7/13/22
Newsletter40
The Ass Crack of Dawn
The sky is already just slightly streaked with blue.
In my buddy’s Ford Flex, if you don’t put on your seatbelt it bongs Alex North’s love theme from “Spartacus.” We hear this lovely theme when Jean Simmons, a slave girl, is put into Spartacus’ cell. He reaches out to touch her and says, “I’ve never had a woman before.” Since he doesn’t pounce right on her, he hears Peter Ustinov (who got an Oscar for this) and Charles McGraw above him watching through cell bars from above. Spartacus yells, “I am not animal!” Ustinov replies, “You don’t seem to be much of a man, either.” I envision this scene every time I get in that Ford Flex.
John Ford was a big USC football fan. The two star players on the 1928 USC football team were both big guys. One was Marion Morrison (who later changed his name to John Wayne) and Ward Bond. Ford got both of them summer jobs in the Fox prop department. John Ford told this story when he was an old man. He was shooting a silent movie called “Mother McCree” when John Wayne, not paying attention, pushed a broom right into the background of Ford’s shot while he was shooting. Ford exploded, and as he put it, “That big galoot threw his broom, ran out of the stage, off the lot, up Western Blvd., and I think he’s still running right now.”
The most prominent and successful film producer in England from the early 1930s through the 1950s, who in my young mind seemed like he had to be the ultimate, snotty, British gentleman, was Alexander Korda. Korda’s real name was Sándor László Kellner and was born into a Jewish family in Pusztatúrpásztó, Austria-Hungary. Korda’s brother Zoltan was an accomplished film director (he directed “Sahara” with Humphry Bogart), and his other brother Vincent was a four-time Oscar nominated art director.
I made my first feature film, “Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except,” with my old buddy Scott Spiegel (who co-wrote “Evil Dead 2”). Making the film took several years, so Scott and I had a lot of time sitting around our office, killing time. We kept ourselves amused coming up with what considered Mad Magazine pieces. One of them was, “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” with Marlin Brando, Sal Minnow, and Tuna Louise. Another was “The Color of Money” with Lorne Green, Betty White, Shirley Temple-Black, Spalding Gray, Red Buttons, etc. Another fine time- killer was coming up with the “what if he married her and her name was” routine. The old favorite (not ours) is: What if Ida Lupino married Don Ho. She’d be Ida Ho. (Hal March III was a famous radio announcer). So, if Tuesday Weld married Hal March III, she be Tuesday March the Third. Our masterpiece was: if Yoko Ono married Brian Eno, divorced him and married Sonny Bono, she’d be Yoko Ono Eno Bono.
The clouds are a lovely orange and it will be a sunny day.