Alain Robbe-Grillet thought Alan Resnais butchered the screenplay to
Last Year at Marienbad. Robert Towne is still bitching about what Roman Polanski
did to his script for
(Kiss Me Deadly) to direct The Limey when he first wrote it. It would have been
a straight revenge fantasy like Point Blank or Get Carter. None of the texture
Terence Stamp brought to the project, much less Ken Loach’s footage from
Poor Cow. I think I once watched the director’s cut of Brian Helgeland’s Payback
and the studio’s toned-down version with another director. I don’t know. I can’t
remember. But I couldn’t have written this poem without the worldwide web and a good
search engine. Plus I still have enough left to remember what Lem Dobbs and Stephen
Soderbergh had to say on the audio commentary I watched yesterday. Did I once watch
a movie on DVD, a remake of a Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn movie, and the original
movie was on the flip side of same DVD, and the original was much better? Yes.
Charade and The Truth About Charlie. Wasn’t Payback a remake of Point Blank, and weren’t both movies based on The Hunter, by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake)?
Inside baseball. In Modern Book Collecting, Robert A. Wilson lists the 50 most
important books of American literature published since the end of World War II,
and the first three are books of poetry by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
and Louis Zukofsky and No. 11 is Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs.
Try to get a book like any of those published today, sports fans.
Not to get “too personal” but that is what
I’m up against. Plus up against
the wall, redneck motherfucker.
