12/4/22
Newletter178
The Crack of Dawn
I had seen Citizen Kane (1941) several times on TV by the time I moved to L.A. when I was 17 and didn’t think that much of it. Certainly, there were some cool shots, but I wasn’t impressed with its construction. Well, that’s because I’d only seen it on TV. Benson & Hedges 100s cigarettes sponsored the 100 Greatest Movies Film Festival in Hollywood, of which they made a pretty big deal. The highlight was that they had gone to the expense of having brand-new 35mm prints made of all the films.
My buddy Rick and I went to the screening of the number one greatest movie of all time, as per Benson & Hedges smokers, and saw Citizen Kane. It was like seeing it for the first time. First of all, you can’t even come close to appreciating Gregg Toland’s astounding cinematography on TV. [I recently purchased the Criterion, 4-disc set of Kane that contains four different 4K transfers of the film that all look terrific but have nothing to do with what that film looks like projected with a new print – it’s breathtakingly luminous]. Also, I was finally able to see that the literary construction of the story is so intricately beautiful that it was totally ruined by the insertion of commercials. I so clearly recall coming out of the theater feeling lightheaded, breathless, utterly overwhelmed by how great movies could possibly be. Here I was, already 18, and Orson Welles made Citizen Kane when he was 25. If I was going to be a contender, I really had to step up my game.
In 1966, right near me here outside Detroit, a man named Andre Blay started a company that did something that no one else in the world did – magnetic tape transfers. By offering this service, Andre Blay invented the 8-track and cassette markets. Previously, the only way to own music was on a record, which wasn’t a particularly portable medium. 8-tracks and cassette tapes changed how the world listened to music, particularly in their cars.
Andre Blay was a visionary. In 1968 he started Magnetic Video and began to duplicate VHS tapes, thus inventing the video tape market. For quite a long while, Mag Video (as we called it) was the largest manufacturer of VHS tapes in the world. Mag Video acquired the 20th Century Fox film library, and it sold so well that 20th bought Mag Video for tens of millions of dollars, and now Andre was one of the richest guys in town, and he remained the head of what was now 20th Century Fox Video. My old buddy Bart, who co-created the special effects for Evil Dead (1983), as well as several of my early films, was the head of coloring for 20th Video. He gave me many, many VHS tapes.
Of all the absurd shit in the world, my good pal and film coworker, Gary Jones, hornswoggled Andre into helping finance his movie Mosquito (1994), in which I appear naked, then get killed by a giant mosquito. That’s the movie wherein I performed a lengthy dialogue scene with the late Ron Ashton, lead guitarist of Iggy & the Stooges, that Gary liked so much that he cut it out of the movie. Thank God, he included it as an extra on the DVD. Andre Blay is the top-billed executive producer of the film.
As James Fitzpatrick would say in Travel Talks, “And as we leave Pago Pago, our hearts smile with joy . . .”