7/28/22
Newsletter55
The Crack of Dawn
It’s the dead of night.
One of my first friends in Hollywood in 1977 was Sheldon Lettich. He and I both loved movies and we both wanted to be writer-directors. Sheldon is seven years older than me and had served as a Marine in Vietnam (one of, if not the only, Jew in the Marine Corps at that time). To Sheldon’s consternation, his first feature credit is co-story on my first film, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except (1985). Soon thereafter he wrote Bloodsport (1987), the film that launched the career of Jean Claude Van Damme. Sheldon went on to write and direct all of Jean Claude’s best movies: Lionheart, Double Impact, The Order (Charlton Heston’s last film). Sheldon also co-wrote Rambo III with Sylvester Stallone. Last year I read Oliver Stone’s terrific autobiography, Chasing the Light, and he’s the only other Hollywood director to serve in Vietnam. Well, Stone’s story is so different from Sheldon’s, I called Sheldon and said, “You’ve got to write your autobiography.” He brushed off the idea, saying something like, “My story isn’t as interesting as Oliver Stone’s.” I said, “Yes it is.” Sheldon grew up in Beverly Hills. His first day at Beverly Hills High, the student assigned to show him around was Richard Dreyfuss. So Sheldon said, “A guy just wrote an article about my Jean Claude films, maybe he’d be interested in writing it.” He was, and he did. The book just came out, Sheldon Lettich: From Vietnam to Van Damme. I bought it yesterday and wrote Sheldon, “It will go into my director biography/autobiography collection. You’re between Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, (Sheldon Lettich), Jerry Lewis, Josh Logan.” Sheldon wrote back, “My head is going to explode.” (https://www.amazon.com/Sheldon-Lettich-Vietnam-Van-Damme/dp/1629339873/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1Y8MWD211ABIY&keywords=sheldon+lettich&qid=1659001031&sprefix=sheldon+lettich%2Caps%2C101&sr=8-1).
In possibly 1979, my friend, Rick Sandford, and I were wandering around Hollywood late one night and came upon an overflowing trash can on Sunset Blvd. It was full of correspondence between an agent named Paul Kohner and a slew of movie stars, like Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo. I can’t remember why, but we didn’t take anything. Paul Kohner’s best friend was William Wyler, as they were both Jews from the same town, Teplitz-Schönau, Austria-Hungary (now Teplice, Czech Republic). Kohner became one of the top agents in Hollywood with clients like: Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Dolores del Río, Maurice Chevalier, Billy Wilder, Henry Fonda, David Niven, Erich von Stroheim, Ingmar Bergman, Lana Turner, Liv Ullmann, and John Huston, to name a few. In 1983 I was trying to make an independent comedy and we thought that Vincent Price should play a small part. I called his agent and it was Paul Kohner. He was very nice, and said what every agent would under the circumstances, “When you have the financing, call back.” Well, we never got the financing.
In my opinion, the best film writer-director of the 1990s was the Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Yimou. He had an incredible run of films: Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qui Ju (1992; a personal favorite), To Live (1994; another favorite), Keep Cool (1997), Not One Less (1999), and The Road Home (1999). Zhang was in Italy directing the opera, Turandot (shown in the documentary, The Turandot Project [2000]) when the Chinese government, in their infinite wisdom, came down on Zhang like a ton of bricks, saying that his films were “Unpatriotic” because they had the audacity to show real life in China. The government threatened him with not allowing him back in the country, where his whole family lived. Sadly, Zhang acquiesced. He turned to making beautifully produced, but severely run-of-the-mill, Chinese historical action/martial arts films like: Hero (2002) with Jet Li, House of Flying Daggers, in 2004, and the ridiculous piece of shit, The Great Wall (2016) with Matt Damon. His film, The Flowers of War (2011), with Christian Bale, isn’t bad, but it’s not good, either. Had the idiotic Chinese government not rained hell on Zhang’s life and career, I have no doubt that he would have made a lot more good movies.
Morning has broken.
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