9/2/23
Newsletter #446
The Crack of Dawn
About 25 years ago my buddy bought me a very serious-looking book (for $45) called, Wide Screen Movies: A History and Filmography of Wide Guage Filmmaking by Robert E. Carr and R.M. Hayes. $45 for a regular old hardcover book was a lot back then, but it was totally worth it. The book is exhaustive and probably as definitive as anyone will ever get on that subject again. Everything you could ever want to know about widescreen film formats is in that book, clearly explained, with photos, diagrams and a list of over a thousand movies shot in various kinds of widescreen. It is a beautifully written, intensely researched, scholarly, and well-published book. My buddy said he’d gotten it at Samuel French Bookstore.
Samuel French Bookstore was a highly unique enterprise. Founded in England in 1830, they opened a shop in New York in the 1890s, then a store in Hollywood in 1940s. Not only did they have an enormous selection of theater and movie books, they also had the largest selection of published plays available anywhere. More than that, Samuel French were the brokers of the plays. What this meant was that if you cared to stage any of those plays, you could license the rights through them. Anyone who participated in any kind of theater, community, school, or theatrical clubs, got their plays from Samuel French. I was in a community theater production of West Side Story when I was 15 (I was one of the Jets) and I still have the yellow Samuel French edition (you’re supposed to return them). The store also had an impressive selection of books, many of which were expensive, that you’d never see anywhere else, like that widescreen book. I’ve looked through that book a hundred times, marveling at the details of 70mm Todd-AO, CinemaScope, Cinerama, and Cinema 55, but seriously, how many of those $45 books could they have sold?
One day I wandered into Samuel French Bookstore in the ‘90s, and as always, I began perusing the movie books. I came across a book in the same series at the widescreen book that was called Vietnam War Films, and it looked every bit as serious and scholarly. I mean, the full title of the book is, Vietnam War Films: Over 600 Feature, Made-for-TV, Pilot and Short Movies, 1939-1992, from the United States, Vietnam, France, Belgium, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa, Great Britain and Other Countries. That’s some serious title. Then I thought, “Hey, I made a Vietnam War movie. Could they really have gone so far that they actually include my movie.” I skimmed through the book and goddam if they didn’t have, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, including every single credit. It was exhaustive. And, as it happened, because we had no money when we made the movie, we gave every single extra a credit. All of the Viet Cong in the film were hired from Chinese restaurants, and there are many of them, as well as about a hundred other extras. I did my best to get the spellings and diacritical marks on the Asian names correct. This book accurately listed everything.
I don’t own this book. I recall that it was $75, and I didn’t have $75 for a book at that time. I was actually kind of offended at the high price. Well, I just this minute bought a “Very Good Condition” copy of the book from a used bookstore for, guess how much? $73.96. Sorry, fellas, your book did not increase in value in 25 years.
Here’s the thing, and I’ve set this up like a shaggy dog joke. Below all of those many, many accurate credits there was a review of the movie. I believe the authors were veterans of the Vietnam War, and you can see from the book they went way out of their way to present a scholarly-looking text. This was not schlock.
And man do they hate my movie, which is indeed schlock. I only read the review once, but it’s the worst review that movie ever got, and believe me, it got some bad reviews. Being a filmmaker and all, I can see the long shot of me standing there reading the red book in Samuel French Bookstore, awed by the hatred for the film that these guys managed to translate into the English language and have published. Sadly, I don’t have a single quote to share with you. Alas, the book is on its way to me.
Here's one serious perspective that these serious writers took when they reviewed all the films – how accurate were the weapons? Well . . . The most featured rifle in TSNKE is a 12-gauge pump shotgun that the art department somehow managed to jam like an M-14 banana clip into, then covered the whole thing with camouflage cloth and a variety of straps with shotgun shells. I was honestly shocked when it arrived on set the first time. It’s not what I had in mind when I wrote the script. It was supposed to be an M-50 machinegun with a belt of bullets just like Rambo. That’s not what I got. Guess what? I shot anyway.
These writers were deeply appalled. I only read the review once, but as I recall, it seems to me that they were able to maintain the same level of disgust throughout the review and for every single aspect of the movie. I could only imagine these poor guys really, really hating the movie, then having to transcribe over a hundred names of extras.
I keep finishing right before the dawn. Anyway, I will share the review when I get it.
Tally-ho!