Category: Authors

David Morrell’s Ruler of the Night

Word on a new David [First Blood] Morrell novel is always welcome here!

On November 15, 2016, we’ll get the third part of Morrell’s Victorian mystery trilogy featuring Thomas De Quincey with Ruler of the Night.

Like David Morrell’s previous De Quincey novels, Ruler of the Night blends fact and fiction to an exceptional degree, this time focusing on a real-life Victorian murder so startling that it changed the culture-in this case, the first murder on an English train. The brutality of the crime stoked the fears of a generation who believed that the newly invented railway would “annihilate time and space.”

In Ruler of the Night, readers feel they’re actually on the harrowing fogbound streets of 1855 London as the brilliant Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey, and his irrepressible daughter, Emily, confront their most ruthless adversary. The stakes couldn’t be greater: both the heart of Victorian society and De Quincey’s tormented soul.

 

 

The fast-paced narrative matches the speed with which the railway changed Victorian life. It brings back Scotland Yard detectives Ryan and Becker, along with Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria, and Prince Albert, and introduces a host of new characters from this fascinating era. Master storyteller David Morrell transports readers back in time, away from the modern world and into the dangerous shadows of the past.

Sinner Man by Lawrence Block

A lot of folks are going to love Sinner Man.  It’s Lawrence Block’s first crime novel that had been lost for nearly 50 years!

To escape punishment for a murder he didn’t mean to commit, insurance man Don Barshter has to take on a new identity: Nathaniel Crowley, ferocious up-and-comer in the New York mob. But can he find safety in the skin of another man…a worse man…a sinner man…?

It’d be a sin to miss this one.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) / Z-View

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Director:  Robert Florey

Screenplay: Robert Florey from a story by Edgar Allan Poe

Stars: Sidney Fox, Bela Lugosi, Leon Ames (aka Leon Waycoff) and Arlene Francis.

The Pitch: “Horror movies sell.  Let’s combine Edgar Allan Poe and Bela Lugosi.”

The Tagline: “Innocent Beauty – this was her wedding eve. On the wall a shadow . . the beast was at large grinning horribly-cruelly. What was Her Fate?”

 

The Overview:  Beware of Spoilers…

Bela Lugosi is the insane scientist, Dr. Mirakle who secretly experiments with blood transfusions from his circus ape to women he kidnaps.  Despite the fact that each woman dies, Mirakle continues his experiments. (Hey!  Isn’t that the definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?)

When the ape takes a liking to a woman in the audience, she becomes his next victim… Camille L’Espanaye [Fox] is up for the next Apefusion unless her fiance can convince the police what the madman is doing.

If you’re a Bela Lugosi fan, then you’ll enjoy this more than those who aren’t.

 

Rating:

12 Facts About “The Outsiders” That Will Stay Gold

Jake Rose and Mental_Floss present 12 Facts About The Outsiders That Will Stay Gold.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN BY A TEENAGER.
S.E. Hinton was Susan Eloise Hinton, a 15-year-old high school student in Tulsa who had grown bored with the trite plots of books targeted to her demographic. “Mary Jane wants to go to the prom with the football hero … didn’t ring true to my life,” Hinton told The New Yorkerin 2014. So she decided to write a more authentic look at teenage struggles. When she finished, she handed the manuscript to a friend’s mother, who had contacts at a book agent in New York. Editors suggested she go by “S.E.” so readers could infer a male author was responsible for the testosterone-heavy characters. It has sold more than 14 million copies.

4. COPPOLA KEPT THE “GREASERS” AWAY FROM THE “SOCS.”
In The Outsiders, the Curtis boys are part of a clique of “Greasers,” lower-income Tulsa residents in perpetual conflict with the socials, or “Socs,” the sweater-sporting affluent kids. To perpetuate that rift, Coppola divided the actors in Tulsa according to their fictional social status: the Socs got better rooms, more spending money, free room service, and leather-bound scripts.

8. HINTON HAS A CAMEO.
Although Coppola’s production company, Zoetrope, was so low on funds at the time of optioning The Outsiders that they could pay Hinton only $500 of her $5000 rights fee, the author was friendly with the director and agreed to shoot a cameo. Hinton appears in the scene where Dallas (Matt Dillon) is being looked after by a nurse. Hinton also had cameos in other adaptations of her work, including 1983’s Rumble Fish (which Coppola also directed) and 1982’s Tex.

Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Notebook

I can’t imagine a book that movie fans will want more than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Notebook.

When Coppola realized that he would direct The Godfather, he re-read Mario Puzo’s novel and made important notations right on the book’s pages. Check out the example below or better yet, click here, to see a full-size version.

The notations would be Coppola’s road map to make The Godfather and he considered them as important as the screenplay.  Coppola explains his process and importance of making his Godfather Notebook in the video below.

The Godfather Notebook will reprint Francis Ford Coppola’s notes and annotations on The Godfather novel by Mario Puzo.  I can’t wait to get my mits on a copy.  “Leave the gun, and take the cannoli… and The Godfather Notebook.”

16 Things You Might Not Know About Rambo

Sean Hutchinson and Mental_Floss present 16 Things You Might Not Know About Rambo.  Here are three of my favorites…

 4. RAMBO DOESN’T ACTUALLY KILL ANYONE IN THE FIRST MOVIE.
Despite his notorious reputation for shooting first and asking questions later, Rambo doesn’t actually do anyone in in First Blood—he only severely wounds the people trying to hunt and harm him. This was a conscious effort on Stallone’s part in his script to change the character into an underdog from the character in the book who, due to his PTSD, goes on a wild killing rampage, which Stallone felt would alienate the audience.

The one character who does die is Deputy Galt, who tracks Rambo through the mountains in a helicopter. Galt, who attempts to shoot Rambo with a rifle, loses his balance and falls from the helicopter after Rambo merely throws a rock toward it to defend himself.

Like the book, Rambo himself was to die at the end of the movie at the hands of Colonel Trautman. The scene where Rambo is killed was filmed, but was scrapped after test audiences hated the fact that it seemed to imply the only way for veterans returning home to cope was by dying.

5. KIRK DOUGLAS WAS SUPPOSED TO PLAY COLONEL TRAUTMAN.
The veteran movie star actually made it to set and appeared in early advertisements for First Blood, but left the production when he demanded the right to rewrite the script. Douglas favored the ending of the book, and felt that Rambo should die in the end. The actor gave the filmmakers an ultimatum: if the production didn’t let him do what he wanted with the script he’d quit. Kotcheff and Stallone wanted to leave the door open for the possibility for Rambo to live or die at the end of the movie, so they let Douglas quit.

Actor Richard Crenna was then cast with a single day’s notice to fill Douglas’ shoes as Rambo’s mentor and father figure, Colonel Trautman. Crenna would reprise his role in two more Rambo movies before he passed away in 2003. He is the only actor besides Stallone to appear in multiple Rambo movies.

The unused alternate ending of First Blood, in which Trautman shoots and kills Rambo, can be seen briefly in the dream sequence in the fourth film, Rambo.

2. HE’S BASED ON A REAL-LIFE WAR HERO.
Morrell first thought of writing a book about a decorated war hero struggling to assimilate back to civilian life when he read about the real-life exploits of World War II soldier Audie Murphy. Murphy was the most decorated American soldier in World War II, earning every possible U.S. military decoration for valor as well as five separate decorations from foreign countries including France and Belgium.

Following the war, Murphy starred as himself in the film adaptation of his own autobiography,To Hell and Back, and would go on to have a film career, appearing in 44 feature films. Murphy—who later suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder, which also inspired Morrell’s characterization of Rambo—tragically died in a plane crash in 1971. The Canadian-born Morrell decided to update his novel to the post-Vietnam era due to the political and cultural climate he saw as a grad student at Penn State in the late 1960s.

Morrell would go on to write the novelizations of the second and third Rambo movies. Since he had Rambo die at the end of the first book he had to retroactively change that to have his hero alive and well in the subsequent books.

Source: David Morrell.

Ridley Scott to Direct S. Craig Zahler’s Wraiths of the Broken Land

Ridley Scott is set to direct an adaptation of S. Craig Zahler’s novel Wraiths of the Broken Land. Drew Goddard will take the screenwriting reins.

This is an all-star team:  

  • Ridley Scott is the acclaimed director of Gladiator, Blade Runner, Alien and so many more fan favorite films.
  • S. Craig Zahler is the writer and director of Bone Tomahawk as well as the up-coming Brawl on Cell Block 99.
  • Drew Goddard is known for his work on Netflix’s Daredevil, The Martian, World War Z and more.

As for Wraiths of the Broken Land, here’s how Amazon describes it…

A brutal and unflinching tale that takes many of its cues from both cinema and pulp horror, Wraiths of the Broken Land is like no Western you’ve ever seen or read. Desperate to reclaim two kidnapped sisters who were forced into prostitution, the Plugfords storm across the badlands and blast their way through Hell. This gritty, character-driven piece will have you by the throat from the very first page and drag you across sharp rocks for its unrelenting duration. Prepare yourself for a savage Western experience that combines elements of Horror, Noir and Asian ultra-violence. You’ve been warned.

 

Source: ComingSoon.

 

10 Hush-Hush Facts About “L.A. Confidential”

Mathew Jackson and Mental Floss present 10 Hush-Hush Facts About L.A. Confidential.  Here are three of my favorites…

1. THE SCRIPTING PROCESS WAS TOUGH.
Writer-director Curtis Hanson had been a longtime James Ellroy fan when he finally read L.A. Confidential, and the characters in that particular Ellroy novel really spoke to him, so he began working on a script. Meanwhile, Brian Helgeland—originally contracted to write an unproduced Viking film for Warner Bros.—was also a huge Ellroy fan, and lobbied hard for the studio to give him the scripting job. When he learned that Hanson already had it, the two met, and bonded over their mutual admiration of Ellroy’s prose. Their passion for the material was clear, but it took two years to get the script done, with a number of obstacles.

“He would turn down other jobs; I would be doing drafts for free,” Helgeland said. “Whenever there was a day when I didn’t want to get up anymore, Curtis tipped the bed and rolled me out on the floor.”

 

3. JAMES ELLROY DIDN’T THINK THE BOOK COULD BE ADAPTED.
Though Wolper was intrigued by the idea of telling the story onscreen, Ellroy and his agent laughed at the thought. The author felt his massive book would never fit on any screen.

“It was big, it was bad, it was bereft of sympathetic characters,” Ellroy said. “It was unconstrainable, uncontainable, and unadaptable.”

 

10. ELLROY APPROVED OF THE MOVIE.
To adapt L.A. Confidential for the screen, Hanson and Helgeland condensed Ellroy’s original novel, boiling the story down to a three-person narrative and ditching other subplots so they could get to the heart of the three cops at the center of the movie. Ellroy, in the end, was pleased with their choices.

 

“They preserved the basic integrity of the book and its main theme, which is that everything in Los Angeles during this era of boosterism and yahooism was two-sided and two-faced and put out for cosmetic purposes,” Ellroy said. “The script is very much about the [characters’] evolution as men and their lives of duress. Brian and Curtis took a work of fiction that had eight plotlines, reduced those to three, and retained the dramatic force of three men working out their destiny. I’ve long held that hard-boiled crime fiction is the history of bad white men doing bad things in the name of authority. They stated that case plain.”

Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips – A Retrospective!

Long time readers know that I am a huge fan of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips comic stories.  Perhaps David Harper summarizes my feelings best when he describes his admiration for Brubaker and Phillips by saying they are…

the finest and most consistent creative partnership in modern comics. When you hear Brubaker and Phillips are working on something, the question isn’t “will I buy it?”, it’s “when can I buy it?” They’re the type of team where your pull list simply has a “Brubaker/Phillips all” item on it. That’s rarefied air, at least for me.

Harper goes on to create an excellent overview of Brubaker and Phillips work in This Noir Life: A Retrospective of the Brubaker/Phillips Partnership at sktched.com.

13 Mysterious Facts About “The Maltese Falcon”

Eric D. Snider and Mental_Floss present 13 Mysterious Facts About The Maltese Falcon.  Here are three of my favorites…

2. IT WOULDN’T EXIST IF HIGH SIERRA HADN’T BEEN A HIT.
John Huston, son of popular stage and screen actor Walter Huston, was a successful scriptwriter for Warner Bros. in the late 1930s, earning Oscar nominations for Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and Sergeant York (1941). When he asked the Warners for a shot at directing, they agreed (and even let him choose the project himself), but only if his next script was a hit. That was High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart, directed by Raoul Walsh, and released in January 1941. Fortunately for Huston, it was a success, and the Warners kept their word. The Maltese Falcon, also starring Bogart, was shot that summer and released in the fall. It was the first of five movies Huston and Bogart would make together.

4. HUMPHREY BOGART’S ICONIC RAPID-FIRE DELIVERY WAS THE RESULT OF A STUDIO NOTE.
Detective Sam Spade had a lot of speeches, which the Warners felt tended to slow things down. They asked Huston to pick up the pace by having Bogart (and the others) talk faster. Huston, eager to please on his first film, took the note to heart and instructed everyone accordingly. When the film was a hit, the rat-a-tat pace became one of the hallmarks of film noir.

5. IT GOT AWAY WITH USING AN OBJECTIONABLE WORD, PROBABLY BECAUSE THE CENSORS WEREN’T COOL ENOUGH TO KNOW IT.
Sam Spade uses the word “gunsel” three times in reference to Wilmer, the hitman who works for Kasper Gutman, a.k.a. the Fat Man. Hammett used the same word in his novel, but only after his editor objected to the word he used first: “catamite,” which is a young man kept by an older man for sexual purposes. While Hammett’s novel identified Cairo (Peter Lorre’s character) as a homosexual and hinted at it for Wilmer and Gutman, this term was considered too explicit. Hammett replaced it with “gunsel,” which his editor assumed meant “gunslinger” or some such. But it didn’t. Gunsel—from the Yiddish word for “little goose,” and passed along in American hobo culture—was merely a synonym for “catamite,” but was too new to be familiar. Hammett got away with it in the book, and it slipped past the Production Code censors when it popped up in the screenplay. Because of Hammett’s usage, the word came to take on “gunman” as a secondary meaning. But make no mistake, it wasn’t Wilmer’s possession of a firearm that Sam Spade was referring to.

20 Facts About Your Favorite Quentin Tarantino Movies

Mental_Floss presents 20 Facts About Your Favorite Quentin Tarantino Movies.  Here are three of my favorites

10. MICHAEL KEATON PLAYED HIS JACKIE BROWN CHARACTER IN ANOTHER MOVIE.
Keaton plays FBI agent Ray Nicolette in Jackie Brown. One year later, he reprised the role for Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (both movies were based on Elmore Leonard novels).

5. THE CONCEPT FOR DEATH PROOF GREW OUT OF TARANTINO’S DESIRE TO BUY A VOLVO.
In a 2007 interview with Newsweek, Tarantino explained the genesis of the idea for Death Proof, the director’s half of Grindhouse: “About 10 years ago, I was talking to a friend about getting a car. And I wanted to get a Volvo because I wanted a really safe car. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to die in some auto accident like the one in Pulp Fiction … So I was talking to my friend about this, and he said, ‘Well, you could take any car and give it to a stunt team, and for $10,000 or $15,000, they can death-proof it for you.’ Well, that phrase ‘death proof’ kinda stuck in my head.”

11. TARANTINO DIRECTED RESERVOIR DOGS BECAUSE TONY SCOTT DIDN’T.
Because he was still new to the business, Tarantino knew he couldn’t direct both True Romance and Reservoir Dogs. So he gave both scripts to Tony Scott and told him to pick one. Though Scott wanted both of the films, he ended up choosing True Romance, leaving Tarantino to make Reservoir Dogs.