William Horberg

Night Cry

Following on my last post about the hard-boiled American novelist Horace McCoy who became a celebrated author of the French existentialists, but is an almost forgotten man today, this is the story of a good one that got away, a tale familiar to any producer.

As a McCoy fan, early in my career as a young executive at Paramount I found myself in New York scouting for literary properties, and meeting with a young agent named Jonathon Matson, whose father Harold Matson had represented literary lions like Evelyn Waugh, C.S. Forester, William Saroyan, and Malcolm Lowry back in the days when giants roamed the earth. 

Matson also represented McCoy at one point, and now the agency represented his estate. Somehow the conversation with young Matson worked its way around to McCoy, and I think he was quite surprised that I was familiar with his work. Perhaps spurred by my passion, he opened an old oak drawer and pulled out a rubber-band wrapped manila folder of loose-leaf typed pages. 

"Maybe you'd want to take a look at this? "Night Cry", an unproduced screenplay that McCoy was working on before his death."

 

Fred C. Dobbs in front of a bag of gold could probably not compete with the greedy expression on my face or the eager anticipation I felt as I hustled out of there with this unearthed manuscript.

McCoy's twisted tale did not disappoint, although at 180+ pages of typed screenplay, it was clearly a shelved first draft that had never made it to revisions. Set in the bohemian demi-monde of 1950's Los Angeles, it had a terrific set-up. 

A mousy brown-dressed head of a private girls school by day has a lonely heart and is placing an ad in the newsletter of a dating service seeking a companion of her intellectual rigor and adventurous spirit. We quickly learn that the dating service is a front operation for a con man named Koko who employs a stable of gigolos who romance and fleece the women who have come there looking for love. When they discover that our schoolmarm is a wealthy recluse with a Malibu mansion, they bring in their ace stud, a handsome devil with a perfect recall memory that makes him a quick study and a dream date. The twist is, unbeknownst to any of these sharpies, our gal is actually a black widow killer, who has been bumping off the cads who disappoint her on the first date! And to cap that, before either of them discover each other's hidden agenda, and much to Koko's chagrin, they start to actually fall in love! 

 

From the theosophical world of P.D. Ouspensky to a beatnik beach club known as the Red Room and home to a scene that James Ellroy might have channeled when he wrote "Dick Contino's Blues", McCoy's trippy script held many pleasures, even though the third act devolved into a more conventional courtroom melodrama for the trial of the killer lady and the ladykiller.

NEXT: "Night Cry" in LaLa Land

william

The Best Hollywood Novel Ever?

Before "The Last Tycoon", before "The Day of the Locust", the former bombadier, tramp, bouncer, Imperial Valley fruit picker and soda jerk Horace McCoy wrote perhaps the quintessential novel about Hollywood with the quintessential title: 

 

If McCoy is remembered at all today it is for his first novel, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" which came out of his personal experience as bouncer at a Santa Monica Pier marathon dance hall in the middle of the depression. It was made into a classic movie by Sydney Pollack, 15 years after McCoy's death in 1955.

But "I Should Have Stayed Home" remains the Ur-text in the genre of tinseltown disillusionment. Almost a precursor to "Sunset Boulevard" in its hard boiled portrait of fringe players whose crushed dreams don't seem to stop them from putting their bottomless faith into the very system they will never be a part of, McCoy's vividly stark writing style remains trenchantly modern. 

As a screenwriter for over a decade at various studios he never saw the same degree of success writing for the movies as the post-war fame his novels found among French intellectuals like Sartre who hailed him as an early unconscious existentialist. This desultory service as a studio hack and the self-loathing that came with the work, seems to have fueled and informed his insight into the memorable characters of Ralph Carson and Mona Matthews who are at the center of this short (113 page) novel.

Check it out.

William

 

The Jack Story

I heard Sydney Pollack tell this story once many years ago, to a struggling first-time filmmaker who was railing against the studio system that he had yet to even enter into. 

It is really a parable, and has stuck with me through the years, as I've seen variations of this mind-set play out in various situations, in Hollywood, and among friends and even family.

Only years later did I come to know that it was a famous comedy routine by an old master: Danny Thomas!

There's this traveling salesman who gets stuck one night on a lonely country road with a flat tire and no jack. So he starts walking toward a service station about a mile away, and as he walks, he talks to himself. "How much can he charge me for renting a jack?" he thinks. "One dollar, maybe two. But it's the middle of the night, so maybe there's an after-hours fee. Probably another five dollars. If he's anything like my brother-in-law, he'll figure I got no place else to go for the jack, so he's cornered the market and has me at his mercy. Ten dollars more."

He goes on walking and thinking, and the price and the anger keep rising. Finally, he gets to the service station and is greeted cheerfully by the owner: "What can I do for you, sir?" But the salesman will have none of it. "You got the nerve to talk to me, you robber," he says. "You can take your stinkin' jack and shove it . ."

Sometimes we all struggle with keeping a positive attitude towards the events in our life. But since we have no control over what happens, but only the ability to reflect and improve on our attitude towards what happens, the Jack Story is a great piece of wisdom to carry with you in the trunk of your car in case you get a flat tire!

william

The Dill Pickle

We all play the time travel game sometimes, letting our imagination roam free to past times and places we would like to visit if we were Bill and Ted on an Excellent Adventure or woke up and found the DeLorean from Back To The Future parked in our driveway one morning.

In the rough and tumble history of Chicago nite spots and watering holes, who could resist setting the wayback machine to 1917 or thereafter and checking out the Dil-Pickle Club, a gathering spot for artists and intellectuals and hoboes and wobblies; a place whose official address was listed as "through the hole in the wall and down Tooker Alley to the Green Lite over the Orange Door"?

Founded by proprieter Jack Jones, who also built the stage, wired the lights and wrote and directed many of the productions put on in this prototypical little theatre in the shadow of what is now Newberry Square, a typical evening's fare might include political topics like the "Russian- Chinese situation" or sexual politics like Trotzky's former lover and noted Bohemain Man-Killer "Martha" opining on "How Should Women Treat Men"?

 

Although Jones died penniless in a flophouse in 1940 after the organization he founded closed its doors in the middle of the great depression, the spirit of the Dill Pickle lives on in Portland, Oregon where a new group of the same name stages events and puts out small press publications in the Pickler's anarchic spirit.

Thanks to Marc Moscato for collecting and publishing a small volume called "Brains, Brilliancy, Bohemia" on the history of the Dil-Pickle and reprinting many of the simple and bold handmade graphics they put out as handbills and flyers and advertisements. You can find more information about the book and the new Dil Pickle Club here.

Enjoy!

william
 

Here Comes Charley Musselwhite

They called him "Memphis Charlie" since the music scene around Memphis in the 1950's which saw the birth of rock and roll was the place where he came of age, but like many other musicians drawn north on the legendary Highway 51, by the mid-sixties he was at the center of the incredibly vibrant blues scene on Chicago's south side.

In 1966 he recorded this seminal album for Vanguard Records with a couple of other white boys - guitarist Harvey Mandel and piano player Barry Goldberg - helping to define that South Side sound for a generation of white kids that were getting turned on to black blues music, before leaving Chicago and heading out to the West Coast.

I met Charlie almost fifteen years later, in 1981, when he and his band were performing at the ChicagoFest music festival on Navy Pier, and I was involved in a project with a number of other producers to record the performances on the Blues Stage for a planned series of broadcasts for cable television.

In true bluesman fashion, the years intervening had been hard on hard-drinking and hard-charging Charlie (he says that his first day sober was in 1987) and he bore little resemblance to the clean cut kid on the cover of Stand Back when he came into the studio to record the interview portion of his episode. Confessing that he couldn't remember the last time he had been awake before noon, and with a pair of Blues Brother-style shades and a black brim covering up most of his head, he certainly was in no mood to start talking without something to lubricate the pipes and take the edge off. Glancing around the mostly empty studio stage, he spotted a bottle of prop wine, corked and half-empty, that had been left sitting out after some table-top catalogue photo shoot who knows how many days earlier.

"Ahh, now that's more like it" he perked up taking a healthy chug of the near-vinegar red liquid.

Soon he had the harp out, and the stories of meeting Little Walter Jacobs and Big Walter Horton and other harmonica legends started spilling out, and the vino was running out, and here came Charley Musselwhite, after all.

Stand back!

william

 

House of Sound

I can't really say what drew me to it. 

A hand-drawn cardboard CD case on a small shelf in the back of the bookstore. The duo-tone building depicted there with no signage to reveal its identity. A label on the back. House of Sound. Handing out Joy. An impulse purchase.

A black and white movie on the dvd inside the case, the name handwritten with a sharpie. A short film by an artist named Vanessa Renwick. I put the dvd in my computer, with no idea what to expect.

The presence of absence.

Hemingway wrote a long short story once called "The Big Two-Hearted River" about a solitary man's camping and fishing trip on the Upper Peninsula of northern Michigan. It is famous because while the author never mentions it, you come to realize that his real subject is the War, and the detailed rituals he describes his character partaking in are part of the unspoken healing process of a wounded veteran soldier returning to a childhood idyll.

Renwick seems to be employing a similar strategy here, as the over ten minute film consists of a beautifully choreographed series of static and tracking shots of a vacant lot that has been fenced in amidst a spare neighborhood of other vacant lots and an occasional house.

From the voiceover dialogue of a nostalgia-tinged conversation that might be a radio show, we come to learn the subject of her film is a long-gone record shop in the black neighborhood of North Portland that was called The House of Sound. Ending with a composed rap by a hip-hop artist called WONE, the film moves from slightly boring to hypnotic to deeply moving as you dial in deeper and deeper to the mood she weaves and the sense of place, of loss, and of celebration.

For some reason watching the movie had the profound effect of making me desperate to see the building that comes to be defined by its absence. Here are the only few images I was able to find online.

  

 

According to the film the owner of the store had an amazing gift for putting on the vinyl that his customers would want to hear and purchase. He'd see someone coming from down the street and by the time they came in the door he'd have selected just the right cut of soul or R&B or Motown or later Funk to make them walk out the door with a stack of new albums. Also a pioneer in the art of mix tapes, the bootleg 8 tracks from the House are legend.

I can't really say what drew me to it. 

But thanks to Vanessa Renwick for capturing the sweet soul of this North Portland landmark in a way that a more conventional documentary could never hope to achieve.

william
 
 

 

Why A Duck?

After touring the beautiful campus of the University of Oregon in Eugene, including the ultra-modern new student athlete center pictured here, a gift of university patron Phil Knight, capped off with a visit to The Duck Store for some green and yellow swag to take home for the kids, the only answer Miro and I could find to that famous Marx Brothers question was: 

"Why Not"?

Everything was so lushly green that I felt like Danny Glover tripping on acid up on the rooftop at the end of "Death At A Funeral". This is one of the oldest buildings in the quad at the center of campus. Miro looks like he fits right in with the other co-eds already!

We had lunch with Professor Richard Herkowitz who teaches film at the university and has created a great new film festival called Cinema Pacific. In a real small world coincidence we were introduced to his wife, the executive director of the campus art museum Jill Hartz. 

Guess whose original Cuban artwork she had on the wall in her office (hint: that's my wife under all that black make-up!)???

We were especially lucky to be taken in and shown the new show that they were hanging in the gallery - an exhibition of polaroid photography by the like-minded artists Andy Warhol and filmmaker Gus Van Sant ("Milk"), a long-time Portland resident! 

They even had a video installation of Van Sant's short film work, including Beat writer and icon and Van Sant collaborator William Burroughs reading a poem entitled "Thanksgiving", a scabrous assault on all-american values.

I met Gus back in the early '80's. He had been a student of Polish filmmaker Marion Marzynski and I wound up being the distributor of one of his early short films, "The Discipline of D.E." based on a Burroughs short story. "D.E." stands for "Do Easy", a kind of zen mantra for an approach to life with minimalist effort. 

The Crimson Burroughs of course went to Harvard, but this seemed like an auspicious omen and sound advice for incoming freshman Miro's college career as an Oregon Duck, so we left it there and headed up to some vinyl record stores and small self-publishing bookstores in Portland's Pearl District.

I found an old early '60's Charlie Musselwhite CD in a remainder bin that featured our friend Barry Goldberg on piano. Miro got a funky hip-hop mix produced by Madlib.

A perfect day!

william

 
  
  

 

Back to School Day

As a college drop-out myself, I haven't spent that much time on any one campus since the '70's when I was a student for a year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. I transfered out to study music at the Berklee College of Music, but that was a much more urban experience as for most of my time there I was living outside the dormitory in a railroad flat in a pile of brick above a liquor store near the Fenway.

So I am excited to take a day away from the blog today and accompany my oldest son on a college tour of the University of Oregon.

Like most teenagers I'm sure he wants me hanging around him on campus like the plague, but I can live vicariously for at least this one day, and remember The Titans, or The Ducks as the case may be in Eugene!

Rah, rah sis-boom-bah!

william

Drawing The Shtetl

 

I first met James Sturm when I cold-called him as a fan of his work, having stumbled across and really enjoyed "The Golem's Mighty Swing" and then worked my way backwards to two smaller books he wrote and illustrated "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight" and "The Revival". 

Those two stories of the early American experience with their rough-hewn drawings seemed to suggest that he might be sympatico to a project I had in mind - the adaptation of a feature screenplay, about a fictional version of the Pinkerton Detective Agency which I had developed over the years with my good friend and great writer C. Gaby Mitchell called "Black Diamond", into a graphic novel.

James was gracious enough to take my call and he taught me a lot about how the business of comic book publishers and graphic novels worked, even though he was eventually unavailable to collaborate on the book. So I wasn't surprised when this knowledgeable artist and entrepreneur told me that he was actually going to open a college - The Center For Cartoon Studies - in White River Junction, Vermont.  

 

I'm glad that James has managed to find the time in between running that institution and teaching to keep up with his own work, which has gotten even richer and deeper along the way. 

His newest is called "Market Day" and in it he turns his attention to character and detail away from the U.S. to a portrait of a day in the life of a rug-weaver in eastern europe in the early 1900's. It feels eerily timely and yet timeless in its portrayal of the socio-economic forces at work and the conflict between art and survival.

Thanks, James.

william

Manga Master Mimics Mickey (Spillane)!

Modern Manga master Tatsumi was only 21 years old in 1956 when he draw this book length graphic novel for the booming Japanese "rental" market of thousands of bookstores around the country that carried new manga stories each month for the insatiable public. 

Featuring a piano player who falls in love with a circus girl who dreams of leaving the big tent and becoming a singer, he is framed for the murder of her abusive carny father, handcuffed together on a train with another, much tougher convict, and then escapes into a winter odyssey eluding a police manhunt when their train crashes in a mountainous region.

With no way to cut the chains around their wrists and survival in doubt if they stay together, the two men on the lam make a desperate agreement to enter into a kind of russian roulette-style proposition - each taking a drink dosed with sleeping powder, with the understanding that whoever wakes up first will cut off the other character's wrist! 

Tough way to go for a piano player!

Tatsumi was said to be influenced by American hard-boiled crime fiction like Mickey Spillane, but this plot reminded me more of the classic Edgar G. Ulmer noir movie "Detour", although with a surprisingly happy ending for such a tense, downbeat story.

Enjoy!

william