The Ass Crack of Dawn

Volume #33

7/6/22

Newsletter33

The Ass Crack of Dawn

The sky is becoming a dusky blue, maybe indicating clouds.  Rain is probably likely.

King Vidor was a huge director in the late silent and early sound films.  Vidor came from Texas and got into movies very early by finding a camera and getting a shot of the U.S. Army marching to Mexico.  He sold the film to a newsreel company, and now he was in the film business.  In 1915 King married the prettiest girl in town, Florence, who also had the movie bug.  They rigged out their Model-T Ford with hammocks and drove to Hollywood.  King had great difficulty getting any work, finally shooting instructional films for the Christian Scientists.  Florence, on the other hand, quickly became one of the biggest movie stars in the world, Florence Vidor, promptly divorcing King.  King finally succeeded, and his film, “The Big Parade,” was the biggest smash success of 1925.  King Vidor was one of the founders of my union, the Director’s Guild of America, in 1935.

When Thomas Edison was 16 he got a job as a telegrapher during the Civil War.  Either he was extremely busy, or he had hours of sitting around waiting.  Edison was quoted much later in his life saying, “Good things come to those who hustle while they wait.”  In this case as a 16-year-old telegrapher, Edison, waited, he studied the telegraph system in front of him.  He decided that it could be improved.  I still don’t understand this, but Edison figured out how to send multiple messages through the same wire.  And this became the first of his many, many patents.

When Julius Caesar was in his early twenties, as he sailed between Italy and Greece, he was kidnapped by pirates.  The pirates’ lair was well-hidden along the rocky coast of Greece.  Caesar, being a nobleman, was ransomed for an enormous amount of money.  This transaction took months, so Caesar lived in a cave with the pirates.  He befriended all of them, and would jokingly tell them that when he got back to Rome he would put together a mercenary army, sail back, find them, and crucify them all.  The pirates thought this was hysterical since their cave was impossible to find . . . except to Caesar.  And gosh darn it, as soon as he was ransomed he put together a mercenary army, did remember where their cave was located, and in fact had all of them crucified.

I worked on the first season of “Hercules” in 1993-94.  The executive producer, Rob Tapert, introduced a female warrior character named Xena in three episodes.  Rob packaged Xena as a series, and Universal immediately ordered 16 episodes, which had to be on the air very soon.  As any executive producer under those circumstances might do, Rob panicked, saying, “I don’t have a concept, I don’t have any writers, I’m screwed.”  I said, “Aren’t all superheroes the same?”  Rob got furious and said, “You don’t know anything!”  I had a 16-page treatment that I had written for a Hercules episode (with my buddy, Jack), and it was turned down out of hand, and I was pretty sure that no one had read it.  So, using find and replace, I changed Hercules to Xena, him to her, he to she, renamed it, and turned it in.  Rob said, “This is brilliant!” and they immediately went into production.  That’s how me and Jack wrote the first Xena episode.

It’s fully daytime, but alas, no sun.  Still, it’s not raining.