Fridays With Hitchcock:Teresa Wright on SHADOW OF A DOUBT

Teresea Wright talks about SHADOW OF A DOUBT in this interview clip...

You may find this shocking, but SHADOW OF A DOUBT was Wright’s 4th film... and she was the star. She was born in Harlem, parents divorced, bounced around as a kid... but her uncle wasn’t a serial killer, he was a serial person - a professional stage actor, and Wright was interested in trying that as a profession. She worked in various theater companies in New England and then landed a small role in the New York Company for Wilder’s OUR TOWN, as well as understudied for the lead. When the actress playing the lead was whisked off to Hollywood to play the lead in the film version of OUR TOWN, Wright stepped in to play the lead on stage... and was great. That lead to being cast in the Broadway run of LIFE WITH FATHER, and then she was whisked away to Hollywood to be in Hellman’s THE LITTLE FOXES... and was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in her first film! In her next film she played Gary Cooper’s wife in PRIDE OF THE YANKEES, and was nominated for Best Actress! Her next film was MRS. MINIVER... and she WON the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

So SHADOW being her 4th film isn’t as surprising as her career up until this film. This was Hitchcock’s favorite film, and the combination of small town story and quiet suspense when there’s a potential killer at the dinner table is great. If you haven’t seen this movie, check it out - I would say that it’s unusual for a Hitchcock, film, but Hitchcock was one of the most experimental filmmakers in history, so many of his films were unusual and experimental. Hitch always said that he wanted to take murder fro the dark alleys and bring it back to the typical home and kitchen... and this is a movie that does that.



One of the great things that Hitch does in this film is to compare and contrast the two Charlies.

When we first see Uncle Charles he’s sitting up in bed smoking a cigar, maybe remembering a pleasant experience (which may have included murdering someone). When we first see young Charlie, she is sitting up in bed in the exact same position (though not smoking a cigar), dreaming of having an adventurous experience (though probably not murdering anyone). Both shots are the same composition and have slow dolly ins. Even though whether the camera dollies or not is the director’s job - the writer had to come up with the scenes of both sitting up in bed. Creating that similarity for the director to photograph. Our job is to set up the story and characters so that the director can find the perfect shot(s) to show that these two are very similar people. The writer also decided to give both protagonist and antagonist the same name - which makes the audience automatically look for those similarities between the two. There are many other things Uncle Charles and young Charlie have in common... and this helps us compare the two in order to find their differences.

- Bill

Of course, I have a couple of books about Hitchcock, SPELLBOUND is in the one that is on sale today...

HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE

LEARN SUSPENSE FROM THE MASTER!

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 52 movies, was known as the “Master Of Suspense”; but what exactly is suspense and how can *we* master it? How does suspense work? How can *we* create “Hitchcockian” suspense scenes in our screenplays, novels, stories and films?

This book uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to show the difference between suspense and surprise, how to use “focus objects” to create suspense, the 20 iconic suspense scenes and situations, how plot twists work, using secrets for suspense, how to use Dread (the cousin of suspense) in horror stories, and dozens of other amazing storytelling lessons. From classics like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Birds” and “Vertigo” and “To Catch A Thief” to older films from the British period like “The 39 Steps” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to his hits from the silent era like “The Lodger” (about Jack The Ripper), we’ll look at all of the techniques to create suspense!

Films Included: NOTORIOUS, SABOTAGE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, FRENZY, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THE LODGER, THE BIRDS, TORN CURTAIN, SABOTEUR, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1955), SUSPICION, and NUMBER SEVENTEEN. 17 Great Films!

369 pages packed with information!

Price: $5.99

Click here for more info!

OTHER COUNTRIES:

UK Folks Click Here.

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Canadian Folks Click Here.

And...

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

ON SALE!!! $2 OFF!

Click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 53 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

Only $5.99

UK Folks Click Here.

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- Bill

THRILLER Thursday: A Third For Pinochle

SEASON 2!!!



The spider web fills the screen, it's Boris Karloff's THRILLER!

Season: 2, Episode: 9.
Airdate: November 20, 1961

Director: Herschel Daugherty.
Writer: Mark Hanna and Boris Sobelman.
Cast: Edward Andrews, Doro Merande, Ann Shoemaker, June Walker, Barbara Perry.
Music: Morton Stevens.
Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline.
Producer: William Frye.

Boris Karloff’s Introduction: “They hardly knew him. Well, if that’s the way Melba and Diedre Pennaroyd treat their casual acquaintances I shudder to think of the hospitality they keep in store for their very special friends, Or perhaps they subscribe to the words of that famous poet who relates that there are some who apparently feel that the best way to make friends is to do something dreadful and then make amends. But what the girls seem to have overlooked for a moment at least is that amends will never sooth the ruffled ego of a corpse. Such an untidy way to go. Pity. I dare say the ace of spades would have worked wonders for a bad hand of pinochle. Tonight’s story is concerned with that ancient game. And the players are: Edward Andrews, Doro Merande, Ann Shoemaker, June Walker, and Barbara Perry. You’ve heard the old saying, Lucky at cards, unlucky at love? Well as sure as my name is Boris Karloff you’ll learn tonight whether or not it’s true, And permit me to give you one piece of advice: Never lay all of your cards on the table. (Holds up a knife) Someone might cut the deck.”

Synopsis: Before Karloff’s introduction there is a scene shot entirely in silhouette where a woman grabs a cleaver, goes into a room where a man is packing, and hacks him up... only to be discovered by another woman (her sister) who scolds her. Now they will need another player for pinochle. This sets the tone - this is a bloody comedy episode...

Welcome to late 1950s/early 1960s suburbia. Peaceful. Conservative. White picket fences. Well manicured lawns. On one side of the street the elderly Pennaroyd Sisters live - they are characters right out of “Arsenic And Old Lace” - two cute little old ladies who often rent their spare room to single men. Melba (Doro Merande) and Diedre (June Walker). On the other side of the street live Maynard and Mrs. Thispin - he is the henpecked husband and she is the wife he mostly married for her money. The Pennaroyd Sisters spy on their neighbors through binoculars - watching the Thispin’s pull into the driveway across the street.

Mrs Thispin (Ann Shoemaker) is going on a trip to visit her sister, and Maynard (Edward Andrews) is doing everything in his power not to go with her. The doorbell rings and it’s a delivery man with *poison* - weedkiller - and Maynard must pretend there has been some mistake in front of his wife... but by this point we have seen enough of bossy Mrs. Thispin to understand why he might have ordered it. In Maynard’s basement workshop he phones his girlfriend - the pneumatic Babs (Barbara Perry) - telling her that he would be willing to possibly buy her a mink stole, and he’d like to discuss it with her at her apartment this afternoon. After he hangs up he pulls a paper mache head from a secret cupboard and puts a wig the color of his wife’s hair on it... then practices strangling it.

Mrs. Thispin has Maynard write notes to all of her friends telling them that she will be away for a while, then she wants him to go out and buy six packages of birdseed for her pet birds which he will have to feed while she is away. She has a huge stack of money in her purse, but gives him just enough to buy the birdseed... down to the penny.

After buying the birdseed he stops off at Babs’ apartment, where he tells her as soon as he inherits some money he will get her a nicer apartment and that mink stole.

When Maynard returns home he attempts to strangle his wife several times, but his timing is all wrong... a Door To Door Salesman (Vito Scotti) rings the bell, the phone rings, etc. Some slight suspense is created here, but it’s mostly played for laughs.

The Door To Door Salesman knocks on the Pennaroyd’s door, and they invite him in and try to rent him their spare room and one of the sisters chases him out with a meat cleaver. Hijinks have ensued.

Maynard keeps failing to strangle his wife - so he grabs a huge paperweight and smashes her skull. That worked. He takes his paper mache head on the dressmaker’s dummy and puts it in the passenger seat - so that it looks like his wife. Puts her suitcases in the car, and drives off... with the Pennaroyd Sisters watching him through their binoculars.

Maynard pulls the car off the road in a secluded section and puts the paper mache head in the trunk... next to his wife’s corpse. Them drives to the train station where he takes his wife’s purse and puts it above her assigned seat, then waits near the Red Cap (Burt Mustin) until a woman of about the right age needs helps with her bags, and makes sure the porter sees him carrying the woman’s bags onto the train with her, makes sure the conductor sees him, and then makes sure the porter sees him waving at the woman in the train as it chugs away. He tells the Red Cap he’s glad to get rid of his wife for a while...

Then drives the car to a remote area just past the next train stop and dumps his wife’s body in the bushes.

At home, he burns the paper mache head... all of the evidence is gone!

A few days later, a Police Detective (Ken Lynch) shows up to inform him they have found his wife’s body. Their theory is that she was mugged on the train due to the large amount of money she was carrying in cash. Maynard does not act broken up, and tells the Detective that they had been married for a long time and the thrill was gone. He knows that if they are thinking it was murder, that he is the prime suspect, and it often crossed his mind to kill her... but he didn’t. The Detective tells him they interviewed the Red Cap who remembers him helping a woman who may or may not have been his wife to the train, but who might have seen her leave the house with him?

Which takes Maynard and the Detective across the street to the Pennaroyd Sisters...

Who remembers watching them driving to the train station. So he is now off the hook.

A few days later Maynard calls Babsie and breaks up with her - he has met a beautiful young redhead and they are flying to Mexico together on vacation. After he hangs up, the phone rings - it’s the Pennaroyd Sisters who want to see him immediately. They have a secret... about his late wife.

Maynard goes across the street where the Sisters are waiting to play pinochle... they know it wasn’t his wife in the car, it was a paper mache head. He stays and plays a hand or two... and begs off. But the Sisters say they used to play around the clock - morning, noon and night! Mr. Thispen will move into the spare bedroom and always be there to play pinochle... or they will go to that nice Detective and tell him what they know.

Review: This episode seems as if they took two completely different stories and tried to tie them together by having them happen across the street from each other. But this doesn’t really work and it never seems like the two tales are connected... except by tone. The Pennaroyd Sisters story is a direct lift from ARSENIC AND OLD LACE with nice little old lady killers, and the Maynard story across the street is one of those cliche Husband-Kills-Nagging-Wife comedy stories we have seen a million times, including an episode of this show, A GOOD IMAGINATION, that also starred Edward Andrews. This is the kind of role he often played - the amusing suburban killer. He’s great at it. But split story makes doesn’t really work... and the Pennaroyd Sisters never really seem to be in desperate need of that third at pinochle which is not only the title of the episode but their sole motivation for doing all sorts of terrible things. It’s like a punchline without the set up.

There are gags, the like the boxes of bird seed, that aren’t very funny but the episode plays them up, hoping that you will laugh anyway. The wacky door-to-door salesman who gets stuck with the Sisters in a scene and is chased around the house with a meat cleaver is not clever. This episode feels a little like MASQUERADE - a few episodes back - where there seems to have been a joke somewhere, but it stayed on the page instead of making it to the screen. Perhaps the script was a laugh riot, but the episode just isn’t funny enough, and I wish they have done it as two episodes, or maybe even a two separate half hours... with the twist end that they are across the street from each other. By connecting the two into one story it just seems to undercut both.

Though this isn’t a great episode, what I find interesting about it is that both stories are part of a larger subgenre that was popular at the time (late 50s, early 60s) about how peaceful, quiet, conservative suburbia was really simmering with corruption and sin below the surface. PEYTON PLACE looked at the sex aspect on the big screen and fiction, but in this episode we have infidelity and murder and insanity hidden behind those lovely white picket fences and well manicured yards. The David Lynch idea that the polite surface always hides a more evil world than the cliche crime infested big city pops up a couple of times on this show, many times on HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, and in movies and TV shows and fiction of the time. It’s interesting to think that all of these horrible criminal acts are *normal*, and that in the repressed suburbs those evil acts still exist... but people just pretend that they don’t. I said earlier that much of Edward Andrews career was playing characters like this, who seemed respectable on the outside but were actually some form of nice monster. In the scene where he is interrogated by the Police Detective and offers him a martini, the perfect host, you get a “what kind of man reads Playboy” vibe. He is a married man with a “little black book” of mistresses he keeps hidden in his sock and a basement filled with all kinds of tools and toys - he has a secret telephone extension down there. Hidden. He seems nice and respectable on the outside, but underneath he is even more corrupt than some random guy in the big city.

I suspect this was a commentary on the times - the suburbs seemed like something out of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER but that was all a facade. In reality - and this episode was written in 1961 - it was a hotbed of what people of the time would call “sin”. When we fondly look back on that era, we need to include episodes like this that tell a different truth. If there is a whole subgenre of crime story on TV about quiet suburban men who cheat like crazy and murder their wives and nice little old ladies who kill between rounds of pinochle; there had to be enough of this going on at the time that this wasn’t shelved in the Science Fiction section. That David Lynch look at late 50s / early 60s suburbia almost makes this episode into something more than a time killer. Almost.

Though the episode is amusing enough to kill 50 minutes if you have nothing better to do, it’s one of those season 2 mis-steps. After finding the show’s “voice” as a horror and suspense show, it seems like they had a few season 1 scripts they needed to get rid of. And the next episode is another mis-step, though an unusual and timely one... The 1961 “MeToo movement” written by and directed by a woman.

- Bill

Scene Of The Week: GOODFELLAS

If you've read Secrets Of Action Screenwriting you know that one of my favorite writing tools is *Magnification*, which I learned in Dan Arnold’s acting class in High School. The basic idea is to make something normal sized and make it much bigger. Stakes and conflict and emotions are all raised. Something average becomes something larger than life... large enough to fill that big screen. This works with concepts, emotions, and understanding the emotions of your characters.

This scene also deals with *Tension* - which is unresolved conflict. To create tension you must have a conflict... and the conflict needs to be ongoing and active and not solved. Once you resolve the conflict, you remove the tension. If you allow the audience to forget the conflict, you remove the tension. On Fridays when I do the Hitchcock entries, there are a couple on tension and suspense and “poking the tiger” to keep the audience aware that there is an existing conflict. If you don’t poke the tiger the conflict dissipates and you lose all of the tension.



So here is a scene that uses both elements, and it’s one of my favorite scenes. From GOODFELLAS (1990) written by Nicholas Pileggi, based on his true crime book. Directed by Martin Scorsese, and it’s like his 15th feature film. He’s one of my favorite directors, never really had a hit like his fellow “Hollywood Brats” but is always doing great work. Ages ago, when I was fresh out of high school, I sent him a letter asking if he’d read one of my screenplays... and he said yes! I sent some crappy early screenplay and got a great letter back from the head of his production company telling me to stick with it, etc. The polite brush off - but the guy never had to be polite in the first place. That script was ANYONE CAN LOSE and a friend asked me about it a couple of days ago - it’s one of those scripts with some great scenes but the story doesn’t work well. People remember it and wonder if I ever figured out how to fix it. Nope. But, back to GOODFELLAS...

Henry Hill is a small time crook way out on the fringe of organized crime, who wants to move up. So he looks to make some new friends who are equally ambitious and see if they can team up to move up the mob ladder... and become the new generation of organized crime. Now here’s the thing - this is kind of like a job interview, and the people you are interviewing you may be armed and may have just killed someone five minutes ago.

So let’s use our magnification tool. Remember those times in your past you were hanging out with someone who you wanted to impress... and *didn’t* want to offend? Might have been a job interview or a first date or meeting your romantic partner’s best friend or some other situation where you were hanging out with someone important and didn’t want to screw it up. Now, because we are all human, we have probably all screwed up in this situation at least once. I am socially inept and have some for of social tourettes that kicks in when I'm with people I need to impress - so that I always say the completely wrong thing. I get nervous and probably try too hard and end up saying something stupid. Because of that, I work hard *not* to do that when I meet people or hang out with people that I want to impress, which makes me even more nervous... But you’ve probably blown it a couple of times, right? Now we’re going to take that anxiety and that mistake and *Magnify* it. We’re going to raise the stakes and emotions and turn that first meeting into a life or death situation. You are hanging out with a guy who kills people. You don’t want to say the wrong thing in this situation, you don’t want to accidentally offend him...



Funny how?

Great scene, and see how they keep “poking the tiger” to keep that tension alive?

This is a great example of how to take a “throw away scene” and make it so entertaining that we’re talking about it 25 years later... but it also helps us identify with Henry (Ray Liotta) and is the perfect introduction to Tommy (Joe Pesci).

While we’re on Joe Pesci - he won an Oscar for this performance, and his speech was: "This is an honor and privilege, thank you," because he didn’t think he was going to win and had no planned acceptance speech. Pesci as been in a bunch of great films, and is always great in lesser films. Would you believe his first time on screen was in HEY LET’S TWIST (1961) because he was a Rock & Roll guitar player for the featured band The Starliters... and even recorded a Rock & Roll solo album as a singer: “Little Joe Sure Can Sing”! He was a childhood friend of Frankie Valli, and was instrumental in the formation of The Four Seasons (he’s even a character in JERSEY BOYS!). So the whole Rock & Roll career, then a new career as an actor that leads to an Oscar win and another nomination plus a bunch of memorable films.

( Joe Pesci plays guitar in a band on The Lucy Show (1966) - Carol Burnett co-stars.) Magnification and Tension work hand-in-hand in this scene, but they can work separately as well in scenes. Tension is a great scene tool, and when I get around to doing the Scenes Blue Book there will be a whole chapter on tension techniques.

The comments section is open for discussion of the scene.

- Bill

Trailer Tuesday: DARK PASSAGE

Dark Passage (1947)

Directed by: Delmer Daves.
Written by: Delmer Daves based on the novel by David Goodis.
Starring: Bogart, Bacall, Bennett, Moorehead.


DARK PASSAGE is a great film, even though I did not own it on DVD until after seeing it on the big screen again a few years ago. David Goodis is one of those great Noir writers, darker than dark. His stories are bleak and contain all of those D Words that make Noir fiction a genre: Darkness, Despair, Doom, Destiny, and Dead ends. Now (2014) I'm getting ready to rewatch a couple of other films based on his books, MOON IN THE GUTTER and NIGHTFALL and SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER.



The house lights go down, and some great Franz Waxman music begins (it is a week later, and I still can not get that music out of my head!) And the WB shield appears on the screen. I love Warner Bros movies - they were gritty when other films were glossy. Even their big Busby Berkeley musicals were about some broke composer and some out of work chorus girl who team up and put on a hit show that saves some theater.

DARK PASSAGE - based on a novel by the amazing Dave Goodis, produced by Jerry Wald (ex-screenwriter - back then they promoted *writers* to producer jobs and studio head of production), written and directed by Delmer Daves (DESTINATION TOKYO), starring Bogart & Bacall and Agnes Moorehead and lots of Warner Bros bit players.



The film opens with escape from San Quentin that is shot POV from the lead character (Bogart) - we never see him... just what he sees. Though the first 65 minutes of the film are from the lead character’‘s POV, and we don’t see Bogart’s face for that entire time, it isn’t 100% POV - it’s a combo of shots of POV and wide and long shots. So the film actually opens with a shot of a garbage truck filled with garbage cans leaving San Quentin Prison... then a pair of hands come out of a garbage can, and they rock it off the back of the truck. POV from inside the can as it rolls down the hill, then a great shot from *inside* the can as the prisoner crawls out, gets his footing, and escapes...

From there on it’s POV from the prisoner - as he ditches his prison shirt, hides from a dozen police on motorcycles looking for him, etc. He *hops a fence* to the road to hitch a ride - amazing stuff. Can you imagine trying to hoist one of those huge old 35mm cameras over the fence with some actor’s arms in your way (as the prisoner’s arms).

He gets picked up by a grifter... and they hear the radio report about the escaped convict! Great POV shot from our convict hero Vince Parry (voiced by Bogart) as the grifter hears the convict’s description and looks up and down at *us* - type of shoes, color of eyes, hair, etc. *We* punch the grifter and escape... and then we are picked up by Bacall, who has some connection to the convict... but what?



Bacall lets him hide out at her place, furnishes him with new clothes, and takes care of him... why? She won’t tell him. Vince was convicted of murdering his wife, has always claimed he was innocent, was convicted to life in prison, and now the only way to have a normal life is to find the real killer before the police catch up with him for escaping San Quentin. But how can he do that with his face on the cover of every newspaper?

Vince gets some back alley plastic surgery in some really dirty tenement where the doctor had his license yanked years ago... very similar to the scene in MINORITY REPORT. The doctor is this crazy guy, who tells him that a botched surgery could make him look like a bulldog... or worse. Does Vince have a place to stay? He’s not supposed to move for a while after the surgery, and needs someone who will take care of him. Well, Vince has already contacted his oldest friend who always believed he was innocent, who will take care of him after the surgery.

But when Vince is dropped off there after the surgery he finds his friend murdered - whoever actually killed Vince’s wife is getting rid of anyone who Vince can go to for help. So Vince has no choice but to *walk* across San Francisco right after surgery - climbing endless flights of stairs (those ones under Coit Tower) to Bacall’s apartment building. She takes him in again....



Okay - 65 minutes into the film, the bandages come off and we see the movie star's face for the very first time. Imagine doing that in a modern film. For half the film we do not see the star's face! While Bacall is slowly taking off the bandages there is this fear that he will look like a bulldog... or worse. But he looks just like Humphrey Bogart! After he looks in the mirror, we ditch the POV stuff and the last half of the movie is a Bogart & Bacall crime film.

I had mis-remembered the film (or maybe this is what happened in the book, which I read about a decade ago) - but I thought after he got the plastic surgery he re-enters his old life with his new face and gets to question all of his old friends about himself and see himself from their POV... and gets to hear what people really think about him. Though that’s touched on in a scene of the film, it really isn’t explored much because the last half of the story picks up speed and is action-action-twist-action! Relentless pacing, and some *savage* plot twists!



Bogart finds the one guy who can prove he's innocent, the guy fights him, the guy goes off a cliff and splats. No way to prove himself innocent! I'm not going to spoil the film with all of the other characters who die - but some *shocking* unexpected deaths in this film. Everyone who can help him prove that he didn’t kill his wife ends up dead. So not only do we not see the movie star’s face for the first 65 minutes, the film manages to kill off people that usually do not get killed off in a film like this. Lots of “you can’t do that in a movie!” scenes.

The film still works - is clever and has shocking twists and a great Franz Waxman score and really well done suspense scenes (one is almost a French Farce - with everyone wanting to go into the room where Bogart is hiding) - and fantastic San Francisco location work. Though San Francisco stuff was probably 2nd unit - the film feels like it was all shot there. You get a real feel for the city, and the film uses some interesting locations that you wouldn’t see in a film that just used the tourist locations.

A little side note on the novelist, David Goodis - in print he was the king of downer noir. A few months ago I read his “lost” novel THE WOUNDED AND THE SLAIN about a drunk and his wife on holiday in some Caribbean country... and while the husband is drinking and whoring, his wife starts screwing some other dude... and then everybody dies. He’s best known for DARK PASSAGE and SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER (filmed by Truffaut) and NIGHTFALL (made into another great noir film) and STREET OF NO RETURN and MOON IN THE GUTTER and CASSIDY’S GIRL and THE BURGLAR (which was made into the film THE BURGLARS which I featured some great stunt clips from in the blog entry “I Do My Own Stunts”). As a writer, he was famous for his crazy practical jokes - he would fall down stairs at movie studios and fake nose bleeds and do all kinds of things that seemed to upset studio folks. He was a loose canon in a fun way.



He also is famous for probably being the creator of THE FUGITIVE TV series... After the show aired, he sued that the show was swiped from DARK PASSAGE - the escaped man sentenced for murder who is searching for the real killer. By the time the lawsuit got to court, Goodis was dead and so were all of his relatives... and they settled with the lawyer for the estate for $12k! Stall long enough and everyone is dead and the people left standing don’t really care!

DARK PASSAGE is a darned good film, and if you have ever walked with me through an underground parking garage with one of those overhead signs that tells you the head clearance, you know Goodis is a major influence on my practical joking. Whack! Ouch, my head!

DARK PASSAGE is available once more on DVD thanks to Warner Archive (link below, click on the DVD box).

Bill

Fridays With Hitchcock: Ten Screenwriting Tips!

Ten Screenwriting Tips from Hitchcock?

The fun part of writing my Hitchcock Books (for screenwriters) is finding all of the *story* techniques that Hitch uses to involve the audience in the stories, and whenever I get off my lazy butt I will write the third book in the series that's all about screenwriting and Hitch's writers.

The great thing about Hitchcock is that when he found a writer that he worked well with, he just kept using them again and again, and some (like Joan Harrison) ended up producers on his TV show and the editor of his magazine (or was it *her* magazine?).

So here's a nice little video that looks at some of Hitch's story techniques...

Of course, I have my own books focusing on Hitchcock... (and hopefully by the middle of next year the third and final book!)

HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE

LEARN SUSPENSE FROM THE MASTER!

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 52 movies, was known as the “Master Of Suspense”; but what exactly is suspense and how can *we* master it? How does suspense work? How can *we* create “Hitchcockian” suspense scenes in our screenplays, novels, stories and films?

This book uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to show the difference between suspense and surprise, how to use “focus objects” to create suspense, the 20 iconic suspense scenes and situations, how plot twists work, using secrets for suspense, how to use Dread (the cousin of suspense) in horror stories, and dozens of other amazing storytelling lessons. From classics like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Birds” and “Vertigo” and “To Catch A Thief” to older films from the British period like “The 39 Steps” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to his hits from the silent era like “The Lodger” (about Jack The Ripper), we’ll look at all of the techniques to create suspense!

Films Included: NOTORIOUS, SABOTAGE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, FRENZY, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THE LODGER, THE BIRDS, TORN CURTAIN, SABOTEUR, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1955), SUSPICION, and NUMBER SEVENTEEN. 17 Great Films!

Only 125,000 words!

Price: $5.99

Click here for more info!

OTHER COUNTRIES:


UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

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And....

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

USA Readers click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 52 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

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THRILLER Thursday: The Closed Cabinet.

The spider web fills the screen, it's Boris Karloff's THRILLER!

THRILLER: The Closed Cabinet

Season: 2, Episode: 10.
Airdate: November 27, 1961

Director: Ida Lupino
Writer: Kay Lenard & Jess Carneol.
Cast: Olive Sturgess, David Frankham, Jennifer Raine, Peter Forster, Patricia Manning.
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cinematography: Benjamin H Kline.
Producer: William Frye.

Boris Karloff’s Introduction: “Evil begats evil. And the evil does not die. The sins of the fathers doom the children through generations yet unborn. Impossible, you say? The superstition from the dark ages. Well, perhaps our story tonight will help you change your mind. We start with a curse and a riddle, inexplicabily bound together. Somewhere in this room lies the clue that will solve the riddle and lift the curse. But 300 years have passed since Dame Alice pronounced that awful curse, and still the riddle is unsolved. Tonight we are concerned with two brothers - the last of the cursed Mervyns and the women who love them. Our players are: Olive Sturgess, David Frankham, Jennifer Raine, Peter Forster, and Patricia Manning. Turn off your lights. Close your windows. And even of the wind should rise, relax... if you can! While we pick up our story in the year 1880, during the reign of her gracious majesty Queen Victoria, and when our tale is told, you’ll believe in curses as sure as my name is Boris Karloff.”

Synopsis: A dark and stormy night. 1580. Lady Beatrice (Patricia Manning) discovers her abusive husband Hugh Mervyn is drunk, and using a dagger found in a secret drawer, murders him and then herself. The bodies are discovered by a Maid (Myra Carter), who finds the dagger next to Beatrice’s corpse and screams... Dame Alice (Doris Lloyd) comes running, takes the dagger from the Maid and then spots her son murdered on the bed... and puts a curse upon the family: “Out of evil comes death! In each generation there shall be a Mervyn who will bring shame and death to the family, for eternity... An end there shall be, but it is beyond the wisdom of man to fix it, or the wit of man to discover it. Who fathoms the riddle, lifts the curse. Pure blood, stained by the blood stained knife, heals the Mervyn shame, ends the Mervyn’s strife,” she says as she returns the dagger to its secret compartment.

1880: The Mervin Castle. A coach pulls up and Evie Bishop (Olive Sturgess) steps out and is welcomed by her cousins Lucy Mervyn (Jennifer Raine) and George Mervyn (Peter Forster) and enter the castle... where handsome Alan Mervyn (David Frankham) descends the staircase and takes Evie in her arms. Alan lives in London and avoids the castle completely, but when he heard that Evie was coming to visit he braved a stay. Eveie has heard that the castle is haunted, that there is a room in the castle that is filled with ghosts... and she would like to stay there. She has never seen a ghost. As she jokes about ghosts, George and Lucy look very uncomfortable. Evie insists on staying in the haunted room, and when Lucy shows her to the room, the two men seem less than happy.

In the “haunted room” (from the opening scene) Lucy tells Evie that several Mervyn relatives have died violent deaths in this room - which would account for the ghosts. The cabinet (where the dagger is hidden) is still there, and Lucy jokes about the legend of the curse. Though there have been a bunch of deaths in this room, Lucy believes it is due to the Mervyn men’s anger issues.

Alan and George have an argument - Alan believes that the curse is real, and staying in this castle is putting Lucy’s life at risk. George believes it’s just hokum - sure, there have been a lot of murders in the family, but whose family hasn’t had them?

As Evie looks around the castle, candles flicker where there is no breeze... and she sees the ghost of Lady Beatrice for a moment. Then the ghost vanishes. When Evie heads downstairs for dinner, she hears the two men arguing and listens in. When George leaves, she comes downstairs and talks to Alan - it’s love!

When George and Lucy come in, Evie asks if their houseguest will be joining them? Who? The woman upstairs. The ghost!

After dinner, Alan takes Evie on a tour of the castle’s hallways to look at the paintings of the family - stopping at Lady Beatrice. That’s the ghost she saw!

A dark and stormy night... awakens Evie. Blows open the windows. She gets up and closes them, and when she goes back to sleep the ghost of Lady Beatrice pops up in a doorway. Trying to communicate with her. Warning her that she is the next victim of the curse?

The next morning when Evie mentions the storm, she gets funny looks: there was no storm. Is she crazy? Alan takes Evie on a tour of the castle grounds, and she tells him that she wants to solve the mystery of the curse so that Alan will feel comfortable in his home. Evie wants to see the dungeon (doesn’t everyone?), but the door is locked to When Alan goes to get the key... the door magically opens as soon as he is gone. Nothing haunted about that at all.

Evie goes in alone - lots of cobwebs down here, but none get on her face. She manages to completely avoid all of the webs and maintain her perfect hair. Doors open one-by-one in front of her, taking her down to the crypt... where she comes face to face with Hugh Mervyn! Well, a bust of him. And finds a cat-o-nine-tails *whip* on his coffin. What’s that all about? Deeper in the crypt she finds a secret room with Lady Beatrice’s coffin... and Lady Beatrice’s ghosts makes an appearance and points at Evie. That’s when Alan runs in, and the ghost vanishes. But was the ghost pointing at her or the wall behind her? On the wall, and inscription under the cobwebs: “Where woman sinned, the maid shall win. But God help the maid who sleeps here-in.” Alan tells her that no one in the family ever knew where Lady Beatrice’s coffin was. No one had ever discovered this secret room until now.

George, with a riding crop in hand, tells Alan and Evie that they could not have found Lady Beatrice’s coffin - no one has found it for 300 years. Men in the family have looked for it and never found it, so how could Evie have found it? George loses his temper... and we get some angry exposition about how Lady Beatrice’s ghost appeared to their mother the night before she died... and now Lady Beatrice has appeared before Evie. George loses it and almost whips Alan. George’s temper is out of control! He storms out of the room.

Alan drops a few pages of exposition on Evie about the curse... and how Hugh was physically abusive to Lady Beatrice until she killed him one night during a violent storm. The storm that was brewing inside her for all of those years of abuse by a drunken husband?

That night, as Lucy plays the harp and George naps, Alan and Evie flirt... and then he sees her to her room like a gentleman... and they almost kiss. Victorian romance at its hottest! I believe this moment was put there to show that Evie was still a virgin - pure - and therefor able to lift the curse. But it’s not set up very well, and we don’t particularly care if they kiss or not - which is a mistake.

Evie does not go to bed - she sits up, waiting for the storm to come. The storm waiting or the storm without? When it comes, it blows open the windows violently. Meanwhile, Alan looks outside his window - no storm, clear skies. This is a nice moment because it shows that the haunted room really is haunted. Evie goes to sleep and the storm blasts the windows open again... and Lady Beatrice appears. She raises her hand to beckon Evie... and Evie is back in time, drunk Hugh Mervyn sleeping in the bed she just got out of. Lady Beatrice points to the cabinet, and Evie finds the secret lever to open it... And takes out the dagger! She is possessed by Lady Beatrice!

She moves to the bed, where Hugh is sleeping, raises the knife and... stops herself from stabbing him, but slices her hand in the process. She shows her bleeding hand to Lady Beatrice’s ghost, “The maid has won,” and the ghost vanishes, leaving Evie alone in the room. The bed is empty. The storm is gone.

She runs out into the hallway, yelling for Alan. He runs from his room and they embrace in the hallway. She tells him what happened, shows him her hand... and there is no blood on her hand. He thinks it might be a nightmare, but she convinces him that she has lifted the curse. In the haunted bedroom, she tells him how to open the drawer... and he finds the dagger with Hugh Mervyn’s crusted blood on it... and another drawer opens and there is a scroll with the curse and, heck, Evie did it and lifted the curse! So he finally kisses her. They can be married with very little chance that he will physically abuse her and maybe even kill her during an argument!

Review: The luck of laziness! I had intended on writing up all of these entries a couple of years ago, and had I done that I’m not sure I would have seen the subtleties in this episode or commented on them as much as will now that we’ve had the MeToo Movement. Though domestic abuse is not the same as inappropriately touching someone, they both fall under the umbrella of ahole male dominance. Though this episode doesn’t really work, I’m cutting it some slack because it’s “a very special episode pf THRILLER”, just like the alcoholism episode. It’s 1961 and domestic violence is a major problem in America (Time Magazine would do an article on the epidemic a couple of years later) and this episode is going to slyly get the message out disguised as a ghost story.

I’m sure that Ida Lupino was hired to direct this episode to give it a woman’s sensibility, but it is not one of her better episodes. I think the screenplay may be getting in the way - but I wonder about the lead actress. The scenes where she *avoids* the cobwebs just seem odd - did the actress not want to get messy? Or was that seen as “degrading” to a female and not done in this episode? Either way, it removes the spooky element from the haunted house story. One of the elements of horror is the “Eeeew!” Factor. If you think of all of those moments in horror movies where you have went “Eeeeew!” mentally (or even outloud), that feeling of revulsion is one of the things that add to the dread and creepy feeling of the film. In horror movies people *touch* gross things and *step in* gross things and *back into* gross things and maybe even sit in gross things. Horror movies are filled with rats and bats and worms and corpses and all kinds of gross things that the characters encounter. There are things that look as if they smell bad in horror films. Things that get on your hands that you need to wash off *now*, but you are miles away from running water. Horror movies put their characters through hell - even the survivors - and that is part of what makes them work, and what makes the survivors strong.

But for whatever reason, here we remove the revulsion and end up with a lead character who just wanders through a haunted castle and easily pushes aside cobwebs as if they are curtains dividing rooms. If someone thought that the women in the story have gone through enough abuse at the hands of their husbands that they needed to avoid abusing them with cobwebs, that was a mistake. It actually weakens a character if they don’t have to go through hell.

I have noted the used of cobwebs and spider webs in earlier episodes, and how sometimes they are just a piece of the background and sometimes there are the focus of the scene. Revulsion is a “no budget” special effect that packs a punch, so you want to make cobwebs part of the scene - something that can not be avoided. So removing the revulsion was a mistake - no matter what the reason.

Lupino does get a few of her creative shots in - and that’s one of the reasons why I love her in low budget films and TV work. Other directors will just do wide shot and close ups - coverage - but she gets those Hitchcock shots in there. Here we have a couple of great early shots - a nice shot through the coach windows as Evie arrives at the castle, and a creepy paranoid shot from a balcony above as Alan watches her enter the castle’s main room. Later in the episode is a great moving shot as the group relaxes in the castle main room at night, it circles them like a Brian DePalma shot. And there is a cool shot *through* the harp at George and Lucy. I suspect with so many locations, there wasn’t time for much else, and the rest is competently directed. I wish she had done more in the creepy dungeon and crypt scenes, but it’s TV. Made on a schedule with a hard deadline. They are okay.

One of the other problems with the episode is Jennifer Raine’s decidedly non-British accent. She has some sort of Southwestern twang, and every time she opens her mouth it takes you out of the episode. Though the others don’t go full-on-British accents, they have that mid-Atlantic sound that Americans can understand but still sound vaguely British.

Though I give kudos to the script for taking on an issue, the story is muddled and the curse and riddle are just a mess. Even after watching it several times, I’m not sure that either actually makes sense. And a clue to understanding the curse ends up written on a wall in Lady Beatrice’s tomb, but this is all still confusing. Too many moving parts to the curse. Too many foot notes. Instead of being something simple (and rhyming) it’s so convoluted you need to take notes through the episode... and even though I did that I’m still confused by it! The reason for the curse also is muddled - the mother of the murdered abuser curses her own family line? There was a better way to do it - having Lady Beatrice curse the family as she is being killed by her husband, but maybe the censors said no to that?

I do like that the curse of domestic abuse is “handed down” from father to son in this story. George’s anger issues are seen as the family curse. But that scene where he has the riding crop in his hand really needed to create suspense and fear that he might use it on his wife, and not in a kinky way. Again, that may have been a censors thing - we don’t want to offend all of the wide beaters in the audience! We need to protect our ratings!

So this episode isn’t very spooky or scary, even though it takes place in a nice haunted castle. Next episode works better - a “weird tales” story about people who communicate with the dead... and the dead aren’t happy with what is going on in the world of the living!

- Bill

Film Courage Plus: Creating Authentic Dialogue

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me, around 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?



Nobody sets out to write stilted, contrived dialogue; yet we’re all been in some cinema wanting to scream at the screen: “Nobody talks like that!” Maybe you’ve even wanted to scream that when reading a friend’s script... or your own. So how do we create dialogue that sounds like something people might actually say?

In the clip I mention my first “realistic dialogue experiment” was to go into the wilds of Burbank armed with tape recorder to collect actual dialogue of indigenous human beings. After filling thirty minutes of tape with the conversations of authentic teenagers and businesspeople, I returned to my lab to transcribe and study this real dialogue. I discovered that I had thirty pages of pointless blathering. A meandering mess that wasn’t witty or interesting... and didn’t make any sense. In the real world, people talk a lot but say nothing. I don’t really want to spend 90 minutes of screen time hoping that someone will say something worthwhile.

My second experiment involved videotaping professional actors improvising dialogue. They were given characters and a situation. After about 20 minutes of videotape, I learned that even talented actors create dialogue that meanders around and serves no purpose. The added bonus was amazing footage of actors *thinking* about what they should say next in a way that real humans don’t really do - we jump in with whatever’s on the top of our heads, even if it sounds stupid. The actors were afraid of saying something stupid - so they thought about what their character would say. Real people don’t think about what their character would say - they are the character! They just say it! But even when the actors seemed to get in the groove, the results were mostly pointless talking that would end up on the cutting room floor.

What I learned from these experiments is that no one really wants realistic dialogue in their film, what they wants is dialogue that *appears* to be realistic, but really serves a story and character purpose. Just as we create our story instead of filming every day life, we need to create our dialogue. A writer can go over and over a dialogue exchange until everything is the very best that it can be, improvised dialogue is the rough draft that needs a lot of work. Realistic dialogue - from the wild - is just pointless jabbering most of the time. Not dramatic or even interesting.

WHAT IS DIALOGUE?

According to Webster’s, dialogue is a conversation between two or more persons. The root word of conversation is converse, meaning contrary or opposite. So dialogue requires at least two people talking who have opposing viewpoints. If both people agree with each other - what are they talking about? This doesn’t mean that every conversation needs to be a heated argument, but you do need to focus on the conflict in the conversation. You may have two people who agree on the main points but disagree on the small stuff - and that’s what the conversation is about. They agree on *what* they should do, but not *how* they should do it, or something similar. If you have a scene where two people are discussing going to the movies and both want to see the same movie, why not just cut to them watching the movie? There is no “converse” in that conversation, so it is pointless and belongs on the cutting room floor.

If only one person is talking, you no longer have dialogue. In the real world, no one just lets you talk for a paragraph or two, they cut in with their two cents. And they don’t politely wait for you to finish. Conversation is like a game of tennis, bouncing back and forth between the players. Each one trying to score their point.

Just like in tennis, every “bounce” of conversation slightly changes the direction of the conversation. Realistic dialogue doesn’t seem to be heading in a pre-determined direction; it’s evolving with every bounce. As writers we may know where the conversation will end up, but the characters don’t and the dialogue isn’t taking the obvious route to that destination.

CONFUSION

Because one character doesn’t know what the other is going to say, they don’t have that perfectly formulated response. In fact, they are likely to misunderstand what the other person says or means. In the heat of an argument, the potential for misunderstanding increases. “I love you” may sound like “I loathe you”. “Your stupid job” may sound like “You’re stupid!” - the other person’s response coming even before the sentence is finished. Real dialogue is filled with confusion and misunderstandings. Look at each line of dialogue from the listener’s perspective: how might they misconstrue the meaning? This is a great way to expose character. Characters shouldn’t respond the way you want them to, or the story needs them to; but the way their history and attitude and *character* forces them to.

I love using misunderstandings to create reversals in dialogue. Leading the audience to think one thing, then pulling the rug out from under them. In my cable film HARD EVIDENCE protagonist Ken Turner has been caught cheating by his wife Madeline and banished to the living room sofa. One morning they bump into each other in the kitchen.

MADDY

That couch can’t be too comfortable to sleep on.

KEN

What are you saying? I can come back to the bedroom, now?

MADDY

No. I think you should move out.

See how the misunderstanding creates a little twist in the story? He thought they were making up, when really they were breaking up. We want dialogue that *sounds realistic* but is crafted to give the audience information in the most interesting and entertaining way.

EXPOSITION

The best way to make dialogue sound realistic is to let it come out and play. As SCREENwriters we are writing for the screen, telling the story visually. Bad dialogue pops up when it is forced to tell the story - when it becomes exposition. I talk about this a little in the clip - you don’t want the dialogue to be stuck doing all of the heavy lifting in your story, you want it to be the icing on the cake. That way it can “come out and play” instead of shouldering the weight of plot. The way to do that is to focus on telling your story visually - allowing the actions of your characters to tell the story. We are SCREENwriters, right? No SPEAKERwriters. So we are writing for the screen first. That’s how we are telling our stories - through the image part of the screenplay. This allows our dialogue the freedom to be entertaining and add an additional layer to the story that is already being told visually.

You can have two characters *talk* about how something is done, or you can have one character demonstrate how it is done to the other. When I was working for Safeway Grocery we had a cardboard bailer. You tossed empty boxes into the machine, pressed the button, and it compressed the cardboard. I was working midnight to 9am stocking crew for a while, and I threw a lot of cardboard into the machine and pressed that button to compress it. But eventually it became full - no more compression possible. So a senior employee showed me how to tie the cardboard bail and eject it onto a pallet to be shipped out. Eventually I was shown how to stack the bails, using this claw arm that was attached to the back of the bailer. The “dialogue” in both scenes was “Watch what I do and remember, you are doing the next one.” And then he tied the bail... and I learned how it was done. That ended up in a screenplay I wrote called NIGHT STOCKERS about a wanna be stand up comic who creates a revolt against an ahole store manager who actually had a ruler to measure employees sideburns, hair, skirt hemlines, etc - and would write you up and fire you if you were over regulations. I had that manager at Safeway!

But the “lesson” of demonstrating something complex instead of having a long monologue about it carried over into my screenwriting. I have written several science fiction screenplays, and instead of some explanation of this future, I just showed how it worked. That same principle was used in my two submarine warfare movies for HBO - I just showed people on submarines accurately doing their jobs, hot bunking, and all of the other things that some bad writer might have explained with dialogue. Demonstrate! That way dialogue is free to come out and play!

Movie dialogue is different than realistic dialogue - it’s what we *wish* we had said. You’ve been in an argument or a conversation and then the next day wished you had said “___________” instead of whatever bland thing you said in the actual conversation. In a movie screenplay, you can do that! You can use all of those clever, cutting, brilliant things that you think of the next day... and make your characters look like the person that you wish you were. The magic of writing!

So take the time to come up with great dialogue... and leave the “plot heavy lifting” for the character’s actions.

Good luck and keep writing!

- Bill

50 Tips On Dialogue!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting protagonists! How to remove bad dialogue (and what *is* bad dialogue), First Hand Dialogue, Awful Exposition, Realism, 50 Professional Dialogue Techniques you can use *today*, Subtext, Subtitles, Humor, Sizzling Banter, *Anti-Dialogue*, Speeches, and more. Tools you can use to make your dialogue sizzle! Special sections that use dialogue examples from movies as diverse as "Bringing Up Baby", "Psycho", "Double Indemnity", "Notorious", the Oscar nominated "You Can Count On Me", "His Girl Friday", and many more! Over 160 pages!

Only $4.99 - and no postage!

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Thank you to everyone!

Bill

Trailer Tuesday: THE DEVILS EIGHT (1969)

THE DEVIL'S EIGHT (1969)

Kino-Lorber released a Blue-Ray of this film in August of 2021, so let's take a look at it, shall we?

Directed by: Burt Topper.
Written by: John Millius (THE WIND AND THE LION), Willard Huyck (AMERICAN GRAFFITI), Larry Gordon (48 HOURS), and James Gordon White (THE INCREDIBLE TWO HEADED TRANSPLANT *and* THE THING WITH TWO HEADS).
Starring: Christopher George, Ross Hagen, Fabian, Leslie Parrish, screenwriter Larry Bishop, Robert DoQui, Ron Riflkin (with hair!).
Produced by: Jack W. Cash.
Cinematography by: Richard C. Glouner (PAYDAY).
Music by: Michael Lloyd & Jerry Styner.




You may think that The Asylum Studios created the "mockbuster" movie like THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED (which means it stood still) and many many others like I AM OMEGA (I AM LEGEND and OMEGA MAN), but coming up with a cheap knock off of a big budget studio film is nothing new in this business, and probably goes back to the silent era. So we are going to kill a couple of birds with the same stone in this entry and look at a B movie knockoff of THE DIRTY DOZEN which also happens to be ground zero for a bunch of screenwriters who would become very famous in five years and a co-star who has been in a couple of movies that I have written, and is one of those charismatic B actors who can take some stupid line that I wrote and deliver it as if it were Shakespeare and make me look good. I saw this film on the big screen at the New Beverly Cinema on a doubke bill with one of my favorite films, THE WIND AND THE LION, a few years back...

THE DEVILS 8 begins with a great opening scene, very much like the opening of 48 HOURS, chain gang somewhere in the South with prisoners doing backbreaking work (though, none of it made much sense - one guys was breaking rocks and another guy was throwing them in a lake! One guy was just sawing boards. But its was all hard work stuff) - then a fight breaks out between prisoners: one of them is our star Christopher George from RAT PATROL. Just like in 48 HOURS, the fight is a way for the prisoners to overpower the guards and escape. George grabs a bunch of prisoners - 8 of them - and says he has an escape route. They run through the woods, coming out at a clearing... where a huge helicopter lands! There are *military guys* with guns in the helicopter! George tells the guys not to worry - this is part of the plan. What plan?

Cool flashback to George and some hottie making out in a car when his carphone rings (when this film was made, that was sci-fi or James Bond) and it’s a mission. George has to stop making out and go to do some spy work. In this case - it’s breaking up a huge moonshine operation run by this GODFATHER-like guy named Burl, played by some fat old guy. Seems that Burl’s organization has Senators and Congressmen and Police and maybe even FBI guys on his payroll. He’s a big fish, and George is supposed to find some way to take him down.

We get out of the flashback in another cool screen-bending dissolve...

STRUCTURE FAILURE

And here’s where we begin to run into trouble. Because DEVILS 8 has some serious structure problems. Because it’s a knock off of THE DIRTY DOZEN, it kind of steals the way that film worked - where about half of the film is training a bunch of anti-authority criminals to become good enough soldiers to complete the mission... and all of the conflicts involved in having a dozen guys with bad attitudes who hate each other living under the same roof. Then, the last half is the mission against the Nazis - and how it goes wrong but they still manage to blow the hell out of the place. Okay, that works for DIRTY DOZEN because the mission is complicated and the guys are a major challenge to train. But in DEVILS, even though the guys are escaped prisoners and have all kinds of conflict with each other - including racial: Henry (Robert DoQui) is pretty much hated by everyone because he’s black - there isn’t a single psycho like Telly Savalas or a real hardcase like John Cassavetes. These 8 convicts may all be lifers, but they are reasonable guys. So the conflict between them is not as intense as it is in DOZEN. Plus, the training is, well, mostly lame. They wrestle. All at once. No one is trained in karate or something, they just all wrestle. They learn to shoot guns, but it’s kind of boring target practice without any tension. They learn to drive crappy cars through a slalom course of cones - wow! Though there are some car wrecks here that really help this section of the film - there aren’t enough crashes and they aren’t very cool and they aren’t *story related*. Just a car crashing in the middle of nowhere.

This half of the movie ends with some crazy stuff - throwing grenades out of cars for no apparent reason. Well, actually, by the end of the film they will have to do this, but in the training camp it makes no sense. And there isn’t any clear set up in this that pays off in that later scene - it’s just a scene where they get to blow up garbage cans with grenades - kind of false action.

They really needed to create conflicts between team members and milk them during the training scenes. This is usually where I bring up the large cast of characters in ALIENS and how we knew each one of them and they were *paired* in the story with the person they had the most conflict with. to keep even the small scenes full of conflict and drama and create arcs for each character... and that doesn't happen here. If they had done that, and then had some *real* hand to hand combat training instead of wrestling and some more interesting target practice (maybe some practice storming a house) and other things that could become very dangerous if your partner wanted to kill or eff you up, the first half of the film would have been entertaining (instead of a slog). Look for the *personal conflicts* in your story and pair up characters!

After their training is over, they go out to somewhere in the South where Burl’s moonshine gang rules the roads.

ROSS HAGEN - THIEF

And here’s the crazy part about this film - the star is Christopher George from RAT PATROL, but the great role in the film - the “lead” in a way - is Ross Hagen playing Frank Davis, ex-moonshine runner and ex-member of Burl’s Gang. Part of this may be Ross acting the hell out of his role, and part of it is that this is the most interesting character in the film once we get to moonshine country. Though Frank was an important character in the training scenes, when we get the ex-gang member back into gang country he becomes the center of the conflict. Ross (who passed away in 2011) was in a couple of films I’ve written, and was one of those actors that can turn the line “How are you?” into two dozen different things - he came to the show with interesting line readings you’d never considered or ever knew existed. He was a great actor for low budget movies because you just hire him and he gives a good performance. He had a bunch of low budget films and a whole bunch of TV guest star stuff on his resume...

But in DEVILS 8 he steals the film from Christopher George.

Steals it from the star.

In order to get him to work against his old gang, George tells him that it wasn’t cops who killed his brother, it was Burl. Now, we don’t know if that’s true or not at that point, and that’s a good technique to use in a script because it turns one moment into several moments. He tells Frank (Ross) that Burl killed his brother, and Frank has to deal with being betrayed by his own gang. Then Frank wonders if George lied to him in order to get him to work against his own gang - and there are some mistrust moments. Once they get to town, Frank discovers that Burl *did* kill his brother, and this confirmation takes us back to Frank feeling betrayed... and then angry... and then grabbing a weapon and going after Burl! Which will blow the whole operation!

George’s plan to take down Burl doesn’t make any sense, but here it is: The 8 are going to hijack whisky shipments until Burl comes to them and makes a deal that they should work together, and show them where the stills are, and tell them who all of the crooked cops and politicians are. Wouldn’t it be easier for Burl to just kill them all? Oddly enough, the plan works...

A couple of scenes later, Frank and George show up at Burl’s place... and guess who the gang boss is sleeping with? Cissy! And Frank has to just take it and not do anything when the man who killed his brother is also sleeping with the woman he loves! That *situation* makes Frank the most important character in the film. On a message board someone asked why we need a character arc, and I said my usual: that I like to think of it as the “emotional conflict” rather than the character arc because it covers more ground. This is a great example of an “emotional conflict” - Frank’s character doesn’t really have much of an arc. Sure, he goes from being a convict to a guy working with the feds, and he becomes more cooperative with George, but his plan is pretty much to kill the guy who killed his brother, and that plan doesn’t change. He wants revenge, he will get revenge. No real arc, there. But he goes through all kinds of emotional hell in this film. He goes back to his home town and is ostracized and has to watch Burl put his fat hands all over the woman he loves and wants to kill the sucker but can’t because it will blow the mission. Compare Ross Hagen’s role of Frank with Christopher George’s cool spy guy who has no emotional conflicts at all, and you wonder why Chris George didn’t demand to play Frank.

Oh, somewhere along here I recognized the fat actor who played Burl... as 1950s pretty boy actor Ralph Meeker (who played Mike Hammer in KISS ME DEADLY) - man, he got fat! One of the reasons I didn't recognize Meeker until late in the film is that he isn't credited in this film until the end. But Meeker went from pretty boy to playing pudgy Southern Cop roles in only a few years. He was a character actor on a million TV shows in the 70s, and retired after the killer pancake movie WITHOUT WARNING. Here he does a great job as the pudgy good old boy moonshiner.

THE OTHER 7

While Ross Hagen is stealing the film from the star, the other guys on the team kill time until the big ending by skinny dipping with hot girls from town and getting into bar room brawls. This stuff all seems like padding - and the big structure problems is that it *is* padding - the film has prison break in scene one and a big action scene at the end and the rest is mostly filler material. Some of it is entertaining filler material, but it kind of slows down the pacing because nothing *important* is happening. This movie gets the cat up the tree and then gets it down, but never throws rocks at it... and makes you realize how important structure is in a screenplay.

One thing I should mention are the characters of the other guys, because they are much better than most low budget exploitation flicks. Singer Fabian is one of the guys, I think the mechanic, and Ron Rifkin is one of the guys - but I have no idea which one because I did not recognize him. Rifkin was in the new version of A STAR IS BORN and on NEW AMSTERDAM (I have never watched that show) and was the evil Sloane on ALIAS (Okay, I have watched that one) and I know him as a middle aged man... and this film was made in 1969 - it was his very first film! I have no idea which one of those young guys was Rifkin. But he may or may not have been the drunk one.... One of the guys has been on the chain gang for a while and the first thing he thinks of when they escape is finding himself a drink. When they hijack Burl’s runners, he swipes some bottles for himself and gets really drunk... and becomes a problem because he’s an alcoholic working undercover as a rum-runner - and keeps getting drunk and screwing up. Except - while searching for something to drink, he spots a truck full of booze and climbs in... and the truck goes to the secret still compound. Now he is not only so drunk he can’t stand, he has the information the team needs for that big action ending.

And we get a big action ending where that throwing hand grenades from a moving car training comes in handy, and most of the 8 die glorious deaths. But the big end action scene is much simpler than the end scene in DIRTY DOZEN and shorter, too. So where DIRTY DOZEN has that big killer action end that is at least a full third of the film, DEVILS 8 has a good action ending but not good enough to make up for the padding that has come before it. Still, they blow up 3 or 4 big stills in towers and wreck any car they have not yet wrecked. The problem is, the action scene isn't fleshed out - it's too simple. Destroy the stills. Okay, they do that and the story is over. What they needed to so is come up with a series of steps and set backs on the way to destroying the stills and Burl's operation. This is why the *writing* is an important part of action scenes - you need to figure out all of the small conflicts and set backs along the way to the big explosion at the end. If you look at the end of 48 HOURS the end action scene is complicated - it begins with the hijacked bus, has a trade for the girl, a big crash and a shoot out and a moment where the regroup and then go to Chinatown for the final action sequence which is made up of several parts - the shoot out at the women's apartment where Billy Bear and Gance were hiding, the shootout with Billy Bear, a chase over Chinatown's rooftops (a maze chase) and finally a high noon shootout between Cates and Gance. All of these steps escalate the final action scene and keep it exciting with twists and turns - we don't just have the big shootout at the women's apartment and it's over, Billy Bear and Gance *escape* (setback) and then Billy Bear and Reggie have a shoot out scene and then we have the chase and then... It's not "they fight", it's a series of scenes and moments. The problem with the action scenes in DEVIL'S 8 is the complete lack of complications and details. For a drive in movie, it needed more action!

I should mention the music - there’s a theme song that’s okay, but the score was just awful. Mike Curb was to blame. It’s kind of SMOKEY & THE BANDIT funny good old boy music, when this film is not a comedy at all. There are scenes where characters are getting *hurt* and this goofy music is playing in the background. It did not work. The theme was fine - one of those ballad things.

THE DEVIL'S 8 is one of those throw away drive in movies they made back in the day, with some great performances and a bunch of screenwriters who would later become famous. Larry Gordon would produce John Millius's DILLINGER in 1973 and then produce Walter Hill's greatest hits. Maybe worth a look, just for the talent that would soon become famous.

- Bill