Earlier this evening I had just finished a yummy dinner of homemade soup with Japanese noodles, miso/lime broth, chicken, carrots, seaweed, and some hot red peppers I bought at the farmers market on Friday evening. I had a great workout this morning and then proceeded to knock the hell out of a to-do list full of tasks, and I even found time to finally unload some winter clothes from my truck at my storage space and sort through a bunch of cold weather clothes before taking a big load to the Salvation Army down the street. The sunset was lovely and the soup was tasty and filling — a nice ending to a productive good day. That’s when I saw a headline on my phone informing me that Sam Shepard had died.

Shepard, his plays, his prose, his films and his persona as an American artist all loom large in my pantheon of creative heroes. I actually admire and enjoy the work of lots of writers, actors and directors, but Shepard is way up on that mountain for me. Shepard is right up there with the Beat Generation which inspired him, and Patti Smith his one time lover and collaborator. Shepard is on that mountain next to other great anti-leading-man actors from the 1980s like Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts at their very best. Among the rocks you can see Shepard sharing a handful of mushroom buttons with Eugene O’Neill and rolling another smoke with Nina Simone whom Shepard saw performing while he was a busboy at the Village Gate when he first moved to New York City. He plays his beloved drums on an outcropping with Jimmy Dean and Brando — they both loved to play the drums and what if Shepard had had the chance to put them on his stage with his words in their mouths?

Motel Chronicles will always be one of my favorite books, and I’ll never forget the Lobster Man from “Cowboy Mouth,” and I’ll never forget Shepard as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff appearing out of the red flames and black smoke from his wrecked plane putting one foot in front of the other crossing the desert walking straight at the camera; not speaking or crying or screaming or yelling, just walking, right into his own legend.

Adios, Sam. Here’s the man himself looking back on his big screen breakthrough in Terence Mallick’s Days of Heaven…

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After James Dean died in his tragic autumn car wreck six decades ago, the wreckage of his Porsche Spyder toured the country as a traffic safety promotion. Then, it disappeared. Here’s a Northwest Herald story about a new leads on the Porsche’s final resting place…

VOLO – Sixty years after the Sept. 30, 1955, crash that killed James Dean, and 10 years after the Volo Auto Museum made a $1 million offer for the legendary actor’s long-missing Porsche Spyder wreckage, a tip regarding the 550’s whereabouts is turning museum officials’ heads.

After Dean’s death, the wrecked Porsche was toured nationally as a highway safety exhibit. But the car went missing while being transported from Florida to California and was reported stolen in the early 1960s, said Brian Grams, director of the museum at 27582 Volo Village Road.

The car’s disappearance, combined with its history and reputation for being cursed, makes it a sought-after relic. The museum made a $1 million offer for it in 2005.

“It’s one of the biggest mysteries in automotive and entertainment history,” Grams said. “Over the past 10 years we’ve received hundreds, if not thousands, of phone calls from people claiming to know the car’s whereabouts.”

While none of those tips ever panned out, interest in the museum’s still standing offer renewed after an episode of “Brad Meltzer’s Lost History” aired last winter. The show featured the legend of the Spyder, as well as an interview with Grams.

“We sifted through the new tips, and one guy who contacted us this spring had an intriguing story,” Grams said. “He said he was 6 years old at the time, and was present as his father and some other men put the wreckage behind a false wall in a building in Whatcom County, Washington.”

The man also recounted some conversational details that further supported his claim. And he offered to take – and passed – a polygraph test, Grams said.

Communications are ongoing. However, the tipster is declining to reveal the building’s location until he inks a deal for a portion of the reward. The museum will pay only if it gains legal possession of the car, and its current ownership is in question.

Here’s a report from America’s Best Kept Secrets examining the car’s disappearance, it’s supposed curse, and James Deans’ interest in the occult…

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Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre kicks off its massive Robert Altman retrospective this weekend. The series includes 19 features and 3 short films, but completists might notice that one of the director’s earliest projects didn’t make the cut.

For me, the most important period in American culture is that window during the 1940′s and 1950′s when European Modernism finally comes to the U.S. and it’s remade with an emphasis on the unfettered expression of the single artist’s voice, resulting in the incendiary pronouncements of Beat literature, Be-Bop jazz, Abstract Expressionism in art, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Method acting.

Lee Strasberg stripped the acting system devised by Konstantin Stanislavsky down to its psychological techniques and taught it to his Actor’s Studio students starting in the 1950′s. One of his prized pupils was James Dean who — along with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift — would revolutionize acting on both stage and screen.

Dean died in 1955 at the age of 24. Two years later Warner Brothers released The James Dean Story. The directing credit is shared by Altman and George A. George. Here’s the Turner Classic Movies take on the flick, its subject and its unconventional director…

While it’s rarely shown in retrospectives of his work, Robert Altman’s The James Dean Story (1957), is easily one of the more offbeat and poetic examples of documentary filmmaking. Officially cited as his second feature (Altman’s first was The Delinquents, 1957), The James Dean Story was co-produced and co-directed with George W. George, a former writing partner of Altman’s, as a serious exploration of the young actor’s mystique and impact on the youth culture of the fifties. Rounding out Altman’s crew was cinematographer Lou Lombardo who shot the bulk of the interviews and transition footage for the film and would remain a close collaborator of Altman’s for many years.

Originally Marlon Brando was approached to do the film’s narration and he gave it serious consideration. In Robert Altman: American Innovator by Judith M. Kass (Popular Library), the actor said, “Toward the end I think he (Dean) was beginning to find his own way as an actor. But this glorifying of Dean is all wrong. That’s why I believe the documentary could be important. To show he wasn’t a hero; show what he really was – just a lost boy trying to find himself.” In the end, Brando refused the offer and Warner Brothers took over the project from Altman, hiring Martin Gabel, a former member of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre Company, to narrate the documentary from a script by Stewart Stern. The latter had not only co-written Rebel Without a Cause but had also been a close friend of Dean’s.

In direct contrast to contemporary documentaries on movie stars, The James Dean Story avoids sensationalism, industry gossip, or celebrity talking heads and instead offers an introspective and occasionally stark portrait of the Indiana farm boy turned superstar. The documentary begins with James Dean’s childhood, when, at the age of nine, he was sent to live with relatives in Fairmount, Indiana and progresses from there through his brief Hollywood career. There are interviews with Dean’s aunt and uncle in Fairmount, the man who sold him his first motorcycle, former UCLA fraternity brothers, the highway patrolman who sped to the scene of Dean’s fatal car wreck, and Arleen Langer, a New York girl who had a crush on him during his struggling actor days. Some of the rarely seen material includes a screen test for East of Eden (1955), a highway safety film Dean made with Gig Young, and Altman’s re-enactment of Dean’s high-speed car wreck as well as numerous photographs and film clips from Dean’s career. Altman also provides a virtual travelogue of Dean’s old stomping grounds from his Indiana childhood (with footage of the Fairmount cemetery, the train station, and the Dean farm) to his New York City days (Rube Goldberg’s apartment, Georgie’s Restaurant) to California hangouts like Schwab’s drugstore.

It was during the making of The James Dean Story that Altman became introduced to the zoom lens which he would soon incorporate into his unique style of filmmaking. He also learned a new technique for presenting archival photographs on film from renown still photographer Louis Clyde Stoumen who called his process “photo motion.” This method dispensed with the traditional presentation of static images, instead adding movement to the photograph as the camera closed-in on specific details in close-up.

Get your Altman retrospective off to a great start with The James Dean Story…

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I don’t have cable. Not only does this mean I nearly never watch sports at home, it also means I’m often tuned into the strange wonders that can be found channel surfing over-the-air digital television. My girlfriend calls it a new “Wild West Golden Age of Television for Weirdos Everywhere.” She’s on to something.

Tonight, on Nashville’s digital television channel 6.6 — also known as WRTNLD6 — I caught a fascinating film broadcast with no ads for the price of electricity. The flick was so fascinating, I began to panic a bit when I couldn’t find out its title — screen menus and even the channel’s online listings simply stated “Classic Movie.” Luckily a flick that includes actresses like — one of my all time favorites — Brooke Adams, lends itself to a bit of IMDB cross-referencing for some easy detective work. Here’s the site’s take on James Dean: Portrait of a Friend…

A dramatization of the story of legendary movie actor James Dean. The film’s writer, William Bast, had roomed with Dean in the early ’50s, when both were trying to break into films as actors.

The 1976 made-for-TV movie features great performances a wonderful script and a surprisingly frank exploration of Dean’s bisexuality. Also, it’s on YouTube

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Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon made its first appearance in 1965. After less than a week, the book was banned and pulled from the shelves. A decade would pass before the book would be released again.

Anger’s underground classic trolls the back alleys and bedrooms of Hollywood during the first half of the 20th Century up through Sharon Tate’s bloody murder at the hands of the Manson Family. The book offers a combustible mix of wild speculation with a salacious style of scandal spreading that launched a thousand urban legends about silver screen giants like James Dean, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield, Rudolph Valentino and more.

This episode of Arena features Anger himself guiding viewers through the book’s most shocking chapters while also offering illuminating insights into his own films including Fireworks, The Invocation of My Demon Brother, Kustom Kar Kommandos, Scorpio Rising and Lucifer Rising.

Check out Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon below:

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