Posts Tagged ‘Mike Hammer’

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Let’s Kick True Noir in the Starter and Another Recognition Plus the End of Mike Hammer!

Tuesday, July 23rd, 2024

The Kickstarter for True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak is live right now.

It’s important, if you’re a devoted reader of mine – a Nate Heller fan – that you participate in some way.

What differs about this effort is that when the Kickstarter time is up (less than two months from now) the final product will be ready to deliver to you, immediately. Some of the physical media versions will take longer to produce, but if you are buying a download, you will not face the usual (and sometimes interminable) Kickstarter wait to receive it.

I have written this adaptation of True Detective, the first Nate Heller novel (Private Eye Writers of America “Best Novel” Shamus, 1984) myself – a 350-page script that will be ten thirty-to-thirty-five minutes each. Much of it has already been recorded. Our casting director/co-producer Christine Sheaks has assembled an incredible cast. And I’ve been able to attend many of the impressive recording sessions via Zoom.

We have two key roles we haven’t announced the actors for as yet – Heller himself and Frank Nitti. Watch this space, and the Kickstarter page, and you’ll know soon.

Anyone who has enjoyed (or is right now in the process of enjoying) the Nathan Heller novels will be…what’s the most evocative, graceful term?…a pig in shit listening to this ten-part adaptation.

I try not to do a hard sell here. We’re friends in this space and I don’t want my friends battered with that kind of thing. But this is key, in my opinion, to my legacy as a crime/mystery author and to Heller’s ability to thrive in the popular culture. I wish I had Jerry Lewis to plead my case and wind up singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

But Jerry is dead, and I’m 76.

So if you’re a fan – and I know you’re out there, I can hear you aging – contribute to this Kickstarter effort. And tell others about it, please. How serious about this am I? Well, the next Nate Heller novel – One-Way Ride – will be the last. And Heller’s future thereafter will be tied up with how well True Noir does. The plan is for three or four more audio adaptations of various novels (probably, next, The Million-Dollar Wound) and three seasons of live action thereafter. I will do all the scripts myself. This is an ambitious plan but doable…with your support.

In other words, if enough of you guys and gals (that phrase alone dates me, doesn’t it?) step up, NATE HELLER LIVES.

If you stop by here regularly, you know that I am about to direct Death by Fruitcake, an adaptation of the Antiques series, a micro production Barb and I are funding ourselves. For Blue Christmas, we ran a Kickstarter. For Death by Fruitcake, we plundered our savings to make our film because I don’t want to get in the way of this Kickstarter for True Noir.

True Noir in a weird way is a co-Hollywood/Iowa production. Our gifted director, Robert Meyer Burnett, is operating out of California. The executive producer, Mike Bawden, is in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities. And I of course have written that 350-page adaptation here in Muscatine, Iowa.

Also key is my longtime collaborator and pal Phil Dingeldein of dphilms in Moline, Illinois, who has been recording behind-the-scenes and promo footage from the very beginning. You’ll be seeing of some his work for the project right here soon.

The team is a strong one and I’m proud to be part of it. Again, forgive the hard sell. Just try to picture me looking up at you with big Margaret Keane eyes.

If you are going to the San Diego Comic Con, Rob and Mike and a bunch of the cast members will have a panel THIS WEEK on Thursday July 25 at 5:30 p.m., Room 6A. I am not attending because the travel, and the crowds and difficulty of attending this event (at which I was long a regular attendee – Seduction of the Innocent, anyone?), make it impossible for me to take part in what is a major part of the launch by Imagination Connoisseurs Unlimited, Rob and Mike’s company. Also, I began fulltime pre-production Fruitcake yesterday (Monday July 22…less than a month out of first day of shoot!).

I am incredibly frustrated that I can’t be at the con panel, but Phil Dingeldein and I recorded a greeting video that will welcome attendees to this key event. If you are going to the con this year, don’t miss this panel.

A poster announcing the event will be given to the first 1000 attendees (well, 999…I asked Rob to save me one). You saw this image a few weeks ago, but here it is again – it’s a banger, as they say.

True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks poster

This project is the big one.

Be part of it…and you’ll never walk alone.

* * *

Normally I would lead with this (but the Kickstarter trumps…pardon the expression…all else):

I am pleased and frankly proud that I’m receiving the 2024 Strand Critics Life Achievement Award.

My statement about this recognition, given by the Strand magazine to the media, is here:

“This is a lovely honor from the last magazine of its kind, much as I am part of a passing pulp breed,” said Collins. “My heroes included Chester Gould, Mickey Spillane, and Donald E. Westlake, later my mentors and friends. My love of movies culminated in the filming of my Road to Perdition. Nathan Heller, Quarry, and Ms. Tree are evidence of my love for detective fiction, much as the Antiques books written with my wife Barbara are of my love for her. I am lucky and blessed to make my living telling elaborate lies about humans at their best and worst.”
M.A.C. holding copies of Skim Deep and Bait Money
* * *

I have completed – and sent to my editor Andrew Sumner at Titan Books – the final Mike Hammer novel, the fifteenth collaborative entry by Mickey Spillane and me on that series (sixteen, if we count the short story collection, A Long Time Dead). That collaboration is posthumous on Mickey’s part, with me (at his request in the last week of his life), taking on the responsibility of completing his unfinished works, primarily Mike Hammer novels.

The novel, with a wraparound that takes place at a cemetery bracketing an early ‘70s yarn, is entitled Baby, It’s Murder, the resonance of which will become clear when you read the book. Despite the bulk of the novel taking place around 1973 (coincidentally the start of my professional writing career), it serves well, I think, as a concluding Hammer novel. You’ll see what I mean if…when…you read it.

The Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer Legacy Project has been a joy and a challenge. I’ve done a few non-Hammer collaborations, too – The Menace for Wolfpack from an unproduced Spillane horror screenplay and completing three novels, Dead Street, The Consummata and The Last Stand (the latter an edit job) all for the great Hard Case Crime.

I do have a few things left that I hope to do – another unproduced Spillane screenplay that could become a novel, two or three Hammer short stories from fragments, and most important, the Mike Danger novel Mickey wrote the first draft of, one of his last works. It’s likely that I’ll convert it into a Mike Hammer novel, but its science-fiction elements make finding the right publisher tricky.

Also, if Skydance actually makes the Mike Hammer movie it secured rights to do, I might offer to do the novelization, and perhaps get a new Hammer novel out there as well. For example, I have yet to novelize the radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder (seen on the VCI blu-ray of the revised, expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and as a standalone DVD with Gary Sandy as Hammer) and that’s a possibility.

My position has been – and I immodestly think it separates me from other “continuation” novelists of series, like those picking up after Robert B. Parker, for example – is that all of these books are stories Mickey set out to write. Every one of the Spillane/Collins-bylined books have real Spillane content. The only exception are the Caleb York novels – the first one, The Saga of Caleb York, reflects his unproduced screenplay (written for his pal John Wayne!), and the subsequent five are by me, utilizing his characters and some plot threads left by the screenplay.

The fifteen additional Hammer novels, and the short story collection, reflect the belief and enthusiasm of a handful of publishers…

Otto Penzler, who first published The Goliath Bone, The Big Bang and Kiss Her Goodbye, as well as the collection A Long Time Dead and the Collins/Spillane critical biography, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction.

Nick Landau, Vivian Cheung and Andrew Sumner at Titan Books, who picked up reprint rights on the first three Spillane/Collins Hammer novels and published the next eleven novels. (Charles Ardai at Hardcase Crime stepped up for non-Hammer novels.)

These are people in publishing with a sense of history, with a grasp on the importance of Mickey Spillane in a pantheon of private eye writers that includes Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

My sincere gratitude goes out to them all.

M.A.C.

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True Noir in Session, an Antiques Indie, and M.A.C. on Film

Tuesday, June 25th, 2024

True Noir has a major recording session scheduled this week, and I hope to attend by Zoom. Participants are in California, New York and…? It’s a big, terrific name cast, bringing True Detective to life as an immersive audio drama from my recently completed ten-part script, and if you are a fan of the Nate Heller books, you’re going to be thrilled.

Our gifted director Robert Meyer Burnett is viewing the project as a movie – there’s even been discussion about animating it – and that brings me to a favorite topic around here: movies – and an announcement.

In what may be my swan song as a low-budget indie filmmaker, I will be directing (in tandem with my wife Barb) from a script we wrote together based on a novella we wrote (got all that?) the first ever movie based on the Antiques/“Trash ‘n’ Treasures” mysteries. The interest our forthcoming Christmas movie, Blue Christmas, has generated was encouragement enough to do another Yuletide mystery, Death by Fruitcake, based on the novella “Antiques Fruitcake” in the collection Antiques Ho Ho Homicides.

And the inability over the last ten years or so of two separate wonderful female showrunners to sell Antiques to TV prompted us to put the thing on its feet ourselves. As a little indie movie.

We have Brandy and Mother cast, with our first choices, whose identity won’t be announced for a while. For now, just know that many of our talented cast members from Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder and Blue Christmas will be back on board, including the latter’s star, Rob Merritt.

Pre-production is seriously underway, with producer/cinematographer Chad T. Bishop putting a crew together and meeting regularly with me for planning sessions. Barb has been gathering props and working with department heads on wardrobe and other areas of the filmmaking process. The script is finished, or anyway as finished as any movie script is until the cameras roll.

Why, particularly at this late date, am I wading back into indie filmmaking? A bunch of reasons.

Some of my markets for publishing fiction have dried up. I’m a white guy closer to eighty than seventy, and that makes me about as much in demand as a stale loaf of Wonder Bread. This lack of foresight on the part of a generation or two who have never heard of me will not stop me from creating. And I do love movies.

That was my mother’s fault, largely, as she took me to at least one movie every weekend, and often two; and the Uptown Theater had Saturday matinees, too. Plus, TV was full of old movies. I was part of the first generation born to TV-watching. I saw George Reeves play Superman, first run. I saw Martin and Lewis movies in the theater – never missed a one. And, after that, Jerry’s solo efforts, although it started getting challenging around Three On a Couch (1966).

Speaking of Jerry Lewis, I am proud to say that my regular Saturday afternoon movie-watching with my eight-year-old grandson Sam continues with his enthusiasm for Ray Harryhausen stop-motion Sinbad movies now equaled by his giddy joy at encountering both Martin and Lewis and Jerry Lewis himself. That I have made my grandson a Jerry Lewis fan is one of my proudest achievements. First up was Artists and Models, and lately it was The Disorderly Orderly. Plus You Tube gems like the following excerpt from Cracking Up.

Please don’t write me and tell me what a horrible person Lewis really was. How he left his kids out of his will and hit on female co-stars and supposedly did this and that reprehensible thing. I have wrestled with the difference between the public and private artist (and he was an artist) and have come to decide that all we’re owed as fans is the work. The rest is largely irrelevant and/or past understanding. Why were two of the most sensitive singers of the Great American Songbook – Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby – such heels in certain private aspects of their lives? Don’t know. Don’t care.

They give us the gift of their talents, and they don’t owe us anything past that. That said, I don’t find O.J. Simpson that funny in the Naked Gun movies – of course, he always was the least funny things in those movies – and I haven’t been able to stomach Robert Blake post-his wife’s murder. Consistency isn’t my strongest trait.

Take Roman Polanski and the sexual misconduct that makes him a fugitive in the United States even today. Does that make Chinatown a bad movie? Unwatchable because the director may have more to do with Noah Cross than Jake Gittes? Not to me it doesn’t – not any more than I can comprehend what it would be like to have your beautiful pregnant wife butchered by Charles Manson’s minions.

Which brings us to Chinatown. Let’s get this out of the way: the current 4K Blu-ray release of that great film is a stunner. It looks wonderful, better than I’ve seen it since seeing it (multiple times) in the theater on its initial release. I never tire of it and always see new things in it. Or should I not like it because Faye Dunaway is supposedly unpleasant on set? Gonna give her a pass on that.

Gonna give a movie a pass on everything but the movie itself, which in the case of Chinatown seems to be more screenwriter Robert Towne’s doing than Polanski’s, although arguably Polanski’s Sharon Tate-inspired ending is what elevates it to its deserved stratospheric reputation. Polanski reportedly cast John Huston as Noah Cross, a decision that also elevated Chinatown and not just because Huston directed the other truly great private eye film, The Maltese Falcon (well, Kiss Me Deadly isn’t bad either).

What struck me about Chinatown this time around is something I would guess others have already noticed; but this was the first time I did. I knew it had the same kind of emotional impact as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (my favorite film); but I hadn’t realized that Chinatown and Vertigo are essentially the same movie. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that.

Both stories revolve around the following: a detective who well-meaningly caused a death in the past, while on the police, and is haunted by it; a client who presents the detective with a false narrative; a scenario that plays with and against the viewer’s boredom while following the detective shadowing a major figure in that false narrative; a female lead who pretends to be one thing and is something else; a detective who exudes confidence, but ultimately is taken down all the way to a tragedy of his own making, unintentionally destroying the woman he has come to love.

I could write a book about it.

And yet this film is one I’ve seen perhaps twenty times and none of this occurred to me before. Either I am very stupid or these movies resonate with me at least in part because of their structural and thematic sameness.

While I am on the subject of movies, let’s tip our hat in farewell to one of the screen’s most interesting actors, Donald Sutherland. Sutherland had a distinctive, quirky presence that should not have lent itself to a multiplicity of roles. And yet there was seemingly nothing he could not play. He put this down to not painting a character good or bad, benign or evil, but instead just trying “to act the fella.” To be the character. He understood that a villain never knows he is the bad guy. He knew that the line between comedy and drama was not just a fine one, but not a line at all.

As coincidence will have it, Barb and I watched one of our favorite films, Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), the evening before we learned of Sutherland’s passing. We revisited that film – which is not perfect, and in fact is rather ragged along the edges – because we’d watched the excellent documentary, Remembering Gene Wilder (2024), the evening before. The night before that we re-watched The Producers (1967), which we’d seen on its first release in a theater in Bettendorf, Iowa. To celebrate Wilder, who we have loved ever since that first Producers viewing. We loved him when he was not really famous yet, in the likes of Start the Revolution Without Me and Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970). He wasn’t quite Willy Wonka yet.

Anyway, we were both struck by how perfect and perfectly funny Wilder and Sutherland were as separated twin brothers, one pair a poor peasant one, the other a rich unpleasant one, both hilarious. Wilder and Sutherland would have made a fantastic comic team had they embarked on a joint career. How funny? Abbott and Costello funny. And, yes, Dean and Jerry funny.

And on some level, this is what I love about the movies. I never met Gene Wilder. Or Donald Sutherland. Or Jerry Lewis (probably a good thing). But they fill some of my most priceless, precious memories. I remember, for example, how hard Barb and I worked to find theaters where we could see Start the Revolution Without Me multiple times. I remember, for example, how initially offended Barb was by the idea of Zero Mostel diddling little old ladies out of money for his latest flop play in The Producers…until she came to find it hilarious. I remember how it felt, as a ten year-old child, to see Vertigo for the first time and be as fooled by the plot as James Stewart. I remember seeing Chinatown for the first time and realizing there was potential in the private eye story to be something more than a mere genre piece.

These actors and directors are friends we encounter, and if in real life they are assholes, find someone else to care because I don’t. These are memories I cherish, as much or nearly so as actual experiences.

And I wonder, as we go to the movies less and less – and when we encounter more and more unspeakable behavior in the seats around us – if watching even the best binge TV available (Mad Men, Sopranos, Breaking Bad) can ever have the impact of that church of popular culture where the wine is Coca Cola and the Sacramental Bread is popcorn?

M.A.C.

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Eliot Ness, Quarry, Writing Series Characters and More

Tuesday, May 21st, 2024

My YouTube appearances with Heath Holland at his Cereal at Midnight continue, with what I think is the best so far: a discussion of Eliot Ness on screen, kicked off by the current Blu-ray edition of The Scarface Mob from Eureka.

Also on the YouTube front, Robert Meyer Burnett, on his Robservations and Let’s Get Physical Media, continues to provide updates on his audio “movie for the ears” adaptation of my novel True Detective. It’s called True Noir: The Casebooks of Nathan Heller, and I am writing the scripts myself. I have delivered the first seven of ten of what will be a fully immersive audio presentation directed by Rob, with an incredible Hollywood cast, and will run at least five hours.

Todd Stashwick of Picard and Twelve Monkeys (and much else) makes a terrific Nate Heller. If this project resonates with the public, look for three more Heller novels to become movies for the mind, all adapted by Heller’s creator himself.

You know – me.

* * *

Paperback Warrior posted the cover of the upcoming (it’s a fall release from Hard Case Crime) Quarry’s Return. That was a post on X, which I guess is what they’re calling Twitter now. It’s from Elon Musk, who named a ship after Ms. Tree, then didn’t follow up on his people asking to license the name from Terry Beatty and me. Somehow I’m reminded of the penny-pinching kazillionaires in classic Li’l Abner by Al Capp.

Quarry's Return

But since this cover image is floating around out there, I thought I should share it, though we’re a few months away from the novel’s release. I didn’t expect to be writing another novel about Quarry in his (ahem) later years; but sequels have a way of worming into my brain as if I were a Presidential candidate and then percolating there (that’s what we writer folks call a mixed metaphor).

Now I have a notion for yet another “old Quarry” story that is wormily percolating, and we’ll see. I had thought that The Last Quarry would be the last Quarry; but then a whole slew (past tense of “slay”) of ‘em followed, filling in the blanks of his life and varied career. Then came Quarry’s Blood, which was really designed to be the last, only when it was warmly received for a book about a cold-blooded killer, I changed my mind (again). And now here’s Quarry’s Return, with Quarry again a geriatric retired hitman kicking younger ass.

It isn’t that I was planning to retire the character. I figured I might do the occasional younger Quarry novel while I am still above ground. I am never anxious to retire a character completely, in my imagination anyway. It wasn’t hard at all to bring Nolan and Jon back in Skim Deep something like forty years later. I knocked on their door and they promptly answered, not much the worse for wear.

I think the reason why I’ve stayed with my series characters is that good ones don’t come along that often. The only one I’ve really consciously retired is Mallory, because there really isn’t a premise there to generate more novels, and anyway he’s essentially me and that bores my ass off.

But I will never understand mystery and suspense writers who do a new character each and every time. Most of these scribes, well, many of them are simply hanging a new name on the old character. Also, I am too aware of how unsuccessful some incredible writers have been, trying to create a second series character. You may have noticed, if you’ve been paying very close attention, that I like Mickey Spillane – the man and his writing. But what’s your favorite Spillane series character after Mike Hammer? And Velda and Pat Chambers don’t count. (Velda could carry a novel, and some would say she carried a whole comic book series under a separate name. Hint: Ms. Tree. But can you imagine the sheer snooze factor of a Pat Chambers novel?)

So with apologies to you Tiger Mann fans, Mike Hammer can’t be created twice. Edgar Rice Burroughs came close by writing John Carter of Mars, but that character was no Tarzan (and Carson of Venus wasn’t even Carter). Going back to Mickey, his second greatest series protagonist was Morgan the Raider (The Delta Factor); but I had to finish the only other book that character generated (The Consummata) from a few chapters in Mickey’s files.

Barb, a while back (in the throes of writing an Antiques novel and enduring the suffering that process creates in my talented wife), started talking about ending that series, fed up with the difficulties of generating more stories about Vivian and Brandy Borne. I insisted that she stick with it (not that my insistence carried any particular weight) because the Borne girls are fabulous fictional creations, in my unhumble opinion. They live and breathe on the page, and act of their own volition, as all great series characters do.

Here’s the thing: Rex Stout was a genius. His Nero Wolfe books are among the most readable and re-readable novels of any kind ever written. No other two fictional characters live and breathe like Wolfe and Archie. They are as good as fiction gets in the world of the creation of mystery genre recurring characters. Holmes and Watson never breathed as fully, and before Nero and Archie, they were the top.

And yet Rex Stout’s publisher kept after him to create another series. And of course he was a smashing success with his other incredibly famous character, Tecumseh Fox. Right? Right? Okay, how about Alphabet Hicks? There’s a banger of a character! Or how about giving Inspector Cramer a mystery of his own? Or that famous female PI, Dol Bonner?

Nope. One of the few true geniuses of mystery fiction, Rex Stout, stunk up the place with these more contrived creations. So I’m of the opinion that when a mystery writer stumbles upon a character that resonates with the public, said mystery writer should give the public what they want.

Are there dangers? Yes, artistic ones. For example, what if I’d been hugely successful right out of the gate with Nolan, who was after all an homage to Don Westlake’s Parker (“homage,” as we all know, is French for “rip-off”). I might still be writing nothing but Nolan books. I’d have written, say, 40 or 50 Nolan and Jon novels…selling millions…and writing nothing else.

Writers do need to flex their talents. That’s why Robert B. Parker wrote westerns on the side and did his own unsuccessful Dol Bonner-type female private eye novel. So it’s risky, sticking with one series. I do think, with the Antiques books, you have two interacting characters – like Archie and Wolfe – who provide a kind of engine for the story beyond the plot machinations.

Mickey wrote about Mike Hammer throughout his sporadic career. Early on he came to feel he’d characterized Hammer so fully, there wasn’t anything else to say. He compensated by writing Tiger Mann and some standalones, though he drifted back to what was essentially the same protagonist under various names. What kept him artistically sane (not a word used much in relation to Mike Hammer, I grant you) was his decision to make Hammer always reflect where he, Mickey Spillane, was in his life. He allowed Hammer to grow somewhat older (not realistically so, but older) and to allow this indomitable character to have frailties – Hammer went on a seven-year drunk; he was, in several novels (including some I completed) recovering from wounds or otherwise physically impaired. This reflected Spillane’s own advancing years, and the on-and-off nature of his writing career.

Look, every mystery writer – every writer – has to do this his or her own way. I am only suggesting that for me it’s been an interesting, rewarding ride, following my characters through their advancing years (and mine). That was true of Nate Heller in the current Too Many Bullets. It was true of Nolan and Jon in Skim Deep. And Quarry in Quarry’s Blood and Quarry’s Return. And if I ever return to Ms. Tree, you can bet your ass she’ll be in menopause.

* * *

Speaking of Ms. Tree, Terry and I are working on the sixth and final Titan volume of the collected Ms. Tree, which gathers almost everything he and I did with the character and her supporting cast (no The P.I.s, though). She had an impressive dozen-year comics run (1981 – 1993) and represents one of the most gratifying collaborations I’ve ever enjoyed. Terry Beatty and I, I am glad to say, will always be thought of by many comics fans as a team.

Right now Terry is working on helping put together (much as he has on the Titan volumes of collected Ms. Tree) our Dark Horse Johnny Dynamite graphic novel, Underworld, in an improved publication that will happen later this year.

It’s an enduring frustration to me that we both worked on Batman but never together. And that we both did syndicated comic strips (Dick Tracy and Rex Morgan respectively), but not as a team. He’s still doing Rex Morgan, but he doesn’t need me – he writes it himself. I like to think he had a good teacher.

As for Dick Tracy, the VCI Blu-ray collection of the four RKO Tracy feature films – with two new commentaries by me and lots of bonus features – will be out in early August.

Getting back to Ms. Tree, here’s Comic Book Treasury’s best crime comics write-up (it invokes Road to Perdition, but lists Ms. Tree).

And speaking of Collins/Beatty, here’s a look at Wild Dog at Tvtropes. It says: “The series was writted by Max Allan Collins with art by Terry Beatty.” I don’t know who “writted” this otherwise nice piece.

M.A.C.

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True Noir, Dick Tracy and King Kong

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2024

The crowd-funding campaign for True Noir: the Nathan Heller Casebooks at KickStarter is set to go live on May 1. I have delivered the first of ten-episode scripts (the production is based on my novel True Detective) and everyone seems pleased. Director Robert Meyer Burnett has started casting. Todd Stashwick of Star Trek: Picard and the 12 Monkeys TV series has been onboard to play Nate Heller for a while now, and in fact you can hear the 12-minute sample starring him – our “proof of concept” – as Nate right now. Right here:

Longtime readers of the Heller saga will recognize this as the beginning of Stolen Away, but that was just chosen as a way to intro newcomers to Heller and to give director Rob Burnett a chance to get the concept on its feet. We’re starting with True Detective, the first novel of course. In addition to Todd, several other notable actors have signed on, including a favorite of mine, Jeffrey Combs of the Re-Animator movies, as Mayor Anton Cermak. The image we’re sharing here is still in progress but you should get a kick out of it.

Jeffrey Combs as Mayor Anton Cermak in True Noir

I am about to dive into the remaining nine scripts (each episode should be in the 35 – 40 minute range) and this is now my current major project. I have a very busy remainder of the year ahead: the last scheduled Mike Hammer novel (Baby, It’s Murder), another Antiques novel (we have just signed to do two more!), and what looks to be the final Heller.

This past week was a busy one. Work on preparing the materials for the VCI/MVD release of Blue Christmas continued, with producer Chad Bishop in the lead. I recorded three (!) Blu-ray commentaries – Chad and I did the Blue Christmas commentary (and he did a great job), and for VCI I recorded commentaries for two mid-‘40s RKO Dick Tracy movies: Dick Tracy Vs. Cueball and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome. These are for an upcoming Blu-ray release of the four RKO features, a boxed set that looks to be a jam-packed affair with multiple commentaries and much more.

I had done commentaries for the other two Tracy films (Dick Tracy and Dick Tracy’s Dilemma) in 1999 for the late Cary Roan, and these are included. Now, a quarter of a century later, I found myself completing the quartet of B movies for Robert Blair at VCI. I’ve always been fond of these films, though the sometimes lauded Gruesome is by far my least favorite, but did not expect to revisit them ever again.

As I have expressed here on occasion, my bitterness over being essentially fired from Dick Tracy – the strip that I had, in my estimation and that of others, saved from cancellation – had been deep and abiding until I was called upon by editor Dean Mullaney (who had first published Ms. Tree) to put on my Big Boy pants (so to speak) and write introductions for the IDW volumes that would collect the complete Chester Gould. I took on that task, spanning a number of years, and reminded myself how much I liked the strip and basically came to terms with the firing that frankly opened the door on much else good that has happened for me. Probably no Road to Perdition, for example, had I still been on Dick Tracy.

This is not to say I don’t retain some bitterness. I was told by a reliable source that the Joe Staton and Mike Curtis team (who’d been approached to take the strip over after Dick Locher’s passing) asked why the Trib wasn’t returning to me. The editor there (a newer one I had never met) reportedly said, “Why would we make the same mistake twice?”

Nonetheless, revisiting Tracy in both the IDW volumes (a long-running series now completed) and again last week by way of those four fun RKO B-features was indeed like Old Home Week. Tracy was my childhood introduction to crime fiction (and comics), and the first big break of my career.

Speaking of Road to Perdition, I was pleased to see the movie version again turning up with some very impressive neighbors — number 17 on Ranker’s list of The 90 Best Mafia Movies Of All Time.

By the way, when I recorded the two Tracy commentaries I did so with my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein at my side. Phil is the Director of Photography on most of what I’ve done in the world of indie filmmaking starting with Mommy (1994) and continuing through this year’s Blue Christmas. Between the two recording sessions for the pair of Tracy movies, Phil and I took lunch and discussed the revision I did recently of my script for a proposed film of Road to Purgatory, my prose sequel to Perdition. It’s a low-budget version (not “low” in my usual scrounging sense, but the Hollywood sense) designed for me to be able to direct myself.

That, frankly, is part of why I undertook doing Blue Christmas and am preparing another feature to shoot late this summer – I want to see if the Old Boy still has it in him. And I’m not referring to Phil.

Road to Purgatory has been the dream project for a long, long time. We’ll see if a dream is all it is.

* * *

For several years now I have spent Saturday afternoons with my grandson Sam, watching movies. We began with animation, including classic Warner Bros and the Fleischer Popeye and Superman cartoons. After that it was 3-D Blu-rays that were mostly CGI – Pixar and others – with occasional live action like the Spy Kids movies (some of which are also 3-D – my obsolete 3-D screen got a workout).

In recent months we’ve delved into comedies, in particularly the Pink Panther movies (skipping the first two) and The Great Race, the latter being more of writer/director Blake Edwards at his comic best. I’ve been edging up on some things that I loved as a kid, and Sam’s father Nate also loved (though not Lone Wolf and Cub yet – Sam is just eight!) (of course so was Nate at the time).

So this week we watched the 1933 King Kong. Barb had warned Sam that the first half hour or so was pretty boring, a lot of it on the ship sailing to the island with Skull Mountain. But Sam never wavered. He wanted to see the whole thing. When Kong arrived in all his gorilla glory, I explained stop motion to Sam – that Kong was mostly a puppet recorded incrementally, and that also a giant head and hand had been used. He did not get frightened but he was into it.

At the end I searched YouTube and found a colorized clip of the fight between Kong and the T-Rex. Sam told me to make sure I stayed with it till we saw Kong flapping the defeated dead T-Rex’s jaw, which was his favorite part (mine too).

Then Sam announced that he liked the black-and-white version better.

There is hope for the world.

M.A.C.

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