 3-D gadget - the old Sawyer Viewmaster, which allows you to view hand-loaded stereo slides in a rotating manual shutter device.

It is amazing how the simple magic of this handheld slide viewer captivates the imagination of Diego and Natalie. I wish I could reproduce the imagery here in the 3-D illusion created by the stereoscopic camera.

We have a number of old Disney movies on disk, as well as fairy tales, urban cityscapes, and natural wonders from all over the planet.

According to the catalog, there were 3-D projectors and screens and even a do-it-yourself kit for making your own 3-D slides produced by Sawyer. I hope to get one and explore the world of 3-D with our family.

I can see an Elsa Mora spectacular-in-the-making if she turns this old technology to use in her new artwork creations!!

william