Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

And right from the get-go when George Segal puts on a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punches him in the nuts, this movie had me. At that age, the height of comedy was a guy in a gorilla suit, and the only thing funnier than that was a guy getting punched in the nuts. So a guy in a gorilla suit getting punched in the nuts was the absolute pinnacle of comedy. No doubt, this movie was going to be hysterical. As late as it was, I was going to watch this movie all the way to the end. I’ve never seen Where’s Poppa? all the way through since that screening. But so many visual moments have remained burned into my brain, whether I understood them then or not.

MASH, the Dollars Trilogy, Where Eagles Dare, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Bullitt. And some, to an eight- or nine-year-old, were fucking boring. Carnal Knowledge? The Fox? Isadora? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Klute? Goodbye, Columbus? Model Shop? Diary of a Mad Housewife?

The second rule, during the movie, don’t ask stupid questions. Maybe one or two, at the beginning of the movie, but after that, I was on my own. Any other questions would have to wait till the movie was over. And, for the most part, I was able to follow this rule. Though there were some exceptions. My mom would recount with her friends about the time they took me to see Carnal Knowledge. Art Garfunkel is trying to talk Candice Bergen into sex. And their dialogue back and forth was something like, C’mon let’s do it? I don’t want to do it. You promised you’d do it? I don’t want to do it. Everybody else is doing it. And apparently, in my squeakiest nine-year-old voice, I asked loudly, “What do they want to do, Mom?” Which, according to my mother, made the theatre full of adults burst out laughing.

Also, I found the iconic freeze-frame ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid too obscure. “What happened?” I remember asking. “They died,” my mom informed me. “They died?” I yelped. “Yes, Quentin, they died,” my mother assured me. “How do you know?” I shrewdly asked. “Because when it froze, that was what that was meant to imply,” she patiently replied. Again I asked, “How do you know?” “I just know,” was her unsatisfying answer. “Why didn’t they show it?” I asked, almost indignant. Then, clearly losing her patience, she snapped, “Because they didn’t want to!” Then I grumbled under my breath, “They shoulda shown it.” And despite how iconic that image has become, I still agree with me, “They shoulda shown it.”

When a child reads an adult book, there’s going to be words they don’t understand. But depending on the context, and the paragraph surrounding the sentence, sometimes they can figure it out. Same thing when a kid watches an adult movie.

Because these adults weren’t used to seeing this type of material. These were the first couple of years of New Hollywood. These audiences had grown up on movies from the fifties and sixties. They were used to peekaboo, insinuation, double entendres, and word play (before 1968, in Goldfinger, Honor Blackman’s character name Pussy Galore was the most explicit sex joke ever uttered in a big commercial film).

On the ride home, even if I didn’t have questions, my parents would talk about the movie we had just seen. These are some of my fondest memories. Sometimes they liked the movie and sometimes they didn’t, but I was usually a little surprised how thoughtful they were about it. And it was interesting to review the movie I had just seen from the perspective of their analysis.

Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.” Right fucking on, Connie!

Less than a year later she would leave Curt and exclusively date black men for the next three years.

Then, on a Downtown Saturday Night, Jim Brown’s new movie, Black Gunn, began flickering through the film projector’s shutter gate for an extremely excited audience of about eight hundred and fifty black folks, eight hundred of them male. And frankly, I’ve never been the same. To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972. The closest thing to that experience I had prior was the year before, when I saw my first James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, with the way the audience knowingly responded to every quip Sean Connery made. And I’d probably add the way the audience had responded to Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry as well. Still . . . there was no comparison.

Sadly, after that night, I never saw Reggie again. And to this day I have no idea what happened to him. From time to time I’d ask my mom, “Whatever happened to Reggie?” She’d just shrug her shoulders and say, “Oh, he’s around.”

But one of the things that made Steve McQueen so popular in the sixties, along with his king of cool persona and his undeniable charisma, was that of the top three actors (Newman, McQueen, and Beatty), McQueen did better movies. Once McQueen became a movie star with The Great Escape, he made a string of movies that were all pretty damn good. In the sixties the only real dud in his filmography post–The Great Escape is Baby the Rain Must Fall. And that’s mostly due to the ridiculous sight of Steve trying to play a folk singer. Whereas Paul Newman for his whole career did an incredible amount of lousy movies mixed in with some iconic ones. I mean, some of the movies Newman agreed to do over the years are really baffling. I suspect he just wanted to get out of the house. After Splendor in the Grass, none of Beatty’s films are worth a damn before Bonnie and Clyde (okay, maybe Lilith). But the material McQueen chose to do—compared to the other two—was consistently of a higher quality.

McQueen didn’t like reading. It’s doubtful he ever read a book of his own volition. He probably never read a newspaper unless there was a story about him in it. And he only read scripts when he had to. It wasn’t that he couldn’t read. He wasn’t illiterate. Neile McQueen, his first wife, told me, “He read car magazines.”

So for most people who haven’t seen the movie in five or six years, even though they’ve seen it a few times before, if you asked them to describe the plot of Bullitt, they couldn’t do it. The comedian Robert Wuhl once told me, “I’ve seen Bullitt four times and I couldn’t tell you what the plot’s about. All I know is it has something to do with Robert Vaughn.” But strangely, in the case of the film Peter Yates made, this isn’t a negative observation. In fact a case could be made it’s a mark of the film’s inner integrity.

Instead of wasting time trying to explain a mystery, it’s the first urban action movie to go from one expertly executed set piece to another (you could make the case that Goldfinger was the first modern movie to do that. But the fantastical nature of the story allowed for it more than a modern-day cop/crime picture).

Don Siegel did terrific location photography in his career, and he would do a good job shooting San Francisco three years later in Dirty Harry (even though half the movie would be shot on the Universal back lot). But nobody had ever shot San Francisco as great as Peter Yates did or ever will again. The way he utilizes location to such a dynamic degree suggests a master cinematic stylist. One of the reasons he did such a dynamite job was he went thirty days over schedule. Yates was shooting a movie, not a schedule. While Yates would do good work many times again—Breaking Away, The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (overrated), The Deep, and Mother, Juggs & Speed (underrated)—he would never demonstrate the cinematic style and confidence he does in Bullitt.

Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt keeps moving forward, Yates as the director follows him, and we the audience sit back and let them do our thinking for us. As pure cinema, it’s one of the best directed movies ever made.

Siegel told director Curtis Hanson (back when he went by the name Curtis Lee Hanson) in the 1968 issue of the film magazine Cinema, “I’m extremely conscious of editing when I’m shooting. Because I work with limited time, very short schedules, I plan everything as I think it’s going to be cut.” Then he added, “It doesn’t necessarily follow that because you’re a good editor, you’ll be a good director. But I do think that to be a good director you have to be a good editor.”

Dirty Harry was Siegel and Eastwood’s fourth collaboration and the film both men would be most known for. It was with Dirty Harry that Eastwood would establish himself outside of cowboy pictures and dethrone John Wayne as America’s number one action star (remarkably Wayne was still going pretty strong into 1970). Dirty Harry would make Siegel, along with Sam Peckinpah, Hollywood’s premier director of action cinema, and its most expert practitioner of cinematic violence. Along with The French Connection, Dirty Harry would facilitate the move from westerns to cop films that took place in that decade both on screen and television. And it would become the most imitated action film of the next two decades, as well as being the first real official entry into the popular subgenre of serial killer movies.

And a year later, Curt and my Uncle Roger took me to a James Bond triple feature that was playing at the Loyola cinema, From Russia with Love, Dr. No, and Goldfinger. After the nonstop excitement of Diamonds Are Forever, I found both From Russia with Love and Dr. No dull as hell (these boring movies are James Bond movies?). But as soon as Goldfinger started, I thought “that’s more like it.”

While I love Peckinpah’s The Getaway there are irritating flaws that are the filmmaker’s fault. Dramatic turns of events that clue the authorities on to which direction the fugitive couple are heading are based on plot contrivances (Richard Bright’s cowboy con man/locker thief). It seems like through the whole movie the couple can’t pass a single Texas extra without them holding a newspaper with their picture in it and that extra doing a double take. Also everybody in the state seems to know not just what Doc looks like, but the make and model of the car he drives. It practically becomes an unintentional running joke (the TV appearance in the repair shop is convenient, but that one Peckinpah pulls off). Also there really wouldn’t have to be a getaway at all, if Beynon didn’t force Doc to use two unstable half-wits like Rudy and Jackson (Bo Hopkins).

Because it’s a movie, stupid. Or is it because it’s a stupid movie?

The old-school genre movie directors dealt within a movie industry I can read about in books, but I really can’t imagine. They’d get assigned a producer from the studio that they couldn’t stand. They’d get assigned actors they didn’t think were right for the part. They’d work with 1st AD’s, costume people, directors of photography, production designers who weren’t working for them. They were working for the studio. And it worked the other way around too. Producers and actors would get stuck with hack directors with no feel for the material they were directing, that were just shooting a schedule. Charles Bronson once claimed that was three out of five directors he worked with. Back in those days people would work together and they’d finish their projects despising each other. Especially Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah once said, “A director has to deal with a whole world absolutely teeming with mediocrities, jackals, hangers-on, and just plain killers.” That’s not been my experience in the industry.

I remember when I worked at my Manhattan Beach video store, Video Archives, and talked to the other employees about the types of movies I wanted to make, and the things I wanted to do inside of those movies. And I would use the example of the opening of Almodóvar’s Matador. And their response would be “Quentin, they won’t let you do that.” To which I replied back, “Who the fuck are ‘they’ to stop me? ‘They’ can go fuck themselves.” Now I wasn’t a professional filmmaker back then. I was a brash know-it-all film geek. Yet, once I graduated to professional filmmaker, I never did let “they” stop me. Viewers can accept my work or reject it. Deem it good, bad, or with indifference. But I’ve always approached my cinema with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome. A fearlessness that comes to me naturally—I mean, who cares, really? It’s only a movie.

But the curse of eighties cinema wasn’t that they wouldn’t let you shoot somebody jerking off to Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. It was that the complex and complicated lead characters of the seventies were the characters that eighties cinema avoided completely. Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties likability was everything. A novel could have a low-down son of a bitch at its center, as long as that low-down son of a bitch was an interesting character. But not a movie. Not in the eighties. After the seventies, it seemed film went back to the restraints of the fifties. Back to when controversial novels and plays had to be drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays. As happened with 9½ Weeks, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, First Blood, The Color Purple, White Palace, Stick, Miami Blues, and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Okay, what about Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Its open sexuality more or less made it to the screen intact. That meant you can do that kind of thing, didn’t it? Yeah, if you made it dull enough. The Unbearable Boredom of Watching. And if you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes. Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.

When the pursuing posse of local yokels fuck around and flip the On Switch of one-man killing machine John J. Rambo in First Blood, instead of slaughtering them like he does in David Morrell’s book, he just wounds them. Does that make the point of the book—that once the government turns a man into a killing machine for the purposes of warfare, keeping that machine turned off back home during peacetime isn’t so easy—irrelevant?

Consequently, in twelve books Parker never gets caught and never gets killed. At the end of Heat, McCauley gets shot by the law. I never liked the ending of Heat. Not just because I wanted to see De Niro get away, not just because I didn’t want him to break his code, and not just because I didn’t want Al Pacino’s detective to win. But from the moment Jon Voight tells him he found the guy who killed Danny Trejo, you know how the movie’s going to end. The close-up of De Niro driving, making up his mind . . . incredible. But once he jerks the wheel, you know he’s doomed. The by-rote moralistic functionality of the last fifteen minutes, compared to the two hours and thirty-five minutes that preceded it, is a drag.

It would appear most critics writing for newspapers and magazines set themselves up as superior to the films they were paid to review. Which I could never understand, because judging from their writing, that was clearly not the case. They looked down on films that gave pleasure, and on the filmmakers who had an understanding of the audience that they did not.

Now, it must be noted for the length of my career—at my hometown newspaper—Kenny set himself up to be my nemesis. Turan wasn’t the only critic to give Pulp Fiction a bad review. But his review wasn’t just a pan of a movie he didn’t care for, it had an agenda. To counteract Todd McCarthy’s and Janet Maslin’s once-in-a-lifetime raves in Variety and the New York Times. I thought maybe I’d get him with Jackie Brown, but no such luck. Then for the next few years, Kenny made it a point to bring me up as a negative example of what was wrong with current cinema in every think piece he wrote. In one about Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, he didn’t just run me over, he drove around the block to run me over. Turan’s animosity towards my work has persisted throughout my career. To such a degree, when he finally responded positively to my film Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, he felt the need to explain to the readers the degree to which he had dismissed my work in the past (though by that time the only one keeping score was me). When you share an antagonism with one critic for as long as Kenny and me, you end up having a strange personal connection with each other. The few times we bumped into each other at an event, we’ve shared a moment of professional mutual rejection that bordered on intimacy.

Nevertheless, it does illustrate the attitude that Dennis’ Hippie Hollywood had about Old Hollywood as it gave way to New Hollywood. These new filmmakers had an anti-establishment perspective. To them, John Ford, John Wayne, and Howard Hawks were the establishment. Charlton Heston was the establishment. Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, and Rock Hudson were the establishment. And since My Fair Lady was definitely the establishment, so too was George Cukor. The Post-Sixties Anti-Establishment Auteurs had just won a revolution. The old studio Broadway musical based extravaganza (The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Hello, Dolly!) was finally at long last dead (many filmmakers today can’t wait for the day they can say that about superhero movies).

When Jaws came out in 1975 it might not have been the best film ever made. But it was easily the best movie ever made. Nothing ever made before it even came close. Because for the first time the man at the helm wasn’t a Richard Fleischer or a Jack Smight or a Michael Anderson executing a studio assignment. But a natural born filmmaker genius who grooved on exactly this kind of movie and would kill himself to deliver the exact vision that was in his head. Spielberg’s command of Jaws showed how clumsy and badly timed most studio genre films were (Logan’s Run, Airport 1975, Towering Inferno, the ’70s James Bond movies).

Hitchcock went in for big suspense set pieces, which he usually accomplished through cinematic virtuosity or daring surprises in the narrative. And Hitchcock either pulled them off . . . (the merry-go-round sequence in Strangers on a Train, Marion Crane’s murder in Psycho, the difficult murder of the KGB agent by Paul Newman and the farmer’s wife in Torn Curtain, The Birds in the playground) . . . or he didn’t . . . (the Mount Rushmore climax of North by Northwest, the rushed rooftop climax at the end of To Catch a Thief, the degrading handling of Anna Massey’s dead corpse in the “potato sack scene” in Frenzy).

For all the huge movie stars that Alfred Hitchcock worked with, the 35mm film camera was always the real star of the show. Well, this approach to cinematic grammar suited the young student filmmaker. Brian De Palma didn’t want to become a filmmaker to shoot footage of people talking to each other. I’m sure Brian watched Rio Bravo in college too. But unlike Bogdanovich, Scorsese, and me, he probably didn’t dig it. He might have thought some of the lines were funny, but for the most part, I’m sure De Palma thought it was just a lot of Howard Hawks shooting footage of John Wayne talking to different people on that damn jail set.* Same thing with The Searchers. I’m positive Brian thinks a whole lot of The Searchers is John Ford shooting John Wayne on a horse talking to Jeffrey Hunter.

And Richard Lester’s magnum opus would be his brilliant slapstick comedy reinvention of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (which I believe is one of the greatest epic film productions ever made).

Then there’s Paul Schrader’s two-script reworking of The Searchers, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Schrader’s own Hardcore. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed to Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake and not actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director explained: “I was thinking about the John Wayne character in The Searchers. He doesn’t say much. . . . He doesn’t belong anywhere, since he just fought a war he believed in and lost, but he has a great love within him that’s been stamped out. He gets carried away, so that during the long search for the young girl, he kills more buffalo than necessary because it’s less food for the Comanche. But throughout, he’s determined that they’ll find her, as he says, ‘As sure as the turning of the earth.’”

The film also made me a champion of its director, John Flynn. At least the three action films he did in a row in the seventies, The Outfit, Rolling Thunder, and Defiance. It seemed all the cool critics had their special filmmaker to champion and Flynn was mine. So much so that I sought him out at nineteen to interview him. How did I manage that? Simple—if not easy—I looked up every John Flynn in the phone book, called them up and asked, “Is this John Flynn?” If they said yes, then I asked them, “The John Flynn who directed Rolling Thunder?” Till eventually one said, “Yes it is, who is this?” Wow! It’s him, it’s fucking him! I had never spoken to a movie director before. No less the director of one of my favorite movies. So I introduced myself and told him I was writing a book on film directors, and could we get together and interview him about his career. And he agreed, and we set a time, and he invited me to come over to his house and conduct the interview. Holy shit, I’m going to see what a movie director’s house looks like!

The first time movie audiences got a taste of Sylvester Stallone’s voice as an artist (writer/actor) wasn’t 1976’s Rocky, but 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush. It’s a low-budget New York independent film directed by Martin Davidson, who would go on to have a nice little filmography that would include the like-minded Eddie and the Cruisers, Hero at Large (after Lords, my favorite), Almost Summer (which enjoys a very very tiny cult following among devotees who saw it when it came out), and the William Petersen & Sissy Spacek nineties romantic comedy Hard Promises (which, apparently, I alone like), and codirected by Stephen Verona, who would go on to direct the ill-fated Gladys Knight–starring feature film vehicle Pipe Dreams, which costarred her sketchy ex-husband.

The story goes King was a replacement for the role of Chico. Originally Chico was played by a young Richard Gere, three years before his breakout roles in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Days of Heaven. And, apparently, Stallone and Gere hated each other so much that Stallone kicked his ass and then Gere either quit or was fired. Another humorous element of Stallone’s “Lords Legacy,” after super producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler read the Rocky script and wanted to make it, they were told they had to do it with the author as the lead. “Well, what has he done before?” they incredulously asked. Stallone’s agent said, “He’s the lead of Lords of Flatbush.” So naturally they screened the film and were completely beside themselves with excitement about the actor and his potential to play a great Rocky . . . because they thought Perry King was Sylvester Stallone!

While I’ve always felt The Lords of Flatbush spent too much footage on the Chico-Jane relationship, their breakup scene, set to a breakup version of their song You and Me, has always punched me in the heart. It’s after that scene you realize how good this dinky little movie really is.

After his success with Rocky (both as writer and star), Stallone would give interviews and journalists would ask how he started writing. He famously said he started trying to write screenplays after he saw Easy Rider. He remarked, “I could do at least as good as that.”

Carl Weathers spends the entire movie fucking furious at his perception in the media. Creed stomping around his giant house—angrily reading hate mail—probably mirrors Stallone stomping around his giant house reading Pauline Kael’s review of Paradise Alley. In the press, Stallone went from “aww shucks” nice guy to challenging movie reviewers to fights (“I’d like to see him say that to my face!”). He had the money, he had the fame, he had the house, he had the wardrobe, he had the cars. But putting pen to paper on the manuscript for Rocky II, he knew something he never could have known when he wrote the first movie. To possess those things there’s a price to be paid. And yeah, people can say, fuck you—no biggie. I’m sure that’s what Stallone would have said before Rocky. But those are people who have never and will never pay that price. And Stallone didn’t handle it well.

Eastwood, from the very beginning, always had a clear understanding of his own iconic persona and so did Siegel. No other director, including Leone—judging by the harsh, insulting remarks Sergio made at Clint’s expense during the publicity for Once Upon a Time in America—understood Eastwood better. And Eastwood didn’t trust anybody with his carefully crafted persona the way he trusted Don Siegel.

By this time in their collaboration, many of the creative decisions are the joint decisions of two simpatico minds. I can imagine Eastwood and Siegel in a script meeting discussing how long can they go in the picture before Frank Morris says his first line. Then how few lines can he speak after that. How few lines can all the characters speak, except for Patrick McGoohan’s loquacious and sadistic warden.

A genuine stylistic prison film precursor to Escape from Alcatraz is the first of the fourteen films in the Japanese action film series Abashiri Bangaichi (1965) starring Japan’s answer to Eastwood, Takakura Ken, and directed by Ken’s Siegel, Teruo Ishii. This stark stylistic black and white snow-set prison escape adventure is a perfect companion piece to the Siegel and Eastwood endeavor (it’s highly unlikely Siegel would have ever seen Abashiri Bangaichi, but not unthinkable that Eastwood may have viewed it for its possible remake potential).

Escape from Alcatraz represents—at the height of that awareness—the last time a convincing prison story could be told that didn’t dwell on those male-rape aspects. And even this film couldn’t completely ignore it. The film’s most unconvincing scene is a ludicrous attempt by some barrel-built prick to bust Morris in the shower. As if anybody would earmark the forty-five-year-old Clint Eastwood for homosexual subjugation.

One tiny reveal reveals another minutia of opportunity. All the step-by-step moments of the escape become intriguing, and by the time you’ve put together a clear picture of the plan, you’re fascinated. The constant chipping away of the Rock, the collecting of the clothes for their moonlight swim (the faultiest part of the plan, and what surely killed them in real life), the paper-mache heads they painstakingly paint and sculpt (the image Siegel uses for the closing credits), the jerry-rigged welding gun they build to cut the cell bars. The plan takes such talent and intelligence that if they hadn’t died, you can’t help but think it could have won them parole.

Schrader’s Melnick made me excuse is not backed up by the film’s executive producer John Milius. Three years after Hardcore’s original release, I asked Milius about the production. He described it then as “A wonderful script turned into a lousy movie,” and he laid the blame on Schrader’s direction. When I asked Milius about Schrader’s studio interference excuse, Big John told me, “Nobody made him change anything, he did exactly what he wanted.” Then, I believed Milius. But today I believe Schrader. I do believe that the head of the studio made him turn his “wonderful script” into “a lousy movie.” But I still blame Schrader. I blame him for giving the same spineless excuse a lot of directors of fiascos claim after the fact, the big bad studio made me. As if they couldn’t say no. Well, then they wouldn’t have made it. Good. Who wants to spend three months making a fucked-up version of their movie? Then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for it, or cringing whenever they watch it, like Schrader does on the DVD commentary? When I reached out to Schrader, I warned him that, while I liked the film’s first half, I’m very rough on it and him in the second half. He wrote back, “I don’t think you could be harsher than I am on the second half of the film.”

In the sweltering hot Texas summer of ’73, on a threadbare budget in four weeks, with a crew of Texas locals, filmmaker Tobe Hooper fucked around and made one of the greatest movies of all time, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. To me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the few perfect movies ever made. There are very few perfect movies. This is okay, since in the pursuit of cinematic art, perfection shouldn’t be the goal. Nevertheless, when it’s accomplished (even by accident), it’s an achievement.

Of course, the two indisputable classics in the genre are Tod Browning’s Freaks and Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley. Freaks is rightly recognized as a towering classic of cinema’s golden age, which once seen is never forgotten (what the fuck is that Pinhead girl?). And while Nightmare Alley is also rightly considered a classic, I still think it’s underrated. To me Nightmare Alley is as good as studio filmmaking ever gets. Tyrone Power (who I’ve never been fond of) is fucking sensational in the movie. And the script adaptation by Jules Furthman (one of my handful of nominees for greatest Hollywood screenwriter of all time) is excellent (it could have never been made in the fifties). Power doesn’t say Furthman’s dialogue, he sings it. Nightmare Alley feels every inch like an Italian neorealism movie from the same era. The film could swap casts with Bitter Rice, Tyrone Power/Vittorio Gassman, Doris Dowling/Joan Blondell, Silvana Mangano/Coleen Gray, and both films would still hold their same place of pride in film history.

I was so inexperienced at what I was doing that I brought my tape recorder with me, but I only brought one cassette. I couldn’t imagine him giving me more than an hour. So once both sides of the tape were done, I didn’t want to look like an idiot, so I just kept flipping it over and re-recording over what I had just recorded. So all the stuff on his early career and The Outfit was lost forever.