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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Reading some stories on Flipboard the other morning, I came across this piece about Alan Parker’s Mickey Rourke, Robert DeNiro and Lisa Bonet film, Angel Heart. Check out this headline:

ALAN PARKER’S ANGEL HEART IS ASTONISHING AS HELL

Obviously I had to flip this to find later and post here for y’all. Here’s a bit from this long, loving analysis of the iconic film…

English film director Alan Parker was first introduced to William Hjortsberg’s novel ‘Falling Angel’ almost immediately after its publication in 1978, but it took another seven or eight years for him to start working on its film adaptation, as the rights to the book passed from one pair of hands to the other. Parker loved the novel—a fine horror story of a hard-boiled detective accepting one job too many and finding himself up to his elbows in the occult and supernatural circumstances he couldn’t possible prepare himself for—and while writing the script he made only a handful of adjustments, determined to make sure Hjortsberg’s story is presented to viewers in the same dark, unsettling manner as the original. Even though he first approached Jack Nicholson to play the main role, the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest star passed on the offer, much to Mickey Rourke’s delight. Upon meeting with Parker, as the filmmaker humorously puts it “looking like he always does off-screen, like an unemployed gas station attendant,” Rourke adamantly insisted he was not only the right man for the job, but the only one. After Robert De Niro finally accepted to take part in the project—and this happened only two weeks before the scheduled start of shooting—Parker was ready to embark on this ominous journey which would ultimately lead to the creation of one of the most haunting psychological horror films of the last half a century.

Check out the rest at the link above after watching this Mickey Rourke interview from the Angel Heart Blu-ray…

Stay Awake!

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25 years ago Charles Bukowski published Hollywood — the poet’s fictional account of adapting the screenplay of his novel Barfly for film.

This all gets a little meta, but Buk wrote a screenplay adaptation of his novel and then adapted his experience of making the Barbet Schroeder film — featuring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway — into a book.

Hollywood tells the hilarious story of Bukowski’s trying to navigate the machinations of the star system of La La Land in a voice that could only be his own. Here’s the Wiki…

The novel is a Roman à clef, in which Bukowski uses the following names as pseudonyms for the fictionalized versions of people with whom he worked on the movie Barfly:
Mickey Rourke, the lead actor in the film, is named Jack Bledsoe.
Faye Dunaway, the lead actress in the film, is named Francine Bowers.
Barbet Schroeder, the director of the film, is named Jon Pinchot.
He also references people he met in Hollywood during his time working on the movie:
Jean-Luc Godard is named Jon-Luc Modard.
Steve Baës is named Francois Racine
Dennis Hopper is named Mack Austin
Sean Penn is named Tom Pell
Norman Mailer is named Victor Norman
David Lynch is named Manz Loeb
Isabella Rossellini is named Rosalind Bonelli
Werner Herzog is named Wenner Zergog
Taylor Hackford is Hector Blackford

Here is a short documentary about the making of Barfly…

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