8/23/22
Newsletter81
The Crack of Dawn
Darkness prevails.
I thought Key & Peele was a pretty funny show, and a couple of their skits were great, like: “Substitute Teacher” and the “East/West College Football.” As it turns out, Keegan-Michael Key is from Detroit. Somebody sent me an interview with him in the last year and he was asked, “What was your first movie?” He said, “Some weird, low-budget movie that was shot in Pontiac, Michigan, called Lunatics: A Love Story. I was an extra.” I wrote and directed Lunatics, but I certainly don’t remember Mr. Key.
As my buddy Sheldon and I struggled to make our way into the movie business, taking any job available, Sheldon met Leon Isaac Kennedy at Cannon Films. Leon was married to the beautiful Jane Kennedy, starred in Penitentiary I, II & III, and co-starred with Chuck Norris in Lone Wolf McQuade, among other things (he’s good friends with Smoky Robinson). Leon was in a constant state of hustle trying to get films made, and he seemed to have a direct line to Cannon’s owners, Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus (I thought Yoram Globus should start a company with Peter Guber so they could be Guber-Globus). So Leon would come up with something (calling it an idea would be overstating it), call Sheldon and pay him $500 to write a 6-12 page treatment that he could pitch to Golan-Globus. Once Sheldon wrote Bloodsport (1987; Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first hit), he turned Leon over to me. So Leon would generally call at about 9:00 PM, say he had a pitch meeting with Menachem Golan the next day at noon, needed a treatment and could I meet him at the Cannon building right now? Of course I always said yes. $500 is $500. Leon would say something like, “Crime in the inner city is awful,” then prove it with ten newspaper clippings. Leon would then order a pizza and I would go into another office and write a treatment, having to dream up every single aspect of it, which is an interesting challenge. I’d finish at about 2:00-4:00 AM and Leon would pay me $500. I don’t know how many times Sheldon did this, but I think I did it five times. Of course, none of these stories every got made into films.
When I was 12 years old in junior high, me and my two pals, Jim and Robert, were the biggest troublemakers in the school. So much so that a social worker named Gary Chamberlain was brought in specially just to see us. Robert (who has since died) told Gary to fuck himself and walked out the first day. Jim (who is now a multi-millionaire living in Warsaw) and I stuck it out. Among the many psychological tests Gary had us do, one was “draw a man.” My favorite album at that moment was Nantucket Sleighride by Mountain, which came with a booklet of the lyrics, illustrated with caricatures of the band members that I quickly figured out how to imitate. So I drew one of those. Gary looked at the drawing and asked, “Does this man have a name?” I said, “Yes, Felix Pappalardi.” Gary looked at me for quite a long time, then asked, “Is he a real person?” I said, “No, Felix Pappalardi is my imaginary friend.” Gary said, “Really?” I said, “No, he’s the bass player for Mountain. He produced one of Cream’s albums.” I honestly don’t think Gary believed me.
Hark! What light beams yonder through my window?