8/9/22
Newsletter67
The Crack of Dawn
As always, it’s dark outside.
In 1968 when I was nine, going on ten, I went away to summer camp for the first time. This was Camp Tamakwa, which I’ve mentioned, where Gilda Radner was a camper and Chevy Chase was a counselor. I was in a large cabin with twenty-five nine-year-olds. On the first day, after lunch, there was rest hour. In the cabin every kid pulled out a pile of comic books, except me. I didn’t read comic books; I read books, and I mistakenly hadn’t brought one. And so for a couple of days I attempted to read comic books. Each comic book was stupider and more awful than the last one: ridiculous assholes in leotards trying to save the universe. I finally went to the camp’s owner, Lou Handler, and asked, “Do you have a book?” He smiled and said, “Yes, would you like to borrow one?” I said yes. He leant me Jack London’s Call of the Wild, then a couple of other books over the summer, and I was saved. That Hollywood has turned to making nothing but comic book movies only underscores the irony of my life.
Lou Handler, meanwhile, was the top boxing referee in Detroit, which used to be a mecca of boxing. Lou refed fights for: Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Jake LaMotta, Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, and literally every other big fighter of the 1940s and ‘50’s (I’ve seen him on ESPN Classic). Lou showed the great old fights on a silent 16mm projector and narrated them himself. Lou taught me to box. Over the five years I attended Camp Tamakwa, Lou and I talked a lot. Anyway, Lou Handler was a huge influence on my life.
I wrote the story for one of the Hercules pilot movies that I directed. I named the bad guy Trikonis, after Gus Trikonis, who was one of the Sharks in the movie, West Side Story (1961), then became a low-budget director, strictly because it sounded Greek to me. Gus ended up being one of the directors of the Hercules series. When I met him and told him I had named a character after him, he told me that he’d gotten twenty phone calls the night that movie premiered. By the way, Gus was Goldie Hawn’s first husband.
As 2nd unit director on the first Hercules pilot movie, I spent a lot of time shooting a big fight scene between Hercules and a giant. The giant was played by George Gonzalas, the tallest man living at that time at 8’2” (he has since died). George and I hit it off immediately. We were both staying at the same hotel and we had dinner together every night. George loved basketball, and was a second-round draft pick for the Atlanta Hawks, but was too slow to make the fast breaks. The team’s owner, Ted Turner, moved George into wrestling and he became Giant George. After dinner, George and I got into the elevator one night, and elevators are only about seven feet high, so George had to crouch down. The elevator stopped, an old man got on, saw George and screamed. George said calmly, “It’s OK.” George told me the greatest moment of his life was in the Houston airport where he met Hakim Olajuwan, who is seven feet tall. George stepped up to Hakim, who had certainly never met anyone who was over a foot taller than him, and George said, “Don’t take this wrong, man, but I love you.”
And it’s still dark.