I wish I could say I liked The Fall Guy, directed by David Leitch, better than I actually did, because coming to it relatively late (it's been hanging on in theaters for about a month now and is already available at home on video-on-demand services) I was rooting for it for reasons based almost solely on it being one of the two pictures leading into the summer movie season that have themselves been designated fall guys emblematic of the so-far disastrous Hollywood money-making year. But instead of being engaged on a big-budget action-movie level (the way, say, Bullet Train, also directed by Leitch, or the John Wick series, which was directed by Leitch's associate at 87 North Productions, Chad Stahelski, most definitely were), the movie's eagerness to please the crowd left me at a distance; its 126 minutes passed by me with only the occasional ripple of genuine amusement, the way an episode of the TV show The Fall Guy might have, had I ever watched a single episode.

Leitch and company have designed The Fall Guy, all about a top-level stuntman (Ryan Gosling) trying to rekindle a romance with his latest movie's director (Emily Blunt) while trying to stay alive on the job and solve a mystery involving the obnoxious movie star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, obviously modeled on Tom Cruise) for whom he serves as a stunt double, as a tribute to the Hollywood community of stunt performers. These folks, whom Leitch and company repeatedly point out take their lives in their hands for their craft, have been largely overlooked (at least as far as awards are concerned) when credit is doled out for the effectiveness of these sorts of movies, and other genres where stunt work might be slightly more invisible, or at least low-key. The possibility of a new Oscar category for stunt coordination and performances has been gaining momentum and may well become a reality by the time nominations are handed out in February 2025 for the beleaguered year through which the American moviegoing audience is now living.

The irony is, if such an award materializes, The Fall Guy would not, in any likely sense, be the top contender, or at least the most deserving of that recognition. No, The Fall Guy's partner in scapegoating for Hollywood's current dire straits, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, would be the more obvious choice here, George Miller's film having far better realized how to create, integrate and execute A-level stunt work with a story for which that work feels organic, essential. The Fall Guy, on the other hand, is impressive on the execution level, but it's story is TV-level; it feels like an afterthought, a way to stitch all this impressive effort and talent into something resembling a coherent narrative.

Leitch, as director and (presumably) overseer of the film's team of editors, headed by Elisabet Ronaldsdottir, even undercuts his own action, interrupting the momentum of several big stunt set pieces with expository scenes which deflate any rhythm and thrust that would have naturally have built, had the scenes been allowed to play as complete sequences. (Imagine if Miller had stopped one of the big scenes involving the War Rig's assault on Gastown to show Immortan Joe back at the Citadel growling in worry or anger about whether or not the truck had arrived yet. Or if Staheleski had repeatedly interrupted John Wick's agonizing battle on the 222 steps leading up to the Sacre-Coeur Basilica so we could get glimpses of Ian McShane and Clancy Brown checking their watches and wondering whether Wick was gonna make it in time.)

I understand why people like The Fall Guy;  it pushes a lot of the right buttons, and the audience I saw it with had a good time with it, yet it's not nearly so clever as its lighthearted movie-star badinage would seem to indicate it thinks it is. And in trying so hard to highlight the stunt performers, who it correctly asserts don't get the sort of credit they deserve, and embarrass the Hollywood awards community into their own sort of action, Leitch's movie undercuts its own argument by not providing a solid movie in the great narrative tradition of the well-told blockbusters of old (and the more recent) to back that argument up. As paeans to the pluck, determination and talent of stunt movie performers and crews, at least The Fall Guy (2024) is no The Fall Guy (1981-1986). But in order to really bolster its own tribute to the dangers of being a great stunt man, it would have been helpful to have something else going on beside (or even in addition to) the paper-thin romance that props this new movie up. Maybe if Leitch had tapped more from The Stunt Man (1980; Richard Rush) than Hooper  (1978; Hal Needham), we'd be talking about a new classic instead of another big, middle-of-the-road action movie taking the fall for its studio's lack of faith and its director not being able to keep his eye entirely off the prize.

*********************************

Most of you won't recognize this man, but today is his 90th birthday and I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about things he's done for me since I met him, sometime in 1978 if I'm not mistaken. His name is Bill Cadbury and he was my professor, leading the film studies department at the University of Oregon at the time I attended and earned my degree in film studies there in from 1977 until 1981. 

Bill's classes were a pretty heady challenge from this kid from a Southern Oregon cow-town, and many was the time I bristled at his embracing of the auteur theory as he introduced me to his own brand of critical thinking, in an attempt to cultivate and encourage our own, as it applied to filmmakers as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Marie Straub, Fritz Lang, Glauber Rocha, Howard Hawks, Luchino Visconti, Werner Herzog, Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Altman, Jean Renoir, Josef von Sternberg, Francis Ford Coppola and just about every other filmmaker whom I either knew before entering his classroom or have come to grips with on my own educational journey ever since.

And as I would quickly discover, those classes were no easy A's--  Bill demanded that you really put yourself out there and apply everything you could muster from your experience to come to an understanding of these directors and their films, and those were practices which I certainly like to think have stood me in good stead and someone who occasionally writes about films, but even more importantly as someone who makes his way through a life where thinking for yourself has always been, and has come to be even more so, a very precious skill.

Bill was a stern teacher in that he never let you rest on your presumptions, and I was witness to more than one instance of a student getting the sharp end of the stick from him when they chose to regurgitate familiar platitudes about his objects of study rather than dare to harvest an original thought for themselves. But he was also an extremely welcoming presence as a professor, and his insights about how classic Hollywood films could be art instead of just commodities or nostalgia fixations were eye-opening in the best way. This sometimes intimidating man invited me on several occasions to drop by his office and talk about film and life, and those times are among my most cherished memories of being a college student; they were fun, illuminating conversations, as key to the expansion of my theretofore relatively narrow world and getting crucial exercise in sharpening thought as any class I ever attended, including his.

I recall one afternoon, when I was feeling the pressure of getting my credits together in preparation for graduation, when we sat in his office and talked about Walter Hill-- The Long Riders had just come out, and we were both admirers. During that visit he also described at length his good fortune in coming across the oversized poster (was it a two-sheet?) for Rooster Cogburn-- not a great movie, he was quick to acknowledge (and I was quick to agree), but being a man who admired John Ford there was room in his heart and his critical perspective for John Wayne, and it tickled him that the poster was one in which the title under which the movie was eventually released had been substituted with the legend Rogue River, the Southern Oregon river where the film was shot and on which much of its action takes place. (I have no idea whether or not this was ever a working title for the film, and an Internet search for the poster yielded nothing. But it was pretty clear it didn't matter a damn to Bill or to me as I listened to him wax on enthusiastically about the prize that helped make his office unique.)

During my senior year under his tutelage, as if I was being rewarded (it certainly felt like it), Bill captained near full quarters on Coppola and Altman, and during that period he more than once appealed to my ego by referring to me, in private and in class, as "our resident expert on The Godfather," even consulting me to help resolve the issue of what characters were ported over, backward in time, from the 1940s of the first movie to the 1920s Little Italy section of the second-- the question was regarding whether one character in The Godfather Part II was a young version of Sal Tessio, and my wisdom was accepted when it was determined that the character of Genco, played by Frank Sivero, was causing the confusion, likely due to a presumptive resemblance (it must have been the brow) to what one could imagine a young Abe Vigoda looking like.

And I will always be grateful to him for the intense study afforded to what emerged during this time as my favorite movie, Nashville. Our in-class sessions examining and discussing Altman's masterpiece were a whirlwind of excitement and critical stimulation for me and helped cement Altman as my favorite director. I'll never forget Bill's remarks when we projected the film's harrowing, exhilarating finale in the classroom the day after seeing the entirety of the film collectively in our assigned lecture hall. After Barbara Jean is assassinated and the shocked crowd resuscitates to the strains of Albuquerque's rendition of "It Don't Worry Me," that crowd eventually joining in with her, Bill stopped the projected and proclaimed, "If you can watch that scene and not be moved to tears, you're a stronger person than I am."

I also remember a fellow student daring to bring a copy of Pauline Kael's Reeling, to that classroom discussion, the book which featured the reprint of her controversial rave for the film, and I readied myself for fireworks-- given Bill's endorsement of the auteur theory, it was no surprise that he favored Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968 over Kael's writing. But instead, Bill noticed the book, acknowledged it and even discussed Kael's thoughts briefly, and as far as I know that student still passed the class. It was also during this week that Bill afforded me an opportunity that I have never since duplicated-- I was able to attend the 7:00 a.m. and 12:00 noon screenings of Nashville, so scheduled for those students who might not be able to attend the evening screening, as well as that regular 7:00 p.m. evening screening, making this the one and only time I've ever managed to see the same movie three times in one day, and I'm so glad it was this one. 

Bill Cadbury was the best sort of influence on me, both as a student given as much to arguing the interpretations he lent to any given work as to absorbing them, and as the human being I eventually became in the wake of experiencing his classes ad learning to think for myself. I will never forget the challenges, the revelations, the affirmations and the criticism he offered to my work, and I am grateful that he was the furthest thing from a rubber stamp on my academic achievements (or anyone else's) that I could have wished for, even during those time when I might actually have preferred that rubber stamp. He helped provide a very valuable education for me in the art form I have loved ever since I can remember, expanding my knowledge and leading me onto paths where I would discover for myself just why that art form was important, its endless possibilities, and what it could ultimately mean to me, if I'd just keep my mind open.

Thank you, Bill, for opening my mind. Happy birthday!

********************************

Somewhere near the end of Ennio (2021), the warm and fascinating tribute to the extraordinary Ennio Morricone directed by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), film composer Nicola Piovani (The Son's Room) rightly deflates Quentin Tarantino's bloviating about Morricone being his favorite composer as hyperbole typical of the director. ("And not just film composer, but composer-- I'm talking Beethoven, Bach, Schubert..." QT would likely have gone on, but you get the sense that those three names probably exhausted his knowledge of classical music.) Yet with Piovani's observation in pocket, Ennio still succeeds in making the case that Morricone, over the six decades of work and 500-plus films for which he wrote the scores, might just be the most innovative, exciting, influential and, yeah, maybe the greatest composer of film music that ever was or will be.

Without ever skimping on the evidence of Morricone's irascibility or inability to suffer fools and their paper-thin ideas, there's much more evidence on hand in Ennio of the man's welcoming presence as teller of his own story and of his particular genius, and not just from the breathless testimony of a grand gallery of talking heads. To see Morricone himself tracing the notes and the themes, extrapolating on ideas and forms and thoughts, all set against the music itself as the ultimate aural illustration, is to come within a faint whistle's distance, or that of a wind-borne refrain of a reverberating harmonica, of insight into the quality of that genius, a proximity hagiographies like this one often fail to approach.

Ennio made me ache to see (and hear) Once Upon a Time in America (1984) again (having missed the long cut during a recent Morricone tribute at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles), to hear his haunting score for Casualties of War (1990), and to regret even more than I have before the two times I had tickets to see Morricone conduct his film music at the Hollywood Bowl-- both engagements were cancelled due to the maestro's ill health. But I also loved the stories of his tussles with filmmakers like Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elio Petri, the tales (and pictures) of his history (going back to grade school) with Sergio Leone, and especially Morricone's emotional recollections of his ow mentors, some of whom never understood their pupil's crescendo of devotion to this less-than-"absolute" music.

Tornatore's documentary made me gasp several times during all these sorts of moments, but never as much as I did during the segment focusing on Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). I find it impossible to watch Jill McBain's arrival on the train at around the half-hour mark of that movie, so empathetically, organically scored to Morricone's sublimely, aching romantic "Jill's Theme," without bursting into tears. And so it happened again watching the sequence here, the familiar images of the film enhanced, embodied by that music, and this time intercut with footage of the superb soprano Edda Dell'Orso, who supplied the gorgeous, soaring vocals to accompany Claudia Cardinale's arrival, actually recording the music I've been so moved by ever since I first saw the film.

For a transcendent moment like this, and seemingly thousands of othrs, I, and we, must always be grateful for what Morricone has brought to our collective dream of moviegoing. Ennio expresses that gratitude by honoring those contributions, and then some. If you've ever been transported by one of his scores, you owe it to yourself to see this excellent documentary.

***********************************

 

I'm still reeling from the experience of seeing Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga at the SIFF Downtown Theater  (formerly the Seattle Cinerama) in downtown Seattle on Monday afternoon (May 27). Given the disparity of reviews from writers I like I respect (Stephanie Zacharek, Odie Henderson and Owen Gleiberman check in for the negative, while Justin Chang, Robert Daniels, Manohla Dargis and Keith Uhlich rank on the enthusiastic side), I had defiintely adjusted my expectations going in, intrigued at the prospect of a movie that could end up being even more interesting because of the diversity of those reactions.

But you can count me with the yea-sayers on this one. Despite a couple of narrative rough patches, Furiosa is, I think, a perverse, hellacious masterpiece, its roots set in a despoiled garden of Eden, its multiple branches of humanity distended, twisted, gnarled by a relentless Wasteland Armageddon, its inhabitants cosplaying their worst savage instincts in a (yes) furious drive not just to survive, but to survive and dominate and extinguish-- not exactly an unfamiliar scenario given our own current modern geopolitical reality. (Eden and Apocalypse are united near the end in one of the most gasp-inducing images of decay and rebirth I can remember ever seeing, especially in a big action film released by a major studio.

Director/cowriter George Miller has made a brilliant career out of crafting demanding cult entertainment that has somehow wormed its way into the collective moviegoing imagination without ever actually taking the box office by storm. (I would include another masterpiece, Babe: Pig in the City, within that assessment.) The writer-director builds on what he started in 1979, yet even after three great action classics (Mad Max, The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Fury Road) and one dud (Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome), he still busy refashioning the familiar and upping the ante on is signature action style into a film that feels of a piece and yet distinct from the others in pacing, in structure, in its overall effect. Ten minutes in, you sense that this is a movie that was never destined to be a crowd-pleasing blockbuster-- it's too profoundly, defiantly weird for that.

Even so, it is a constantly surprising movie too. Charlize Theron's Furiosa in Fury Road was a real original, but Anya Taylor-Joy thrives in her shadow nonetheless. (And so does Ayla Browne, who plays one of two younger incarnations of this soon-to-be-war-rig-driving warrior.) Yet the biggest surprise, performance-wise, is delivered by Chris Hemsworth, whose over-the-top tyrannical posturing as Dementus (here seen in his Red phase) is far more nuanced and strangely moving (at times) than clips you may have seen could ever have suggested. (Similarly, the film is an eye-popping rejoinder to its own CG-heavy trailers-- Miller and company's integration of CG with physical action is sublimely rendered, almost painterly, sometimes imperfect, and not at all weighted toward the sort of absurdly artificial landscapes and physics-defying nonsense of either those trailers or the majority of modern action epics.)

Furiosa's relatively underwhelming box-office performance, duly noted by wags and pundits and other media vulture types, has more to do with Hollywood studios reaping what they have sown, in terms of loading their slates with giant movies that have to make $500 million in order to even come close to making a profit, than the audience somehow sniffing it out and deciding in advance that Miller's grand undertaking was somehow no good. These mega-budgeted, underperforming "sure things" are also being unleashed at a time when, in order to keep up with those soaring costs created by Hollywood's make-or-break strategy, going to the movies has become prohibitively expensive for many people (unless you're Nicole Kidman, I guess). So who can blame audiences when, taking their cue from the studios' incredibly fucked-up business model, they decide to move on the implicit promise that if they just hold tight, they be able to catch Furiosa (or Barbie, or  Oppenheimer) on Max or Netflix in a month or so. So, no worries! (Two days after I originally posted this piece, on May 29, New York magazine film critic Bilge Ebiri agreed in his piece entitled "Movies Like Furiosa Were Never Meant to Save Hollywood.")

And Furiosa really does need to be seen in a theater-- I saw it with a packed house in that magnificent theater in Seattle and it was one of the most overwhelming sonic and visual presentations I've ever been lucky enough to attend, easily the equal of anything available in the best theaters in Hollywood. (Critic Charles Taylor was right-- that screen is a pisser. And my second screening this past Sunday at my lovely Rose Theatre in downtown Port Townsend was a surprisingly potent presentation as well.) I haven't shaken either experience yet, nearly two weeks after that first showing-- only Miller could, or apparently would even care to infuse the end of the world with this much nerve-jangling exhilaration (tempered by a refusal to suggest that this really is anything but the end of the world), and Furiosa sent me out of the theater on the sort of big-budget movie high the likes of which I haven't experienced since, well Mad Max: Fury Road.

But it also ends on an ambivalent emotional note, of the recognition of a wounded soul set out on a journey that cannot possibly hold anything remotely like the promise of redemption or fulfillment, even despite what we may know from the 2015 film that this one leads directly into. I left Furiosa knowing I saw exactly the movie its creators intended, knowing that I would think about it for days (I have), knowing I'd be back to see it again-- I did, with my daughters. Don't wait for this Max. See this Mad Max saga on the biggest screen you can find. And don't put it off-- Furiosa may soon disappear into a Wasteland dust storm of endless, streaming choices where the hope for anything like the overwhelming technical presentation this movie deserves will be as rare as stumbling upon a Citadel filled with fresh water and food, or a giant tanker filled with guzzoline just waiting to be claimed.

*********************************

To hear the seasoned film critic Rex Reed tell it, Woody Allen's new film Coup de Chance (his 50th) "restor(es) the masterful filmmaker to his deserved position as one of the screen's most profound storytellers." That's a lot to hang on such a slight film, and Reed clearly has more at stake in Allen's supposed reputation as "a master storyteller" than I do-- I've never thought of writer-director of tightly woven works of narrative like Annie Hall or Manhattan as anything of the sort. In the past 30 years Allen has directed exactly three movies-- his 1994 TV-movie adaptation of his early play Don't Drink the Water, 1997's Deconstructing Harry and 2014's Magic in the Moonlight-- which I thought were fully engaged works, and three others, 2009's Whatever Works, 2015's Irrational Man and 2021's Rifkin's Festival, which stood out among a very spotty run over the past three decades as possible career worsts.

Coup de Chance might just be, as Reed suggests, Allen's best movie in years, but not because, at age 87, the acclaimed (and beleaguered) writer-director is doing much of anything differently than he has since about 1978. He's still filtering other directors through his own blinkered lens-- this time it's Claude Chabrol Lite rather than Ingmar Bergman Lite (Interiors) or Federico Fellini Lite (Stardust Memories). But the advantage Coup de Chance  has over the last, say, ten movies Allen has made is that, yes, it's in French and not English (the pretensions of his often mannered and obvious dialogue play a lot better subtitled), and the movie is populated by unfamiliar actors (at least they are unfamiliar to me) rather than the usual crowded cast of 15 or 16 players who are in there just because they want to be in a Woody Allen film. (Few young actors have been clamoring for that cachet of late, and some of the ones who did have spent a lot of time and press columns openly distancing themselves from the director for reasons unrelated to whether or not the raison d'etre behind his indefatigable output has seemed increasingly thin for years now.)

The simple truth is, it's easier to relax into Allen's unflappable rhythms as his camera glides down Parisian avenues and through Parisian parks, in the company of young, beautiful, adulterous lovers, all shot with customary beauty by Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, Last Tango In Paris, Apocalypse Now) and scored to vintage Nat Adderly recordings, and to accept those impossibly lovely young characters for who they seem to be, if you're not constantly distracted by yet another cameo appearance by a familiar face-- Oh, look, it's Wallace Shawn! And there's Andrew Dice Clay! And here comes Selena Gomez! (And really, what goes does it do to repeatedly hire the world's greatest living cinematographer if you just as repeatedly come up goose eggs in the Crafting Memorable Pictures Department-- Storaro does pretty work here, but an hour after the movie was over I couldn't recall a single distinctly expressive image.)

The story starts off among moneyed Europeans of the sort that would fit right into the favored world of Allen's New York-- a chance meeting between a young woman working in the Parisian art world (Lou de Laage) and an up-and-coming writer (Niels Schneider) who has been in love with her since their university days leads the woman to reconsider her marriage to a possibly shady financier (Melvil Poupaud) and, eventually, an affair with her rather persistent old friend. When the financier begins to come around to the possibility of the couple's indiscretions, he hires a detective to follow them and confirm his suspicions, at which point Allen's debt to Chabrol begins to threaten to create ripples on the film's placid surface.


But it turns out that, no major surprise, Allen doesn't have much taste for the nasty elements of the melodrama of infidelity he's set up. Truth be told, he seems to disdain the simple amour of the lovers' predicament too. In Coup de Chance, as in many of the director's other movies, the temperature of the narrative barely varies as the story tracks from intellectual pursuits to romantic complications to, eventually, crimes of passion. The significance of a lottery ticket, for example, which might be red meat in the hands of a Chabrol, and which is given much weight midway through the picture, is a narrative dead end. Rather than playing a part in what eventually happens to the young lovers, Allen is content to use the ticket simply as a clunky metaphor for his ultimately platitudinous premise, that to be alive on Earth at all, in whatever circumstances, is to have already bucked astronomical odds against the likelihood of simple existence, for which we should all be grateful-- especially presumably, if that existence gets to play out in the impossible beauty of Manhattan or along the Champs-Elysees.

As the film begins to play with the elements of suspense and builds (sort of) to its climax, where Chabrol might have finally gotten things boiling, Allen instead rather insistently prefers a simmer which plays almost like indifference. The "coup de chance" (stroke of luck) he ends his story on is so abrupt, it ends up feeling like the deus ex machina of "a master storyteller" who has lost his interest and just wants to grope his way to the end of the scenario-- there's no evidence that he cares at all about building tension or raising the temperature of his audience, or even how he might start to go about doing such a thing.

Coup de Chance goes down easier than an Allen film has in a while because it has the trappings of Paris and the French language to help tart up the proceedings with a patina of sophistication and disguise the fact that there's really not much going on other than beautiful people in beautiful settings gliding sleepily through the motions. But, given how unsatisfying much of Allen's output has been over the past 30 years, that may be well enough for some. I left the theater glad I saw it, glad that I even had the opportunity to see it, glad that what might end up being the capper to an arguably uneven, but (perhaps just as arguably) extraordinary career at least was entirely a leaking bag of warmed-over goods like Whatever Works, or a deadly botch in the manner of Irrational Man or Rifkin's Festival. If you've ever liked a Woody Allen movie, it's hard to imagine not wanting to see and assess for yourself if Allen's stroke of luck has truly held out to the end. 

*********************************************

 

As far as I know, I have never seen Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955; Charles Lamont) in its entirety. This is the story of why, despite that seemingly insurmountable fact, it's a movie that has had a huge impact on my life.

When I was but a babe, my mom and dad, like many young marrieds who suddenly found themselves with children back in the early '60s, bough an 8mm Bell & Howell camera-projector combo package with which they set about documenting the adventures of those children-- me and my little sister, Carrie-- as we toddled our way around my grandma's farm, where we all lived until around 1966.

At age three or four I remember a hug level of excitement whenever they would trot out the home movies, but not just because of the chance to see myself and my sister on the big(ish) screen my dad would have to set up as a prelude to our evening's entertainment. No, see, as a part of that Bell & Howell set there were included two 50-foot, approximately four-minute-long 8mm reels from Castle Films included, presumably to get the buyer excited about what their new projector could do before they shot any film of their own. 

(This short remembrance was written on May 11, 2024, in remembrance of Roger Corman upon his passing on May 9.)

In 1982, a friend of mine and I hopped in his Ford sedan, packed up his projector and a box full of movies we'd created together and made our way from our dull southern Oregon to Los Angeles, my first visit, to suss out the possibilities of getting work in the movie business. Much of that visit was spent just going to the movies and having fun, of course, but somehow-- oh, the fearless cold-calls of youth!-- we wrangled an audience with producer Mary Ann Fisher at Roger Corman's New World Pictures compound in Venice (which was an at least partially converted lumberyard, as I recall) to show her our stuff.

The screening went well, she liked our movies, and I was thrilled to get the opportunity to enthusiastically talk to someone about Hollywood Boulevard, Rock and Roll High School, Piranha, Death Race 2000, Caged Heat and even Amarcord, no matter that the Joe Dante/Allan Arkush/Paul Bartel/Jonathan Demme era at New World had already passed, and no matter than Federico Fellini was nowhere to be found on the lot (!) (Corman raised a lot of eyebrows in the early '70s when he acquired American distribution rights to Amarcord  and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers.)

At the end of our visit, Fisher surprised my friend and me by dangling the possibility of our coming to work at New World Pictures, for very slim money, of course. Unfortunately, I was still operation under the misperception at the time that the fortunes of myself and my friend were joined at the hip, something that would soon change in a big way. And he certainly wasn't going to leave his girlfriend, or bring her to LA from Oregon, for $150 a week. As for me, I was still too young and immature, even at 21, and certainly not hungry enough to consider going it alone.

So we ended up chalking the whole thing up to experience-- to what end, I was never sure. But that visit was and remains a hugely important memory for me along the road to whatever self-realization I eventually arrived at (if I ever did). And as much as we were excited to be showing our Super-8 films to someone who actually worked in Hollywood (well, in Venice), to top the whole thing off, Fisher briefly interrupted our screening to take a call from Corman and, while we listened, told her boss how she was spending the afternoon, describing our movies to him as having "the kind of feel you like, Roger."

No, I never went to work for Roger Corman and New World Pictures, but as brushes with greatness go, that was a really good one.