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Blue Christmas Is a Wrap!

Tuesday, October 31st, 2023

Jake Marley (Chris Causey) and Richard Stone (Rob Merritt) in the private eye’s office.

We completed production on Blue Christmas last evening, and will be picking up various things and stuff at Muscatine Community College (our gracious host) this afternoon. Before I discuss the shoot, let me provide some background, requesting patience from those of you who have heard this story before (perhaps more than once).

The day before Thanksgiving 1992, I was notified by mail in a letter from a particularly odious editor at Tribune Media Services that my services as writer of the Dick Tracy strip were no longer required. I had done the writing of the strip, taking over for creator Chester Gould, since late 1977 – a fifteen-year run plus a few months.

Actually, they had already picked up my contract by not notifying me into I was three months into the new contract period, which was an automatic pick-up. But when I called the gracious Robert Reed, the recently retired head of the TMS, he talked me out of suing the Trib. He had hired me, and he deplored the decision of the editor (who had not hired me), but reminded me how many lawyers the Trib had, and how costly it would be for me to fight a battle even in the right. Then he said something I will always appreciate him for.

“You don’t need to worry about your next job,” he said. “You’re Max Allan Collins.”

I had needed reminding on that point. My friend and future DC Comics editor, Mike Gold, had already told me, “You really should have moved on after ten years. It stopped serving your career at that point.”

Nonetheless, it was a blow. And the same day, my agent informed me that – just a few weeks after winning the Best Novel Shamus award for Stolen Away – my Nate Heller contract had been dropped by Bantam Books, who had screwed up the series by publishing the hardcover and trade edition simultaneously, and making my hardcover sales on that title look like shit in the computers.

So I had lost everything, career-wise – both Tracy and Heller. I scrambled and did a few short stories for my pals Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, God bless their memories, but mostly I was at a loss. Untethered. And as close to a writing block as I had ever got. Thanks to Ed and Marty I kept going. But other than those assignments (writing for their theme anthologies), I had hit the wall.

Then on Christmas Eve 1992, after the festivities were over (my family has always celebrated Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day), I had an idea and began to write. A Christmas Carol was one of my favorite stories, the Alistair Sim film of it in particular, and my favorite single detective novel was The Maltese Falcon. I had the stray thought that the two stories might be effectively combined, and began to type. I have no idea how long I worked – most of the night, as it was a single session – but the result was a fifty-page novella, “A Wreath for Marley.”

I am not by inclination a short story writer, but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew “Marley” was special. Maybe not to anybody else, but to me. And over the years it’s been in several anthologies and ultimately the lead story in a holiday-themed collection of my shorter stories, Blue Christmas (available from Wolfpack in the collection’s most current incarnation).

The writing of “Marley” ended my creative logjam. Soon I had sold Carnal Hours, one of the best Heller novels, to Dutton in a multiple-book contract; and – on the fly, at WonderCon – sold the idea of Road to Perdition to a DC editor who wondered if I might be interested in writing a noir graphic novel. Mike Gold and Robert Reed had been right – losing Dick Tracy was like Dean Martin breaking up with Jerry Lewis – teaming with Jerry was the best thing that ever happened to Dino (Martin said) and the next best thing had been breaking up with Jerry.

Another result of losing the Tracy strip was finally pursuing my interest in filmmaking. In 1994 I wrote The Expert in Hollywood for director William Lustig, and wrote and directed Mommy here in Iowa. The latter feature – in which Patty McCormack portrayed a grown-up variation on her famous evil kid role in The Bad Seed – became a video store hit and sold to Lifetime as a movie of the week. Its success led to my scripting a feature film version of “A Wreath for Marley,” which I called Blue Christmas. We were in pre-production of that project when the success of Mommy made it necessary to follow up with a sequel, Mommy’s Day, causing us to temporarily shelve Blue Christmas. The thought was to do it next.

That did not happen. While Mommy’s Day was also a video store hit, we did not get a cable TV sale, and then my producer – only my best friend from high school days and the best man at Barb and my wedding – stole our money. I was never able to mount a full-throated production again. Our budgets of half a million and a quarter million for Mommy 1 and 2 respectively were never to be repeated.

I managed to stay active in indie filmmaking for another decade. I served three terms as president of the Iowa Motion Picture Association. I was able to get funded for two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) and did three short films with my Mommy director of photography, Phil Dingeldein. Phil and I mounted Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market for around $10,000 (shooting mostly on security cameras) and had a similar budget (thanks to a Humanities Iowa grant) with Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. I wrote numerous screenplays and sold a few, including some that were never produced, with a short Quarry film, “A Matter of Principal” leading to the feature The Last Lullaby, which I co-wrote.

Then, of course, there was Road to Perdition with its big-name cast and Academy Award nominations and so on, which led to Phil and me trying to get the sequel, Road to Purgatory, off the ground. Much time was spent on that and we came heart-breakingly close several times. While various screenwriting projects continued (and still do), gradually I came to accept that my film directing days were over.

I did not consider this a tragedy as my fiction writing was trucking along. A Quarry TV series was produced by HBO for their Cinemax network and I was able to do a couple of scripts for it (one for the never-produced second season). Filmmaking was a part of my credentials and that was nice but nothing I was actively pursuing any longer.

Then last year I co-produced the “Mike Hammer” Golden Age Radio-style play, Encore for Murder, originally an audio full-cast production with Stacy Keach. I had done the play twice before (in Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida) with Gary Sandy as Hammer. Gary and I were friends going back to his co-starring role in Mommy’s Day. This latest Encore production was a fundraiser for the local art center/museum, and Gary generously donated his time.

The play came together so well that literally a few days before its single performance, I called Phil Dingeldein and asked, “Do you want to make a movie this weekend?”

As some of you already know, Phil came down and he and Chad Bishop (who was the on-stage foley guy in the play) pooled their resources to shoot two dress rehearsals and our one performance. Then Chad and I spent a month or so editing the footage into a movie of sorts – or maybe it’s a television program, hard to say exactly what animal it is.

At any rate, the result, like the performance itself, was surprisingly good. Phil and I were already mounting an expanded version of the Spillane documentary as a 75th anniversary (of Mike Hammer) release for VCI. We showed Encore for Murder to Bob Blair, the president of VCI, pitching it as a Blu-ray bonus feature for the expanded documentary. Bob not only snatched it right up for that purpose, he planned a release on DVD of Encore itself. Both will be out well before year’s end.

So my filmmaking juices were flowing again. I proposed to Chad Bishop that we mount a follow-up Golden Age radio-style production of Blue Christmas. This morphed into a stage play that I planned to shoot much as we had Encore, only with more elaborate pre-production.

Finally I decided just to shoot it as a movie.

The script needed to be reworked from one that had half a dozen locations to one location in which all the the Scrooge-like visions take place in the private eye hero’s office – a single realistic set that would serve surrealistic purposes.

Phil came on board, taking a week’s vacation to shoot it (with his sometime accomplice, the talented and skilled Liz Toal), meaning we had to mount the principal photography in a single week. I approached Muscatine Community College about using their black box theater as, essentially, a film sound stage for the week-long shoot, and they got on board.

We had been led to believe we had a good shot at a Greenlight Iowa grant for $50,000, which would have been tight but sufficient. We mounted an Indie Go Go campaign to raise supplemental funding and reached our $7000 goal. But the grant did not come to us – although frankly we were never contacted about that after jumping through many an official hoop (never even informed we weren’t getting it, which stalled us while we waited for news that never arrived).

So finally we built upon the Indie Go Go money, took our own payment completely out of the budget (Chad, Phil and me), and got one $5000 investor and a few more donations, coming up with a princely $14,000 to produce the equivalent of a $300,000 to $500,000 indie. This was a big part of planning to do the film in (choke) six days.

For a long time, Gary Sandy was going to play Marley, but other commitments and a reluctance to work during the actor’s strike (although our micro-budgeted production was not a target of the strike) caused Gary to drop out a few weeks before shooting began. That left us with a cast consisting of talent from the Quad Cities, Cedar Rapids and Muscatine, with almost everyone from Encore for Murder back again.

So how did the shoot go?

The professionalism of Phil and Liz was a breathtaking thing to watch. Chad Bishop wore more hats than Barthlomew Cubbins – lighting, audio, producer, actor. I had caught Covid about a month out and got cleared to work weeks before the production would begin; so I was tired and exhausted going in…but that didn’t stop me. I would say I got my stride back by the second or at the latest third day.


Barb and Max on set at Blue Christmas.

Our set was a thing of beauty thanks to Bill Turner, a veteran of local theater; and Bill took on a role in the production as well, doing a fine job. Our lead was the remarkable Rob Merritt from Cedar Rapids, who has many movie roles under his belt and held up under the burden of being in virtually every scene. Among his co-stars was national celebrity Alisabeth Von Presley, who looks like something out of a Russ Meyer dream and performed like a dream, period. The entire cast did stellar work, including Encore veterans Chris Causey, Rene Mauck, Cassidy Probasco, Brian Linderman, Keith Porter, Judy Wilson, and Evan Maynard. Tommy Ratkiewicz-Stierwalt, Chase Bishop, Kim Furness, Dave Juehring, Tracy Pelzer-Timm and Scot Gehre, among others, were also in a very talented cast of twenty-four. Corey Ruby did the special effects, and my old Seduction of the Innocent pal Chris Christensen has signed on to do the score.


Director of Photography Phil Dingeldein gets a role…

…and lead actor Rob Merritt films a scene.

We worked long days – seven a.m. till at least seven p.m. On all but one day, I went home on the lunch hour and took a nap. The production was both brutal and rewarding, and it’s doubtful I’ll ever be foolish enough to put myself through something like this again…although I’m glad to have done this one last time.


Special effects man Corey Ruby takes pride in applying bullet holes to lovely Alisabeth Von Presley.

Barb had sworn not to be part of this crazy effort, but she was right there with me on the first day and thereafter. She ran craft services and did so very much more. Nathan Collins and Matt Clemens were there every day running security (MCC was in session). Nate did everything from man a boom pole to shoot footage on a high-end camera.

Of course, we’re not finished. Chad and I (and Chad’s cohort Jeremy Ferguson) will be shooting Second Unit material, chiefly establishing shots (once the snow starts to fall here). And right away we will begin editing, a process I enjoy a great deal.

I will report here as we move forward, but I can say that at long last, the promise of Blue Christmas is being fulfilled. If we’re not the best goddamn fourteen-thousand dollar movie ever made, I defy you to show me one that is.

* * *

Despite some stellar reviews on Amazon, Too Many Bullets remains mostly ignored by critics elsewhere. As I mentioned previously, none of the trades – Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal or Booklist – had reviewed it.

I am going to get the book into some reviewers’ hands, but in the meantime, if you’ve read and enjoyed the novel, please review it at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads and elsewhere, and if you have your own blog, talk it up there.

There have been a few notices, like this one.

And this.

M.A.C.

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Quarry on the Brain

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

On the occasion of my starting a new Quarry novel, Quarry’s Return, let’s look at Quarry on audio and screen.

Let’s start with this excellent overview, which properly gives Hard Case Crime some praise for bringing the series back to life, and lavishes praise on the film The Last Lullaby (more about that below).

I have been very lucky with the readers of my audio books. Dan John Miller is, hands down, the voice of Nate Heller. For a long run, I had Stacy Keach himself reading the Spillane/Collins novels. When Stacy stepped down, Stefan Rudnicki stepped up and has done a fabulous job – no small job filling those Keach shoes (and trenchcoat). Several readers have done right by Quarry, but Stefan is the definitive Quarry.

Check out this sample and see. And hear.

If you’ve never seen The Last Lullaby, the Quarry movie starring Tom Sizemore, co-written by me (and derived from my novel The Last Quarry), it’s available on Amazon Prime.

It’s also available on YouTube. Looks good there.

Here is the trailer.

While I like the Quarry Cinemax series, I think The Last Lullaby – even though Quarry is called “Price” there in – is the more accurate rendition of the character.

I required the production not to call the lead character Quarry because I didn’t want to give up sequel rights. This is the same reason Parker is called “Walker” in the film Point Blank, based on Richard Stark’s The Hunter.

Unfortunately, the short (and award-winning) film, “A Matter of Principal,” which I wrote for the same director (Jeffrey Goodman) who put together The Last Lullaby, does not seem to be available anywhere but on the somewhat out-of-print Black Box that collects a number of my films.

It’s available at Amazon for (gasp!) $68, but secondary sellers there have it for much less.

Troma Direct has it for a much more reasonable $29.71.

I won’t provide a link, but e-bay has it for $40 and up.

Wherever you get it, The Black Box includes: Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market; Mommy; Mommy’s Day; and Shades of Noir, which has several of my shorts, including “A Matter of Principal.” Be forewarned that better versions of the two Mommy movies are coming.

There are a few copies of just the Shades of Noir DVD (never sold separately from the Black Box boxed set) at e-bay in the $25 range. The Troma option seems the best.

Now if only they’d send me some royalties!

* * *
Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One, still from train action scene.

A quick appraisal of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One.

Well, it’s a terrific action movie. Beautifully shot, with Tom Cruise going for broke in what is likely to be the conclusion of the series with Part Two. It’s a thrill ride and often surprisingly witty. Not without heart, it shows a human side of the Cruise character and his supporting cast.

On the downside, the A.I. aspect is not explored as anything but another Blue Meanie. A Big Blue Meanie, the Ultimate Blue Meanie; but little is done with it. The biggest deal is probably screwing up the Internet and forcing our agents to (arrghhh!!!) go analog to use the Net.

The horror.

I am also not crazy about the Part One/Part Two thing, because a two-and-a-half hour movie ought to give you some resolution.

Terrific and fun, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning etc. is not, to me, as satisfying as Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (reviled by some, particularly those who decided to hate it before seeing it). Here’s the difference: MI is an action movie and a satisfying one, a wild ride. Indiana Jones is an adventure movie. It’s about, among other things, archeology. Which is to say it’s about something, and not just a vague, scary Big Blue Meanie.

That does not mean you should skip MI, because it’s a terrific example of an action movie. Its action scenes outdo the Indiana Jones movie by half; the final scene on a train in MI is one of the best action scenes (and funniest) I’ve ever seen, if not the best). But Indy is adventure and speaks to the inner child in a very different way.

Not a popular view perhaps, but there you have it.

* * *

Here is a positive review of Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction that is nicely illustrated and worth a look.

And here’s yet another “Movies You Didn’t Know Came from Comic Book” articles. Guess what’s included. (And no, I didn’t “base” Road to Perdition on Lone Wolf and Cub – the latter was an influence among a number of other influences. A key influence, like John Woo HK cinema and the real life of John and Connor Looney and Richard Stark’s Parker and various movies about Bonnie and Clyde and more.

M.A.C.

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55 Is Not the Limit! Barb and Me

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2023

Our wedding anniversary is coming up on June 1. It’s our 55th, a number that sounds more like a speed limit than a designation of how long two people have been together in a marital partnership. Barb and I have been a couple longer even than that – the fall of 1966 – and have known each other since childhood.

Barbara Collins

In the West Junior High band, here in Muscatine, Iowa, Barb was first chair trumpet and I was second chair. I was okay (not false modesty) but she was excellent. I tried several times to “challenge” her, the process by which you could unseat the person occupying the chair above yours. I failed miserably, and I would even say trying to play “Golden Gate” (the difficult piece she sadistically chose) was one of my more humiliating experiences, even in junior high terms, which is basically one humiliating experience after another. The band director actually interrupted my performance, saying, “I lost you somewhere, Mr. Collins.” Barb had already completed the impossible number flawlessly.

And yet I wound up marrying the girl who had visited upon me the most withering humiliation of my youth. This only goes to show how weak a male can be when a beautiful blonde is willing to go out with him. (I should also note that I quit band after junior high, concentrating on chorus.)

We were thrown together, in a way, because we were the only two of our extended crowds who had, after high school graduation, wound up at Muscatine Community College and not at the University of Iowa or some other institution of higher learning. Our first date in MCC days was to Wild Cat Den as part of a group that may have been a church one – I don’t recall. I only know I made clear to Barb how little I enjoyed the Great Out of Doors. Despite her lovely company, I had a terrible time, looking out for snakes and other small creatures bent on my destruction.

How we wound up on a second date, I will never know. We went to the nearby Quad Cities to a movie – possibly a drive-in – and I was trying to impress her with my brilliant gift of gab. She was quiet, occasionally nodding, and doing her best not to look glazed (she still does this when I am off on some verbal tear, which is frequent). She states that the moment she fell in love with me was when I put my hand in a water glass (during some brilliant monologue) and she had smiled and thought to herself, “He’s not so smart. I can put up with this.”

We were an item by Thanksgiving, disgusting our fellow students with our lovey-dovey behavior. It became obvious to me that, within this quiet lovely girl, was a smart, funny human being worth hanging out with forever. A crisis having to do with her mentally ill mother dragging Barb and two of her sisters across country (to Arizona) to get one of those sisters well from a supposed illness (undiagnosed) had only brought us closer together upon her inevitable return. Her mom’s general erratic behavior had a lot to do with why we decided to get married right after graduation from MCC – Barb was nineteen, I was twenty.

When I look back on these fifty-five years, I realize how very lucky I was and continue to be. While I tend to focus on my career, I don’t value anything more than my relationship with Barb. She has continued to amaze and amuse and delight me, and occasionally put me in my place. I had no idea – nor did she – that she would develop into such a wonderful writer. The Antiques series is a unique accomplishment and my co-authorship of Barb’s novels is among my proudest achievements. The son we produced, Nathan, is another.

Then there’s how beautiful she still is. I am obviously a shallow soul. I have been criticized for celebrating attractive women in my fiction – apparently I should have been celebrating harridans – but I admit that one of the great pleasures of my life is the many times each day when I glance at this lovely girl (yes, I know she’s a woman!) and think, “Wow. How can I be this lucky?”

On the other hand, it’s another reason for people to hate me. I get it. I would feel the same way. I’d be right there with you saying, “That lucky effing stiff.”

She may or may not read this. She reads my updates sporadically – after all, she is subjected to what I think every time we go out together. We’re easy to spot. She’s the beauty. I’m the beast with his fingers in the water glass.

* * *

The day this appears we will have seven days remaining on the Blue Christmas Indiegogo fund-raising effort. Just in case you were wondering what to get Barb and me for our wedding anniversary.

I will continue, this week, to honor requests from anyone who puts in $35 or more to do my best to fill in some blanks on their M.A.C. want list. Barb and I have sent out around fifteen packages so far, often containing one-of-a-kind items that I’ve parted with in gratitude for this support.

We do not know yet (soon, I hope) if we’ve nabbed a Greenlight grant, but even if we don’t, we intend to go forward with the best version of Blue Christmas we can. The Indiegogo $5000 (we are at 85% now!) will go toward matching funds, if we get the grant, or into the production itself, if we don’t.

Chad Bishop is the mastermind here, aided and abetted by Karen Cooney. Karen is the go-getter who went and got me to do Encore for Murder as a fund-raiser for the local Art Center. If I hadn’t had the experience of turning that one live performance into a multi-camera movie (or “movie”), I would not have got my filmic juices flowing again. Right now Chad and my longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein (and a talented young woman named Liz Toal) are working hard to get other projects going, including Reincarnal and even Road to Purgatory.

I did not imagine at this age (75, choke) post-open-heart surgery that I would be back at filmmaking again. Few in that field have trod a weirder road than mine. Mommy and Mommy’s Day had respectable low budgets (half a mil and a quarter of a mil respectively); but after that, my then best friend slash producer stole most of the profits, and my subsequent productions have been put together with spit and chewing gum – Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life are respectively $10,000 and $15,000 productions but managed to get national distribution and some decent critical reaction.

And yet my graphic novel Road to Perdition became a $90 million movie (at the same time Real Time was shooting on a budget that maybe covered one day of stocking Perdition’s craft services table) and I made respectable money on two films I wrote but did not direct, The Expert and The Last Lullaby. The Quarry TV series at Cinemax, for which I wrote two scripts, also paid some bills.

Along the way there have been two documentaries (Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Caveman: V.T. Hamlin and Alley Oop) I wrote and directed, and three short films, and one I didn’t direct – A Matter of Principal – but wrote; that one was an award-winner and led to the feature, The Last Lullaby. By the way, that’s a Quarry movie with a great Tom Sizemore performance and it’s available on Amazon Prime right now.

I am the rare writer of prose fiction who will admit that he likes movies as much as books. I feel lucky, even honored, to have been able to do as much as I have in that arena, even if my own little movies have never made me a dime. The joys of collaboration – my friendships with the likes of Phil and Chad and the late Steve Henke, my creative collaboration with the late Mike Cornelison – are more reward than anyone could dream of.

Should I have gone to Hollywood and pursued that dream, as opposed to joining the fiction-writing ranks of Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane? No. I do not have the temperament for what Hollywood puts writers through. Because movies are my side hustle, screenwriting for Hollywood on occasion is something I can abide. I would also probably have been married three or four times by now, and I refer you to earlier in this post for the reasons why that would have been a tragedy.

Last night I watched Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder on the local public access channel. Because we have landed a deal with VCI that includes both home video release and streaming for both the new expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane and Encore for Murder, we have decided not to offer either to the Iowa or Quad Cities branches of PBS. But my collaborator Chad Bishop runs Channel 9, Muscatine’s public access channel, and his participation in the project includes the right to show Encore there.

I had worked on Encore on a computer screen – on several actually – and have seen it projected on a full-size movie screen at our recent premiere showing. But this was the first time I’d seen it on my TV at home. And that was a thrill, because that’s the venue we had in mind. I refer to it as a “movie,” but really it’s a TV program. I thought it held up pretty well. When you consider that we only decided to record the play a few days out from dress rehearsal and its one public performance, it’s another of the small miracles that seem to litter my life.

And there’s nothing wrong with small miracles. You can enjoy them. The big miracles are so overwhelming, you can’t really enjoy them.

But I’m willing to try.

* * *

I did an interview with Jason Dehart on his podcast Words, Images, & Worlds that is fairly wide-ranging and covers some things that have rarely come up, like the influence of Hong Kong movies on my work.

This is a really good interview with my frequent collaborator, Matthew Clemens.

Here’s a way to access my Batman comic strip continuity with Marshall Rogers.

Here’s a free-wheeling interview that I really enjoyed doing – you might, too.

Finally, he’s a largely positive review of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life.

M.A.C.

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The Movies Keep Pulling Me Back In!

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

I’ve spent a lot of time here, at this update/blog entries, over the past year or so talking about Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer, and my efforts to complete Mickey’s work and to specifically celebrate the 75th anniversary of Mike Hammer’s first appearance in I, The Jury.

Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction cover
Hardcover:
E-Book: Kobo
Digital Audiobook: Kobo Libro.fm

A good deal of these posts have centered upon the biography written by Jim Traylor and me, Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (and published by Mysterious Press). The response to that book has been terrific, and I have reason to hope our bio will be considered the definitive work on Mickey and will play a major role in getting this great and very influential mystery writer his due.

Lately here I’ve discussed certain Spillane-centric efforts of myself and longtime collaborator Phil Dingeldein, the Director and Photography (as well as Editor) on my indie films Mommy, Mommy’s Day, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market and Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life. We have expanded my 1998 documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, from 47 minutes to 61, covering the later few years of Mickey’s life and work as well as my project of completing his unfinished manuscripts (at his request in the final weeks of his life).

We also – and as I’ve reported here, did so last-minute and somewhat on the fly – recorded the performance last September in Muscatine, Iowa, of my Golden Age Radio-style play, Mickey Spillane’s Encore for Murder, capturing Gary Sandy’s charismatic performance as Hammer (he had starred in productions of Encore at Owensboro, Kentucky, and Clearwater, Florida, previously, and of course was Patty McCormack’s co-star in Mommy’s Day).

This fall the expanded Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane with Encore for Murder presented as a second feature will be out on home video from VCI Entertainment. VCI will be taking both the documentary and the edited/recorded play performance out to the streaming services, too. We are also in early stages of putting together definitive versions of Mommy and Mommy’s Day, having finally located their un-Filmlooked masters (not coincidentally Mickey appeared as Mommy’s lawyer in both).

Things on these updates will begin swinging back toward my own (and Barb’s) work, as only two more Hammer novels (one already delivered, Dig Two Graves) are planned. That may change, as Skydance has optioned all the Hammer novels (the solo Spillane and collaborative Spillane/Collins ones). A renewed interest in Mike Hammer and his creator, due to a new big-deal movie, could inspire me to go back to the files and see what of Mickey’s unfinished work remains.

Encore for Murder has led to a reawakening of my interest in filmmaking. I’ve continued to do the occasional screenplay (director David Wexler is prepping Cap City, based on the Spillane/Collins novella, “A Bullet for Satisfaction”) but I had thought, after my heart surgery and other medical fun-and-games, my moviemaking days were over, save for the occasional scripting job.

But working with editor Chad Bishop has revitalized me, and so we are moving from Encore – that little “movie” that sort of willed itself into existence – to Blue Christmas, based on my novella, a sort of Scrooge/Maltese Falcon mash-up. We have only a couple of more weeks on our Indiegogo campaign to raise $5000 that will provide some of the matching funds needed if our Greenlight grant comes through (and if it doesn’t, those funds will go into the production itself).

A good number of you have supported this effort and I appreciate it…very much. I have been offering perks here that are not part of the Indiegogo descriptions of levels of participation. What I’m doing is working with contributors to fill items on their M.A.C. want list, according to the level of their contribution; most of you will be thanked on screen. Here’s a window on the Indiegogo page. We are at nearly $3000 at this stage.

Anybody who contributes $35 will be recognized on screen. (Keep in mind my postage and handling for your perk, once we’ve decided via e-mail what you’d like, comes out of that $35.)

Our budget is probably going to be around $150,000, with “in kind” figured in – in kind covers things like meager-to-no salaries for actors and crew, local businesses supporting us with free lodging and food, etc. We are seeking a relatively small amount but need it to secure matching funds, often a requirement with grants, or to help cover cash outlay. Much of what we’re doing is volunteer and includes the support of Muscatine Community College, where we’ll be shooting much of the production in their Black Box theater.

Really, I anticipate putting on screen something like looks like at least a half-million-dollar production. (We did Real Time and Eliot Ness for $10,000 and $15,000 respectively.)

I am a believer in the notion that if the story is strong, and the performances and production professional

enough, you don’t have to have huge stars and Hollywood production values to make a satisfying movie. It’s a small miracle that we’ve done five features, two feature-length documentaries, and three award-winning shorts right here in this corner of Iowa. If you want to help us work another minor miracle, consider stepping up.

We are coming down the pike here. If you’ve been thinking about participating, now’s the time.

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While I did not attend the Edgars this year – I can lose so much more easily at home than in a New York hotel – I was asked by the MWA to write about Mickey for their nifty program book. In that publication, a number of mystery writers were celebrated by other pros in the field in brief essays about why each of the chosen artists were worth, well, choosing.

This is what I wrote:

MICKEY SPILLANE
by Max Allan Collins

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, TV private eyes were the rage. Among the first was Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) with Darren McGavin, which I started watching when I was ten. Video P.I. series were often directly based on literary sources – The Thin Man, Phillip Marlowe, 77 Sunset Strip, Perry Mason – with the biggest hit, Peter Gunn, a Hammer variation. I haunted the spinner racks, using my buck a month allowance to buy 25-cent paperbacks by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Spillane books were considered “dirty,” and for a while I satisfied my urge just reading the jaw-dropping endings. I researched Hammett, Chandler and Spillane, discovering the first two were admired and celebrated, whereas Spillane was attacked as juvenile delinquent-breeding trash. I loved all three, so this made no sense to me. So began a lifetime of reading, defending and eventually getting to know Mickey, and having the privilege of turning his unfinished material into books.

Mickey defies literary appraisal – he is an unpretentious blue-collar ex-comic book writer, his first seven novels (six Mike Hammer mysteries) his most popular, significant work. But his amazing first and last chapters, distinctive first-person voice, and noir poetry on every page makes him more than just a pop phenomenon. For reasons explored in Mickey Spillane – King of Pulp Fiction (2023, co-written by James L. Traylor and me), he stopped writing novels for ten years at his popular peak. Returning for a longer run in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, he was back on the bestseller lists but overshadowed by Ian Fleming, the obscure British thriller writer Mickey’s publisher promoted during their star’s absence. Much of Mickey’s later career was media-driven – he starred in two movies (as Hammer in The Girl Hunters, 1964) and spoofing himself in an eighteen-year (!) run of Miller Lite commercials. A household name in the 20th Century, Spillane demands reappraisal as the writer who re-invented private eye fiction, and whose success sparked the creation of paperback originals, with Hammer the template not just for Bond but Dirty Harry, John Shaft and every vigilante-tinged tough guy who came after.

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Here’s a nice gallery of Hard Case Crime covers, including some of mine. [The site creates galleries from Tumblr hashtags and may contain NSFW content –Nate]

Here’s a mixed review from the somewhat accurately self-described B-Movie Enema. What this reviewer doesn’t understand is that reviewing a movie off You Tube is not the ideal place to judge its lighting, production values or audio (very hissy on You Tube, we’re told – like Gomer Pyle once said, “Surprise, surprise!”). Still, he makes some interesting points. But the major point he makes, inadvertently, is that we are lucky we found the original pre-Filmlook masters for a re-release of both Mommy movies next year.

By the way, the same reviewer liked Mommy a lot more. A lot. He really appreciates Rachel Lemieux’s terrific performance.

I do hope this reviewer will revisit the sequel when he realizes (a) you shouldn’t judge how a movie looks or sounds on You Tube, and (b) you shouldn’t expect the sequel to be exactly like the original.

M.A.C.

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Posted in Message from M.A.C. | Comments Off on The Movies Keep Pulling Me Back In!

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