I’m not intending on keeping track of every development in the saga of the upcoming TV show Hoke, based on the Willeford novels — but at least it looks as if the pilot is a sure thing, because they’ve cast almost every major role. Paul Giamatti. Oona Chaplin moving over from Game of Thrones.
Something to fill the environmental niche as Justified is about to amble offstage. . . .
Jesús Ángel González López — the guy who told us all about La Cuidad Maldita, the Spaghetti Western version of Hammett’s Red Harvest — recently dropped me a note to say:
“Did I tell you I sent a DVD copy of the movie to Jason E. Squire, the original
scriptwriter who finally got to see the movie 36 years later? I feel like I’ve
accomplished something!”
Since I had never heard of it, I was thinking that movie had to be obscure — and I’m thinking if the guy who wrote the screenplay (!) had never seen it since it was released, yep, it was really obscure.
I’m hauling up to Novato for an appearance this coming Saturday, and a couple of weeks later you can track me down in Livermore.
On Sunday February 16, 2p.m. in the Storytime Room of the Civic Center Library, you’ll find me on hand to present the tour via a power point slideshow for the eighth annual Livermore Reads Together (which I guess is like a Big Read, only just for Livermore).
Instead of four hours, it’ll last about an hour or so. Instead of burning the soles off your gumshoes on the mean streets you’ll be able to sit in a chair, even fall asleep if so inclined. And it looks as if the deal is free.
Man. The notoriously brutal Dashiell Hammett Tour doesn’t get any easier than that, does it?
If you’ve got a few bucks to donate to a good cause, this coming Saturday, February 8 at 6:30p.m., the Novato Theater Film Club is showing the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon — the classic version. The good cause: saving and renovating the Novato Theater.
The fundraiser asks $15 from members of the film club, $20 for non-members, with the event to be held in the Key Room of Homeward Bound of Marin, 1385 North Hamilton Parkway in Novato.
In addition to the film (though you don’t really need a lot on top of Bogie, little Pete Lorre and the best Fat Man ever) I’ll be there for a Q&A session on Hammett, the hard-boiled and noir genres — especially if you didn’t get enough chatter about movies during the recent Noir City run in the Castro Theatre, hey, there’s lots more to be said.
And if the Q&A doesn’t cover what you want to know, I’m hanging around for a general mix and mingle follow-up. I, of course, like to talk with film buffs who like to talk.
(Novato might seem a trifle out-of-the-way for me, but you must remember that it was while stationed at Hamilton Field in that city with the Army Air Corps that no less than Charles Willeford finally sat down and began his career as a novelist — if I can assist that burg as a nod to the ghost of Willeford, I’m happy to do it. And I truly regret the passing of the old theatres of yesteryear — the theatres and the bookstores. Yeah, smart phones and tablets are more compact, but not half as much fun.)
Another year of Noir City — without the usual bleak noir rain — opens in the Castro Theatre tonight, with a specially restored 35mm print of the Roy Huggins film Too Late for Tears.
Dennis McMillan and I were thinking about sitting in on that one, but various complications ensued. We’ll have to catch it later on, somewhere. . . .
Dennis ranks Tears (at least at this moment in time) as one of the top ten noirs, and wanted to catch it — in large part because his old friend, pulp and screenwriter Howard Browne, was “instrumental in the book’s genesis, when he received the unfinished manuscript for the book from Huggins, who told him he had no idea how to wrap up the complicated plot.”
Browne wrote Huggins a five-page letter detailing point-by-point how he “should rewrite the novel to make it saleable, which Huggins did.”
Browne received the rewritten and completed manuscript from Huggins a month or so later. He told Dennis the ending was “still lost in a welter of words.”
So Browne rewrote the last two chapters himself, sent the manuscript back to Huggins, who then polished them up in his own language — and the book appeared in 1947. The movie followed in 1949.
Huggins returned Browne’s favor in 1953 by inviting him to “forget his job as editor of the Ziff-Davis pulp line and come out to Hollywood and make some real money.” Browne ended up writing for Cheyenne, Combat, Mission: Impossible and other Huggins productions — finishing his Hollywood career as a “script doctor” on The Rockford Files.
(You’ll find Dennis blurbing the Browne/Huggins relationship on p156 of his interview in the noir issue of Contrappasso.)
Dennis McMillan has been buzzing through the area lately — you’ll remember he got his car with Kansas plates stolen as an early Xmas present — and a few weeks later he got the ticket for his stolen car running the Fastrak lane at the Carquinez Bridge tollbooth, northbound into the unknown. . . .
Complete with a shot of the license plate.
It just seems somehow unjust, you know?
Meanwhile, our pals over at Contrappasso magazine have just released a noir-themed issue, which features a very long interview with Dennis from 2005. It catches him in amber a few years before he decides to bail out of the publishing game for a second time (and recaps why he gave up the first time), including lots of commentary on his posse of writers such as James Crumley, Connelly, Pelecanos, Nisbet, Truluck. Any dedicated collector of the imprint will want it.
Plus the issue features a new memoir of Charles Willeford by Lester Goran, a novelist who happened to teach in the Miami-Dade college system at the same time as the author of The Burnt Orange Heresy. It features some nice bits (“among his best known admonitions to a class was: ‘No one who believes in God can be a writer!'”), but also confirms my impression of people in the area who knew Willeford. Sure, they were aware he wrote books. They saw him constantly joking and kidding around. But somehow they didn’t quite appreciate the fact that he was doing really great writing, and his “sudden” fame at the end (and enduring fame today) sort of baffles them.
Also new in this issue is a poetic, hard-boiled little poem by another pal, Floyd Salas, who is becoming a Contrappasso regular.
And editor Matthew Asprey tells me his “Hammett/Poisonous City essay has been newly updated to reference your Red Harvest spaghetti western discovery” — yes, the info appeared here on Up and Down These Mean Streets, but it was yet another pal, Dr. Jesús Ángel González López of the Departamento de Filología in Universidad de Cantabria, who tipped us to the existence of La Cuidad Maldita.
What do you know, but they’ve got a Kickstarter campaign going to restore the roving pack of Doggie Diner heads to refurbished glory — just like they did for the Doggie out near the entrance to the Zoo several years ago.
As I’ve mentioned at least once, I was custodian for the collection in the early days, when John Law first realized his dream of having his own Dog Head. Of course, being John Law, he couldn’t leave the iconic mutts holed away in some hideout, but had to take them out to delight the world. Again and again. Hundreds of appearances. . . .
John first fixated on the Heads in the era of the Suicide Club, but came into the collection, one by one, during the early days of The Cacophony Society — they get a lot of coverage in the new book on that counter culture group. In fact, the last time I saw the Heads show up on the scene was during the Commonwealth Club event for the book in the Castro Theatre late last year, where Chuck Palahniuk (of Fight Club fame, who was a member in good standing of the Portland branch of Cacophony) took the stage with John and others involved in the project.
Pretty much everybody delights in the Dogs, from Zippy the Pinhead on up. And donations start at a meagre 2 bucks.
I can imagine Sam Spade tossing in a sawbuck, just for the hell of it.
Yesterday was the 78th anniversary of the one time we know of that Hammett met Chandler, commemorated by the LA Times — and with a few tidbits added in by me for the Mean Streets crowd. Now Terry Zobeck pops in another tidbit to factor into the saga.
Here’s Terry:
The LA Times article claims Hammett never wrote a word about Chandler, but that’s not exactly true. In a letter to daughter Mary dated December 26, 1944 he wrote: “By the way there’s an article about detective stories (and me) in the December Atlantic Monthly that you might like. It’s by Raymond Chandler and — though this may sound immodest of me — he does a pretty good job.”
High praise indeed from Hammett; no wonder he kept a copy.
Vince Emery just popped me a link to an LA Times article covering the one time Hammett and Chandler met at the dinner for Black Mask writers — nicely documented by the famous photo — 78 years ago today. Hop over and check it out.
The article is reasonably good — the writer doesn’t know (or doesn’t want to take up the wordage needed to explain) about the 1931 film version of The Maltese Falcon with Ricardo Cortez, and so refers to the 1941 Bogie version as the only version. By the date of that dinner, Hammett had several films adaptations and screen treatments to his credit — and every novel he would write already in print. Chandler had only been trying his hand in the pulp jungle for three years by that point, with the novels and screenplays that cinched his fame still off in the future.
One thing the writer doesn’t know is that a typewritten copy of Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” labeling Hammett “the ace performer” of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, was among the items found in the boxes of photos and memorabilia that Hammett’s wife kept — the discovery of this trove detailed in Jo Hammett’s Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers.
I got to look through the boxes at the time they were found, and couldn’t help think that there must be some significance to Hammett retaining — or leaving with his wife for her to retain — a copy of the essay. As I remember, it was typed out single space — presumably by Hammett (or more likely by one of his secretaries, on his instruction).
It’s nice to know that Hammett was aware of the tribute, and seems to have appreciated it enough to keep a copy around for awhile. From one ace performer to another. . . .
Catching up on this past week’s file of Jeopardy! on the DVR, a surprise moment from the Double Jeopardy Round aired Thursday December 19:
Category: Literary Landmarks.
The $1200 slot.
Statement: In the late 1920s Dashiell Hammett lived in an apt. at 891 Post St. in San Francisco, also this detective’s address.
Then, the moments of suspense. Tic toc, tic toc. . . .
Typically on Jeopardy! if they ask who wrote The Big Sleep, the contestants will say “Dashiell Hammett.” If they ask who was the detective in The Maltese Falcon someone will guess “Philip Marlowe.” The contestants know enough to have it narrowed down to Hammett or Chandler (all you need to know to be reasonably conversant in the hard-boiled arena, really), but jump the wrong way.
This time the woman buzzes in.
Her answer?
“Who is Sam Spade?”
Correct!
I wish she’d won the day, but it was not to be.
