Tony Hillerman wrote “lyrical, authentic and compelling mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest,” books that “blazed innovative trails in the American detective story,” writes Marilyn Stasio in an obituary in today’s International Herald Tribune. “Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers.” Hillerman died Sunday of pulminary failure, at age 83.
Monday, October 27, 2008
R.I.P:Tony Hillerman (1925-2008)
Tony Hillerman wrote “lyrical, authentic and compelling mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest,” books that “blazed innovative trails in the American detective story,” writes Marilyn Stasio in an obituary in today’s International Herald Tribune. “Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers.” Hillerman died Sunday of pulminary failure, at age 83.
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Good, The Bad and the Weird
Korean filmmaker Kim Jee-woon impressed audiences at the Hawaii International Film Festival with his wild and woolly "kim-chee Western."
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
"Locket & Key"
The music of Donna the Buffalo has been labeled as alternative-country, Americana, folk-rock -- and a dozen or so other things. But the group is more than plain ol' country enough for Great American Country. Which is why this video for their terrific new single, "Locket & Key," is set to debut Friday (Oct. 10) on GAC's Edge of Country program. But wait, there's more: The more the video is requested, the more GAC will play it. If you like it, you can visit here and ask for more.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Willie Nelson in 3-D
Are you ready for The Red-Headed Stranger in 3-D? Stereo Vision Entertainment, Inc. has announced plans to produce Secrets of the Lost San Sabas, a film in which Willie Nelson will play "an Indian guide to afterlife on a 300-year quest for justice. The movie's filled with ghosts and goddesses from the Aztec Nation, along with some of today's most colorful characters, all shot in state-of-the-art, digital 3-D." Cowabunga.
Seven things you may not know about "The Magnificent Seven"
Robert Vaughn tells tales and shares secrets throughout A Fortunate Life, his sharply observed and self-deprecatingly witty autobiography. But we were especially intrigued by those parts of the book -- newly issued in paperback -- that focus on The Magnificent Seven, the classic 1960 Western -- based on Akira Kuroswa's Seven Samurai (1954) -- in which the actor appeared as a self-doubting gunslinger alongside co-stars Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz -- and Brad Dexter.
Yes, Brad Dexter. Not Eli Wallach.
As Vaughn notes in his autobiography, Dexter "is the 'Bashful' of The Magnificent Seven -- the actor in the group who most people fail to name, just as most people forget Bashful when naming the Seven Dwarfs. Many movie buffs will mention Eli Wallach as one of the Seven, which is wrong. He was great in the picture as Calvera, the leader of the bandit gang that is terrorizing the Mexican villagers we come to rescue."
Six other choice nuggets to savor in A Fortunate Life:
THIS GROUP OF SEVEN WAS A HAPPY ACCIDENT. Long before taking the reins of The Magnificent Seven, filmmaker John Sturges earned his spurs as a director of Grade-A Westerns with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Last Train from Gun Hill and The Law and Jake Wade. But during the production process for this film, he had to race against the clock: The Screen Actors Guild had called a strike to start in Spring 1960. Vaughn writes that when he showed up at Sturges' office for his audition, on a morning in January, “an ax was hanging over every movie project in Hollywood. Unless the casting for a picture was completed by noon on a particular Friday, production couldn’t begin.” The good news: Sturges had already more or less decided to cast Vaughn on the basis of the actor's Oscar-nominated supporting performance in The Young Philadelphians. The bad news: At that point, Sturges had commitments from only two other actors, Brynner and McQueen. And the clock was ticking.
Sturges told Vaughn: “We don’t have a script, just Kurosawa’s picture to work from. You’ll have to go on faith. But we’ll be filming in Cuernavaca. Never been there? You’ll love it — it’s the Palm Springs of Mexico.” Vaughn told Sturges: "I'm in." Sturges told Vaughn: "Good decision, young man. And do you know any other good young actors? I’ve got four other slots to fill.” As it turned out, Vaughn did indeed know at least one likely candidate: James Coburn, a friend and former classmate who had attracted attention one year earlier in a supporting role opposite Randolph Scott and future Bonanza star Pernell Roberts in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome. The other three? Sturges managed to round them up on his own.
WHEN YOU'VE GOT TO GO, YOU'VE GOT TO GO. Vaughn discovered fairly quickly after filming began that there was a downside to filming on location in Mexico. He might have passed on the film, he wrote, "[i]f I'd known that I would be spending my three months in Cuernavaca with a stomach-churning case of the Aztec two-step."
THEY MADE IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG. "There were long periods," Vaughn recalls, "when we didn't work because the script was still being written. We'd be told one evening, 'Tomorrow we'll be doing scene so-and-so.' and that night carbon copies of the script on onion-skin paper would be slid under our doors to learn for the next day."
PISTOL ENVY. Throughout the production, Vaughn writes, Steve McQueen "always was intensely competitive, even to the point of being paranoid." He was convinced that Yul Brynner was pulling every nasty trick in the book to steal scenes, and often complained to Vaughn about what he felt were Brynner's underhanded attempts to upstage him. At one point, he actually went ballistic -- figuratively speaking, of course -- about Byrnner's choice of weaponry. The gun "has a bleeping pearl handle for God's sake," McQueen ranted. "He shouldn't have a gun like that. It's too bleeping fancy. Nobody's gonna look at anything else with that goddamn gun in the picture." Notes Vaughn: "Of course, Steve meant that nobody would be looking at Steve McQueen."
NO SMALL PARTS. "It's a sobering thought," Vaughn writes, "to realize I'm the last of the Seven still alive." On the brighter side, however, "Eli is still going strong." Ironically, though, Eli Wallach very nearly turned down the role of Calvera, the bandit chief whose repeated raids on a remote village lead the villagers to hire The Magnificent Seven in the first place. As he recalls in his own autobiography -- The Good, The Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, also available in paperback -- Wallach was still best known as a New York stage actor, despite his showy turn in Eli Kazan's controversial Baby Doll (1956). He knew full well that exposure in a major Hollywood movie could help his career. At first, however, Wallach was concerned about the relative scarcity of his screen time. He accepted the part only after he realized how he could make every minute count. “After rereading the script,” Wallach writes, “I realized that even though I only appeared in the first few minutes of the film, the natives spoke about my return for the next forty-five minutes – ‘Calvera’s coming.’ ‘When is he coming back?’ – so, I decided to do the part.”
YOU NEVER CAN TELL. After filming wrapped in Cuernavaca, Vaughn admits, "I was convinced that The Magnificent Seven would be a failure. Instead, of course, it became a box-office hit, a star-making vehicle for several in the cast, including Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, and a classic Western drama still enjoyed today almost half a century after it was made. It's the second-most frequnetly played movie on American TV (trailing only Casablanca).
"So what the hell do I know?"
Yes, Brad Dexter. Not Eli Wallach.
As Vaughn notes in his autobiography, Dexter "is the 'Bashful' of The Magnificent Seven -- the actor in the group who most people fail to name, just as most people forget Bashful when naming the Seven Dwarfs. Many movie buffs will mention Eli Wallach as one of the Seven, which is wrong. He was great in the picture as Calvera, the leader of the bandit gang that is terrorizing the Mexican villagers we come to rescue."
Six other choice nuggets to savor in A Fortunate Life:
THIS GROUP OF SEVEN WAS A HAPPY ACCIDENT. Long before taking the reins of The Magnificent Seven, filmmaker John Sturges earned his spurs as a director of Grade-A Westerns with Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Last Train from Gun Hill and The Law and Jake Wade. But during the production process for this film, he had to race against the clock: The Screen Actors Guild had called a strike to start in Spring 1960. Vaughn writes that when he showed up at Sturges' office for his audition, on a morning in January, “an ax was hanging over every movie project in Hollywood. Unless the casting for a picture was completed by noon on a particular Friday, production couldn’t begin.” The good news: Sturges had already more or less decided to cast Vaughn on the basis of the actor's Oscar-nominated supporting performance in The Young Philadelphians. The bad news: At that point, Sturges had commitments from only two other actors, Brynner and McQueen. And the clock was ticking.
Sturges told Vaughn: “We don’t have a script, just Kurosawa’s picture to work from. You’ll have to go on faith. But we’ll be filming in Cuernavaca. Never been there? You’ll love it — it’s the Palm Springs of Mexico.” Vaughn told Sturges: "I'm in." Sturges told Vaughn: "Good decision, young man. And do you know any other good young actors? I’ve got four other slots to fill.” As it turned out, Vaughn did indeed know at least one likely candidate: James Coburn, a friend and former classmate who had attracted attention one year earlier in a supporting role opposite Randolph Scott and future Bonanza star Pernell Roberts in Budd Boetticher’s Ride Lonesome. The other three? Sturges managed to round them up on his own.
WHEN YOU'VE GOT TO GO, YOU'VE GOT TO GO. Vaughn discovered fairly quickly after filming began that there was a downside to filming on location in Mexico. He might have passed on the film, he wrote, "[i]f I'd known that I would be spending my three months in Cuernavaca with a stomach-churning case of the Aztec two-step."
THEY MADE IT UP AS THEY WENT ALONG. "There were long periods," Vaughn recalls, "when we didn't work because the script was still being written. We'd be told one evening, 'Tomorrow we'll be doing scene so-and-so.' and that night carbon copies of the script on onion-skin paper would be slid under our doors to learn for the next day."
PISTOL ENVY. Throughout the production, Vaughn writes, Steve McQueen "always was intensely competitive, even to the point of being paranoid." He was convinced that Yul Brynner was pulling every nasty trick in the book to steal scenes, and often complained to Vaughn about what he felt were Brynner's underhanded attempts to upstage him. At one point, he actually went ballistic -- figuratively speaking, of course -- about Byrnner's choice of weaponry. The gun "has a bleeping pearl handle for God's sake," McQueen ranted. "He shouldn't have a gun like that. It's too bleeping fancy. Nobody's gonna look at anything else with that goddamn gun in the picture." Notes Vaughn: "Of course, Steve meant that nobody would be looking at Steve McQueen."
NO SMALL PARTS. "It's a sobering thought," Vaughn writes, "to realize I'm the last of the Seven still alive." On the brighter side, however, "Eli is still going strong." Ironically, though, Eli Wallach very nearly turned down the role of Calvera, the bandit chief whose repeated raids on a remote village lead the villagers to hire The Magnificent Seven in the first place. As he recalls in his own autobiography -- The Good, The Bad, and Me: In My Anecdotage, also available in paperback -- Wallach was still best known as a New York stage actor, despite his showy turn in Eli Kazan's controversial Baby Doll (1956). He knew full well that exposure in a major Hollywood movie could help his career. At first, however, Wallach was concerned about the relative scarcity of his screen time. He accepted the part only after he realized how he could make every minute count. “After rereading the script,” Wallach writes, “I realized that even though I only appeared in the first few minutes of the film, the natives spoke about my return for the next forty-five minutes – ‘Calvera’s coming.’ ‘When is he coming back?’ – so, I decided to do the part.”
YOU NEVER CAN TELL. After filming wrapped in Cuernavaca, Vaughn admits, "I was convinced that The Magnificent Seven would be a failure. Instead, of course, it became a box-office hit, a star-making vehicle for several in the cast, including Steve McQueen, James Coburn, and Charles Bronson, and a classic Western drama still enjoyed today almost half a century after it was made. It's the second-most frequnetly played movie on American TV (trailing only Casablanca).
"So what the hell do I know?"
Friday, October 3, 2008
Bluegrass champs
The new duo Dailey & Vincent -- that is, Jamie Dailey (above, left) and Darrin Vincent (right) -- dominated the International Bluegrass Music Association awards Thursday in Nashville, winning entertainer of the year, album of the year, vocal group, emerging artist and gospel recorded performance. You can read more about it here.
Redford remembers Newman
"I first met Paul Newman in 1968, when George Roy Hill, the director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, introduced us in New York City. When the studio didn't want me for the film — it wanted somebody as well known as Paul — he stood up for me. I don't know how many people would have done that; they would have listened to their agents or the studio powers." More from Robert Redford here.
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