Today’s update/blog will be very stream of consciousness.
I am writing it on March 3, 2025, my 77th birthday. My father died on his 78th birthday, so I sense the clock ticking. Loudly. Memories are flooding in like the water of the terribly tepid bath I took this morning. My memory is selective – I have few vivid memories, rather many more sketchy ones. Ask Terry Beatty, my longtime collaborator, who has had to put up with my smear of a memory more than most. My wife Barb is probably relieved she doesn’t have to hear more about what little I remember.
This will be about loss. The list of key players in the drama of my life who’ve already had a final curtain call is a long one. Bruce Peters, the greatest rock ‘n’ roll showman I ever had the honor and difficulty of appearing with. Paul Thomas, my closest friend in the many years of playing rock ‘n’ roll. Michael Cornelison, the actor who was at times a troubled soul but usually a smart, positive one who starred in four of my indie movies and narrated my two documentaries. There are others, too many others; but these three stand out.
I am going to give myself a present. I rarely talk politics here. It’s a combination of respecting the opinions of others and cravenly not wanting to lose any readers. But I am allowing myself the following little joke:
President Donald Trump and V.P. J.D. Vance prepare to welcome President Zelensky
If this offends you deeply, we are so on opposite pages that you are invited never to read me again. I have, on several occasions, requested that disgruntled readers not put my words into their brain, even temporarily. I hate to see you go but don’t let the screen door (you know the rest).
Before I start rambling on this and that, I will pause to say how much I love my wife Barb and what an incredible partner in every phase of my adult life she has been – beautiful, smart, funny, and supportive. When I was in the hospital in 2016 for open-heart surgery, for two-and-a-half weeks, she was there every day. The follow-up surgery a year later, she was there. Every procedure that followed, she was there. She also is excellent at putting me in my place.
Plus she gave me my son Nate, who gave me my grandson Sam and granddaughter Lucy, all three gifts that keep on giving.
Well, that’s out of the way, so let’s talk about Larry Coven.
Larry passed away recently. I met him under unusual circumstances. Barb and I loved Second City in Chicago, the great improv comedy theater where we once saw the cast that largely became that of SCTV. Larry was in the strongest cast I ever saw at Second City, including that storied Canadian one. He shared the stage with George Wendt, Tim Kazurinsky, Mary Gross, Jim Belushi and Danny Breen, all of whom went on to later fame in movies and television, from Cheers to Saturday Night Live and many movie and national TV appearances.
At one of these performances, Barb and I were in Chicago for an early comics convention at the Congress Hotel…I think it was still the Pick-Congress then. To my astonishment, Larry Coven was there. He turned out to be a book and comics dealer, and was a little wary of me because my Second City enthusiasm was on the psychotic side.
But we hit it off and stayed in touch – not regularly though more than just an acquaintance sort of thing. He was amused by my Spillane enthusiasm but respected my right to have it. I asked him, in 1995, to take a small role for me in my Mommy sequel, Mommy’s Day. He appeared as an ominous doctor who gave Patty McCormack as Mommy a dose of something to curtail her homicidal tendencies. This appearance was a generous one, but so was Larry’s delivering the legendary Del Close to me for another role in the film.
Close turned out to be a book enthusiast and a (I can’t believe this even today) fan of mine. Whenever a true Chicagoan endorsed Nate Heller, that was a big deal to me. Del took the role in Mommy’s Day in part because Mickey Spillane was in it and Del wanted to meet this very famous writer and get his Spillane books signed.
Larry took on a much bigger role in my little indie Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market, playing the upbeat clerk whose quiet evening was disrupted by armed robbers. He brought an improvisational touch to the proceedings (“We have some fine Hostess products”) and true professionalism. He had appeared in several other films and on lots of TV. His presence in the cast, which otherwise included mostly inexperienced or local actors, set a high standard and encouraged good performances around him.
If you haven’t seen Real Time: Siege at Lucas Market (and there are enthusiasts of that odd little production), it was my first but not last attempt to get a movie made on spit and chewing gum. Our budget was $10,000. I presented it as a found-footage movie, but it was really tightly scripted, with room for Larry to work a little magic. It came to be after the success of the two Mommy movies was scuttled by a “friend” who was also my producer, and who stole most of the money.
This led to my two documentaries, and the $10,000 production of Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life (with Mike Cornelison, who had considerable Hollywood success for about a decade, appearing on Hill Street Blues, World’s Greatest American Hero and helming three pilot movies, among much else, including a memorable role in Albert Brooks’ Lost in America). Two more recent movies of mine have also been micro-budget affairs (Blue Christmas, also a ten-grand wonder, and the slightly higher budgeted Death By Fruitcake). It was tough getting through both of them without Mike Cornelison in the mix.
Larry would call me whenever I had a novel out – which is often! – and requested that he might send me books of mine to sign, one for himself and another batch for his customers (he was a book dealer, remember). What a bright, funny presence he was. Hearing from him was always a joy. I was lucky to have known him.
Another passing is less personal but has a resonance I’ll share with you (and, yes, I’ve written about this before).
The film Bonnie and Clyde was extraordinarily influential on me. It re-sparked my interest in Prohibition-era crime, initially created by the Untouchables TV series. All of this, plus my Dick Tracy interest, led me down the path to writing historical crime fiction, notably True Detective, currently getting a new lease on life thanks to director Rob Burnett’s True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak, the fully immersive audio drama written by me.
Bonnie and Clyde was, and is, a great movie. But I was particularly taken, as were so many others, by an unknown actor’s portrayal of Clyde’s brother Buck. As much as I loved virtually every element of director Arthur Penn’s film, it was Gene Hackman’s performance as Buck that really stole the show for me. The real-life Buck died by police gunfire in my home state of Iowa, and a famous photo of the crime scene, including the bloodied Buck, was recreated in the film.
As I’ve said here and elsewhere before, my father was no huge movie buff. Max Allan Collins, Sr., was a gifted musician but his movie interest was negligible, and he seemed only to put up with my mother’s keen interest in movies, and his son’s. Dad was a sports fan and I was a disappointment in my preference for going to movie matinees on the weekend and not watching sports with him.
But at my urging he went with me to Bonnie and Clyde, which at that point I’d seen half a dozen times. When the Iowa-set scene with the recreation of Buck’s bloody death came on the screen, he was visibly shaken. An ex-WW 2-era Naval veteran, Dad had never reacted to a movie in this fashion, even one as bloody as Bonnie and Clyde. I asked him afterward why it had affected him so, and he reported that his father (my grandfather) had driven him to the bloody crime scene (not far from their Grand Junction, Iowa, home) to witness the aftermath of what a life in crime could bring. The bloody garments were strewn around in the sort of grove where the gun battle had taken place, as was a bullet-pocked car or two. Dad would have been a young boy when he saw this, but he hadn’t thought of it in years till Arthur Penn put it on screen. That Buck Barrow had been brought to life, and then to die, so effectively, so memorably, had an impact.
Hackman was always a favorite actor of mine, but I couldn’t see him without thinking of Buck Barrow and my youngster-age father. I realize that Hackman’s death, at least as I write this, is shrouded in mystery and unfortunate circumstances. But as Clint Eastwood said in The Unforgiven, a movie with an Oscar-winning performance by Gene Hackman, “We all have it coming, kid.”
At 77 I am very aware that the end is coming for all of us. Some are lucky enough, and hard-working enough, to leave behind them a legacy of work, if not one of the magnitude of movies and novels that Gene Hackman did. And all of us who love great acting are lucky to have been on the planet when Hackman was around.
I should leave it at that, but I can’t help but comment that Barb and I watched, this past weekend, a Hackman film, Bite the Bullet, a terrific, under-appreciated movie that co-stars James Coburn. Seeing those two working together is a master class in film acting.
What I love about this pairing is how Hackman is an actor who learned to be a movie star, and Coburn is a movie star who leaned to be an actor.
I’m glad I was around to see them both.
If you’re wondering what I want for my birthday, it’s for you to go to truenoir.co and order True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak.
M.A.C.
