6/24/22
Newsletter21
It’s 4:04 AM. My across-the-street neighbor, who stays up late, sees my lights on as he retires to bed. We’re on opposite schedules.
The term “Heavy metal” came from the 1968 Steppenwolf song, “Born to be Wild:” “I like smoke and lightnin'/ Heavy metal thunder.”
The very first movie ever made is called “Roundhay Garden Scene” made by Louis Le Prince in 1888 (it’s on U-Tube). Le Prince’s first movie camera had sixteen lenses. His third camera was exactly the design of all movie cameras for more than the next hundred years. In 1890 Le Prince got on a train with his movie camera and was never seen again.
There is only one extant photograph of the notorious outlaw, Billy the Kid. His holster and pistol are on his left side. Therefore, he became known (after his death) as “The Left-Handed Gun,” which is the title of an early Paul Newman movie about Billy the Kid. However, after closer inspection, it was discovered that the one photo was printed backwards, and Billy was actually a righty.
The cast and crew of “Evil Dead” (formerly “Book of the Dead”) arrived in Tennessee in Nov., 1979. The first day of shooting was in a car driving around. I was out at the cabin fixing it up with two other guys. One of the main images of that film is of a white-eyed monster peering out from beneath a trapdoor leading down to the cellar. The construction supervisor cut the square trapdoor in the floor, took out the wood revealing the ground below it, handed me a shovel and said, “Dig the cellar.” I spent the entire first three days digging about an eight foot hole. But I’d made it into show business.
I write jokes occasionally. My first was when I was in elementary school. Have you heard about the new, all-natural car? It’s called the Alfalfa Romeo. I wrote an anti-Semitic joke yesterday: I found a website called “Free Printable Jewish Calendars,” and it only cost $1.00.
Lupe Vélez, the first Latin-American movie star, was known as the “Mexican Spitfire” for her outrageous temper. She started in silent films in 1924 and quickly became a star. She had a stormy six-year marriage to Johnny Weissmuller (real name Johann Peter Weißmüller), five-time Olympic gold medal-winner, who went on to play Tarzan in twelve films. When Lupe Vélez’s career faded out in the early 1940s, she decided that she’d had enough. She dressed in her most expensive silk nightgown, applied her makeup perfectly, put silk sheets on the bed, then took a whole bottle of the barbiturate, Seconal. She was found the next day in her bathroom with her head in the toilet, and she had drowned.
When two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, William Faulkner, was just starting off in the early 1930s, he came to Hollywood. He became friends with the director Howard Hawks who hired him to write a script. This gave Faulkner the money to go back to Mississippi and write his first novel. This cycle continued Faulkner’s whole life: come to Hollywood, write a movie for Hawks (then other directors), go back home and write another novel. Among many other stories (mostly unproduced) for Howard Hawks, Faulkner co-wrote two Bogart/Bacall classic films: “To Have and To Have Not” and “The Big Sleep.”
An orange hue is just creeping into the bottom of the blue dawn sky.