How The Fixer Man Got A Film Well- Hollywood Bingo-Matt Dolan’s Revenge- With Primo Detective Fiction Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

How The Fixer Man Got A Film Well- Hollywood Bingo-Matt Dolan’s Revenge- With Primo Detective Fiction Writer Dashiell Hammett In Mind

By Zack James

Matt Dolan was a “fixer” man. No, not the drug-dealer fixer man famous, or infamous, in mean streets lore or in the hard-edged short stories of addiction, mostly heroin (horse, H, boy) by the crusty writer Nelson Algren, he of The Man With The Golden Arm the film adaptation of which revived Frank Sinatra’s film career, who had that scene down pat in an earlier age, an age when such addictions were sidebars and not front page headlines like today. Matt Dolan, called Mack for some reason buried so far back in childhood that nobody, including Matt knows how he came by that moniker, was a writer, is a writer who comes in and fixes up some film, some “picture” as they say in the trade when it is going off the wheels for any number of a hundred reasons that a script, even if the scriptwriter is the guy or gal who wrote the thing that the studio paid all that money for but was getting dragged down because somewhere after production had started the thing started turning in on itself and the studio, or more likely the producer of the particular film, would call Mack in to bail the film out, bail the director and everybody who worked the sets who saw their wages ending if the damn thing wasn’t  “fixed” by guys and gals like Mack.

Sure there are a million writers, some good, some bad who write anything from multi-week best sellers on some publications lists to stinkpots (pardon the old-fashioned word but it applies to some of the thousands of writings Mack had run through in his time). Sure there are a million screenwriters, or it seems like it when they roll the credits, mostly good or were at one time good and were either protected by the Guild or by somebody in management who owed them something. But there were, are surprisingly few “fixers” in the whole of the film industry and so they command high wages (really these days some fixed amount usually in the six figures agreed to in advance and signed on the dotted line as per Guild agreement which covers fixers as well as all the other categories of writers and musicians). Mack was, is among the best and has been since the 1950s when he broke into the industry and after a few false starts, and disappointments, got his reputation cemented when he saved the “stinker” High School Confidential. 

Mack came up with the very bright idea that that worthless cautionary tale about high school kids succumbing to the lure of heroin provided by evil nightclub owners and other denizens of the back alleys, the fixer man who deserves to roast for a while in hell just as every junkie should get a free pass to heaven since they served their collective hells on this planet, needed a big fix to take the stink off the thing that every kid would reject out of hand because it had the “voice of authority’ festering in it like some bleeding boil. The way Mack saw it no kid in his or her right mind was going to sit through their precious Saturday afternoon double-feature at the local Majestic Theater to be told stuff they got at home every day for free, and endlessly too. So Mack, a little younger then than the average screenwriter on the Hollywood scene and savvy to the role that music, specifically rock and roll music after Elvis and others broke the ground, came up with the idea of putting the then “hot” rock and roll mad monk saint Jerry Lee Lewis on the back of a flatbed truck with his piano and his sidemen and have the truck tooling toward the high school as he played his flame-throwing song High School Confidential. The film grossed a ton of money off of a shoestring budget because all the kids cared about was that scene and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies. Mack could name his price after that, usually. All the studios wanted him.         

But the supply and demand stresses of being a fixer put a lot of pressure on Mack, especially when he was working on some play or screenplay of his own which he was looking to have produced. One night Mack, who besides being a fixer man loved the ladies, loved the young ones especially even as he got older, said they kept him young, or whatever reason older guys give these days for chasing young skirts (or for older gay guys and lesbian women these days when the great secret of Hollywood same sex lives has become passe and they too can openly cavort with the younger set of their sexual identity) , was telling Jack Callahan, an executive at Excelsior Films, the company that he had the closest ties to over the previous  twenty years or so over drinks at his favorite watering hole, The Dirty Duck, off of Vine Street, about how he got his first contract to fix a “stinker” at Excelsior.

At that time maybe the summer of 1972 Max Stein called him up when he was up in Big Sur trying to work out some kinks in a screenplay that would later be produced under the title Love In The Park (and which made that studio, the now defunct Blue Blaze Films, a ton of money but not enough to keep the wolves away when they produced a big series of flops, real stinkers, none of which they saw the wisdom of bringing him or any fixer in on) and told him that the latest film he was producing, Hurry, My Sweet, was losing steam, needed a fixer man and he had heard through Harry Swann at Delta Films that Mack was the man he needed. Mack pleaded prior commitment but Max threw up a number that Mack couldn’t refuse and so he committed to a two- week stint back down at La Jolla where the film was shot to try to work something out of the air once again. Max sent him along with the contract a copy of the screenplay as it was then being worked on.

What the script was about was an old-time kind of detective story, a genre that was making a comeback on the screen, after a long absence since the time of the great black and white film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. The plotline involved as those type films always did some nefarious murder (or murders depending on how grizzly the producer and director though they could take the thing and not have irate parents banning their kids from spending their dough to see it) to be solved by a resourceful detective. One hook here was that the hard-boiled female detective, they always had to be hard-boiled whatever their gender since the days of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler switched things up back in the 1920s and 1930s, Patty Lane, being played by veteran screen actress Mara Whiting.

Another hook was that the bad guy was a bad gal, Laura Devine, played by the beautiful Gina Saint-Germain, who had wasted her drug-dealing lover, Gary Lawlor, played by rising star Sam Lawrence, after he had turned Laura’s sister, Sarah, played by new comer Sissy Moore, on to drugs and to the streets doing tricks for short money to feed her habit. The big hook though is that Sarah, after Laura wasted Gary, was holding five kilos of pure high- grade Columbian cocaine which she intended to sell to the highest bidder, Laura or anybody else, so she could get off the streets and feed her own habit in private. Laura putting pure greed over sisterly love sent some of her boys (and a girl sharpshooter as well) out to find the sister, find the dope really. Hard-pressed Sarah looked up in the Los Angeles telephone directory for a detective to help her out, for protection really, and to broker a deal if necessary and came up with Patty who she thinks is a guy because the listing of the agency was Pat Lane and Associates. Pretty standard stuff but Mack could see where Max was a little panicky because if the theme reflected more contemporary times and concerns it was still a “stinker” as far as he was concerned.                        

When Mack got to the set down in La Jolla not far from the university and close to the rock-strewn ocean that was playing a nice visual backdrop to the action he told the director, Josh Lannon well-known for working B films on short money, and short storyline filling out the meek dialogue with plenty of action, the thing was a stinker, no question and no amount of action was going to cover-up a beaten down storyline. Of course Josh took umbrage at that statement saying that he was given the thing for short money by Max and if Mack could bring it around well fine, if not then that was that. Mack was used to that kind of reaction and knowing he had money-man Max’s backing let it ride, let the ill-tempered director blow off steam.  

Of course Mack also knew that once production was started, once the actors had committed to their parts as best they could that all the interpersonal problems that face any collective effort, egos, bruised feelings, hostility, make-shift love, and desire for bigger roles in the film-and in future films if an actor showed promise, especially in a stinker came into play. That is where Mack’s fixer skills and love of younger women got a serious work-out.

About an hour and a half after Mack got on the set while sitting in an off-stage cubicle trying to figure out a new hook to make the audience interested enough in any character to take a chance and see the movie Sissy Moore came into his space. No question she was a good-looking young woman and as soon as she entered he had ideas, knowing she had ideas. Tall, slender, red-hair, long legs, not beautiful, not Gina Saint-Germaine beautiful for even a Hollywood novice knew, knows that you cannot have two beautiful women on one screen because they will not stand for it, and the audience won’t either even the women, but the kind of woman that once the film is over you think about, think about to the exclusion of the serious beauty.         

Sissy had heard that morning that the famous Mack Dolan was coming to fix the script and while she was only a new-comer people around the set and around Hollywood said with some proper training and proper roles she could be somebody. That was all she needed to know to get her small-town girl (Lima, Ohio) wanting habits on. She took dead aim at Mack, despite the fact that at the time she was maybe twenty years younger than him, and he had not due to that huge alcohol and lately drug consumption  aged gracefully, and coming right up to him so he could smell that gardenia perfume she was wearing mixed with thoughts of hard sex ahead she laid it on the line (she, as she told Mack after they had hit the satin sheets over at the Biltmore a few times, knew through the usually very reliable starlet grapevine that he had a thing for younger women, with or without the gardenia perfume).

She wanted her part built up, thought bad ass bad girl Laura in the story, meaning really Gina, after she wasted Gary was nothing to the whole plot, that she should be seen more, have more lines around her ability to evade the bad boys Laura sent after her, played more of a role helping Patty take the heat off of her. In return Mack could have, as she rather coyly put it, given what she was offering, he could have anything he wanted from her, anything she had to give.

Now, as Mack told Jack that night at the Dirty Duck, there are more urban legends about how famous stars, male and female, yes, males in the then male-dominated management end, worked their way up the cinematic food chain by “offering anything somebody in power wanted, anything they had to give” and a fair amount was just that-urban legend. But even back in 1972 there was plenty of sex being traded for stardom, or hopes of stardom, or better somebody in power taking advantage of some youngster’s hopes of stardom before being shunted back to Topeka, Toledo, or Boise. So Mack made his pact with Sissy, made it tight, and for the length of his time on the set he got his ashes and whatever else he wanted hauled by her. This time, unlike a few times before when he was a guy in power himself playing on some young thing’s hope for stardom, his agreement to get Sissy more screen time, more to say, was based on what he had seen in the rushes, had seen that star quality, maybe not the top but she would not have to sit by the midnight phone hoping for work.    

Naturally the increase of one actor’s role at the expense of another, here Gina, caused an uproar on the set, caused Gina to say she would not perform at her usual high level. Mack knew he had Max’s okay, since he had called him after the pact with Sissy was consummated the first time so he was able to ride it out. Here’s how: Mack determined that what the film needed with so many good-looking females was more sex, or in those days when it was still dicey to get too graphic in sex scenes, was the allure of sex. Now it wasn’t going to be Patty as the crusading detective ready to save an errant young woman and Gina flat out refused to do any sex scenes but Sissy, well, Sissy really was up for anything that would get her up the food chain, especially after Mack put the bug in her ear that such efforts would enhance her career opportunities.

There wasn’t much that Mack could do with the script with what was already in the can but that is when he came up with the idea that would save the damn thing. Sissy early on as she got more addicted to the drugs Gary was feeding her and was out doing tricks on the streets got into a situation where some guys Gary knew propositioned her to come to a poker party with them. She agreed once Gary said he would “make her well.” So the scene got set up in a smoky hotel room, cards out, chips out, cigarettes out, drinks out on the table and then Sissy dressed scantily like a Playboy bunny, popular at the time, without saying a word starts going provocatively under the table. Nothing showing what is happening but obviously Sissy is going down to “play the flute” as Mack put it euphemistically in his stage directions. That B film made a ton of money for Excelsior because all the kids cared about was that scene once they heard about it and then they could go back to whatever boy-girl thing they were doing the in the dark upstairs balconies, go back with a vengeance. That one scene made Sissy a “hot” property (and forced Gina in a later film to do a “play the flute” scene more graphically shown than anything Sissy had done) Among the gossips of the town, among your average red-blooded males out in the hinterlands Sissy was almost always thereafter called “the flutist” and nobody had to ask twice who that was or what it meant. Brilliance, Mack, pure brilliance.

Lost In The Rain On Desolation Row -With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind

Lost In The Rain On Desolation Row -With Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited In Mind

By Jack Callahan

“I’ve met Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, I’ve been in the tower with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, “declared Robert South to no one in particular although Jake Devine was the only one in the room at the time. With those words Jake, Jake known as Jake since childhood to distinguish him from John Devine, Senior although his father a genial Irishman addicted to sports betting and drinking whiskey not always in that order was more the slap on the back Jake type while Jake in the throes of his high hippie moments was trying to shed that moniker for his new identity one Be-Bop Benny but old habits die hard and his old high school friends called him Jake and when he went on the hitchhike road west with them in 1965,1966 the name stuck whether he liked it or not, knew that Robert was two things-one, high as a kite on either speed or LSD just then the drug of choice among the “hip” (not always the same as Hippie but Jake did not want to argue the fine points on that one since he himself had been on a two day black beauty speed high-low) on the mind-expanding conscious West Coast cohort of the brethren and two, Robert had been listening to the whole of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row at least once, probably more than once if he was high since he would not have had the stamina to switch the sound system that Captain Crunch had installed in their “digs” now that they were off the road for the winter and settled into Pablo’s mansion. By the way in compensation  for being called Jake by one and all on the bus, of which more in a minute, he had gathered some sense of respect because his latest flame, a serious “hippie chick” met on the road at Big Sur as they were heading south, Frilly Jilly, called him Be-Bop Benny,  called him a few other things once they high on grass, you know marijuana,  got down to the “do the do,” a term the guys still carried with them from the corner days in Riverdale after they had heard the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf do a song with those words in it, those words meaning hitting the sheets, having sex, what she called him in her high hormonal moments was left to them.              

 Yeah, Robert, Jimmy Jenkins, Frank Riley, and a guy, Josh Breslin, they met from a mill town in Maine on Russian Hill in San Francisco where they were camped out in a small park when he stopped by the bus and asked for a joint had been on quite a ride since coming West to see what it was all about and were learning quickly it was all about “drugs, sex and rock and roll” at its core but also about getting out from under the old ways of thinking and living. So when they hit Frisco they headed like lemmings to the sea to Golden Gate Park where all the hell was breaking loose met a few guys who “turned them on,” got them invited to a few parties, including one Captain Crunch was throwing around the new yellow brick road bus that he had just purchased (allegedly in a trade for a big sack of dope but all the time they were on the bus they never had that rumor confirmed by the Captain or anybody else and mainly it didn’t matter by then). This bus was nothing but an old school bus that had been turned into a moving commune after the seats had been torn out, mattresses thrown down, a storage area for family living material like utensils, dishes, and pots and pans, the thing had been repainted in every day-glo  psychedelic color under the sun and best of all hooked up with a great sound system Dippy Mike, the guy who did the sound system for Fillmore West and the Dead, put together for any trips they would take.

And almost from the start at Golden Gate Park the trips began once Captain had selected the Riverdale boys as part of his crew to head south with him. The reason for that heading south, the reason Robert was holding forth those lines from Desolation Row was to “house-sit” here in La Jolla at this mansion that belonged to Pablo Rios, a friend of the Captain’s and a serious south of the border drug dealer who was in Mexico for the winter and the Captain had agreed to doing the sitting as we got into “winter quarters.” Now that the bus was not being used, was being refitted with a new engine and so not useable, the sound system had been transferred to the house for the weekly parties the Captain threw for his friends (and whoever happened to hear about the event and knew where to find the place, not as easy as it sounds when stoned in hideaway between the cliffs La Jolla).                    

Robert, once settled in, once he got his own room with his lady-friend, Lavender Minnie, got heavily into the dope, got heavily into listening to the amped up music and Jake thought he had begun, like they had all heard about with kids who did too much dope, to go over the edge.      

Just as Jake thought that thought Robert rag out again with “they’re selling postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown,” and Jake knew that Robert had gone for the next plus minutes to his own world. Eleven plus minutes if he was lucky, since more than once Robert had decided that he needed to give his own take on what the whole thing meant, what the various references meant to him. For example that business with Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two exile poets who almost single-handedly broke from the old forms and created modern poetry and were treated like gods among the hip at one point was Dylan throwing on the gauntlet, telling those guys a new sheriff was in town. Well, maybe, if you think Dylan was a lyric poet rather than a song-writer, or maybe put the two together. For example that postcards of the hanging stuff was his political moment like Billie Holiday had with Strange Fruit about the scandalous open lynching of black men in the South put together with a new sense of masculinity turned in on itself with sailor boys caught out on the seven seas who transformed themselves in boy-girls with those all male crews. For example that stuff about Ophelia, you know Hamlet’s chick and how she was giving up the ghost (committing suicide) not because of some lost love but because she was pregnant and was not sure who the father was.

For example….but Jake knew Robert was merely babbling, merely going through the numbers and beside, taking another sweet swift hit of meth to jet fuel those two black beauties that had kicked in hours ago he had his own “take” on those lyrics and with the “fake” wisdom brought on by the speed, which would bring hours of high and low thoughts he started to write some stuff down (he would say later so he would not forget it since the thoughts were flying fast and furious just then) and as he drifted into himself here is what came out on those stained yellow legal pad sheets that held whatever was written on them….                

I have to admit Robert was on to something, something sinister and devilish in the American psyche but he was dead wrong on what that “postcards of the hanging” was about, who was being hanged and for what reason. Sure, Billie sang her blessed, goddamn blessed junkie heart out and not just on Strange Fruit, sang her heart out until near the end and the dope, the hop got the best of her voice and her psyche.  Sure I would have seen the fixer man for her if she would just sing one more song to chase my blues away, make them sail into this freaking Pacific wind to the China seas reminding me that many a lost high white note found its way along that path blowing out from North Beach joints but Strange Fruits that dirge to what the fuck was going on in the damn Mister James Crow South during her times, hell ours too since there is a loss of train of thought when Billie couldn’t squeeze anymore life out of the needle and put the lights of New Jack City out in the shade and my running around in cracker North Adamsville trying to drum up books, can you believe this, books for little black kids, then Negro, now Afro-American is gaining currency, but black, black as night like Billie with that sweet orchid hair in god-forsaken Alabama where goddam, Nina Simone was right, goddam hell was breaking loose and Mississippi was burning, burning white stick crosses and white steepled churches, Baptist churches too but it might as well have been some mongrel Buddha swings congregation because the flame was going down in Negro-town.

Yeah, Billie sang it right, sang about that lonely stick figure, black, black as coal swinging in the wind, head bent from that awful snapped neck which could be heard back in the far reaches of the crowd where the children, the very white children stood to learn about who was boss and who was crap, hell, shit in Mister James Crow’s house and about how that lonely stick figure would provide a brisk short-term trade in Mister Brady’s photograph emporium among the fucking hillbilly white trash come to see yet another black man put to the ground, going to see his maker if the fuckin n---ers [edited by Greg Green to conform with publication policy around that “word” and its implications when white guys, even white guys who scratched and cajoled  around white bread, white bread, white trash North Adamsville to get books, can you believe books for black schoolchildren in heathen Alabama] had a maker, had their very own high Jehovah black as night maker. No Mr. Bob, Mr. Dylan taking a righteous war name from drunken sot and Welsh poet, maybe a welcher at the bar tab in the Village too meant to take a look at some hand-press printed postcards of the hanging of the avenging angel, the righteous son of that high Jehovah that made him and those sullen black Baptists too, John Brown, Captain John Brown late of Kansas prairie fires and Harpers Ferry fight(never sure whether there is an apostrophe between the “r” and the “s” on Harpers so no) against the same bastards, against the fathers and grandfathers of those white trash (and not just white trash either once you took the hoods off if they bothered to put them on just to hang a lonely stick figure n—ger, and you know what that coded word means for Miss Scarlett O’Hara and her beau sweet boy Rhett, or her children, all who could be seen swarming around those barren trees), and maybe great-grandfathers of those later photographs per Mr. Brady who watched in heated glean at yet another example of the rightness of keeping Mister James Crow’s laws in place, maybe forever…

…Hell, I don’t know what to make of that “painting the passports brown” so somebody else can figure that one out, maybe and I don’t think I would be that far off he was just holy goof trying to get lyrical and maybe was too stoned to see that there were no passports from those hanging trees…

Leave it to Robert to get the sex stuff all mixed up, “the beauty parlors are filled with sailors” part although he knew, flat out knew and I don’t know where from about what really goes on in isolated male society [again by publication policy maybe “isolated female society” like on the  isle of Lesbos), aboard ships with cozy dark bunks and several watches to do whatever had to be done with sore asses and sore mouths a cause for doctor looks when on land), in prisons where the cells are small and the lights are dim with the howl of someone, some fresh young boy getting his baptism, his deflowering, and of course, honey to the bee what they call in England public schools but here for some reason private school where half of the British ruling class, half the literati got their own de-flowerings. What he didn’t know, maybe couldn’t know although we spent some time down in P-town, excuse me, Provincetown, the kingdom of those guys who are “light on their feet,” fags, sissies (the site manager said he would let this go even though it was a close call) where we drunk as skunks would bash a few for sport for looking at us with those hungry ravenous eyes was that the whole expression was coded, was some Jean Genet Our Lady of the Flowers  reference to “dilly boys,” the guys who hung around the darkened wharves, the low-light taverns frequented by home-bound sailors looking for a change of pace, looking for fresh new faces once they had been deflowered, once they had had their share of sore, asses, sore mouths, damn, sore cocks. What he didn’t realize was that not only sailors were lusting for a workout with dilly boys but those public- school graduates were as well, were searching for some rough trade. Here is what nobody knew, nobody wanted to know running the whole show, running those dilly boys through their paces was none other that Sherlock Holmes, yeah, the so-called parlor pink detective who couldn’t open a bottle of wine without a page of instructions and his honey, his girlfriend if that is the right way to say it [today husband if married-boyfriend if not but that is what Josh wrote back then so onward] Doc Watson, not the famous blind or whatever you call guy who lost his sight late bluegrass star but some stumblebum backwater quack. They ran the rackets, dope, robberies, women, dilly boys, art heists, everything that ran through London while the public relations firm they hired to cover their asses, ha, literally, shilled the story about how they were true blue to king and country (to the stately queens of England too-another coded reference) fighting the much maligned and heterosexual Doc Moriarty who almost thwarted these bastards before they killed him.

The rumor was that the whole thing started, the whole Holmes-Watson criminal enterprise which was protected by men in high places in government, business and society, you know those fellow public-school boys who worked the political racket when Doc Watson went to the beauty parlor to get a fresh do so he would look nice for Sherlock when they went on vacation to Scotland, some islands off the coast, and ran into a couple of pretty sailors just off HMS Pinafore or some such ship and were getting their do’s to look pretty for the rough trade running through the notorious Black Lantern tavern, public house, okay, near the notorious Clapper wharves. Doc pressed a couple of their buttons, showed them some opium he was in legal possession of and they were off to the tavern. That is where to his delight Doc learned about dilly boys and about looking “pretty” checked out some of the merchandise and came home to Holmes who was reportedly frantic with the Doc’s genetic sore ass, sore mouth and sore cock. Sherlock, intrigued, always intrigued I will say that for him after he calmed down went with Doc to the Black Lantern, feasted on the boys, including those two pretty sailors who escorted Doc to that location and the rest is history.

Fuck I have been in that place, have been down the hellish parts of the row, maybe better called the River Styx after old opium-eater Sam Coleridge started seeing sunless seas and went off the deep end about it forgetting Wordsworth’s advice to smoke that madness bong in freaking moderation. Typical junkie’s remorse, lament, you pick the word but don’t give me some twelve step higher power bullshit. Been down there by myself, alone, and with every kind of woman, lately Frilly Jilly, like that moniker, she curls my toes, likes to swallow my cum when she giving me a blowjob, says the stuff is filled with protein which we don’t get enough of doing serious dope, serious speed which takes away the hungers, food hungers anyway and so she will suck me dry, and it is okay with me except once she tried to kiss me with a load in her mouth, wanted me to taste my own cum, wanted to French kiss with that freaking mouth, I freaked out. Jesus. I was just thinking that when we hung around the corner, hung around Riverdale waiting for something to happen we would speculate, boredom I guess, about who, which girls we knew, if they gave head, you know blowjobs would they swallow or spit. Frankie Kelly, who left us a few days ago to head back to Riverdale to check about his draft status and about how to get out of the thing somehow what with the war raging, was the first guy to bring it up and while we knew all about blowjobs we at first thought about the question it seemed strange, seemed kind of esoteric and who gives a fuck but Frankie said that if a girl spit that meant she didn’t like your cum, didn’t have any kinky traits and so maybe was not going to go the distance. Like I say Jilly is a swallower and when I mentioned that conversation she said girls, her girlfriends anyway, talked about the same thing except since it concerned them more they took it seriously and Jilly said the first time she gave a guy a blowjob back in junior high school a couple of years ago when she started getting sexy thoughts and wanted to do something about it, to experiment, she didn’t like it and spit it out. The guy, older, went crazy when she did that. That is when she talked to some girlfriends, the ones who were sexually active or wanted to be, one who told her to swallow fast and it would be okay, which she did the next time with the guy she still didn’t like it but got it down okay and so she has been a swallower ever since. She said she only started to like it, to feel better about taking it when she read last year about the protein and that made her thing of it like a vitamin, a supplement and that was why she liked to suck a guy dry to get as much protein as possible.  (By the way we never even considered that crazy joint swallow Jilly was into who said she learned it from a college guy who was worried about losing his cum to the bed or wherever they did it and she got hooked on doing it, did it with a girl once when they were in a motel room with two guys and the other girl, not the guys though, was interested. But these day Jilly was mostly about the protein, was about swallowing the cum to keep her energy up, and about curling my toes).     

Some women really do like to take it on the wild side. Jilly does, has ever since we picked her up on the Pacific Coast Highway around Carlsbad, maybe Oceanside where the freaking Marines do their blow-up stuff. Likes to give blowjobs and is good at it although since she is only sixteen and does not want to get “in the family way” that is as far as she will go, maybe a sneak hand-job when we are riding along on the bus but I am getting away from what I was thinking about, about circuses, about Lilly Ann, about Madame LaRue ‘s daughter Lilly Ann, who shilled for the Madame, brought in the customers for mother’s fortune-telling racket (with Lilly Ann grabbingly wallets in the dark but I didn’t know that until later, until she, Lilly Ann trusted me enough to believe that I would not turn her in. Jesus, a snitch, no fucking way, excuse my English if I haven’t said that, excuse me, before). Lilly Ann and mother, Madame came to Riverdale with Jim Calhoun’s Mighty Midget Circus, that was how it was billed on the posters and advertisements around town. Jim had been coming to town and I had been threatening when things got tense at home to leave with the operation once they folded up their tents and split, although I never did. That tells you how tense things were at times in the house with wild woman mother and four older brothers crowding me out. The year I am talking about was the year I met Lilly Ann when I was sixteen, she said she was also sixteen but she was really thirteen, going on fourteen she said when she told me the truth after she told me about the wallet-snatching operations that provided the real dough for her and the Madame (Lilly always called her Madame as did everybody else including me).

That was the year, not with her, that would come later, when I first had sex with a girl, a girl from school who you would never think was into sex, had been since doing since twelve when an older brother’s friend “broke her in” she called it when she made me promise not to tell anybody or else she would tell her mother what I had done and get me in serious trouble, was into moaning and groaning and who would scream when she came, screamed right in my ear. Got all wet, sweated some she moved her hips and stomach so much while she was in heat, while she was getting ready to climax (which the first time she did it I didn’t realize that women could do, couldn’t understand why she was so wet). In those days, funny that was just a few years ago but since I have been on the West Coast, since I have been “riding with the king” as Captain Crunch calls it, we, meaning all the corner boys, Robert too were totally interested in getting blowjobs and maybe regular sex, what some girl told me was called the missionary position which she did not like, did not like the weight on top of her and liked to be on top where she could move her hips frantically which was alright with me and made me realize how square we were in high school with our little regular missionary position lack of imagination, if that was available but most of us agreed that a blowjob was easier to figure, easier to get, and less hassle than figuring out how and where to “do the do” our expression for what we called going all the way. I tried to get this girl to give me some head but she balked, she balked as I put my cock near her mouth. Said that thing, my penis, was nasty, she didn’t want it in her mouth. Had tasted some guy’s come after giving him a hand-job and didn’t like the taste, hated it. So no sale. Some young girls are funny you think like with Jilly they would be more worried about getting pregnant than worried about the taste of cum in their mouths. I wish I knew that protein line Jilly mentioned then maybe she would have gone for that, she was a science whizz.

Lilly Ann was actually easy to make, to get in the rack once I won her a doll at Skeets, my favorite game at circuses and amusement parks. When I asked her for a blowjob one afternoon down by the beach she put the towel over us and went to work. Not as good as Jilly since she bared her teeth too much, not enough tongue-lashing   and stopped when I proved to take longer than expected before she started up again but beforehand she had asked me if I liked a girl to swallow or to spit out when she was done. I asked her which she preferred, and she said she didn’t care-if it tasted good she would swallow, if not spit it out. So girls are different in that regard. Lilly Ann was the first girl though who said that if she liked a guy and his cum didn’t taste good and he wanted her to swallow but she had spit it out the next time she would chew gum or something to kill the taste. A girlfriend had told her that when she was younger after some guy almost slugged her for spitting out. Liked to use bubble gum she said so she could make bubbles afterwards and we laughed about that. She sucked me dry said I tasted like maple syrup. We went together for the three weeks the circus was in town and once again home life had me hankering to go on the road when the circus left town, go with Lilly Ann and all the kid stuff romance ideas attached to that. Then one day I went into their trailer and there on the couch Lilly Ann was fucking Mr. Leonard, the city permit guy who okayed Jim’s permit for the city grounds used by the circus. Seems Lilly Ann was the graft for Leonard’s okay. Fuck. I ran out and maybe ran out of naiveite. Never saw Lilly Ann again and lost my taste for circuses- for a while.     

I don’t even want to talk about riot squads, coppers after all the hassles I, we have had between the corner in Riverdale where the cops had seven eyes each on us instead of checking out real crime and criminals and the few demonstrations against the freaking Vietnam War we got knocked around  in at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco topped off by about seven stops of our home, of Captain Crunch’s cruising yellow brick road bus looking not for dope, not for sanitary violations or something stupid like that which would be the usual excuse to stop us although our ace driver Chuck Cassady has everything under control but whether we have underage girls, presumably girls, hidden away with mothers and fathers wondering frantically where their wandering charges were and whether they have been deflowered, nice word, the latter really of concern since they, those parents didn’t want to have to send their young things to the mythical “Aunt Emma” if and when they get pregnant by who knows who. That Aunt Emma thing code for sending the girl away to someplace maybe never to be seen in town again to avoid the obvious stigma of pregnancy not for the girl who after all was just doing what came naturally to humans, having sexual feelings and doing something about it. As I write this Frilly Jilly said if she was ever picked up when the cops stopped us she would take them in back and give them the best blowjobs they ever had, would suck them dry until it hurt. She said a girlfriend of her ’s, maybe the first one who told her guys like it better overall when you swallow their cum, shows that you are part of them the girlfriend said, told she had to do that once and everything came out fine. Had made sure both cops were there even though she felt funny with one cop watching so that she had them cornered if they tried to take her in. One cop said sorry to bother her after. The cops didn’t know she was only fourteen years old so she had something on them. Smart girl. Smart girl Jilly too since she would use the same ruse although I hope she doesn’t have to use it when I am around, or she is around me. I know it has to be done but I am still smarting from Lilly Ann way back having to get out of tight spot by fucking some guy’s brains out.

Jesus this screed in turning into a sex story, a  male fantasy sex story and not staying on the skids of what the bard was getting to and then he lays this Cinderella meeting some charming prince, or some sidewalk Lothario anyway and he gives us the whole thing in a short expression, Cinderella although it could have been Snow White, could have been the Fairie Queen from John Dryden or was it Pope, Alexander Pope, could, well, could have been any fairy tale is easy which turns this whole section into another free for all. Stick with me this Cinderella story is kind of cute, our girl is working the hard life for some bitch mother and her sisters, half- sisters I guess…

No, this screed is getting too weird, getting again into another sex thing Cinderella, Snow White whoever had to “do the do” to get out from under some horrible situation by giving herself, by getting de-flowered  one night to some prince, or a guy who claimed to be a prince. We have been down this road before, so finis. Well not finis since Frilly Jilly read what I had written and said it got her kind of horny, got her thinking about “playing the flute” as she called it lately after one of the young women we partied with a few days ago told her what she called it. That girl also said that Jilly should, well you figure it out, figure out Desolation Row lyrics too                                              

When Your Lost In The Rain In…Hollywood And You Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Hollywood Hotel” (1937)-A Film Review

When Your Lost In The Rain In…Hollywood And You Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Hollywood Hotel” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Hollywood Hotel, starring Dick Powell, the Lane sisters (important since this film involves mistaken identities, well-known gossip columnist Luella Parson, Benny Goodman and his Orchestra, classic song Hooray for Hollywood by Johnny Mercer, directed by master dance man Bugby Berkeley, 1937    

In case anybody is following the “dispute” between the old wizened ex-film editor and now in his dotage occasional spot reviewer Sam Lowell I can call a truce here in the film under review Bugby Berkeley’s Hollywood Hotel. Reason: Sam Lowell has been quoted, quoted around the water cooler and I have my mentor Seth Garth as witness that he wouldn’t touch a musical, a song and dance film, with a ten-foot pole and when he was, way back when probably when the films came out in the 1930s and he was dodging them, assigned them to stringers or some female in the office. (To set the record, a couple of records, straight Seth and Sam actually go a long way back to their days as what Seth calls “corner boy” days growing up in working class town North Adamsville but Seth is “pissed” off at Sam these days since he, Sam, had been a leader in getting their mutual old friend and former site administrator Allan Jackson dumped, purged some say, under the theme that the, as Seth put it to me, “torch had to be passed” and he has balked at doing so in his own case. But enough of internal office water cooler politics. More pressing, more pressing because my partner is getting “pissed” at the rumors, there is nothing, nothing romantic, between Seth and I although if he was younger and did not have a wife, all these guys, all these corner boys, seem to have set some record for collectively marrying, I would certainly be interested and let’s leave it at that. Hey, Seth is old enough to be my grandfather for Christ sakes.)              

Sam needed not have worried about getting this assignment since I was more than happy to take it as I had recently been talking to my grandmother and she mentioned, after hearing that I had been taken on at this publication although she mixed it up with American Film Gazette which she used to read to find out what critics thought of films she was interested in seeing, that she wished I would spent some time reviewing earlier films, films from the 1930s and 1940s when they were out in Hollywood producing films to get people through the gloomy Great Depression and what she called fretting  through World War II. She mentioned that she would take my mother during the 1960s to Ann Arbor, to the University Cinema, to watch retrospectives from that period. I mentioned that my mother had not done so, had not taken me to such events maybe having four kids stopped her in her tracks I don’t know. Grandma said that my mother had loved the musicals and that would be a good place for me to start. I actually watched a couple of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films with fellow reviewer Leslie Dumont who was doing a retrospective on their ten- film series a while back. When Greg put this on the assignment board I went for it.       

Seth mentioned that if things were true to form, if he knew his old pal Sam Lowell he knew the reason why Sam would have passed this film on to some stringer, somebody down in the food chain. (I can’t resist this but there is a persistent rumor going around that after Sam made his big splash with what they still call the definitive book on film noir back in the 1970s he basically “mailed in,” had stringers do his reviews under his by-line or just ripped the press releases from the studios off the board and passed them in as his own but that is part of our dispute, so I will avoid going further here.) Sam would have turned his nose down at the lead performer here Ronnie Bowers, played by Dick Powell who started out as a song and dance man but who later did some serious noir work, especially in the film adaptation of crime novelist Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (on screen Murder, My Sweet). Old school Sam, very old school if you ask me, would have had a field day comparing the ah shucks, starry-eyed Dick Powell of this Bugby Berkeley production (according to Seth and my grandmother too he was the king of exotic spectacular chorus line dance productions although this film is mainly a musical effort) with the tough guy, wind-mill chasing, searching a little rough justice, dame-chasing, take a punch or two, a slug or two for the cause Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe. ((The above courtesy of mentor Seth since I have not watched many earlier such noir films.)      

Frankly I liked the starry-eyed going to Hollywood Dick Powell character, big band Benny Goodman sax player, since I once when I was about ten crazy with an idea that I would grow up to be a movie star, a dream like about ten million others trying to beat the odds against success and a trip to the seamy side of the Hollywood experience. Ronnie winds up in Hollywood in the hotel of the title to wait upon stardom, or go back to Peoria, Butte, Boise, Toledo, Portland or wherever he or any star-struck kid came from. Fate takes a hand early since not only can Ronnie play sax, although we never see that being used by our man but can sing which will be his “hook.” This is where the classic Hollywood hook, who knows maybe all of Western literary convention, boy meets girl that has saved many a B-film comes in. (This nugget according to Seth who can sniff out this trope in half the films ever produced according to Leslie Dumont).          

A famous star, Mona Marshall, a drama queen if there ever was one, played by one of the Lane sisters, was to attend a world premier with all the glitter Hollywood can muster and is supposed to attend that event with her co-star, her leading man. But she blows town in a snit. Problem, problem for the studio who is on the hook. Enter waitress Rosemary, played by the other Lane sister, who bears a striking resemblance to Mona. Bingo do the switch and bait. Problem, co-star would know the difference. Enter Ronnie. And the start of the boy meets girl romance (and singing duos too). When Mona gets wind of what happened she went storming creating holy hell. Meanwhile waitress goes back to work and Ronnie waits upon the fates until the next move. Next move turns on the ability to sing on key which co-star cannot as the next film premier demonstrated. Enter Ronnie to save the day for a price. Bingo.  But what about waitress budding romance (the good and steady Lane as opposed to the drama queen Lane). No problem as they do the old switch again and now both Ronnie and Rosemary can sing up a storm on the silver screen while legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons and Benny Goodman and his Orchestra look on. According to my grandmother this type film got her and her family through a few days of the Depression thinking golden thoughts of Hollywood dreams. And she is probably right in her recollections.               

Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” In Mind

Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” In Mind 

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

As the readers of this site [this review initially posted on the American Left History blog and the on-line at American Literary Gazette site] may know I recently have retired, maybe semi-retired is a better way to put it, from the day to day, week to week grind of reviewing film old and young as I just hit my sixty-fifth year on this whacky old planet. That stepping aside to let Sandy Salmon, my friend and competitor from the Gazette, take his paces on a regular basis did not mean that I would be going completely silent as I intended, and told the site administrator Pete Markin as much, to do an occasional film review and general commentary. This is one of those general commentary times.

What has me exercised is Sandy’s recent review of Australian director Peter Weir’s World War I classic Gallipoli starring Mark Lee and Mel Gibson. I take no issue with Sandy since he did a fine job. What caught my attention was Sandy’s comment about Archie’s, the role played by Mark Lee, fervent desire to join his fellow Aussies on Gallipoli peninsula as a patriotic duty and a manly adventure. When I did my own review of the film back in 1981 when it first came out I make a number of comments about my own military experiences and those of some of the guys I hung around with in high school who had to make some decisions about what to do about the war of our generation, the Vietnam War of the decade of the 1960s. 

While the action of the Australian young men itching to get into the “action” of World War I (which by the way we are commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the third year of this year) preceded us by fifty years a lot of the same ideas were hanging around our old-time working class neighborhood in Vietnam War times. More than a few guys like Jim Leary and Freddie Lewis were like Archie ready, willing and able to go fight the “red menace,” tip the dominoes our way, do their patriotic duty take your pick of reasons. Maybe in Freddie’s case to get out of the hostile household that he grew up in and maybe Jim like Archie a little for the adventure, to prove something about the questions he had about his manhood. I did not pick those two names out accidently for those names now are permanently etched on that hallowed black granite wall down in Washington that brings tears to my eyes old as I am every time I go there.       

Then there were guys like me and Jack Callahan, Pete Markin who didn’t want to go into the military, didn’t want to enlist like Jim and Freddie but who having no real reason not to go when our local draft boards sent “the letter” requesting our services did go and survived. The main reason that we did not want to go, at least at the time, not later when we got a serious idea of what war was about, was it kind of cramped our style, would put a crimp in our drinking, doping, and grabbing every girl who was not nailed down style. Later Pete and I got religion on the issues of war and peace and being on the right side of the angels on the question, realized that the other options like draft refusal which might have meant jail or fleeing to Canada were probably better options. But we were like Archie and Frank in Gallipoli working class kids even though we had all been college students as well. When in our past was there even a notion of not going when the military called, of abandoning the old life in America for who knows what in Canada. We did what we did with what made sense to us at the time even if we were dead-ass wrong.         

And then of course there is a story from our town like Frank Jackman’s who grew up in a neighborhood even down lower on the social scale than ours, grew up in “the projects,” the notorious projects which our parents would threaten us with if we didn’t stop being a serious drain the family’s resources. Frank somehow was a college guy too and like us “accepted” induction although he had more qualms about what the heck was going on in Vietnam and about being a soldier. But like us he also accepted induction because he could see no other road out. This is where the story changes up though. Frank almost immediately upon getting to basic training down at Fort Dix knew that he had made a mistake-had no business in a uniform. And by hook or by crook he did something about it, especially once he got orders for Vietnam. The “hook” part was that through a serious of actions which I don’t need to detail here he wound up doing a little over a year in an Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam. Brave man.  The “crook” part was also through a series of actions which need not detain us now, mostly through the civilian courts, he was discharged, discharged from the stockade, honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.            

Archie, Frank and their Aussie comrades only started to get an idea, a real idea about the horrors of war when they were in the trenches in front of the Turks also entrenched on Gallipoli peninsula and being mowed down like some many blades of grass. Archie and most of the crew that joined up with him were among those blades of grass. It was at the point where Archie was steeling himself to go over the top of the trenches after two previous waves had been mowed down and then being cut down by the Turkish machine-gun firing that I realized how brave Frank Jackman’s actions were in retrospect.