Ed Gorman's Blog, page 173

Remembering John D. MacDonald's pulp fiction by Fred Blosser

Remembering John D. MacDonald's pulp fiction by Fred Blosser

Years ago, as a fledgling enthusiast of pulp and paperback fiction, I was a big fan of the legendary JDMBibliophile 'zine. I was especially fond of the "Early JDM" column, in which Francis M. Nevins Jr. profiled MacDonald's pulp stories from Black Mask, Dime Detective, and other such wonderful treasuries of hardboiled fiction.

Several of those stories, with JDM's blessings, were eventually collected by Martin H. Greenberg, Nevins, Walter Shine, and Jean Shine in the two "Good Old Stuff" volumes of the 1980s. But many others remain unreprinted. This is unfortunate, because nuggets of tough-guy gold repose in those now-crumbling pulpwood pages. As cases in point, I would refer you to two novelettes from Dime Detective that show MacDonald at his youthful peak as a riveting storyteller.

I wrote about those stories in the Spring 1992 issue of The JDM Review, and what follows is an updated recap of the article. I figure that most of you are unfamiliar with the 1992 article. Twenty years later, with pulp making a resurgence of sorts with e-books and POD houses, it may be a good time for a reminder as to how energetic MacDonald's magazine work was.

First, "Call Your Murder Signals!" (Dime Detective, June 1948). As in most of JDM's pulp stories, the protagonist of this 12,000-word effort isn't the typical private eye or police detective pulp hero. Benjamin "Tige" Gaynor, war hero and former All-American lineman, is coach of a pro football team called the Port Davis Travelers.

When Tige runs afoul of a crooked gambling ring, local gangsters try to kill him. Failing that, they frame him for the murder of a former player. With a pert young woman on his side, Gaynor clears his name and brings the bad guys to lead-laced justice. (Man, pulp lingo is contagious.)

From the first page, in which Tige is shot and pushed out of a speeding car on a lonely country road, "Call Your Murder Signals!" is textbook-perfect pulp. JDM keeps the plot moving at high velocity, while throwing in the occasional twist of phrase that presages his mature Gold Medal style:

"Without knowing how it happened, I was on my face in the shallow ditch, and my hands were no longer tied. My right arm was twisted under me at a funny angle. I burned in a dozen places. My cheek rested in a puddle, and the rain beat down on me.

"The legs were gone, too. Oh, they were there, but they were old stockings filled with sand and putty."

The blurb on the magazine's contents page is pure pulp platinum: "Snap into kill formation, boys, and -- CALL YOUR MURDER SIGNALS! When the trigger toughs tried to bench him for keeps, All-American Gaynor decides he'd rather do-in than die."

Incidentally, by that June 1948 cover date, Dime Detective no longer sold for 10 cents. Cover price: 15 cents.

Another placid town seething with hidden corruption, Hunt City, is the setting for "Too Many Sinners" (Dime Detective, June 1949). Johnny Rogan, a "tall, hardy-looking young man with a firm jaw, friendly blue eyes, and a shock of yellow hair," is a soft-hearted repo man. Assigned to repossess a car for a bank, he encounters a prostitution and extortion ring, a deceptively cherubic old man named Esperance whose enemies have a way of disappearing suddenly, and a lethal beauty named Carlotta.

In the 1992 article, mentioning Carlotta, I suggested that readers visualize Barbara Carrera in a 1940s pageboy hairdo. Now I would suggest Eva Mendes, Sofia Vergara, maybe Eva Longoria.

With a plot slightly reminiscent of Hammett's "The Scorched Face" (in the 1992 article, I goofed and inexplicably cited Hammett's "Fly Paper"), "Too Many Sinners" may strike modern readers as dated, at least in regard to details of technology. Esperance drugs local young women, puts them into what the tabloids used to call compromising positions, and uses the photos to blackmail the women or force them into turning tricks. Nowadays, I guess sex videos or on-line porn would be involved.

As in "Call Your Murder Signals!", JDM keeps the action rocketing along. There's a masterful sequence in which Johnny, tied up in his car and doused with gasoline, struggles to free himself before a lighted cigarette burns down and ignites the petrol.

The blurb for this one is even better than the one for the 1948 novelette:

"A thrill-starved girl's fury cremates -- TOO MANY SINNERS. She was just a brunette on a skip list -- steering Johnny to hell."

In between the beatings, shootings, and stabbings, the mundane details of Rogan's repo job have an authentic ring. One suspects that JDM drew on his own brief career in repossessing cars and appliances while putting himself through college.

Incidentally, if you think "Call Your Murder Signals!" and "Too Many Sinners" push the limits of corn, consider that two other titles in the June 1949 issue were "A Sap Takes the Rap" and "Tin-Lizzy Houdini." As noted in the "Good Old Stuff" collections, the titles of MacDonald's pulp stories were often changed as they crossed the editor's desk. Whatever the title, they deserve better than the impermanence of brittling pulpwood pages.

Karl Edward Wagner

Ed here: This is one of the most extraordinary collections I've ever seen. The making of the massive book with its astonishing illustrations reminds us of how nothing will ever replace the sheer beauty and craftsmanship of finely made books. Then there are the stories. Wagner has long been one of my favorite horror story writers because he was able to balance the psychological so well with the outre. There is a pure pulp poetry and mordancy to his work that I equate with the best genre fiction has to offer.

I didn't know Karl. He took a few of my stories for his Year's Best anthologies, which pleased me, and one of my stories caused him to write me about a friend of his who was in steep decline. He said he'd never been able to understand this man but that after reading my story he realized what his friend was going through. The irony being, as several writers attest in their introductions to his various stories, that Karl himself was in steep decline for quite a long time before he died.

I felt that he never got his due as a writer. He was able to create moods, back stories, histories that far more popular writers would never even dare attempt. If you think I exaggerate read any of the stories in this book.

KARL EDWARD WAGNER
MASTERS OF THE WEIRD TALE



SYNOPSIS

With over 700 pages, including all of Karl Edward Wagner's horror fiction, this is one of the best, most impeccably proofed and designed in our Masters of the Weird Tale series. This collection includes Sticks, Where the Summer Ends, In the Pines; in sum, all of the horror fiction. Feel free to email us for a list of the stories as a PDF file, or click here to download it yourself.
This collection has a color cover by J.K. Potter and over ten full-page, full-color interior illustrations by Potter as well. The book is edited and introduced by Stephen Jones, has an additional introduction by Peter Straub, a remembrance by David Drake, and a new afterword by Laird Barron. The introductions are profusely illustrated with pictures of Karl in both black & white and color.
The edition is limited to 200 copies for sale. Each numbered copy is signed by Stephen Jones, J.K. Potter, Peter Straub, Laird Barron, and David Drake.
Each book is fully bound in cloth and comes in a handsome two-tone slipcase to match your other volumes in the Masters of the Weird Tale series. It will be shipping in early to mid November. Sorry for the delay!
The queries we have been receiving on this title have been considerable; we expect it to be fully subscribed before publication.

EDITION INFORMATION

Limited to 200 copies.
Introductions by Stephen Jones and Peter Straub.
New color illustrations by J.K. Potter.
Signed by J.K. Potter, Stephen Jones, Peter Straub, Laird Barron and David Drake.
Slipcase, ribbon marker, head and tail bands, three-piece cloth construction.

Forgotten Books: The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris

Ed here: I'm going through some health problems which is why I haven't been posting the last few nights. I'm feeling better but the issues haven't been resolved as yet.

Forgotten Books: The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris

There was a time in my life, college age and maybe a decade after, when I took Andrews Sarris' opinions of American films and American filmmakers pretty much as gospel. Times and people change. I bought a copy in a dime bin and looked through it and realized that it is in fact a rather pedantic and downright goofy survey of American films.

Sarris sensibly enough divides his opinions into chapters with headings such as Pantheon Directors, The Far Side of Paradise and Less Than Meets The Eye and so on. Hard to disagree with his Pantheon which includes Keaton, Chaplin, Ford, Ophuls and so on. With one exception that is. He includes Fritz Lang in the Pantheon and then in Less Than Meets The Eye dumps on Billy Wilder. What? There are few directors who have captured their AMERICAN time better than Wilder. The Lost Weekend, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace In The Hole, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot,The Apartment...I take nothing away from Lang, though his self-mythologizing got tiresome. He is certainly a major director. But as far as serious accomplishments go...Lang but not Wilder in this so-called Pantheon?

He also dumps on, among others, Robert Aldrich, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, Preston Sturges and Anthony Mann--good sometimes but not good enough for the Pantheon. Really? Preston Sturges not as "good" as Ernest Lubitsch? Not even Sturges would have claimed he was. And Wilder doesn't belong even on this list?

Sarris is at his most readable when he deals with directors he considers sub-human. Peckinpah, Roger Corman, Curtis Harrington and Ida Lupino. He has cordial fun with them and sees merit in their assumed irrelevance.

But unfortunately then it's back to the pot shots. Under the Heading "Strained Seriousness" we have...Stanley Kubrick? Really Stanley Kubrick?

Be warned: You'll neeed a lot of Prozac for this one. And your dental bill will shoot up because of all your teeth gnashing.'

A new Psycho? NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!

Ed here: Lee Pfeiffer is one of my favorite movie reviewers/commentators. H's also of course published and editor of Cinema Retro my favorite magazine about films.I had the same response to this news that Lee did.

By Lee Pfeiffer

Look, I'm not one of these high-brow guys who knock all of the programming on cable TV. About the only shows I ever have time to watch are guilty pleasures like Hoarders and Storage Wars plus various National Geographic programs that center on helpless humans being devoured by wild animals. Most of the time I'm working on my computer, so the only programs that run consistently are political shows that don't require me to sit in front of a screen. In fact, with all the heated debates on these programs, they provide plenty of wild animal-like behavior in and of themselves. What I do find really offensive is when a cable network decides to use a legendary movie as the basis of a low-grade TV concept. For example, A&E has just announced that it is developing a series titled Bates Motel that will explore the early years of Psycho's legendary cinematic killer Norman Bates, as well as his Oedipus-like relationship with his mother. Is this really what classic movie lovers have been clamoring for? Obviously not. How many people even remember that there was a TV movie sequel to Psycho back in 1987? So this new project is a rip-off of a rip-off. However, A&E is gambling that there are plenty of undiscriminating viewers out there who probably never even saw the original film and will think this concept is a hoot. Murder and implied incest? Irresistable! And now Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece can be improved upon with the inclusion of numerous dumb-ass commercials, color cinematography and answers to the mysteries surrounding Bates' background that were so annoyingly mysterious that they might have inspired you to use your own imagination. Click here for the lurid details.

-------------------THE LURID DETAILS FROM HOLLYWOOD REPORTER



TCA: 'Psycho' Prequel Series 'Bates Motel' in the Works at A&E
The cable network that's home to "Intervention" and "The Glades" also picks up the rights to Danish serial killer drama "Those Who Kill."
11:44 AM PST 1/13/2012 by Lesley Goldberg
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Everett Collection
"Psycho"
A&E is continuing its push into scripted programming, developing series projects based on the famed hotel featured in Psycho and a Danish format about serial killers.
OUR EDITOR RECOMMENDS

A&E Network Hires Three Programming Executives

'Hoarders,' 'Intervention' Have Solid Returns on A&E

Pierce Brosnan's 'Bag of Bones' Miniseries Boosts Ratings for A&E
The network Friday announced it is in early development on Bates Motel, a potential series from Universal Television for A&E that would serve as a prequel to the Alfred Hitchcock 1960 classic Psycho.
The series would offer an understanding into how Norman Bates' psyche developed and would tell the back story of the film's killer, learning of how his mother, Norma, and her lover damaged him, transforming him into serial-killing motel owner. Anthony Perkins played Norman in the film.
Anthony Cipriano penned the script.
The project is not the first time a Psycho spinoff effort has been attempted. NBC aired a 90-minute TV movie titled Bates Motel in 1987.
Meanwhile, the cable net that's home to unscripted fare including Intervention and Hoarders has acquired the rights to Danish format Those Who Kill.
Based on the best-seller by Elsebeth Egholm, the Danish series is about serial killers and the people who pursue and catch them.
The original series revolves around a female police detective who works to understand her connection into the mind of a serial killer and a profiler who has a deeper psychological understanding that connects them to the killer and their victims.
Kill hails from Imagine Television and Fox 21. Glen Morgan will pen the script and executive produce alongside Brian Grazer, Francie Calfo, Peter Bose and Jonas Allen.
Should either project go to series, it would join the network's original scripted offerings that include The Glades and Breakout Kings.
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit

Pity Him Afterward Donald Westlake

Pity Him Afterward Donald Westlake

Ed here: One day a publisher I knew called me and said is there a Don Westlake novel that has never been in paperback. I immediately said yes. He asked me if I had a copy of it. I said yes. I sent him my one and only copy, a very good hardcover edition of Pity Him Afterwrd. As it turned out they had to destroy it to create the new book. But it was worth it so other people could read it. It's that good.

From 2007:

Every once in awhile I get stoned just watching a literary master do his work. The last two nights I was flat out dazzled from beginning to end with Donald Westlake's 1964 novels PITY HIM AFTERWARD.

The story concerns an escaped madman who takes the identity of a man who is headed to a theater that does summer stock. While we see the story several times from the madman's point of view, we're never sure who he is. This is a fair clue mystery.

In quick succession, a young woman who works summer stock is found murdered in the house where the young, struggling actors stay. A part-time chief of police appears to find the killer.

Two points: writers owe their readers original takes on familiar tropes as often as possible. The madman here is no slobbering beast but rather a deranged and sometimes pitiful lunatic (the opening three thousand words are among the most accomplished Westlake pieces I've ever read). And the police chief Eric Songard is one of the most unique cops I've come across in mystery fiction. He works nine months of the year as a professor and summers as a police chief. The small town he oversees usually offers nothing worse than drunks and the occasional fight. Murder is another matter. Westake gives us a cop whose self-confidence is so bad all he can do is try and hasten the appearance of the regular cops from a nearby district. Meanwhile he has to pretend he knows what's going on. He could easily have gone to series. He's a great character.

As the story is told, we get a beleivable look at summer stock with its low pay, brutal hours, frequent rivalries. The payoff is that some of the actors will get their Equity card at the end of the nine week run and thereby become professional actors.

Then there is the telling. The craft is impeccable. Precise and concise and yet evocative because of the images Westlake constantly presents us. You also have to marvel at the rhythm of his language, watching how'll he'll shave an anticpated word here for a certain effect, add a word there for the sake of cadence. These sentences are CRAFTED.

There are so many great Westlake novels it's impossble to rank them. But given what he accomplished, I'd have to say this is one of his early best.

Ricky Gervais Is Losing His Edge by Not Shutting Up About His Edge

Ed here: To me Ricky Gervais is a genius. That isn't to say he's been a genius lately. A lame end to Extras (one of my all-time favorites shows), truly bad movies and lately being inescapable on tv and in print coming on like Napoleon before Waterloo. When he was famous he was fun to listen to. His descriptions of growing up, of trying to sell his shows, of being at least a bit of every one of his noodgy protagonists--he was great. But now that he's SUPER famous he's a lot less clever and likable. I always wondered if Larry David wasn't secretly exposing the new Gervais in their Curb episode. His "outsider" and "iconoclast" routine is especially irritating. This guy is an outsider like I'm an insider. I take no pleasure in saying these things. His is an enduring and exciting talent. But he doesn't wear his new super fame very well at all. I watched three episodes of Extras last night. For me Gervais at his best.

Ricky Gervais Is Losing His Edge by Not Shutting Up About His Edge
By Willa Paskin FROM VULTURE


Exactly a year ago, days before Ricky Gervais was set to host the Golden Globes for the second time, there seemed to be no more perfect an awards show host in the universe. To that point, Gervais had made himself into something of an awards show treasure: Whenever he was trotted out for his few minutes of on-air patter, he was always funny — which, given the typical caliber of such banter, made him a walking miracle. And then came the 68th annual Golden Globes, an event at which Gervais had the audacity to level some actual fastballs (or fast relative to the standard softballs) at the rich, famous, beautiful people sitting in the audience and/or watching from home. Not everyone was pleased with Gervais's gleeful skewering, and the likes of Judd Apatow and the Hollywood Foreign Press argued that Gervais's performance had crossed a line, making for an unnecessarily bitter and antagonistic show. Vulture was on record as enjoying the whole thing — it was the perfect antidote to the season's award show circuit of overstated mutual praise — and the Hollywood Foreign Press lightened up after a few months and asked Gervais to repeat as the host this year. But in the year since the Globes, one person has appeared to be more amused and delighted by Gervais's performance than anyone else, in or out of Hollywood: Ricky Gervais himself. Having spent an awards show deflating the hype around movie stars, Gervais has spent the last year buying his own.

Ricky Gervais told some appealingly honest-to-mean jokes about famous people. And he has spent the last few months smugly discussing them as though they were tragically misunderstood by oversensitive actors. He self-importantly talks about how great it is to have Hollywood "scared to death of me." Just this week, baldly flouting the truism that to explain humor is to kill humor, he gave an interview to EW dissecting all of his Golden Globes jokes, pedantically offering up highfalutin reasons why it's funny to give Robert Downey Jr. a hard time about his addictive past — all as if his awards show patter was a complicated and multilayered upending of the social order rather than just funny jabs. He behaves as if telling Angelina Jolie she was in a bad movie is somehow striking a blow for the common man, and not, in its way, as totally frivolous as telling her she was in a good one. (It's not that insulting her isn't entertaining, but when Perez Hilton was still in his drawing-penises-on-her-face phase, he didn't pretend he was doing important work.)

Gervais seems determined to keep promoting the notion that his performance at the Globes was wildly offensive, but it was only mildly offensive, at best, however many easily offended people he managed to offend. You can revisit most of last year's jokes here: In addition to knocks on Robert Downey Jr. and The Tourist, they included digs at Cher, Scientology, Charlie Sheen, Hugh Hefner, Sex and the City 2, and and the HFPA. Sure, to that insular industry audience the jabs were more cutting than the usual award show fare and were pretty gloriously ungrateful (he went after no one so much as the hosting HFPA, accusing them of bribery and making a joke about how the president had dentures), but as The New York Times Magazine puts it in a profile of him running this weekend, "It was the sort of material that would have barely rattled Medic Alert bracelets at a Friars Club roast." Gervais took some hard shots at easy, deserving targets, and if that made for a fairly shocking awards show, that's because awards shows are absurdly staid and self-important, not because Gervais was breaking new ground — something that a comedian of Gervais's stature and know-how should be the first to admit. But you wouldn't know it from Gervais, who has spent the last twelve months reveling in his iconoclasm (posing as Jesus and all).

(more)"
That does in fact say it all: Gervais is a rich, powerful guy who one night a year makes fun of his brethren. He's not an outsider, he's just imagining himself to be. If Hollywood isn't offended by his jokes, why does he feel the need to keep patronizingly explaining why they weren't offensive? And if Hollywood did, in fact, take offense, why is he insecurely going out of his way to say they didn't? Whether people were offended or not, shouldn't he just laugh it off and move on, rather than harping on his accomplishment for months and months?

Promoting the notion that he doesn't play by Hollywood's sycophantic rules is good branding for Gervais; it'll certainly get more people to watch the show this Sunday night. (The ad campaign for the Globes has Gervais telling audiences that the only difference between them and him, is that they'll be saying catty things from home, and he'll be doing it to celebrities' faces.) We know we're looking forward to it because he will take more digs than anyone else would, and the show will be less bland for it. But we will also spend the entire night worrying that at the end of the show, we are in for another yearlong didactic and scolding explanation about how humor works and a giggling identity crisis about whether he's a Hollywood insider or outsider. We'll also spend the night wondering where the man went who made his career by being unerringly clear-eyed about the ways that a lack of self-awareness and desire for approval can turn a person into a buffoon, i.e., a David Brent. Because he doesn't seem to be the same guy telling the jokes anymore.

GET MORE: BLASPHEMY, RICKY GERVAIS, GOLDEN GLOBES 2012, JOHNNY DEPP,

Forgotten Books: How Like An Angel by Margaret Millar

How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar

I've always held the opinion that some writers are just too good for the mass market. This is a true of a number of literary writers but it's also true of at least one writer of crime fiction, the late Margret Millar. For all her many deserved awards, she never became the enormous commercial success she deserved to be.

For me she's the single most elegant stylist who ever shaped a mystery story. You revel in her sentences. She used wit and dark humor in the direst of novels long before it was fashionable in the genre. And she was a better (and much fairer) bamboozler than Agatha Christie.

I recently reread her How Like and Angel and its richness, its darkness, its perverse wit make me repeat what I've said many times before--if this isn't the perfect mystery novel, it comes damned close.

The story, complex as it becomes, is simple in its set-up. Private eye Joe Quinn, having gambled away all his money, begins hitchiking from Reno to Caifornia. Along the way he sees the Tower, the symbol of a religious cult that eventually offers him not only shelter but a chance to put his skills to use. Sister Blessing asks him to find a man named Patrick O'Gorman. The man is dead. Which makes Quinn suspicious of why they want him located.

Among its many pleasures is the way this novel, published in the early sixties, anticipates some of the fringe cults that would grow out of the flower power days. There's more than a touch of ole Charlie Manson in the Tower.

I've always argued that the traditional mystery can be used for purposes other than simply whodunit. Here Millar gives us a great novel of character, a wry and not unkind look at people drawn to cults and a dark stunning story of forged lives.

From Jack O'Connell 1970s Movies of The Week Casting Game!

Ed,

As a lover of the 1970s Movie of the Week, I really grooved on this morn's posting.

Have you played the "Cast the 1970s Movie of the Week" game? Here's the list:

The Playbook for Making a 1970s MFTVM



Now that you've watched a bushel of MFTVMs, you're ready to make your own. Below you'll find a manual we picked up from central casting



Young Turk

Peter Haskell: slick young turk

Michael Parks: brooding young turk

Frank Converse: smart young turk

Christopher George: hotheaded young turk

Peter Mark Richman: duplicitous young turk

James Franciscus: WASPY young turk

Jan‑Michael Vincent: surfer‑dude young turk

Michael Cole: confused young turk

Glenn Corbett: mild‑mannered young turk

Dack Rambo: cowboy young turk



Woman In Jeopardy

Rosemary Forsyth: woman in jeopardy

Hope Lange: woman in jeopardy

Blythe Danner: woman in jeopardy

Lee Grant: woman in jeopardy

Rosemary Forsyth: woman in jeopardy

Yvette Mimieux: woman in jeopardy

Mariette Hartley: woman in jeopardy

Elizabeth Montgomery: woman in jeopardy

Donna Mills: woman in jeopardy



Ingenue

Carol Lynley: ingenue in trouble

Lesley Ann Warren: ingenue in heat

Lynda Day George: ingenue in mourning

Tisha Sterling: hippy deb ingenue



Suburban Mom

Sandy Dennis: jilted suburban wife drifting into diet pill abuse



Suburban Dad

Carl Betz: suburban dad with a mistress

Mike Farrell: suburban dad with an issue

Dennis Weaver: suburban dad in jeopardy



Kids

Richard Thomas: overly sensitive youth

Mitch Vogel: overly sensitive youth

Lance Kerwin: overly sensitive youth

Robby Benson: overly sensitive youth

Jennifer Salt: rebellious daughter

Glynnis O'Connor: girl with a problem

Linda Blair: girl with a big problem



Grandma

Estelle Parsons: grandma



Granddad

Arthur Kennedy: granddad

Will Geer: dotty old granddad



Cop

Robert Forster: detective first class loner

Harry Guardino: media savvy police commissioner

Cameron Mitchell: good cop gone bad

Claude Akins: Deputy Bud



Lawyer

Richard Basehart: district attorney

Pernell Roberts: politically ambitious DA

James Whitmore: defense attorney

Howard Duff: stop‑at‑nothing defense attorney

Simon Oakland: badly dressed ambulance chaser

Hugh O'Brian: playboy lawyer



Doctor

Lloyd Nolan: kind‑but‑wise doctor

Barnard Hughes: kindly‑but‑eccentric doctor

William Windom: alcoholic mess doctor

Sam Groom: playboy surgeon



Businessmen

Barry Sullivan: craven industrialist

Peter Graves: the CEO

Monte Markham: real estate mogul with a secret

Richard Anderson: supervisor Adams

Mark Goddard: double‑crossing business partner

Herb Edelman: sales, any kind of sales

Jim Hutton: Dodge dealership owner

Ed Nelson: life‑insurance saleman with a dozen blue blazers

David Hedison: desperate stockbroker



Government

Broderick Crawford: by‑the‑book alderman

William Schallert: head of the school board



Arts and Entertainment

Anthony Perkins: repressed young artist

Sheree North: nightclub singer with heart of gold

Roddy McDowall: in the closet art dealer



High Society

Agnes Moorehead: bitter, catty socialite

Henry Jones: snotty garden club chairman

Grayson Hall: divorced nympho lush



Working Stiffs

Eugene Roche: rubbish hauler

John Karlen: Handyman Tom

Norman Fell: summons server

William Demarest: mean barkeep

Arlene Golonka: waitress at the diner



Sports

Alex Karras: Coach Roy

Robert Foxworth: weekend white water rafter in safari vest

Joseph Campanella: golf pro



Academics

Percy Rodriguez: Professor of obscure myths and legends

Georg Stanford Brown: head of the black students union



Head Cases

John Carradine: creepy old coot

Zalman King: obsessive psycho boyfriend

John Savage: recently released young mental patient



Utility Players

Edward Asner: cop or crooked union official

Leslie Nielsen: cop or well‑dressed embezzler

Avery Schreiber: chauffeur or diner owner

Cleavon Little: pimp or revolutionary

Darren McGavin: average‑guy‑in‑over‑his‑head or editor‑in‑chief

Elke Sommer: woman with a past or spy

Ted Bessell: the new boyfriend or management trainee



Now post your concept and ideal cast!

Sam McCain now on Kindle

Ed here: Part of the reason I started writing the Sam McCain novels was because I was sick of hearing about how wonderful the decade of the Fifties was. You know, Ozzie & Harriet and Father Knows Best. Most egregious, to me, was Happy Days. By then even the Republicans knew better. If you were white, Christian, middle-class, straight and white collar the decade was probably more decent to you than not. But given the racism, sexism, Communist witch hunts, union-busting and large pockets of poverty, not even Ozzie's dopey smile could make the excluded Happy.

The books aren't sermons. All of them are humorous more than not and all of them are, I think, solid fair clue puzzles. But I also touch on the demons of the time; as one of the Chicago papers noted "This is Happy Days as it really was." There's even nostalgia for those who recall the times I use. The Day The Music Died begins on the night Buddy Holly died in that terrible needless plane crash; Wake Up Little Suzie begins on the day the Edsel was unveiled. I have some fun with the difficulty the press, national and local, had describing the Edsel grill. As a New York Times reporter said: "We had to say it looked like a vagina without using that word."

I honestly think you'll enjoy the Sam McCain novels. They begin, as I said, in 1958. The latest, Bad Moon Rising, takes place in 1968. And yes, each book is titled after a then current song.

Here are some press quotes:

"Gorman's delightful series...provokes a bracing nostalgia for a time that was neither as innocent nor as dull as is sometimes said." -The Wall Street Journal

"Offers the rueful wisdom and and charm of an exemplary hero who is curious not only about whodunit but also about some of the more elusive riddles and human existence." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Gorman knowingly invests his whodunit with all the right cultural touches...but, by not ignoring the racism and sexual taboos of the time he elevates it to a story with bite and substance." Chicago Tribune

"McCain's zeal to cleanse Black River Fall of evil makes him the kind of hero any small town could take to its heart." --New York Times

"In (the Sam McCain books) good and evil clash with the same heartbreaking results as they have in the more urban crime drama of Block or Leonard." Booklist

The first two novels are now available for $4.99 each or $6.99for both in one package.



The Day The Music Died (The Sam McCain Mysteries) [Kindle Edition]
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ABC'S MOVIE OF THE WEEK

Ed here: Yeah a lot of them were trashy but some were fun-trashy and a few of them were actually good. I'd take them over most of the predictable sit-coms and cop shows airing now. One especially fine one was Ira Levin's "Dr. Cook's Garden" with believe-it-or-not Bing Crosby in this creepy but oddly moving tv version of the play. There was another good one, too, that always struck me as a knock-off of a very good John Brunner science fiction story but that may just have been the fan boy in me wanting to promote an sf writer.

FROM CLASSIC-FILM-TV.blogspot
http://classic-film-tv.blogspot.com/

ABC's The Movie of the Week

Made-for-TV movies eventually got a bad rap, which explains why they pretty much faded from network television in the 1990s. But I still fondly recall what I call the "Golden Age of the TV Movie": the early 1970s when ABC began broadcasting its Movie of the Week.

Every Tuesday night, ABC introduced a world premiere telefilm in a ninety-minute time slot (about 72 minutes without commercials). The success of the series can be attributed, in part, to the variety of its films: suspense (The Longest Night), horror (The Night Stalker), science fiction (Night Slaves), World War II action (Death Race), comedy (The Daughters of Joshua Cabe), Western (The Hanged Man), serious drama (That Certain Smile), film noir (Goodnight, My Love) and even kung fu (Men of the Dragon). Many of the telefilms were also pilots for TV series--some of which made it as regular series (The Six Million Dollar Man) and some that didn't (The Monk with George Maharis as a private eye).


Dennis Weaver in Duel, written by
Richard Matheson.
Several films earned critical plaudits, such as Brian's Song, Duel, That Certain Summer, Tribes, and The Point. Occasionally, one would be released theatrically in either in the U.S. or Europe--often with additional footage--after its TV broadcast. That was the case with Steven Spielberg's suspenseful chase drama Duel and The Sex Symbol with Connie Stevens playing an actress loosely inspired by Marilyn Monroe.

I'm always surprised by how many of the ABC Movie of Week telefilms are fondly remembered by fellow film buffs. For example, people may not remember the title of Trilogy of Terror--but mention the creepy TV movie with Karen Black about the killer doll and a lot of folks will know it.

The original Movie of the Week debuted on Tuesday night in 1969. It was so successful that ABC launched a Movie of the Weekend, which subsequently shifted to mid-week so there were Tuesday and Wednesday Movies of the Week installments. The final Movie of the Week was broadcast in 1976.

The catchy theme to the Movie of the Week opening was written by Burt Bacharach. Its actual title is "Nikki," named after Burt's daughter with Angie Dickinson. Click on the clip below to view the full opening for When Michael Calls, a thriller with Ben Gazzara, Elizabeth Ashley, and Michal Douglas. At the end of the clip is preview for the following week's movie, The Screaming Woman, starring Olivia de Havilland. Unfortunately, the video quality doesn't do justice to the bright, colorful graphics.



In terms of originality, the only network that competed with ABC was CBS, which launched CBS Tuesday Night Movie in 1972. It sent speeding helicopters (Birds of Prey), ancient evil Druids (The Horror at 37,000 Feet), and, most memorably, Gargoyles to battle its TV-movie rival at ABC.


Crosby as Dr. Cook.
Sadly, only a handful of these films are available on DVD (and even then, the prints are usually inferior in quality). I'd love to see TCM get the rights to the Movie of the Week. It'd be great to see Bing Crosby in Dr. Cook's Garden again and see if the film as good as I remember.

Below is a sampling of the telefilms that played on The Movie of the Week (to include the Tuesday and Wednesay editions and The Movie of the Weekend on Saturday). Note that several movies featured performers from the classic film era:


Seven in Darkness (1969)
Daughter of the Mind (1969) with Gene Tierney & Ray Milland
Gidget Grows Up (1969)
Honeymoon with a Stranger (1969)
The Over-the-Hill Gang (1969) with Walter Brennan & Andy Devine
The Ballad of Andy Crocker (1969)
The Immortal (1969)
Wake Me When the War Is Over (1969)
Along Came a Spider (1970)
Carter's Army (1970)
Crowhaven Farm (1970)
How Awful about Allan (1970) with Anthony Perkins & Julie Harris
Night Slaves (1970)
The Over the Hill Gang Rides Again with Walter Brennan & Fred Astaire
Run, Simon, Run (1970)
The Love War (1970)
Tribes (1970)
Brian's Song (1971)
Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate (1971) with Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy, Sylvia Sidney
Dr. Cook's Garden (1971)
Duel (1971)
In Broad Daylight (1971)
In Search of America (1971)
Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring (1971)
The Birdmen (1971)
The Devil and Miss Sarah (1971)
The Feminist and the Fuzz (1971)
The Point! (1971)
The Reluctant Heroes (1971)
A Great American Tragedy (1972)
Goodnight, My Love (1972)
Moon of the Wolf (1972)
That Certain Summer (1972)
The Astronaut (1972)
The Daughters of Joshua Cabe (1972) with Buddy Ebsen & Sandra Dee
The Longest Night (1972)
Madame Sin (1972) with Bette Davis & Robert Wagner
The People (1972)
The Screaming Woman (1972) with Olivia de Havilland
Women in Chains (1972)
A Cold Night's Death (1973)
A Summer Without Boys (1973)
Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)
Female Artillery (1973)
Go Ask Alice (1973)
Isn't It Shocking? (1973)
Satan's School for Girls (1973)
Shirts/Skins (1973)
The Girl Most Likely to... (1973)
The Girls of Huntington House (1973)
The Man Without a Country (1973) with Cliff Robertson
The Night Strangler (1973)
The Third Girl from the Left (1973)
Get Christie Love! (1974)
Hit Lady (1974)
Houston, We've Got a Problem (1974)
Killdozer (1974)
Locusts (1974)
The Mark of Zorro (1974)
The Morning After (1974)
Thursday's Game (1974)
Winter Kill (1974)
Posted by Rick29 at 10:28 PM 5 comments
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Labels: dr. cook's garden, duel, movie of the week, rick29 (author), trilogy of terror