WEEK END

After a week of weirdness, I ask myself, should I laugh when I hear Attorney General John Ashcroft has gallstone pancreatitis, “a serious and painful abdominal illness"? Or is that mean?

Mick Farren;s stuff in this week’s LA CityBeat. First up a preview of The Sopranos.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=721&IssueNum=39
And then Andy Klein and I double team the dreary Oscar Show.
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=726&IssueNum=39

FRESH FRIDAY LINKS

Our pal hipspinster blogs on Elvis Costello
http://hipspinster.blogspot.com/
And Belle de Jour, our favorite call girl, weighs in with more of her chic and unique weberotica
http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

JACK ELAM

At the beginning of the week I mentioned being sad at seeing the great character actor Jack Elam on the Academy Awards tribute to those motion picture stars who had died this year. This prompted some correspondence, and now Henry Cabot Beck unearths bits of an old, unpublished interview conducted just before Elam’s death....

ON SAM PECKINPAH
Peckinpah tried-just died--to get me to do-what was the name of the western in Mexico?-(Jenny, his wife, tells him) The Wild Bunch, and I turned him down, wouldn't do it. For a very simple reason. Cause if I did Sam's pictures, we're personal friends, and that means I had to live with him on location. And if I live with him at night it'd mean dinner, poker-he loved to play poker too, and I knew I'd be seeing a lot of him and drinking together, right? I knew I couldn't live through it. I can't drink that much, I can't run, it was just a rowdy life for three or four months, which it's gonna be, so I turned the picture down. It almost broke our friendship up, but it didn't, because later on he came along and made me an awful lot of money on another picture that he did, Billy The Kid-(wife chimes in: "Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid"), in which I had a very small part and made a fortune. I did a cameo in it, worked three days, and he made the studio carry me at full salary for three months. Bought me two Lincolns out of the small change left over.

ON FRITZ LANG:
The only one I was really in, was the one with Marlene Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.He was a character, but he was a gentle-I loved him. We had a great personal friendship which developed. We had an instinctive liking of each other. And a lot of directors I don't like for sour shit, because to be a director, it helps a lot to be a prick, and in this case he wasn't. He was mean, people thought, but he wasn't mean at all. He was brusque, but he was certainly a gentle (?), but he was very very brusque, though, in his handling of people. But he was very kind if he liked you. There was a fellow named Dan Seymour, he was in all of Fritz' pictures-they had a personal relationship, and that's where I met Dan Seymour was on one of Fritz' pictures, course I worked with Dan on other things, anyway I was very honored, I felt honored, because of being invited to a very special dinner at his home one night. He had a home high in the hills over Hollywood with a view for a million miles, you know, looking over Beverly Hills and everything, it was a strange house to me, it didn't go with his character because it was a modern house and it was a catered affair, a very very lovely party-twelve or sixteen good friends of his, and I felt very flattered to be invited because…

I enjoyed the man's company a great deal. He was very very considerate to me personally.

(Rancho Notorious)

We had a lot of fun. We got to match coins to see who got to walk by Marlene Dietrich's dressing room when she was changing cause she never closed the door. I won a couple of times.
I remember Fritz had a couple of problems, seems to me he had a couple of serious problems with the cameraman (Hal Mohr, who also shot Destry Rides Again with Dietrich), because the cameraman's very important in a Dietrich picture and three or four times-cameraman's very important on a Fritz Lang picture because Fritz Lang pictures were big pictures-but I remember that Fritz would line up a shot, he'd walk it through, then you walk away, go to your dressing room, wherever you want to go, and the cameraman and his crew light the set, which takes maybe an hour, or in some cases two hours, then you bring everybody in, you run the scene, then you shoot it. And I know that more than once on a Dietrich situation we'd come back and the scene had been changed, the positions had been changed cause the cameraman had changed the positions. And Fritz would say, "That hurts my shot!" and he would argue. But he had a brusque manner and its definitely a very very strong accent, as I'm sure you know. But Fritz was a very kind man; I liked him very much. And as far as I'm concerned he was a very good director.

(More tomorrow)

CRYPTIQUE – It’s a shotgun romance.