The ‘Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid’ Project

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When I went to the theater with my friend Ray in 1982 to see Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, it was not because I was a deep fan of detective movies or film noir. Steve Martin and Carl Reiner were enough of a selling point to motivate me to see this comedy, and it’s something I never regretted.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is both a satire and a salute to the detective and film noir films of the 1940s and 1950s, with Steve Martin as Rigby Reardon hired by Juliet Forrest (Rachel Ward) to investigate the mysterious death of her father, a famous scientist. Rigby’s investigation brings him into contact with numerous shady and dangerous characters before leading him to a cadre of Nazis in South America bent on continuing the war with America.

What makes this film special is that it’s a collage project with most of the shady and dangerous characters that Martin interacts with as Rigby carefully edited scenes from classic movies of the period. By careful use of over-the-shoulder shots, sets and costumes crafted to duplicate those seen in the archival footage, and sometimes the use of doubles photographed without their faces visible, the illusion that Martin is actually in these scenes is delivered with a degree of sophistication that’s impressive.

A few years after seeing and thoroughly enjoying this movie in my Introduction to Cinematography course I was exposed to some of the more important films that Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid used in its collages and my fascination with film noir began.

Last month I got the idea it might be fun to make it a challenge to watch every one of the 19 classic movies that this film borrowed clips from. By my own count, I’ve seen eight, leaving eleven yet to be experienced. I made a list, organized it by IMDB ratings, and decided to start from the lowest rated and work my way to the highest, skipping none—making this a mix of films new to me and old favorites.

  1. Double Indemnity (1944) – 8.3
    2. White Heat (1949) – 8.1
    3. Suspicion (1941) – 8.1
    4. The Killers (1946) – 8.0
    5. The Lost Weekend (1945) – 8.0
    6. In a Lonely Place (1950) – 8.0
    7. Notorious (1946) – 7.9
    8. The Big Sleep (1946) – 7.8
    9. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948) – 7.7
    10. Dark Passage (1947) – 7.6
    11. The Glass Key (1942) – 7.6
    12. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) – 7.6
    13. I Walk Alone (1947) – 7.4
    14. This Gun for Hire (1942) – 7.3
    15. Humoresque (1946) – 7.3
    16. Deception (1946) – 7.2
    17. Johnny Eager (1941) – 7.1
    18. Keeper of the Flame (1942) – 6.9
    19. The Bribe (1949) – 6.8

My project ran into immediate trouble.

The Bribe, which fascinated me most from the clips utilized by Reiner and Martin, was not streaming anywhere, nor was it available even as a video-on-demand (VOD) rental. There had been a single release on DVD 16 years ago in 2010 and long out of print.

I didn’t want to abandon this project—it seemed fun to me—but I also hated the idea of skipping some of the films that violated the very essence of the endeavor. Surrender seemed to be the only option until I remembered one tiny little fact: the San Diego Library System has DVDs.

A quick search of the catalog revealed that they had two copies of The Bribe on disc, and so soon, my friends, I will begin the climb up that list as my 2026 cinematic venture.

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Not Well but Not Terribly Sick Either

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So, Tuesday to Wednesday were not my salad days.

By later afternoon Tuesday I began suffering G.I. distress, and by that I do not mean my World War II veterans were having a bad day but that my lower colon had decided that it had lots of material it no longer required and that it would be expediting removal.

 The last few hours at my day job witnessed frequent and prolonged visits to what the brits call ‘the water closet’ with my tummy giving rumbling accompaniment.  I finished my shift, came home to a light supper and a pleasant evening, if not comfortably, with my Sweete-Wife. The evening was slightly marred by the Late Show with Stephen Cobert going on vacation for the week. (Dude, you’re going forever in May, stop taking vacation days.)

By later evening I began to feel flush, my ears burned and my head started throbbing. I texted my manager to let her know I was feeling unwell and may miss work the next day.

Yup.

I awoke Wednesday morning to a migraine, possibly intensified by the rainy weather that had moved in, and a lower G.I. tract that insisted I move not very far from any available restroom. I called in sick, which I hate doing, and slept for a total of 9 1/2 hours. The prolonged sleep dried my eyes out and even with drops my eyesight remained less than optimal the entire day.

By the end of the afternoon the digestive issues seemed to have passed, mostly. whichever bug caused them seems to have moved on to browner pastures, and the migraine responded to medication, which relieved the pain but left me lightheaded.

Wednesday saw no day job work performed, no writing work completed, and no joy in the horizon-to-horizon grey rainy clouds which now cover San Diego like a shroud.

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It Should Not Be Titanic versus L. A. Confidential

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As we approach the Academy Awards once again, the discussion turns to snubs and the films that should have won Best Picture, with lively debate centered on 1997’s Best Picture winner, Titanic, and the beloved loser that year, the neo-noir L.A. Confidential.

L.A. Confidential is a complex story with intertwined story arcs of passion, corruption, ambition, and organized crime in post-War Los Angeles as it attempts to build a ‘modern’ police force. Adapted from James Ellroy’s doorstop of a novel with a bewildering number of characters and a pace that demands the audience keeps up as the twisty plot is slowly revealed, the script is a miracle of adaptation.

Titanic is an epic of motion picture wizardry, a tale of star-crossed lovers from opposite ends of society who meet and discover themselves aboard the famed and doomed ocean liner as it makes its fateful transatlantic crossing. Ridiculed both within and without the industry for its massive production and its legendary cost overruns, many believed before its release that it would signal the end of James Cameron’s ‘Golden Boy’ image as he finally suffered a disastrous box office bomb. Though the script suffers from cardboard villains and trite, clichéd dialogue, the movie became the most successful motion picture in history, losing that crown to another James Cameron film, Avatar.

The problem with the award is that it’s a singular honor when in fact there should be two awards at the top honoring outstanding achievement in motion pictures.

There should be Best Film, which in 1997, I would award to L.A. Confidential. This would be an award which judges the picture based on its themes, its writing, its story, and how those elements synthesize. It would be an award to recognize the artistry that explores the nature of humanity and the human soul. This award should go to the producers, the people responsible for finding and developing the story from concept, through however many writers and directors are involved, to final form.

The companion award should be Best Production. This would recognize outstanding achievement in the production of a motion picture, the mastery of coordinating hundreds of skilled artists and craftsmen. The nearly impossible task of maintaining such an army and keeping it focused on an artistic vision and realizing that artistic vision. Titanic is a near perfect example of a film that shows a real mastery of production along with all three of The Lord of the Rings installments. This is a director’s award, the person tasked with guiding the day to day work of that vast army.

Sadly, that is not the world we inhabit.

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My Good Weekend

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This weekend was the Super Bowl and as I care not at all for football or any sport the only impact that had on my life was how populated various places might be and where to eat on Sunday to avoid the loud and excited crowds.

Friday night was a quiet evening at home watching the next episode of season two of The Night Manager. Season two isn’t as tight and as compelling as season one but far from trash television. Also, my Sweetie-Wife decided that she was interested in seeing the newest adaptation of Dracula, even though we are going in with very low expectation. Frankly Caleb Landry Jones looks to be the worst casting for the icon vampire since Lon Chaney Jr. got stuck with the role in Son of Dracula.

Saturday morning was a nice long walk with my Sweetie-Wife along Riverside Park that is near our home, then spending at least some of the evening Tabletop Role Playing over Zoom in the evening. During my preparation for helping players generate new characters for this Space Opera game I discovered that I could feed pages of the dense and badly written rule book into Claude and have that A.I. create spreadsheets for some of the more formula driven aspects of the game. The session went very well and those A.I.-created spreadsheets for the most part worked very well.

Robert Evans

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday my spouse and I took our customary trip to the San Diego Zoo. Given that this was Super Bowl Sunday I expected less than usual attendance and that is what we found. It was not deserted but with the exception of the pandas, we encountered few areas of congestion. It was a pleasant walk. I even got this very nice photo of one of the tigers. We lunched at a spot where we were nearly alone and then came home to relax the rest of the day away ending it with a game of Star Trek: The Original Series deck-building game and the next episode of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.

I had a very nice weekend.

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Helen of Troy Wasn’t Real

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Later this year we’ll get Christopher Nolan’s next epic and chronologically scrambled film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. I’m a fan of Nolan’s work, in general, Interstellar mistakes cynicism for wisdom — a fault that often appears when he works with his brother Jonathan — so I expect to put my butt in the theater when this is released.

Rumors have slipped out and I do not believe that they have been verified that Nolan has cast actor Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the mythical reason for the war and destruction of Troy. As Ms. Nyong’o is far from the Aryan ideal of feminine beauty, the usual quarters of the internet have released their hateful monkeys, pretending to be aghast at this ‘historical inaccuracy.’

Daniel Benavides – Creative Commons License

First off, Helen of Troy is a fictional character.  There is no ‘historical accuracy’ in any casting of her. She probably doesn’t look like how Homer or anyone of his time would have pictured the subject of the epics, but that hardly matters. Beauty and what is considered beautiful is such a slippery concept, shifting so quickly from culture to culture and, hell, from year to year within the same culture. No, the intense ‘debate’ has little to do with history and much more to do with weak and scared people needing something, particularly culture, to reassure them that they are the best in the universe and that their pale skin is evidence of that fact. ( I am pretty damned pale myself, but all that really means is that I consider the sun an evil force.)

This is not the first time we have been subjected to this vile nastiness cosplaying as ‘accuracy.’

When Marvel released Thor in 2011, there were the same cries and thumping of sunken chests over the casting of Idris Elba as Heimdall. Again, we were assaulted with the argument it wasn’t ‘accurate’ as though Heimdall existed in reality and not simply the product of mead-induced story-telling.

1989’s Batman saw the same thing erupt, though with far less notoriety due to that being the pre-internet age, with the casting of Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent. Again, a fictional character though this time one with a history of being depicted visually.

Lupita Nyong’o is not only a fantastically attractive person, she is a highly skilled and proficient actor, someone who has mastered her craft. If she is playing Helen of Troy, I will be perfectly fine with that and will find it far, far easier to suspend my disbelief than when I was assailed with Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist.

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I Get a New Desk

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Hopefully life will get a little less painful after today.

At my day job where I work in a cubicle, the desks are adjustable for height. There’s a neat little button off the left edge with which you can raise the desk all the way up to a standing desk or lower it enough for a wheelchair user. For most of the time, this has been a godsend. During working hours, I had the desk at the height that was right for the dual monitors I needed to perform my processing. Then on lunch I raised the desk so that it was ergonomically better for spending an hour working on my laptop.

Then the desk broke.

At first when I lowered it, sometimes it wouldn’t stop and just lower all the way, forcing me to scramble out of its path lest my leg get squished. I could then raise it where I needed it, but eventually the motor lost its function and would only lower it, always to the bottom setting. I had to force it up and disconnect the controller. The desk is now at a height that’s right for neither work and is particularly bad for my laptop work, inducing terrible neck pain.

That’s right, it’s literally a pain in the neck.

It has been like this for months, first because the people who maintain the desks couldn’t get the parts they needed, and then because they couldn’t get what they needed to simply replace the desk. Well, today I should be in a much better situation; I am moving to a new cube.

I got to pick out the cube I wanted, making sure I am not next to any of our large windows in the office where intense sunlight could induce a migraine and still positioned well enough away from most of the rest of the floor so it will be quieter for the most part.

With me about to embark on a new novel, this comes at a perfect time.

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Movie Review: Three Strangers (1946)

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Counted among Warner Brothers’ film noir catalog, Three Strangers shares a thematic aspect with The Night Has a Thousand Eyes in that it is a noir with a strong atmosphere of the supernatural about it.

Warner Brothers Studios

A mysterious woman wordlessly lures a man to her apartment in London. Once inside another man, obviously intoxicated, rises from the sofa. The woman explains that she also invited this gentleman, again without knowing anything about him, even his name. She speedily explains that at least for the moment, they must not reveal their names or anything about themselves to each other. In her apartment she has a statue of the Chinese goddess Kwan Yin and at midnight as the new year begins, it is said that the goddess will open her eyes and grant a wish to three strangers, provided that they wish for the same thing. They agree to wish for money via a lottery ticket for the national horse race. They sign the ticket, making it a contract amongst themselves, using a blotter to obscure their names as they sign so no one sees another’s name.

They wait for midnight, gazing at the candle-lit statuette. The hour is struck, and a wind extinguishes the flame, plunging the room into darkness. By the time the candle is relit, the hour has passed. Then Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who can now safely reveal her name, insists that she saw the statuette’s eyes open, as the myth insisted. The first man, Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) insists he saw no such thing, with the third person, Johnny West (Peter Lorre) taking no serious part in the debate if the eye opened or not. The three go their separate ways, Arbutny cynical that anything serious has transpired, West willing to believe but more interested in more drink to fuel his alcoholism, and Shackleford devout in her faith that this idol will bring about fortune for them all.

The rest of the film follows the three through their troubled lives. Arbutny has embezzled funds from a trust he manages for an eccentric widowed peer, the discovery of which will ruin him financially and reputationally. West, in a drunken stupor, was shanghaied into being a lookout for a burglary that went badly and ended with the murder of a police officer. Shackleford instigated the entire affair in hope of winning back her husband who, after unspecified marital difficulties, has taken an extended business trip to Canada. Each person’s life spirals more and more out of control. Arbutny finds no source of funds to cover his theft and his client is now suspicious. West ends up taking the fall for the murder one of his compatriots committed, and Shackleford’s husband returns, demanding a divorce so he may marry his new love. When the lottery ticket turns out to have drawn not only the name of a horse in the race but one favored to win, the film turns to its final act without ever addressing if it had been mere chance or supernatural forces at work as the characters suffer the consequences of their choices.

Three Strangers is an fascionating sort of film noir. Produced in 1946, it is early in that genre’s formation, so the dipping into the supernatural is not an attempt to revitalize a form but one that rose organically when John Huston conceived the story. It is a film I have heard of for quite some time and this week finally got around to watching. In terms of film noir, there are better movies that I will revisit much more often than this one, but it is also interesting enough to warrant watching and with a collection of characters that are entertaining with all their faults; Icy the woman who loves West despite his drinking, Gabby their accomplice in the robbery who is a brute but one with a code and the clerks working in Arbunty’s office all give the film charm and depth. . I really like how the supernatural—not only Kwan Yin but the spirits of the dead visiting their loved ones—is handled so deftly that it can be mere coincidence or actual evidence that there is much more to the world than what we can see, hear, and touch. Three Strangers is a gritty crime noir that suggests perhaps the world is not as material as it appears.

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Remaking the Exorcist

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After the box office failure of Exorcist: Believer, which Universal, who had acquired the rights from Warner Brothers had hoped to revitalize the franchise and launch a new horror trilogy, the project was taken away from its director, David Gordon Green.

A new film currently known simply as The Exorcist has been handed to the reigning prince of cinematic horror, Mike Flanagan.

While there are some Flanagan projects that I have found to be inspired and masterfully crafted, in particular Doctor Sleep a sequel to The Shining that manages to honor both the original source material and the cinematic legacy, I have serious doubts about yet another Exorcist project. The Exorcist, in my opinion, should have never had any sequels and the concept of a ‘franchise’ is utterly repellant.

 First off, a horror franchise is a deeply difficult thing. Oh, there are tons and tons of them about and every studio dreams of having a run that is like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, or Scream, but what horror existed in those movies quickly vanished with the sequels. To me those movies ceased to horrify and only titillated with more and more elaborate methods of murders combined with advancing practical effects. I can’t remember ever being disturbed by these sequels and horror should disturb you emotionally not inspire cheers from gore as spectacle.

The second reason I am highly skeptical of an Exorcist franchise is that this story, this tale, was never constructed for that sort of open-ended treatment. The Exorcist, both novel and screenplay, was William Peter Blatty’s method of dealing with his own crisis of faith.  It was not a cash grab, but a work produced by a devoted Catholic who found his own way thorny and used fiction to explore answers to his deep theological questions. While the rest of the world considered The Exorcist a horror novel and film, Blatty and director William Friedkin, did not, treating the material as a theological mystery. With the exception of Blatty’s work with the novel Legion adapted into The Exorcist III, none of the sequels possessed the deep questioning nature of the original source material, they pursued effects and shock value, making them ultimately forgettable. yet another sequel to The Exorcist is the last thing cinema requires.

Little is actually known about Flanagan’s project and rumor has suggested that instead of a sequel he may be remaking the original film, a new adaptation of the novel.

This too would be a mistake.

Since its publication I have read the novel the Exorcist three or four times. I do not count it among my favorite books, but it is fascinating and an interesting glimpse into the time it was written. The script and motion picture are excellent adaptations, some of the best. Nearly all of the novel’s core story and more importantly questions are there, particularly with the final revisions later released. If this is a re-adaptation of the novel I fail to see what they can include that wasn’t in the original film’s take. What was left out deserved to be left out. Audiences, even in the 70s and more so today, would laugh at Father Karras’ quest to prove that it was telekinesis that moved the objects and not demonic possession. (Really, in the 70s psychic powers were all the rage in fiction and in the culture.)

The 1973 film was a miracle of adaptation, in script, in direction, and in casting. It was lightning in a bottle that I doubt even Flanagan can recreate.

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The Hardest Aspect of Writing a Novel

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Now, this is going to be different for different writers. Some will find the plotting to be the mountain that they must conquer; for others it will be the dialogue, and others constructing the actual sentences, or crafting interesting characters, even just finding the time to get the damned words down on paper or in the processor. I have often said that the hardest part of writing is butt-to-chair, fingers-to-keyboard—actually getting started with that day’s production of prose—and I stand by it. But today I want to talk about not the actual words-in-a-row challenge, but a different challenge: writing with the goal of traditional publication.

It is not the novel manuscript itself. Not to me. Outrageous Fortune clocks in at about 96,000 words, and I produced that volume in about six months. Once I hit the first 6,000 to 7,000 words, the work becomes self-generating, and I almost never had a manuscript die once that threshold was reached.

Ahh, but after that comes the really hard writing: the query letter and the synopsis.

The query letter should ideally be under 300 words; agents are busy and don’t have time for lengthy missives—rambling in your query won’t inspire confidence in your fiction. In that letter you need to give the basics of your work: genre and word count, a paragraph that conveys the story, the character, the conflict, and the theme, along with a closing that details your credits (if any) and why you’re the right person to have written this novel. Remember: you’re doing all this—displaying your voice and uniqueness as a writer—in about 300 words.

The synopsis has the benefit of needing only the story, but it’s still a maddening challenge. Now, in about 400 words, you need to tell the core story of your novel, the characters, the challenges, the themes, and exactly how it all resolves—ideally with some stylistic flourish. My novel required 96,000 words to establish who everyone is and why they act as they do. Hopefully, the characters come across to readers as believable people acting in a manner consistent with their nature. I have managed to produce a synopsis that is under 400 words and I think it’s good, but man, so much of what makes this story work is not in that bit of text.

Will it work? Only the agents can tell you—and waiting for their response is the second hardest thing about writing.

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Hoping Insomnia Will Not Disrupt My Weekend Plans Again

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Last Friday, for reasons I have yet to comprehend, a nasty bout of insomnia struck. I went to bed, lay there with my sleep apnea mask on, and waited for 45 minutes to fall asleep. This is not at all like my normal pattern as I usually am fully asleep within 5 or 10 minutes of lying down. After that three quarters of an hour I rose, switched off the CPAP machine, removed the mask, and shuffled into my living room to watch YouTube videos. This killed another hour and finally I returned to bed and this time slept, but still rising out of that slumber at my appointed time.

I spent the entire Saturday groggy and listless. My plans for the evening were to catch a late showing of No Other Way since my sweetie-wife was uninterested in the film and thus off the board for a Sunday morning matinee.  This did not come to pass as my sheer exhaustion made the idea of a late showing a burden and the prospect of driving after midnight struck me as foolish.

This weekend Send Help opens, and I really hope to see it at a late-night screening on Saturday. Here’s hoping I can sleep in a manner that I am accustomed to.

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