7/10/22
Newsletter37
The Ass Crack of Dawn
At 4:00 AM it’s nowhere near dawn.
In the 1958 film, “St. Louis Blues,” pianist/vocalist Nat King Cole played early jazz composer and trombone player, W.C. Handy. The film begins with Handy as a kid, and was played by 12-year-old Billy Preston. Billy went on to be a great musician, and was seen most recently in Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” where Preston was brought in the play keyboards for The Beatles. I saw him in concert with the Rolling Stones in 1975.
In 1959 the 19-year-old black, singer/actor, Johnny Nash, starred in an “important,” though not very good, film called, “Take a Giant Step,” about a contemporary black family. Johnny’s acting career didn’t take off, so he went into the music business. He released a number of singles between 1960-66 that all did all right. In 1963 Nash sang the title song for the cartoon, “The Mighty Hercules” (which I could sing right now, if under duress). In 1967 Johnny Nash went to Jamaica and met Bob Marley & the Wailers, and was so impressed he hired them to record for his own record label (which they never did) for $50 a week. Nash was so influenced by reggae music that in 1971 he recorded his own reggae/pop album in Kingston that contained the song, “I Can See Clearly Now,” which became the international smash hit of that year. Johnny’s follow-up in 1972 was Bob Marley’s “Stir it Up,” which also charted. This success is what caused Bob Marley & the Wailers to get a real recording contract, and the rest is history.
Last night I saw some southern, redneck, cracker, asshole politician suggest that what America really needs to do is revive the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the commie-hunters who rooted out the Communists in Hollywood with the blacklist of the 1950s, destroying many careers. But this yo-yo couldn’t keep his stupid mouth shut, and explained that HUAC was started after WWII by Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin. As a note, McCarthy’s right-hand-man was Richard Nixon. Except McCarthy didn’t start HUAC in the 1940s, it was J. Parnell Thomas. Worse still, HUAC wasn’t formed in the ‘40s, it was formed in the 1930s to root out Nazis. Anyway, aside from having a truly bad idea, this numb-nuts got every detail wrong.
As a Director’s Guild member I was invited to the memorials the DGA put on for recently deceased directors, and I attended the memorial for Stanley Kubrick. The first four rows of the theater were taped off, obviously for the important guests. I was seated right behind Curtis Hanson (writer/director of “L.A. Confidential”), and we talked a little bit. Then secret service guys wearing black suits and equipped with walkie talkies began arriving: one, two, three, four, five . . . Curtis and I were both flabbergasted and wondered if the president was going to be there. No, it was Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Terry Semel, head of Warner Brothers. These four guys got their own four rows. Curtis turned to me and whispered, “I thought we were all DGA brothers.”
And this is just name-dropping, but what the hell. I keep seeing trailers for some God-awful-looking TV show called, “The Boys,” where they shoot laser beams out of their eyes. The lead actor is Karl Urban. I directed Karl in his first two TV appearances in Xena almost 25 years ago.
As 2nd unit director on Hercules one of my first jobs was directing sequences of the centaur, who was half man/half horse. The human man part was played by Cliff Curtis, who had never been in anything before. Well, Cliff is really good, and of Maori heritage, so he has a swarthy complexion. This allowed him to be cast as every kind of brown-skinned person in the world, from the Arab guide in “Three Kings” to Pablo Escobar in “Blow.” Purely coincidentally, in the film, “The Palace,” Jim Carrey keeps watching an old swashbuckler movie. The hero of the film-within-the-film was played by Bruce Campbell, and the evil Arab was played by Cliff Curtis. Although I never worked on the series, while I was directing Xena, they were also producing "Young Hercules" which starred a somewhat bewildered-looking young actor named Ryan Gosling.
I think it’s starting to get light out, but it may be an illusion.